Change is imminent not only in philosophy but in business as well.
The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) position has undergone a mind-boggling evolution over the past few years. Many CMOs today are in charge of every aspect of the customer experience (CX), including technology, customer data and analytics, overall account growth, and, ultimately, impact on the bottom line. They used to be in charge of all things creative and brand-related.
No, that’s not the only value I wish to demonstrate here. Read on!
CMOs Understand Customers the Most
Fortunately, knowing your target audience is the essence of marketing, and you should keep them in mind when making creative and strategic decisions. 66% of customers anticipate businesses to understand their wants. In fact, customers will pay extra for a positive experience. Moreover, customer-focused companies are also 60% more profitable than those that aren't.
Savvy marketers raise the standard for customer experiences with a firm over time by using data and research to understand what they want and how to build expectations for purchasing things.
Although marketing is a part of CX, successful CX isn't always marketing.
While marketing is in charge of the initial stages of the pre-purchase customer journey, many CMOs have experienced the disappointments that come with raising expectations that the business is unable to meet owing to subpar CX. These flaws may include a supplier's failure to deliver the ordered goods, unhelpful customer service provided by ineffective chatbots, outsourced customer service representatives, or other errors that cause the overall experience to suffer from broken promises.
In addition to adding significantly to a company's overall value, a CMO takeover of the customer experience can also designate marketers to operationalize feedback they have gathered from customers, such as when they are faced with an angry customer's viral tweetstorm about a negative brand experience.
How Has a CMO's Role Changed?
Companies have become considerably more customer-centric over the past few years, and a lot of that focus is now placed on initiatives that operate under the umbrella of CX. CMOs are the drivers of CX, whose scope and direction can be widespread and go beyond the typical purview of a marketing firm. This Chief Customer Officer depiction needs CMOs to lead the way or at least take a significant role in CX.
Furthermore, CMOs and their staff must be unequivocal masters in consumer or customer habits and patterns and be acutely aware of the competitive marketplace, past company performance, and broader megatrends. Without a powerful insight mechanism, there is currently no viable alternative. If you don't understand your customers and the holistic sensibility of the community they live in, you can't be customer-centric.
Approach to Strategy
CMOs are once again adopting a more deliberate approach to strategy or plans that are built on a deeper understanding and designed to be adaptable and dynamic. The past several years have demonstrated how quickly and severely the world can change. Businesses unable or unwilling to change their strategies will continue to struggle.
LTV Prioritization
Another significant change for CMOs is their increased success with lifetime value (LTV) optimization instead of just short-term transactional goals. Equilibrating short-term company objectives with long-term demands is never assured. Finding and retaining the right customers has become essential due to the high friction and exorbitant costs associated with acquiring new customers. Companies and CMOs with solid business plans and good financial standing are making LTV an imperative.
Importance of the Brand
The brand is now more critical than ever. Many businesses have thrived through difficult times thanks to the magic of a robust and dynamic brand. As consumers are overrun with options in virtually every industry, the impact of this has become fairly obvious. As the importance of this area continues to grow, CMOs are prioritizing bringing in-house brand strategy.
Better Expertise of the Marketplace
As they're more knowledgeable about their industries, markets, and customers, many CMOs have significantly increased their power level within their companies. The best knowledgeable CMOs consistently make a significant influence. They are valued contributors to the overall business strategy and are well-liked by colleagues. CMOs who are primarily interested in the marketing sector may find that they have positioned themselves as the heads of an execution team rather than as significant strategists or swayers of the company's overall direction.
The New Role of CMOs in Essence
The scope of the marketing position has significantly increased during the past few years. The "Modern CMO" must possess new skills: brand forecasting, product marketing coaching, and expertise in data science, MarTech, and life cycle marketing. Very few people can do it all, but those who can have a significant strategic and commercial impact on their companies are in high demand. As a result, an unmatched option exists to upgrade to a "CMO Plus" role.
Enhancing the customer experience is one of the critical new areas that many CMOs are placing a high premium on due to how important it is for building a brand and increasing loyalty. Synchronization is ultimately the customer's move toward communion. Understanding the customer from the audience's perspective and becoming aware of their purchasing habits are essential to marketing.
"Getting brands to gain a share of mind is a challenge. People want to feel connected to brands. Customer data is key to understanding who you are and what they need," Norie Verwijst, Associate Category Manager - Frozen, Topco Associates LLC, as per the Clootrack report.
- The new role of a CMO requires communicating with and understanding customers. The second is follow-through, ensuring that everything is offered once a customer enters a store or visits our website.
