Some CMO’s only expect to be in their position between 36-43 months. For those that are in for the long haul – at least 6-8 years – there are key initiatives beyond short term sales that must be tackled. You can’t wait these out. The “tenured” CMO is the one who has made it past the first 12 months that for one reason or another kicks out a lot of ‘bad fits.’ If you have made it that far presumably you can assimilate to the culture of the place. You have also figured out how to sustain or improve short term business results.
Next up are those bigger, foundational jobs that will suck energy and resources before having a payoff. If you avoid them, you may not only put your job in jeopardy but the competitiveness of your company in the future.
Here are four marketing must-do’s for the tenured CMO:
First-Party Data Strategy to Build Lasting Value & Competitive Advantage
Whether you sell direct or through a channel, your marketing organization’s ability to have solid first-party data on your customers and any channel partners (e.g. third-party sellers like independent agents or brokers) is key to competing tomorrow. That first-party data should expand with every transaction and includes demographic, psychographic, transaction and other behavioral data. Some good sense needs to be applied to not collect everything under the sun (and protect privacy). But, in general, more is better.
The strategy needs to include the ability to access and apply the data to marketing and customer experience use-cases. Your data needs to be on the cloud (if possible) to allow you to more easily combine with third-party data sources like Acxiom, Experian, Bombora, and more.
Command of your own customer and channel data serves as a defense against the walled-garden marketing channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Amazon. They have made their intentions clear. For now, they will not let user data out to partners in any significant way. Your first-party data strategy is also a hedge against the “cookie-less” future.
While I am sure the number of marketers working towards self-sufficiency is far greater than those who have achieved it, Mark Grether @mark_grether highlighted the shift in Martech Today:
“Recent surveys show more than 80 percent of marketers are data self-sufficient, or working towards the goal of self-sufficiency. Even before GDPR, marketers were shifting priorities and investments toward a heavier reliance on data. Because of this, there is a trend towards bringing these efforts “in-house” closer to the CMO and not under the purview of an agency. In fact, Unilever cited that its recent $1 billion acquisition of Dollar Shave Club was in part to gain access to the brand’s “unique consumer and data insights.””
Integrating Human-Centered Design to Get Closer to the Customer
Of all the ways to get closer to the customer to design better products and services, the practices of human-centered design watch the video above) feels like the most powerful. Inviting customers in to co-create a product, to inform its design and how it is marketed, will do more to ensure our marketing teams (or senior executives) don’t get too swept away with their hunches.
Dave Thomsen from Wanderful Media calls out the strength of more feedback, more often:
“When you’re working at breakneck speeds with tight deadlines, taking time out to gather feedback from users can feel like a luxury that’s easy to put off. But there’s no substitute for the nuance and depth of insight that can come from an in-person conversation. And with a couple of well-crafted Craigslist ads, a couple hundred dollars to pay your participants and an afternoon, you can quickly check key assumptions, uncover opportunities for improvement and gather inspiration for new ideas.”
Working side-by-side with customers (vs. behind one-way mirrors) breeds compassion and empathy. Those are two keys to truly customer-obsessed organizations. Human-centered design is a great way to bake it into culture.
Here's a great summary from Greater Good Studio - What is Human-Centered Design
Better Revenue Attribution and Belief
The need for better revenue attribution is not new. Still, it’s shocking how hard it is for many marketing organizations. Big consumer product goods companies and ecommerce companies seem to have this licked. For most others it remains a work-in-progress. Many CMOs are stymied by the difficulty in proving that a dollar spent in marketing (across 12 channels over an extended period of time) results in a causal uptick in sales. Building all the hard data pipes to prove it and report it daily (unless you are ecommerce) may be prohibitive.
Demonstrating the correlation between strong marketing programs and business results via highly instrumented pilots may be the better strategy. Then comes the second part of the CMO’s job – building belief in the senior executive ranks. These are the colleagues vying for limited annual budget dollars. They may be IT leaders, product leaders, finance folks. They are not marketers. Communicating the evidence of these pilots and getting them to acknowledge and buy-in to those results takes some adept maneuvering. Never assume the results speak for themselves. You can have produced the most definitive results, but if you haven’t gotten the “management committee” shark tank to acknowledge it, all may be for naught.
Do you want to be a marketing services leader or do you want to be the CMO in line to become the Chief Revenue Officer?
Build an Operating System That Delivers Against Key Goals
I have spent a lot of time planning out the next marketing organization structure. Is it aligned to products, customers, channels, marketing operations like ‘demand gen?’ While it matters which you choose or which hybrid you build, in this age of “agile marketing” how you work together may matter more.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just adopting agile marketing as a method. First of all, it doesn’t exist. Many of us have been working to apply the principles and ceremonies of ‘agile’ to marketing. Listen to the Agile Marketing podcast and it corroborates my experience applying it to an enterprise marketing organization – some things work and others don’t. (See The Boston Agile Group's approach here). CMG built a variant on an emerging view of agile marketing as an OS. It’s pretty strong and yet relies on significant change management to actually put it into practice.
Some marketers see promise in the “flywheel” model (see video above). This has been made popular by Hubspot. The flywheel is really portrayed as an alternative to the sales funnel yet it has strong implications for how your marketing organization can operate.
Creating a Marketing OS that works for you is highly personalized to your organization. My best suggestion is to rally your teams around common processes which may have shared artifacts like a common brief, channel plan or content Kanban board. Regardless of who the marketing team members report to or what discipline they come from – email vs. social vs. performance – if they share a common approach and tools to planning and execution that will become increasingly effective.
A Portfolio Approach
CMOs with an ambition to endure need to deliver value in the short run and they need to place bets on foundational capabilities that will help the organization compete next year or the year after. Tenured CMOs build a portfolio approach to their jobs and bravely place bets on tomorrow.
From NextNow Digital:
Simple Customer Journeys Drive Marketing Strategy
One of the real gems of planning methods, Drivers and Barriers, examines a particular customer persona at a stage in their journey, e.g., discovery, education/engagement, etc., and using any available research, identifies the drivers and barriers. Click the link to learn more.
How Generative AI Will Change Visuals in Marketing
AI-generated text is one thing, but visuals are a different story. MidJourney, DALL-E2 and Stable Diffusion are super-interesting visual playgrounds creating extraordinary fantasy images or increasingly realistic people or creatures. Click the link to learn about the innovators like KittyKat.
The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox
A lot of businesses may be wasting their money on digital advertising. They struggle to use it well and gain enough efficiency for a positive return on their media investment. Here's a toolbox that works in the face of higher ad costs and lower effectiveness. Click on the link.
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