The CMO Top Ten
// February 15th, 2011
A recent white paper by the CMO Council (a worldwide network of Chief Marketing Officers) considered the challenges facing today’s top marketing executives and identified these ten opportunities to improve an organisation’s marketing effectiveness:
1. Mr Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall
The biggest challenge to Marketing Directors today: the silos that exist in most medium to large organisations. Functional heads of departments – advertising, media buying, public relations, promotions/merchandising, CRM, interactive, sales, research/analytics – tend to resist the loss of control and the blending of marketing assets that would actually make it easier for companies to achieve their common goals.
2. Live or Die by the Numbers
Companies don’t usually lack data, whether it is transactional, behavioural, attitudinal or demographic. What they lack is the expertise needed to extract meaningful, predictable and actionable insight from the combined customer information that flows through the organisation.
3. They Want It Now
“End of the month” is no longer an acceptable timeframe for responding to customers and acting on information received (if it ever was). The marketplace has been transformed into an “always on, instant gratification” environment — consumers who want action will tweet and blog about company responses (or inaction). The price of excellent customer service is eternal vigilance.
4. Share the Smarts
Some of the cleverest solutions are likely to emerge from the outlying arms of your corporate empire, where inspiration and perspiration have to make up for a lack of access to organisational resources (and usually no budget). Make a special effort to gather and share those ideas across your organisation.
5. Synchronise Supply & Demand
Today’s Point of Sales Systems typically provide abundant data for tracking sales, managing inventory levels and forecasting product demand (although too many marketers are out of the loop and reliant on others to keep them updated on an occasional basis). Unfortunately, product supply data is seldom as sophisticated, which can cause problems such as out-of-stock or too much of the wrong product. Leading marketers are now looking to improve their organisation’s back-end business intelligence to streamline the process.
6. Better, Faster, Stronger
Time-to-market is the new mantra as windows of market opportunity open and close more rapidly. Meeting new product launch demands and opportunistic promotional requirements has never been more intense. The pressure is on marketers and the creators of marketing materials to deliver effective, robust solutions faster than ever.
7. Protect your identity
The demand to project a consistent brand identity is putting pressure on marketing groups to create centralised online repositories of pre-approved brand assets and content elements (logos, identity guides, images, video, graphics, audio, digital art files, user guides, collaterals, PowerPoints, signage, merchandising systems, booth designs, campaign components, etc.). Ensuring consistency and uniformity of brand messaging, promises and claims; pricing, policies and programs – as well as visual identity, brand tonality and lexicon – is essential to rights management, customer experience, business compliance and risk reduction.
8. Feed the Channels
Increasing the quality, quantity and timeliness of leads, as well as delivering more sales ready opportunities to internal and channel sales teams, requires greater investments in technology. Better targeting, profiling, segmentation and personalisation through advanced customer data and audience analytics is central to this mandate.
9. Suddenly it’s all about Relationships
The rapid acceptance of Internet-based social media has engendered profound changes in customer markets and business cultures and processes, impacting and influencing every facet of the way companies communicate, innovate, cross-pollinate, engage and deliver support across critical internal and external audiences. The adoption of new social media and community platforms is spawning new practices in product and idea development, customer-driven support, market intelligence gathering, problem resolution and brand message proliferation.
10. Adopt the new ROI
ROI metrics are no longer just about reach, frequency, brand recognition and CPM rates. They are much more about relevancy, response, recurring relationships and business return. This requires disciplined and clinical approaches to improving information and list access, database management, market segmentation, customer profiling, audience value, content relevance, email deliverability, search optimization, website performance, traffic quality, channel strategy, alternative media usage and closed loop measurement and recalibration.
In other words, what are you measuring and is it still relevant?
Download the full report at http://www.cmocouncil.org/cat_details.php?fid=141 (free registration required)