Marketing Strategy Hbr – Marketers must connect the dots across data, digital and the entire customer journey to demand a broader growth agenda.
A result. As the pace of digital transformation continues, marketers are at the forefront of their organizations, connecting the dots of customer needs and data, business priorities and digital agendas. The author suggests five steps for marketing leaders to aggressively drive growth and create value.
Marketing Strategy Hbr
As we begin 2022, we are facing the third year in which the pandemic has changed the reality of our business. The acceleration of digital behavior isn’t slowing down, and neither are your customers’ expectations.
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As the crisis continues, this is the year for marketing leaders to redouble their commitment to accelerating change at scale. With widespread recognition of their impact on sales, results and growth, marketers have a new mandate to connect the dots of customer needs and data, business priorities and digital agendas and become central in their organizations. value.
The question is: How can a CMO facilitate change and create value? Based on what I’ve seen as I work with CMOs on data-driven transformation in marketing, e-commerce and every aspect of the customer journey, here are five actions marketing leaders can take to increase impact:
It’s not fun when marketing is a cost center, especially when the CFO has to cut spending areas. But today, marketing is understood as a revenue driver relative to sales in general.
Today’s media types, such as social, search and programmatic, are highly measured and executive team leaders are used to expecting results from marketing spend. Of course, too much indexing invested in productivity (such as the last click to sell online) can sacrifice brand health and equity. The best strategies balance short- and long-term outcomes. But the productive impact of the dollar shift is that leaders outside of the sales function are now seeing significant sales impact at work.
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This creates an opportunity for marketers to become synonymous with the organization’s traditional revenue leaders – salespeople – and marketers must take advantage of this shift. In 2022, the key is to make the results understandable to a wider company audience. Attribution, or the math that tells you which marketing efforts work, challenges us all as mobile platforms, browsers, and the walled gardens of e-commerce and social media continue to change the rules. and dividing the landscape. But marketers shouldn’t be afraid to do “good enough” math to make sense of the dollars — from top-of-the-line branding to click-to-purchase moments. The more holistically companies view costs as a form of performance, the better. The key is to focus less on each individual cost line and more on their combined predictive and collective value.
Today’s agenda does not respect the already organized boundaries that are limited by conventional marketing ideas or other related functions. Marketers must make clear demands to drive the growth agenda and ensure unified business leadership.
About building kingdoms to get data, analytics, or technology agendas, teams, or budgets. It’s about building the right internal communication through a customer journey lens. Customers don’t care about internal organizational boundaries – they expect their experience to be intuitive, predictable and relevant. Devolution of organizational functions often hinders this goal.
Take the rapid growth of social commerce, a prime example of this new growth agenda. Media presented to consumers must be highly targeted and directly connected to an effective, personalized e-commerce experience. A connected social commerce journey must understand that users are likely to be on a mobile device and therefore require a fast, frictionless, mobile-first checkout experience. Any validation hurdle prevents sales from converting to sales. Marketers should collaborate with partners who create online product pages and payment mechanics to create an experience with minimal friction. Simply put, it all has to happen naturally, and that requires more real-time coordination than organizational boundaries allow.
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A survey of approximately 200 senior marketing executives found that 77% of respondents believe that the marketing function needs a strong voice in creating corporate strategy as owners of the customer journey. Areas like data-driven marketing, e-commerce, and CRM can’t lead in silos, because how quickly friction needs to be removed from the customer journey to accelerate top-line growth.
The pandemic has united C-Suite leadership teams like never before, so digital transformation is gaining undeniable momentum in many companies. However, the success of digital transformation depends on the success of data transformation. Companies can implement technologies such as CRM or consolidating sources into a data lake, but fundamental questions such as the true level of data quality and how to manage the continuous state of the data throughout organization still needs to be addressed. Marketers need to pay close attention to the right sources of quality data to use the engine. Value is created through integrated analytics models that drive last-mile solutions, rather than one-off solutions coded for a short period of time or for a particular business.
Lasting and meaningful change can only happen through a true partnership of cross-functional business leaders across sales and marketing, technology, data/analytics, and finance. In fact, EY/
The survey heard from 600 cross-functional senior executive respondents in marketing, technology and finance, highlighting that data strategy is distributed more than all executive roles such as CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, CISO and CMO.
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Business changes are fully synchronized – and the answer is not just a better “dashboard” or data visualization. The work of integrating data into digital technology and processes can be difficult, especially on a global scale, but if done right, creating value creates momentum and trust.
Despite all the talk about data and technology, talent will likely be the most important issue in 2022. Based on many conversations with CMOs last year across all sectors, from consumer products to in technology to manufacturing, talent challenges include data-driven skills shortages, general sustainability challenges and incentives.
Detailed examination, breadth and depth. It forces leaders to review how they build and train their teams, manage and collaborate with external partners such as agencies, and adopt new working models while maintaining the right balance of consistency and independence. Many leaders are taking matters into their own hands, creating new training programs to transform their current talent into modern, full-fledged marketers. These activities create greater consistency and even mobility within the company.
The information revolution means there is more advanced thinking. Today’s marketers need to spend less time in the rearview mirror analyzing past results and instead use predictive analytics to predict the future. These new superpowers allow marketers to drive growth and operational efficiency, as they not only target advertising, for example, but also ensure that a company’s supply chain runs only when it is in place. to deliver products.
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However, when marketers become biased and too biased towards automation, they lose their uniquely human capacity for intuition and creativity. Storytelling skills are more important than ever to ensure that creative messages still connect with people, even when targeted well and quickly. From retail media networks in the physical and digital worlds to virtual branding and transactional experiences in the metaverse, new marketing options and formats will continue to emerge. Even if the math is fully understood from the beginning, there should be room for taking risks and making variations.
By 2022, marketing leaders will have the ability to connect the customer journey to a complete growth agenda, stay creative, and measure data and technology in more meaningful ways than ever before. The speed of decision-making is becoming faster, while also becoming more variable, connected and complex. Those who can create internal connective tissue will transform their companies to become more competitive and unlock new levels of value creation by taking center stage in growth strategy and the C-suite.
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Diversity Latest Magazine Ascend Topics Podcasts Video Store Big Data Ideas and Visual Choices Case Study A recent study found that more than half of medium-sized companies do not have a roadmap to guide their digital strategy.
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A result. The National Center for the Middle Market has been tracking companies between $10 million and $1 billion in annual revenue since 2012. Although average revenue growth for middle market companies has increased in 2021, a more a closer look reveals a split recovery: 45% of companies reported revenue growth of 10% or more, but another 34% saw revenue flat or declining. With an uneven recovery and ongoing challenges, how can mid-sized companies thrive? The data shows that the middle market