Modern CMO – Leading Growth Marketing

By Rohit Prabhakar

Today’s CMO is just not responsible for the brand, PR, and communications. Two most important goals for modern CMO are responsible for growth marketing with sales and customer experience (CX). In the last few years, you must have seen the rise of demand centers and CX responsibilities in CMO organization. This is the reality of modern CMO who is leading growth marketing.

Three key focus areas for every modern CMO leading growth marketing are:

•     Customer Focus
•     Marketing Technology
•     Agility

Customer Focus

The customer is now in control of when, where and how they engage. More complexity arises as a customer uses many devices, apps, channels to engage. Modern CMO wants their team to increase engagement and reduc churn rates. This is not possible without knowing your customer well.

You may be able to get high traffic using good content strategies and investing in paid media. That traffic many times doesn’t convert into meaningful traffic that your marketing and sales team can act on. Once you understand customer needs and mindset you can improve engagement and task completion rates. This will lead to more quality marketing qualified and eventually sales qualified leads.

Customer focus also builds a culture that focuses on improving CX and not just campaigns. This enables your team to think beyond lead generation and focus on customer lifecycle. A great customer experience again leads to business growth. Studies from various groups have proven the impact of improvement in CX to growth in many industries. This also leads to big-time improvement in customer retention. Every customer churn eliminated is more powerful then a new customer created.

Marketing Technology (MarTech)

The secret to effective marketing is good data, meaningful insights and ability to execute and optimize. Right marketing technology stack will enables that vision. A right MarTech stack enables your teams with the power of data, ability to know your customer and automate marketing processes so that your teams can focus on right tasks. Here is a very good graphic on how marketers use Marketing Technology.

CMO must think like a CIO and hire leaders that can get the best ROI from their MarTech investments.

The goal of MarTech is enabling the marketer to run their campaigns in the shortest possible time. That means as less development and releases as possible. A right MarTech stack should enable the goal of zero development platform.

Side note: I firmly believe that marketing teams should not have development responsibilities in their teams. In industry terms, this is called shadow IT. All CMOS should have strong relationships with their CIOs and use their teams when it comes to architecture, development, security, and support. Another very good topic to consider in your discussions with CIO is DevOps for Marketing.

Agility

Improving marketing efficiency and effectiveness is every CMO’s goal. No longer we can afford programs that run for months and years. Imagine you are investing millions of dollars on ad spend and end of the year you find that there was only 5-15% ROI.

It is important to change campaigns on short timelines based on the results they are driving. MarTech alone cannot be effective until both your people and processes are agile. Agility will enable your teams to track, analyze and optimize those programs. This will create a culture in your team to plan and adjust all campaigns on a bi-weekly basis. Imagine the cost savings and high ROI that you can achieve with this ability.

Agility is not just forming agile teams, kanban boards, backlogs, and bi-weekly releases. The most important part of agility is to enable your teams with decision-making rights. The biggest killer of speed is organizational hierarchies.

This is nothing new as your product and tech teams have been agile for years. A modern CMO leading growth marketing must connect and learn how their CIO and product team who has already adopted agility.