Power in Precision with Account-Based Marketing

BMC Software’s Dani Scherer, Sr Director of Business Operations, and Ankit Sharma, Sr. Manager of Marketing Operations, recently took part in Power in Precision: How BMC Engages Top Accounts. During this webinar, they discussed how to implement successful account-based marketing (ABM) programs and how BMC engages their top tier accounts using Oracle CX.  They talked about:

• The challenges they faced in aligning sales and marketing

• The transformation of mindset, strategy, and process across the organization

• Their implementation and execution of this new strategy with Oracle Eloqua and the unbelievable success they achieved

If you missed out on this webinar, you can watch the replay here. 

Here are a lightly edited version of the top five questions Scherer and Sharma answered during the webinar.

1. What would you recommend to someone who is looking into implementing an ABM strategy?

Implementing an ABM strategy is not an easy thing to do by any stretch of the imagination. When we (BMC) began to look at ABM, there was a top level goal in the organization to better align our marketing and sales teams. In order to do this, a shift in mindset was required. We understood that driving change in an organization is not always welcome and is sometimes met with pushback.

 In our case, we had buy-in from senior level management, which created a top-down approach, allowing our teams to work towards one goal in a fast and efficient way. By understanding organizational goals, marketing and sales were able to apply insight from their respective data to come together and determine which accounts to focus on.

From there, we leveraged Oracle Eloqua to make sure that the proper processes were in place to ensure that data was flowing freely throughout the sales cycle. As a result, marketing and sales were able to rally around a combined strategy where we are all in it together. 

2. What did it take to get your ABM program up and running? What resources were required? 

In order to get our programs off the ground, we took a two-phased approach. The first phase kicked off in January of 2019. It was a transitional phase where we worked internally to identify target accounts that matched our ideal customer profile. This allowed us to design our marketing programs and begin running nurture campaigns targeted at those accounts.

The second phase began six months later when we hired three dedicated ABM planners, whose focus was to align closely with our sales organization. Field marketing planners were now focusing on top accounts and we were starting to optimize our strategies. By the end of the year, we had programs in market that  targeted 24 of our top ABM accounts and 14 ABM cluster programs targeting our second tier of top accounts, which amounted to 500 accounts with similar customer profiles.

3. What systems do you use to execute your ABM strategies?

When thinking about this, ask yourself if the different technologies you want to use work well with your existing systems. This is imperative because if your technology does not play well with your existing systems it makes it very hard for your marketing and sales organizations to execute and deliver results. 

At BMC, we use many systems and technologies to execute on our ABM efforts. Oracle Eloqua sits at the core of everything we do. Oracle Eloqua is the foundational piece that allows us to connect our data and ensure that it is flowing freely across our business units and getting to the places it needs to go.

From there, we can launch campaigns that engage and convert our target accounts. Additionally, the extensibility of Oracle Eloqua enables us to integrate with our CRM to ensure that leads are flowing quickly to sales, Lattice to pull in intent and fit data through the cloud app, and other partners to achieve success with our strategy. 

4. Is your ABM strategy primarily targeted to existing customers or new accounts?

When it comes to our programs, it is a combination. Each of our top target accounts, which are  generally existing customers, have a targeted plan. We first focus on making sure that our existing customers are getting the most out of the solutions that they have already invested in. This includes helping them understand what additional BMC solutions can help them grow and transform their business. 

We also have target accounts that are net new prospects. Here, our sales organization focuses on helping those accounts understand how BMC solutions can help address their business pain points. Additionally, we use our clusters to further focus on net-new prospects.

For example, one of our customers may have one of our solutions that addresses a specific persona’s  pain point. However, this may not address additional personas at this account who need education and enablement on another segment of our business that will address their specific business needs. We use our technology to scale this approach. 

5. How are you able to continue the alignment between your marketing and sales teams and celebrate the success of your programs?

It is all about communication. When we began our programs in 2019, communication across our teams proved vital to our success and is just as important today. The majority of our communication was done through a lot of meetings, which turned out to be a difference maker and educational tool for all parties involved. We set out ground rules to be transparent with the good, the bad, and the ugly of everything going on at the time.

