How data and CX are elevating the CMO role

According to McKinsey, IBM, Forrester, Deloitte and other organizations that follow CMOs closely, the CMO’s value and reputation in the C-suite and boardroom are rising.

In this second article in our series, we dig into the reasons for this steady – if not always straight-line – ascent. And we stress-test this premise by talking with several practicing CMOs.

In particular, we delve into how data on marketing’s efforts, as well as knowledge of the customer experience, are burnishing the CMO’s reputation. With a recent study showing CEOs rate CMOs most highly for making a demonstrable financial impact and understanding the customer’s point of view, these were timely topics.

Q

P/M: How has ready access to data elevated the reputation of the CMO?

A

Phil: CMOs have access to data that enable them to be a lot more accountable for business growth. As long as they also have access to skilled resources that can analyze this data, CMOs can have more of a voice to contribute strategically to what the company is looking to accomplish. In the past, CMOs had less data and were not able to provide evidence of marketing contributing to growth. So, the first budget to be cut when things got tight was often marketing’s.

Liz: The more that we’ve become a Salesforce-driven company and invested in ancillary marketing automation, the more successful I have been at my job. Ten years ago, there are times when I would have scratched my head and said, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to know X.” Now I can figure out X very, very quickly. The ability to parse data and understand the factors that drive current business opportunity – and signal future opportunity – is incredibly important in leading businesses to a broader horizon.

Q

P/M: How is marketing operationalized in your company?

A

Gary: Product marketing is responsible for setting the strategic agenda by product. They serve as the strategic core for all of marketing. They have to intimately understand and define each buyer persona working in sync with the demand gen teams and especially the social teams to execute finely-tuned campaigns that get each persona to raise their hands and become engaged in a two-way dialogue. Demand gen teams are not only driving campaigns in a number of different micro-channels, they’re actually measuring the results of everything we do and fine-tuning campaign performance almost immediately. We use account-based marketing to understand propensity to buy and propensity to consider by account and company type.

Q

P/M: Some have noted that there are really two different types of CMO – data-oriented and brand-oriented.

A

Liz: Some CMOs are more focused on brand and positioning, some on nitty gritty sales figures. Personally, my own natural tendency is to gravitate toward bigger-picture goals. But I’m very conscious of the need to dig into the nitty-gritty data.

Kristen: Marketers tend to be seen as either brand /creative marketers or performance / analytics marketers, but not both. Marketers can do both but aren’t necessarily given career paths to develop both types of skills and responsible for both aspects. The new age of digital marketing can undermine the values of brand, creative advertising, message strategy, because it’s very difficult to measure. I think that’s an opportunity. Longer term, to build a brand, you need a strong creative strategy around it or you will hit a ceiling by doing only digital marketing. My e-commerce company really began to skyrocket after investing in a brand campaign and move the needle on aided brand awareness. Start-ups are realizing that they need strong creative strategy to maximize brand awareness if they’re going to reach multiple billions of dollars in revenue.

Rishi: But I think that’s changing, because companies are realizing that’s an artificial separation. Today, brand is demand and demand is brand. Increasingly with technology, you can measure the impact of your brand spend.

Q

P/M: How has the focus on customer experience elevated the CMO role?

A

Chris: If you can map out all the different customer touch points and think about how to improve that customer experience – it could be through a product, it could be through services, it could be through marketing – that becomes a source of differentiation for you. And it’s above and beyond marketing. Marketing may be at the core, because it could be charting the customer experience, but you need to bring in all the other groups to impact that experience.

Ken: Because customer experience is so broad, it really has to be owned by everyone in the C-suite. The CMO knows the consumer and can design a great e-commerce experience. At the same time, we need the CIO to build that experience. Sales needs to have a customer experience view, as does the call center leader. Giving customer experience to only one person in the C-suite is setting them up to fail. That said, CMOs can offer leadership in advancing the customer experience through things like experience design and customer journey mapping.

Q

P/M: How do you orchestrate your teams to put the customer at the center through the journey?

A

Phil: Marketing is supposed to be the voice of the customer. The members of our collaborative purchasing cooperative are attentive to a fault in consuming our content, but how well do we really know them? In addition to analyzing content consumption, we’ve done market segmentation, created a new role of category managers (e.g., technology) who really understand purchasing dynamics within that category, and have done a big brand study. It’s all about the data. Our organization is being driven by data. Even designers need to know the data. Without data, we’re lost. I also recommend that new CMOs go on a road tour and meet face-to-face with customers and sales colleagues. Climbing into and staying in an ivory tower is dangerous.

Ken: We’re on a path to data-enabled user journeys, but still in early stages. I don’t think too many companies have figured out how to make data actionable in a way that enables personalization yet. Lack of agility and integration of systems is hurting us on things like a single view of the customer and cloud analytics solutions. Investments here tends to be around solving specific problems, specific use cases. Each needs to be justified with its own ROI, on a case-by-case basis.

Q

P/M: How do you engage customers and ultimately drive loyalty?

A

Gary: Nurturing your customer base after they’ve purchased is more critical than it’s ever been. We call it customer advocacy. We ensure customers know that we’re always on their side, always working to help them improve their own business performance.

Liz: We need to be educators as well as marketers. People come to us looking for financing and, given how our business works, we say no to them 90% of the time. Once we’ve said no to them, how do we keep them coming back? We say, “not this time” instead of “no”. We reward the fact that these people want to get what we do, they’re interested, and we educate them on what will make them a more successful candidate for an investment the next time they come back – so that they do come back. So much of our business is about finding ways to engage these people before we can say “yes.”

Missed Part 1 in our three-part series? Read it now. Or continue to Part 3 for more on the strategic roles that CMOs should be playing.

¹ Deloitte, The makings of a more confident CMO, September 2019