Ever-Changing Rules: New Era Challenges For CMOs

The average tenure for a chief marketing officer in the current economic climate is about 24 months. Today’s challenges demand that the CMO be a “test and learn” person relying on a strong infrastructure of data, tools and analytics. By conquering and exploiting these new challenges, CMOs can hopefully beat the averages in terms keeping their jobs and ride the next wave of increasingly complex challenges.

Once, it was enough to meet the following criteria:

Traditional Challenge 1:
Build an integrated and complete view of your customers and prospects.
Building a comprehensive, dedicated marketing database is critical to executing solid marketing programs, plans and campaigns. Also critical is a complete customer interaction history, plus supplemental data to indicate future behavior. Delving into third party data attributes, demographic and psychographic data has allowed companies to drastically improve their view, treatments and interactions.

Traditional Challenge 2: Truly understand your customers, prospects and suspects.
After assembling the appropriate data about their customers, marketing executives’ next job was to make sense of it all. They employed behavioral segmentation to flush out clusters or segments of similar customers to be appended with third party data and profiled. By creatively naming these segments, CMOs gained momentum increasing or decreasing their various sub-groups of customers.

Traditional Challenge 3: Move beyond “socialistic marketing” or “spray and pray.”
Once the segmentation is complete, the goal is primarily to use this data and information to improve interactions: replacing the same message sent to all customers with tailored direct mail, e-mails, phone scripts, etc., to the different segments. Predictive models add another layer of accuracy in matching and finding best customers.

Traditional Challenge 4: Present a single company face to the customer.
No matter what channel customers emerge from, they should feel valued, with their preferences, interests and total history (including purchases and customer service ) all understood. To collect and store customers’ transaction history at each touchpoint, sales, marketing and customer service executives had to talk periodically so that the right hand knew what the left hand was doing.

Now, marketers need to shift their focus to a new set of increasingly complex challenges, and their success will be a good indicator of their company’s ability to thrive in the upcoming years.

New Challenge 1:
Understand true marketing costs to get more value for your dollar.
At a micro level, understanding the ROI of a single marketing promotion or campaign is important, but it is also essential to see the forest for the trees and understand that the cost of the forest is not the price of each tree added together. A macro view of marketing costs helps CMOs understand the true cost of all the technology needed to run marketing, and then consider new advances such as software as a service (SaaS), which can dramatically reduce costs while providing bundled functionality.

New Challenge 2:
Integrate your off-line data with your on-line data.
It seems like every day there is another new and powerful channel to communicate with customers. First there was the Internet, then texting, and now Twitter – – what next? The challenges these new channels represent are magnified by the fact that things happen in warp speed as opposed to the “boring” traditional channels such as direct mail, outbound telemarketing and even email. Again, to effectively market to suspects, prospects, and customers, a company has to be able to create a complete view of their constituents.

New Challenge 3:
Supplement batch, outbound campaigns with the new wave of campaigns.
Traditional batch outbound campaigns are still very popular; particularly email campaigns where the costs are extremely low as compared to direct mail. Companies need to master the new wave of campaigns — including inbound driven, event-driven, online, and multi-channel — and combine them for maximum effect.

New Challenge 4:
Use a multi-channel marketing thrust to allocate scarce marketing dollars to the most appropriate, highest return channels.
John Wannamaker’s quote is as relevant today: “I know half of my marketing dollars are wasted … I just don’t know which half!” Marketers today need to know which channels are more effective or less wasteful in terms of marketing spend. How this is accomplished can dramatically improve an overall marketing program.

New Challenge 5:
Continue on the “Customer Centricity” journey by focusing on relevant and appropriate metrics.
CMOs need to access industry-relevant metrics that provide a compass for future journeys, campaigns, and programs. Metrics need to be stated in terms of the customer, readily accessible at very frequent intervals, or in real time, e.g., “average revenue per customer” and “revenue per customer segment.” Most metrics can be anchored around three main goals: customer acquisition, customer development (cross sell/up sell), and customer loyalty (churn/retention). By laying out plans based on customer segments, CMOs can use these metrics for course corrections.

The bottom line? If chief marketing officers can move beyond historical, traditional challenges and capitalize on the new wave of challenges, they can change the game with a greater level of precision, measurement and customer access — and take their company to the next level of marketing while claiming greater share of customers’ wallets.

Patrick O’Halloran ([email protected]) is chief executive officer of Entiera.