Executives today are facing more pressure than ever to correlate their efforts to quantifiable business results, and CMOs in particular are center stage as they gain more accountability for their initiatives. In fact, CMOs are the most likely among C-suite players to pay with their jobs when companies miss growth targets, according to a global study by Accenture.
In light of these pressures, marketers have been hard at work to find the best solutions that will drive measurable business results. One particular area of focus is digital transformation, where marketers are taking formerly siloed areas of the business like content marketing, advertising and social, and connecting the data and insights to form a more complete picture of how prospects engage pre-sale.
Data-driven marketing is an organization-wide effort
Given the challenges presented when trying to integrate these various channels, marketers must first tackle these questions before fully immersing themselves in the digital transformation journey:
- What can be prioritized to deliver high impact?
- What is the best way to navigate, ensuring stakeholders across the organization are invested in driving the changes that create improved results?
CMOs must tackle these with the added responsibility of taking into account their impact on a global level. More and more, CMOs are responsible for global marketing efforts across product lines and in regions where localized support is important, so gaining buy-in is critical. Marketing strategies must be easy to replicate in local markets and content must be able to be edited easily. One way we see our customers approach this is by prioritizing the transformation of marketing channels by building a central pool of resources from across departments, and is accessible to anybody who might need it.
Another area that we see marketing leaders tackle as a priority is events. This can include both webinars and in-person field events and conferences, where global engagement across all business units is high.
Where to start and how to navigate
With a flood of new martech tools every year, CMOs know that simply integrating a bevy of shiny new toys into your marketing tech stack is not always the best solution, and can bring unintended side effects. Rather than making it easier to track customers through a funnel, we often see companies suffering from massive fragmentation.
So what good are all those mountains of data if you can’t make them work for you? It’s useless to know thousands of data points about a potential customer if you’re not actually using them. Companies that build thriving digital marketing campaigns use their pooled data to create targeted marketing communications designed with surgical precision. Solve the technical problems causing data silos – and the culture problems preventing data sharing between departments – and you’ll start to see the true dividends of the wealth of data that you’re sitting on.
What types of data can you start to show
According to Accenture, 847 CMOs said they spend an average of 60 percent of their time fixing traditional marketing channels that aren’t delivering. That says a lot about the effectiveness of these channels, but it also shows that most CMOs don’t have a surplus of time to crunch numbers. Once you start to free up the flow of information between your teams, your number one goal should be to automate your marketing systems. Without digitization, data-driven marketing can be complex and costly, and trying to manage it manually will quickly become counterproductive.