This shifted the way we communicated across the board. It is now ok for sales to doubt something and communicate that to marketing. In turn, it is now our responsibility to do the research and look at the data and report back what may not be working. 

In terms of celebrating, communication is key as well. As a marketing org, we stay close to data to identify when something is progressing. Whenever and wherever possible, we try to ensure that the sales org is the one at the podium saying “Hey I just closed this deal and it would not have been possible” rather than the typical “Hey marketing isn't doing anything” that is often heard.

When these sentiments come from the voice of sales, it has a more profound effect on perceptions in other parts of the organization. By leveraging this shift in mindset and enhancing our communications across teams, we were able to create an environment where sales and marketing were each other’s champions.

                                                                                                                                   

For more information about ABM and marketing and sales alignment, check out:

• Do More with Sales Enablement
• How Marketing Can Prime a Lead for Sales
• Account-Based Accounting and Social Media: A One-Two Knockout Punch
• Account-Based Confusion: Enterprise Edition

You can also watch the replay of the webinar here.

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5 Aces to Overcoming the Pandemic for CMOs

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Why Smart Digital Marketers Measure the Performance of Each Creative Asset

Smart digital marketers love measurement.

We measure anything that can be measured—page views, bounce rate, email clickthrough, average order value, twitter mentions, and just about anything else that can help us gauge the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.

After all, if you can’t measure it – then how are you going to improve it?

So isn’t it a little surprising that we don’t have a data-driven way to measure —arguably—the most critical piece of any marketing campaign?

I’m talking about measuring the effectiveness of your creative assets.

The heart and soul of any marketing campaign

‘Effectiveness’ can mean a lot of things, but in this context, I’m using it to reference whether featuring a specific creative asset leads to increased conversions.

The heart and soul of any marketing campaign really comes down to the choice of imagery. The visuals need to resonate with your audience if you want to encourage a conversion. 

Developing new creative assets is no small investment either. From planning to photoshoots to editing; a lot of time and energy goes into every design that features in a marketing campaign.

Marketers might spend days, if not weeks, obsessing over these assets before releasing it into the wild to see whether it moves the needle. They might see review after review before finally being sent off to be included in an email blast or a social media campaign.

Of course, we can see whether a marketing campaign has been successful after we send it. You can compare two campaigns against each other and decide which was most effective. But that doesn’t provide us with much insight into how effective one creative asset was over another.  And that’s because different visuals will resonate with different audiences.

The type of imagery that leads one person to convert might lead another to hit the unsubscribe button.

That’s not a failure on the part of the creative asset, but with who it's targeting.  Marketers need to account for this when measuring the effectiveness of a creative asset.

What should you know about your creative assets?

At a high level, you want to know which creatives perform well across your entire audience, which assets are only effective for a smaller percentage of the audience, and which assets you should stop investing in.

That means there are three buckets your creative assets can fall into:

1. Creative asset that performs well across all segments of your audience

2. Creative asset that performs well for specific segments of your audience

3. Creative asset that does not perform well for any segments of your audience

If you can figure out which bucket each of your creative assets falls into, then you can begin to identify the trends and patterns that make the design effective at driving conversions for a given subset of customers.

Without knowing which bucket each piece of creative falls into, you’re flying blind.

How should you measure the ‘effectiveness’ of your creative assets?

It sounds simple, but when you manage multiple marketing campaigns and creative assets across various events—things get complicated fast.

In the email channel, you can gather a vast amount of data around your creative assets' performance.. There is open, click, and conversion data that can be used to inform the effectiveness of each creative asset that gets deployed.

To understand how effective a piece of creative is, there are two things that need to be tracked:

1. How effective is this piece of creative at leading customers to a conversion?

2. How much of my audience reacts positively to this piece of creative?

Along with overall effectiveness, it is also important to understand which percentage of your audience a creative asset is effective for. This allows you to identify niche creative assets and opportunities to produce more content for underserved segments.

For example, you might be interested in understanding which creative assets are best at increasing engagement and conversions among your customers who spend the least with you annually.

These insights into which creative assets are most effective will lead you to produce more relevant content and serve it to those most likely to react to it positively. You also get to avoid the problem of sending the wrong content to your audience, leading to unsubscribes and less enthusiasm about opening your emails.

