Future CMO must be engaged and fearless

Our rela­tion­ship with com­pa­nies has changed. As cus­tomers, whether shop­ping for a fam­i­ly din­ner or work­ing with col­leagues to buy a mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar IT sys­tem, what we expect from a com­pa­ny is very dif­fer­ent from fif­teen or even ten years ago.

Back then when decid­ing what to buy in the super­mar­ket, we drew on mar­ket­ing mes­sages and some word-of-mouth rec­om­men­da­tions. We didn’t expect a com­pa­ny to “under­stand” us, but we did respond to, or even rev­elled in, the best mar­ket­ing cam­paigns.

Sim­i­lar­ly, those buy­ing busi­ness prod­ucts and ser­vices back then may have read some of the gener­ic mar­ket­ing lit­er­a­ture they were sent but, if con­sid­er­ing a pur­chase, they would prob­a­bly call the sales team to dis­cuss what they want­ed.

This has been changed by what Steve Lucas, chief exec­u­tive of Mar­ke­to, calls the “engage­ment econ­o­my” where, as he says, “more than half of human­i­ty is now con­nect­ed by social and mobile plat­forms, apps and devices”. Because it’s now so easy to com­mu­ni­cate per­son­al­ly with organ­i­sa­tions and each oth­er, we have far high­er expec­ta­tions that com­pa­nies under­stand us as indi­vid­u­als.

Yes, high­ly mem­o­rable mar­ket­ing cam­paigns will still gen­er­ate huge inter­est, such as Nike’s Break­ing 2 ini­tia­tive to help a run­ner break the daunt­ing two-hour mark for the marathon. But while res­o­nant sto­ries will remain at the heart of good mar­ket­ing, mar­keters must now make that sto­ry rel­e­vant for every cus­tomer in every chan­nel.

For exam­ple, a new run­ner may be inspired by Break­ing 2, but doesn’t then need an email fol­low-up pro­mot­ing shoes when they’ve already bought their first pair. What they may need, how­ev­er, is a newslet­ter with train­ing advice and sug­ges­tions for extra cloth­ing to buy.

And this is where the marketer’s role has changed. Not only should the mar­keter be per­son­al­is­ing con­tent for cus­tomers, the cus­tomer now expects it. Indeed, the new run­ner would prob­a­bly be dis­il­lu­sioned with the brand if it tried to sell him or her the same shoes they just bought.

This is no dif­fer­ent for busi­ness-to-busi­ness (B2B) mar­keters. Busi­ness buy­ers get a long way through the pur­chase deci­sion before they ever actu­al­ly speak to a sales rep. They expect to spend min­i­mal time dis­cussing their needs, as they think they already know what they want, and more time hag­gling over price.

To counter this, mar­keters need to nur­ture them through­out the buy­ing cycle by find­ing the right deci­sion-mak­ers before they are con­sid­er­ing a pur­chase and engage them with use­ful con­tent. As Mr Lucas says: “Mar­keters must now curate the entire cus­tomer expe­ri­ence.”

Mar­ket­ing func­tion of the future

In both B2B and busi­ness-to-con­sumer sit­u­a­tions, then, mar­keters have a more promi­nent role to play than they once did. The pur­pose of the mar­ket­ing func­tion of the future will be not to just pro­mote prod­ucts, but to rep­re­sent the com­pa­ny in the engage­ment econ­o­my – in every inter­ac­tion the com­pa­ny has with its cus­tomers across all chan­nels – and to ensure that, when a cus­tomer wants to buy or ask for ser­vice, it is as effort­less as pos­si­ble.

This is scary for many of the world’s mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als. They still need to cre­ate sto­ries that appeal to their core audi­ence, but must also under­stand and chart the full cus­tomer jour­ney, and pro­vide the right com­mu­ni­ca­tion at the right time in the right chan­nel. This is exact­ly what we as cus­tomers expect and we will hap­pi­ly turn to a com­peti­tor if we don’t get it.

On top of that, because this mass per­son­al­i­sa­tion requires so much effort, many mar­keters now work dai­ly with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI). The right AI will help firms find trends in the ter­abytes of cus­tomer data they col­lect and per­son­alise their mar­ket­ing based on those insights. This is not only some­thing new to mas­ter, but also some­thing many mar­keters fear; they wor­ry they will lose their jobs, either to an algo­rithm or to a data sci­en­tist.

The role of mar­ket­ing is becom­ing so inte­gral to every­thing a com­pa­ny does in the engage­ment econ­o­my that mar­keters will be in demand for years to come

Yet this isn’t the case at all. First, mass per­son­al­i­sa­tion is impos­si­ble with­out tech­nol­o­gy. And sec­ond, the role of mar­ket­ing is becom­ing so inte­gral to every­thing a com­pa­ny does in the engage­ment econ­o­my that mar­keters will be in demand for years to come.

With this greater under­stand­ing of cus­tomers, the chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer (CMO) of the future and his or her staff also need a greater under­stand­ing of data and tech­nol­o­gy. Cur­rent cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment sys­tems record what cus­tomers have told a com­pa­ny, where­as this new approach will enable mar­keters to record “engage­ment and expe­ri­ence data”, as Mr Lucas puts it.

This is much more pow­er­ful, as it tracks how peo­ple actu­al­ly behave, rather than how they say they act. Cou­pled with AI, this enables mar­keters to get smarter and more focused, and serve their cus­tomer even bet­ter.

 Make the most of the future – be fear­less

To cap­i­talise on all this change, mar­keters must learn to be fear­less, as mem­bers of Marketo’s Mar­ket­ing Nation com­mu­ni­ty demon­strate. And, as Sarah Kennedy, CMO of Mar­ke­to, says when asked about the best advice she’s ever been giv­en: “Jump out of the plane first, then find your para­chute on the way down.” Mar­keters can’t afford to let per­fec­tion­ism get in the way of exper­i­ment­ing and learn­ing.

CMOs should use this fear­less approach to focus on three pri­or­i­ties. First, they need to under­stand what infor­ma­tion, tech­nol­o­gy and sup­port their teams need. This should include com­plete com­fort with own­ing and oper­at­ing the martech stack, includ­ing embrac­ing the use of AI tools.

Sec­ond, they must ensure the mar­ket­ing func­tion and the broad­er organ­i­sa­tion have the right organ­i­sa­tion­al struc­ture to make this new approach to mar­ket­ing work.

And last, but cer­tain­ly not least, CMOs must recruit the right mix of peo­ple. In this new envi­ron­ment, mar­ket­ing teams need as many “left-brain” thinkers as more tra­di­tion­al cre­ative “right-brain” ones.

So, the future mar­ket­ing func­tion will be one that is far more pow­er­ful and impor­tant to its com­pa­ny. But CMOs need to be fear­less in tak­ing a more promi­nent role to help their teams and organ­i­sa­tions meld tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing skills, which have nev­er been more impor­tant, with the right tech­nol­o­gy and approach.

 Learn how Marketo’s plat­form and AI capa­bil­i­ties help mar­keters with mass per­son­al­i­sa­tion, and give them the tools to be the fear­less lead­ers they now need to be by vis­it­ing uk.marketo.com