- Sending the data to the individuals in charge of each touchpoint is a significant component of a CMO's responsibility for managing marketing and the customer experience. For example, the supply chain manager looks at on-time deliveries based on the number of deliveries within the window assured.
4 Key Pillars of Success for CMOs
While marketers have difficulty, many brands are working to give customers an omnichannel, consistent, and contextualized experience. As a result, the chief marketing officer's job description has evolved from "marketing only" to include marketing and technology. We arrived at four crucial success factors that CMOs are concentrating on to navigate this difficult time.
1. Data
This is unquestionably the factor controlling the marketing process in the most significant way. The single source of truth is a rugged ideal to achieve, even though everyone has been talking about it for a while. This is because numerous channels are coming from various individuals and siloed data.
CMOs need to:
- Work with several data types, including collecting data from many sources, unlocking it, and arranging it understandably and practically to support their marketing strategy.
- Have the skill to manage a large-scale, cloud-based infrastructure that can support big data processing
2. Consent And Compliance
Consent-based marketing solutions have been developed due to cookie deprecation, regulatory action, and rising consumer expectations. This implies that marketers must realize they are responsible for the conduct of their solution providers. A top priority for most CMOs is putting together a compliant, first-party data asset.
CMOs need to:
- Decide on a plan to personalize interactions, collect first-party consumer data
- Be pliant with all data silos by carefully implementing consent capture.
3. MarTech
"New data and AI-driven methods are needed to engage and influence today's sophisticated and socially hyperactive consumers. To remain relevant, brands need to provide new value for existing customers with elevated and rewarding experiences across all touchpoints, while acquiring new ones with contextually tailored precision. Hyper-personalization moves an enterprise from targeting segments of its consumer base, to surgically targeting individual consumers, and wowing them with signature experiences at high-value moments," Lance Moncrieffe, AI Expert Practices Leader, Cognizant.
The technological ecosystem has constantly been changing. It is crucial to select an effective technology platform to gather a large amount of currently available data and support the marketing plan. Every CMO needs to be involved in understanding the methods or have a great partner helping them do so. This partner should also be able to advise them on the best way to apply the strategies.
CMOs need to:
- Evaluate their teams and each individual's comparative tech savviness to navigate through the abundance of technologies.
- Manage the organizational dynamics with stakeholders such as Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), Chief Development Officers (CDOs), and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to prioritize technology spending for marketing amidst the contending preferences.
4. Beyond Marketing
Rapid revenue growth and increased profitability can result from aligning sales, marketing, and operations. This suggests that a CMO's responsibilities now extend far beyond marketing. The CMO can tailor every encounter across channels and roles, including sales, service, and commerce, thanks to the unanimity of the data and the appropriate configuration. The traditionally exclusive marketing KPIs are now shared with other tasks, demonstrating the need for extensive collaboration between marketing and other functions.
CMOs need to:
- Collaborate effectively with other department champions to strive for positive alignment and the successful implementation of integrated initiatives.
- Share ownership of shared KPIs with significant stakeholders if they want the marketing function to be recognized and valued throughout the enterprise.
CMOs in the Coming Years
Without a doubt, the CMO role will become more demanding due to expectations for supporting the scope, pace, and complexity. The strengths and intricacies of the brand, the developing capabilities of technology, and the rapid changes in culture and consumer behavior will all require the next generation of CMOs to make these distinctions. They will need to assemble adaptable, fluid teams, work smoothly with outside resources, and, of course, evaluate and improve all they do.
CMOs are already grappling with all these issues, but momentum and complexity will make future iterations of these issues immensely more complex.
The Key Takeaways
Remember that your customers are more intelligent than before. You might assume that all you need to do is outperform your rival. At the very least, remember this: While you compete with your immediate competitors, your service and experience are measured against the finest that any of your customers have ever been provided. Even when your business isn't exactly a customer experience ace, customers may use that as a benchmark when evaluating your CX.
People appreciate and desire positive customer experiences. At first glance, managing CX on top of other responsibilities as a CMO could seem overwhelming. But marketers are the only ones who truly understand customers.
Moving back to a more disjointed system will seem outdated if best practices are adopted and company leadership is on board to make CX the center of their brand. Maybe you're not ready to bring in a CXO to replace your CMO. But as a step in the right direction, you can consider adding the X and renaming the position to Chief Marketing & Experience Officer (CMXO).
Read More: 5 Ways To Unite Brand, Marketing, and Customer Experience