Measuring creative asset effectiveness means more relevant messages

Relevance is one of the most important words in the world of marketing for a reason. The right creative asset can make the difference between a customer hitting the unsubscribe button or clicking through from your email.

In the email channel, it’s so important to be relevant. Consumers are bombarded with email today and in order to stick out and stay in the inbox, being relevant to your audience is essential.

                                                                                                                       

For more information about measuring marketing effectiveness, A/B testing, and looking at digital analytics and results, please visit:

• Oracle Maxymiser

• Oracle Infinity

• Oracle CX Marketing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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How to Prepare for the Future of Travel

One industry that’s been majorly impacted by social distancing, government-mandated health and safety restrictions, and regional and countrywide lockdowns than the travel and hospitality industry. Even once travel restrictions are completely lifted, marketers within these businesses will have the tricky job of messaging to consumers who are reluctant to take trips for either business or recreation. Because of this reluctance, Goldman Sachs doesn’t expect 2019 travel levels to be reached again until at least 2023.

However, that doesn’t mean travel companies should remain static. Rather, this time period is an opportunity to judiciously prioritize opportunities to meet travelers where they are today and where they’ll be tomorrow.

First, let’s examine what travel marketers should be doing to prepare for the long-term future of travel, and then we’ll look at more immediate, low-cost opportunities to pursue today.

Adapting to long-term changes to travel

There’s little doubt that the future of travel will look quite different in the years ahead. Those in the hospitality and travel industry will try to:

1. Recalibrate and adjust to travelers’ expectations

The future of travel will entail fewer planes and fewer flight options in a given market, fewer cruise ships, fewer Uber or Lyft drivers, and fewer restaurants. Some travelers might find this more limited set of options frustrating. So, whether at a call center or during check-in, it would be helpful for customer service support workers to recalibrate travelers’ expectations as smoothly and painlessly as possible.

To do this efficiently, strive to understand what’s most important to each of your customers. Is it a direct flight rather than a one with a connection? Is it the time of day to travel? Is it the hotel’s proximity to landmarks or free parking? Ask your customers questions and guide them to the right information so that their must-have preferences can be addressed first, followed by the nice-to-haves.

Cleaning and sanitation procedures will likely be a major area of concern as well. Basic reassurances will be critical, and additional details will be needed to satisfy some travelers. To put them at ease, some companies will likely offer an add-on sanitization package, special seats or rooms for high-risk travelers, or other accommodations for customers willing to pay for them. Guidance on protocols and options may not only get certain individuals traveling sooner, but could also be a cost offset option as a business. Additionally, perhaps third-party validated industry standards become an option to “certify” cleanliness levels across properties. 

Other customer conveniences like buffets, water fountains, pools, hot tubs, pool chairs, and various other shared experience items may either be removed, closed more often for required cleaning breaks, or only available by appointment. Some guests may consider these efforts inconvenient and be upset. Using triggered pre-trip messages via email, SMS, and push to set expectations appropriately ahead of time will be vital to avoiding surprised and unhappy guests.

2. Embrace a third kind of traveler: the workationer

While a lot of attention has been given to the WFH (Working From Home) trend, we think some of these workers will take it a step further and be a part of the WFA (Working From Anywhere) movement. When these workers travel, they won’t fall into the two traditional buckets of those traveling for business and those traveling for recreation. They’ll be doing a mix of the two with a working vacation.

While workationers are not new, the pandemic and the resulting changes to work and life will increase their numbers. So, to prepare for the future of travel, companies will try harder to attract this once-niche traveler.

For example, consider promoting spaces that are designed for both work and vacation, such as amenities like high-speed internet connections which appeal to workationers. Include pictures and floorplans of those spaces in your marketing messages to create a sense of confidence that both work and relaxation are achievable. In addition to bundled “vacation packages” that include air, hotel, and car, consider creating “work/play packages.” If brands are able to attract these workationers, they might be rewarded with longer stays on their properties. 

3. Think about how your customer segments will change and message appropriately

The pandemic affected everyone differently based on their age, health conditions, where they live, and beliefs. So, the makeup of your customer base could mean big or small changes for you.

For instance, was a large portion of your business driven by people over the age of 60? Typically traveling for leisure more than business, this segment may be one of the last to come around to traveling again given their heightened health worries and concerns with confusing procedures, such as contactless room entry and contactless payments. Smart brands will adapt the targeting, imagery, and copy of their marketing efforts to speak effectively to this audience.

At the other end of the spectrum, some of your customers will decide that their procrastination-first approach to their bucket list of travel experiences needs to stop. They’ll want to tackle that head on as soon as they feel it’s safe. Other customers who missed or postponed major family milestones, such as weddings, family reunions, quinceañera parties, 25th-wedding anniversary celebrations, or 40th-birthday celebrations will be looking to make up for lost time. Identifying customers through surveys and browsing patterns, and then marketing to them effectively is a significant audience segmentation opportunity. 

4. Embrace the new travel priority to avoid crowds.

Early indications point to the future of travel being much more focused on:

• “Off the beaten path" and lesser known, but equally rewarding destinations

• Bespoke experiences and guided trips that are lower stress and enable a deeper connection with the place or people they’re visiting

• Simply avoiding crowded places

• Off-season travel, such as traveling to Paris in the spring when the weather is cooler and cloudier so they can visit tourist spots when there aren’t long lines and huge crowds 

These changes in consumer preferences offer travel and hospitality companies lots of opportunities to shift their promotions, packaging, segmentation, and testing strategies to identify and cater to crowd-weary travelers. They may also lead to the re-defining of peak-, shoulder-, and off-seasons and a better distribution of travelers, who previously flocked to a relatively small number of super-popular destinations. 

Protecting your business now

Adopting most of the strategies above involve significant planning, and perhaps resources, that aren’t available for many travel companies right now due to required cost-cutting measures. However, the following actions can be implemented more immediately to help ensure success:

1. Protect your loyalists

For most of your loyalty club members, it’s been a long time since they’ve experienced the benefits of being a customer. Room or seat upgrades, members-only lounges, trips bought with points—most of the nicer elements of being a loyalty member are distant memories now. That means that the opportunity for these loyalists to be won over by a competitor has likely increased.

Consider these ways to keep your loyalists engaged:

• Focus more on non-travel opportunities and benefits

• Feature benefits or offers for those with your credit card

• Use your partnerships creatively to provide ways to redeem loyalty points

• Add temporary perks to loyalty tiers right now that encourage certain incremental behaviors moving the customer closer to travel. Perhaps having them filling out a survey on when they’d feel comfortable traveling, about where they want to go next, why they want to travel, and so on. Motivators that can be added to a profile to use for marketing in the future are helpful data points

• Extend the expiration date of loyalty points

• Extend the expiration of a loyalty tier, if it has to be maintained through continued activity

• Create a "dream trip in 2021" sweepstakes to give away a trip designed using a mix of properties, , destinations, and partners which jumpstarts customers’ excitement around traveling again (and then awarding several of the trips for future redemption) 

Note that this is also a prime opportunity for you to consider ways to attract your competitors’ loyalists, too. Consider heavier promotion to “match the status” a person may have with a competitor with an added benefit or two to entice them to try your offering.

2. Focus on your first-timers

You may have more first-time guests, flyers, or travelers right now as a percentage of your customer base than you’ve had in a long time. Whether it’s due to price shopping by leisure travelers or people staying at properties outside of city centers where a different mix of hospitality properties are available, embrace this opportunity to win these first-timers over as loyal customers going forward.

Suggestions to do so include:

• Get them into your loyalty program ASAP. Ensure there is value from Day One so they experience benefits right away

• Use your email program to onboard first-timers and orient them to your brand. If you haven’t looked at your onboarding messaging in a while, take a look at it with fresh eyes and make sure it’s appropriate for today’s travel world and your current goals 

• Communicate with first-timers ahead of their stay, flight, or car rental, being clear about what they should expect, especially since some of your procedures likely changed. The more you communicate, the more seamless their experience will be

• Send them a survey regarding their stay and follow up with them thanking them for the feedback and addressing any issues they had

3. Use your data wisely

I’m not talking about data from six months ago. That’s old data. That may as well be from six years ago. I’m talking about leveraging recent data, leading indicators of your customers and their interest and propensity to travel with you. 

Recent email open and click data—especially click data that’s tied to specific content categories—is highly instructive regarding intent. Same with site visit data from customers that are logged in. Connect that with frequency of engagement, and you get a sense of which customers have an increasing engagement velocity, which indicates a rising interest and openness to travel. The same holds true with your push and SMS messaging and so on.

Make sure you’re using all of the data trails at your disposal to optimize the experience for your customers, because different travelers will be ready at different times. Smart brands are ready when their customers are. 

4. Communicate

Using whatever customer touchpoints available, tell your customers what they need to know to ensure their experience is as good as possible. Tell them what you’re doing to make their visit safe and enjoyable—even better, show them via videos. Explain to them how their contactless experience will work from beginning to end. Highlight your cleaning protocols and staff training. Communication is important.

Note that some of this messaging is sensitive and may not make for the most comfortable content. For example, some travelers aren’t nervous about the measures hotels or airlines are taking, but rather how their fellow travelers will react and whether they’ll comply. In the airline industry alone, hundreds of passengers have been banned by airlines because of incidents that have led to flight delays and cancellations.

Simply telling your customers what your expectations are for their behavior may not be enough. The industry might consider having travelers agree to observe all safety measures as a part of their reservation, with financial and other penalties spelled out should they break the agreement. It may also be time for airlines to share their no-fly lists with one another so that bad actors can’t simply take their dangerous behavior to another carrier. These are difficult discussions, but may be necessary to overcome the hesitations of cautious travelers.

Finally, put your social media and PR teams on high alert and prepared to manage issues as people get back into traveling. Images of people violating established protocols are some of the most prone to be shared right now, so preparedness on this front is an absolute requirement.

5. Validate that what used to work, still does

What worked in early 2020 may not work now. A/B testing is low-cost, high-reward method of ensuring that your messaging is aligned with your customers’ needs. Spend some cycles testing imagery, content, and timing for all your digital marketing and communication channels. 

The same holds true for your website, landing pages, and mobile app. Identify your most valuable touchpoints in your engagement ecosystem to ensure they reflect what travelers value today through validation and optimization testing. This would most certainly include your booking process, but may also include your cancellation process, rebooking process, application process for your private label credit card, and other touchpoints.

6. Add “snooze” functionality to ward off brand disengagers

Right now, anyone who unsubscribes from your email, SMS, and push messages may simply be doing so because they know they won’t be traveling for many months and therefore don’t want any messages from you. Rather than hoping that these customers will re-subscribe to your promotions (and not a competitor’s) in the future, reduce the risk that they won’t by offering them the opportunity to snooze their subscription for a while.

Right now, the worst action is inaction. Most travel and hospitality companies are in the position of protecting cash flow in order to sustain the business. This mix of immediate low-cost opportunities, paired with laying the groundwork for longer-term customer needs, hopefully provides that balance of moving forward while still protecting the business.

I speak for many people I know right now that would like nothing more than to hop on a plane; meet with friends, family, and colleagues in person over dinner; stay in a hotel ahead of a trip to see a college football game in person; or take a family cruise in the Caribbean to celebrate mom’s 70th birthday. We all hope to do this with you soon.

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Need help with your marketing campaigns? Oracle CX Marketing Consulting has more than 500 of the expert marketing minds ready to help you to achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including an Analytics & Strategic Services and Creative Services teams to help you target the right subscribers with the right message.

Learn more or reach out to us at CXMconsulting_ww@oracle.com

For more information about marketing during disruption, please read:

• Content Marketing During a Crisis or World Event
• How Sports Teams Connected with Fans Amid COVID-19 Using Creative and Respectful Digital Marketing
• 10 Expert Tips for Marketing During a Crisis

 

 

 

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5 New Technologies for Your Martech Stack

Marketing automation, like all technology, continues to evolve at a rapid pace. That means constant additions to the set of new tech tools, platforms, and solutions you have to consider. Here are some to be on the lookout for that could be game-changers for your marketing objectives. 

Voice search

Search technology is a key area that is beginning to evolve. Already, voice search has become more popular thanks to voice assistants like Siri and smart speakers for the home, such as Google Home and Amazon Echo. This will continue to play a role in marketing, providing new ways to share information and be found through voice search. 

While there are challenges with developing marketing for this technology, there are also opportunities. For example, if smart speaker users ask their digital assistant for a recipe, you can link your food product or ingredient to these recipes. Even if you aren’t quite ready to do a smart speaker ad, you can still optimize for voice search by addressing the different search patterns, such as longer, conversation-style queries.

Visual search

However, even greater in terms of opportunity could be the transition to visual searches that rely on images over words to find products and services within search engines. Thanks to further developments in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), this new type of search is becoming a popular way to search versus having to figure out keywords. 
To take advantage of this marketing technology, you will need to build image search into your web inventory as well as add images to your existing sitemap. Integration with other types of technology like chatbots can also help propel visual search capability.

No-code platforms and integrations

With the benefits of marketing technology integrations to do more, companies are producing user-friendly open platforms that don’t require code to customize or add integrations. 

This means you can use more marketing technology without turning to IT for assistance. The result is more agile responses and changes to customer experiences. In turn, customers will appreciate the quick response to their need for improved service delivery. 

Additionally, it’s the ability to integrate more types of advanced technology that will also provide a way to get more intelligence from the available data. For example, combining big data accessed from smart devices with artificial intelligence and machine learning as well as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality can add new layers of understanding about customer behavior and preferences.  

Advanced automation 

While marketing automation of workflows and other tasks is already mainstream, there are more advanced automation techniques on the horizon. This includes automated marketing content generation based on advancements with natural language generation tools. 

Unlike previous attempts that resulted in generic content, the new technology is proving that machine learning is advancing in its understanding of the nuances of human language as well as deepening its ability to provide customization and greater detail to the content generated. 

Digital convenience

Look for more marketing technology aimed at digital convenience that both addresses the recent change to how consumers can access retailers and restaurants as well as meets their expectations for more on-demand experiences. There has been a definitive shift where people are valuing their time (and, recently, their health) over the cost of delivery options.  

These vast changes will require new digital asset management and product information system technology driven by AI. Investing in this technology will mean that marketers can do their part in keeping these digital experiences fresh, relevant, and aligned with product and service availability. 

A balanced approach to your martech stack

These are just a few of the promising marketing technologies set to launch or grow in the next year. Within each of these technologies, numerous tools and solutions may launch, creating a dilemma for you and your martech stack. 

You want to be positioned to leverage the best that marketing technology offers, but that doesn’t mean adding everything here or on the growing list of available products. All of this technology is worth keeping an eye out for to assess if it can assist with your marketing objectives. 

To get the most return from all marketing technology, you must decide what you need to do better and how to use the time available to make those changes. That may mean changing the channels you use, allocating more tasks to automation, employing new tactics, or all of the above.  

                                                                                                                                               

For more information about new marketing technologies, check out:

• Oracle CX Marketing
• What Are the Key Components of an Effective Martech Stack?
• 3 Opportunities Virtual Reality Presents for Digital Marketers

 

 

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CMO Spotlight: Melissa Sargeant, Litmus

Oracle CX Marketing recently caught up with Melissa Sargeant, CMO of our partner Litmus.  Our conversation ranged how data changed the world of marketing forever to marketing’s importance to a business to how marketers should seek deep human connections with customers.

Q: What did you go to school for?

I attended Roanoke College in Salem, VA, where I majored in political science and US history.

Q: Tell us about your first job.

The agency was headquartered in New Jersey, but I worked in the Washington, DC office which focused on public affairs. The agency was aligned to everything going on at Capitol Hill, and I got to work on some big issues, write speeches, and received my first exposure to marketing. After the exposure, I branched off into corporate communications, which was my first actual job in marketing.  

Q: Why did you want to become a CMO?

I’ve been doing marketing for 30 years and am very passionate about modern marketing. When I started, marketing was often treated like an arts and crafts department. We wrote press releases, created product data sheets, and we even ordered carpets for the trade shows.

Digital, however, transformed the world of marketing into a science-led discipline. The more data allows us to understand our customers, the more we can drive meaningful experiences.

In my time, I’ve done corporate communications, demand gen, product marketing, product management, and leadership. I feel a responsibility to create a learning path and way forward for the next generation of marketers, and data plays a key role in that, as it will empower the next generation to better understand their customers and create exceptional experiences that keep them coming back for more.

Q: What’s your biggest challenge as a CMO?

I’ve found it to be balancing short-term needs with a long-term strategy. I’ve been in my position for almost a year now, but when you start as a CMO, you try to get the lay of the land, see what’s working and what needs improvement. However, you can’t tell everyone to hit the pause button for 90 days to work everything out. It’s not only like in the beginning, though. It’s like that for the whole journey, from the start of your tenure to the end.

So, you learn to do things in parallel, but you should align your integrated marketing program with your long-term growth strategy.

Q: Why do you feel the average tenure of a modern CMO is under two years?

I’ve read a lot of publications that touch on this matter, and a perception seems to exist that there is a disconnect between CMOs and CEOs. This might be the case for some, but I think we’ve seen the importance of marketing become amplified, which has created a great many opportunities for talented CMOS. The really good ones are being constantly recruited for new positions or seeking new challenges. Some have even been promoted. We’ve seen a few CMOs become CEOs, heads of operations, or the heads of all CX for businesses.

Q: What’s one piece of advice you would give to other CMOs?

Connect the business value of what you’re doing in marketing to your business’s overall goals. This is critical, though it isn’t easy, not with multichannel marketing programs all doing different things and having different results and levels of influence. Though we have tools to help with this, it’s still not always a perfect process. However, once there was a time in marketing when we didn’t have any data. Now we have more than we ever thought we would. The need has now arisen for us to know how to synthesize this data, leverage the actionable insights, create experiences based on these insights  and share with our business stakeholders.

Q: What’s one thing you wish CEOs understood about marketing?

Marketing has influence over more than just marketing. Everyone talks about the customer experience, but marketing is a key part of every touchpoint in the customer journey. In a world impacted by COVID-19, we’re trying to cultivate customers for life. Marketing is what drives an experience that achieves this from awareness to consideration to decision and advocacy. In this environment, truly delivering on what customers crave equals success, and marketing plays an integral in that process.

Q: What do you think marketing will look like in 2050? What adjustments do you feel marketers should be making with the COVID-19 crisis?

Personalization will continue to be key. In Litmus’ State of Email Marketing, we found that people in marketing highlighted personalization as one of their top 3 priorities.

Consumer demand for personalized experiences is driving a major transformation in marketing today. A few years ago, our marketing programs were designed from the perspective of one to many. Today, that’s gone from one to some. Where we are heading is a one-to-one approach to create human-to-human connections between consumers and a brand.

As for COVID-19, marketers should expect to be asked to do more with less. We always are, but we should expect that to be amplified to the next level. Drive efficiency and productivity, and make sure that what  you’re running is good for your entire marketing mix of channels, be it social, search, email, and so on. Look to create a multiplier effect to deliver more for less. We'll be discussing these types of necessary adjustments in our upcoming CMO panel on how companies can best prepare for a post-2020 world. 

Q: What job would you never want to do?

I don’t think I’d make a good waitstaff person, though I admire everyone that is one, especially right now. They’re not always dealing with people at their best selves, and these people might be hungry, particular about their food, and their mind could be on so many things. I don’t think I’d be able to keep a smile on my face and retain a sunny disposition at scale for more than a week. My hat’s off to anyone that can, as they have patience and virtue that I admire.

Q. What advice do you have for aspiring marketers and aspiring CMOs?

This will sound funny, but run toward the dumpster fire. There’s always a program that everyone rolls their eyes at, but you can make a name for yourself by facing challenges nobody else will.

You’ll either make it better or nothing will change. It might be highly unlikely that you’ll make it work, but your growth as a professional will come when things are difficult, and you’ll learn plenty of skills to apply to your next gig. No one has ever gotten better at anything by doing things that are easy. If you do make it work, you’ll become a hero and have built a reputation for having resiliency. The skills you develop doing so will lay the foundation for to you to become confident, curious, and empathetic – all great strengths to set you on the path toward becoming an effective leader. 

                                                                                                         

Catch up with other CMOs:

• CMO Spotlight: Julia Stead, Allocadia
• CMO Spotlight: Randy Frisch, Uberflip
• Marketing in a Non-Marketing World: A Chat with Robert Kraut

For more insights into the world of CMOs, subscribe to the CMO Spark Newsletter.

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