BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here
Edit Story

The CMO Revolution: 10 Challenges That Will Rock The Marketing World In 2016

Oracle

Fortified with unprecedented analytical tools and deep insights into customer behavior, charge-leading, business-model-upending CMOs in 2016 will claim new responsibilities for revenue, seize ownership of the end-to-end customer experience, and take leading roles in the digital transformations of their organizations.

No doubt, some people will think that’s sheer madness, and that the purely numerical change in budget allocations from 2015 to 2016 will mean nothing more than the CMO still runs events, still oversees advertising spending, still defines the brand image the company wishes to project, and still is forced to rely on too much guesswork and not enough precision.

Well, bless their hearts, but businesspeople expecting or nostalgic for the status quo are in for a miserable, stress-filled, and hair-on-fire year, because these profound evolutions in the CMO position are the direct results of equally profound upheavals in the way buyers think about what they need, evaluate what’s available, and conduct transactions.

They’re the direct result of exploding numbers of digitally native consumers across the world who have eagerly seized full control of the buyer-seller relationship and have absolutely zero intention of relinquishing any of that control.

They’re the direct result of long-entrenched sales processes and cycles that have been rendered obsolete almost overnight.

They’re the direct result of the severe pressures felt by CEOs in every business in every industry in every region of the world as they search for ways to grow in the midst of new competitors, new business models, surging customer expectations, and blindingly fast innovations in products and services.

They’re the direct result of buyers demanding that they—not the seller—be the ones who set the terms of the relationship, the channels of distribution, the methods of payment, the schedules, the product mixes, and the metrics for defining value.

And they’re the direct result of powerful new technology that has turned marketing and marketing strategy upside down.

As this hyperevolution of business overall and of the CMO role unfolds, we at Oracle—based on thousands of ongoing conversations we have with CMOs, CEOs, and other business leaders around the world—have identified 10 mission-critical challenges for CMOs in 2016 that we believe represent not only the biggest challenges they face, but also the biggest opportunities their companies can seize.

We’ve also clustered those 10 issues into four categories:

  1. Modern Responsibilities: To drive greater ROI and engage more meaningfully with customers, leading CMOs are asserting control over Attribution of their marketing spend based on their analysis of successful conversions of prospects into paying customers, creating a Unified View of the Customer, and building world-class Digital Talent.
  2. Modern Goals: In perfect alignment with corporate objectives, top CMOs are playing central roles in driving Digital Transformation, owning the Customer Experience, and becoming fully accountable for Revenue Growth.
  3. Modern Approaches: In pursuit of those goals, transformative CMOs are fully exploiting and optimizing Omnichannel strategies and Social/Mobile technologies to simultaneously dazzle customers and drive business value.
  4. Modern Opportunities: By taking on these forward-looking responsibilities and deploying innovative approaches to help their businesses nail their strategic goals, high-achieving CMOs will earn not only a full seat on the Executive Committee, but also board-level access.

CMOs, here are your top 10 challenges—and opportunities—for 2016:

  • Modern Responsibilities
  1. Attribution to maximize marketing investment. Says one CMO, “The #1 issue facing CMOs is attribution, which is top of mind for every CEO and board. If you get attribution right, you can drive conversion, which is the Holy Grail.” On top of that, attribution moves CMOs from the “soft science” of traditional marketing to the “hard science” of precise revenue generation. As another CMO put it, “Attribution is absolute. It is the #1 thing on my plate right now.”
  2. Unified view of customers and prospects. Buyers own the buyer-seller relationship, and one sure way to send them rushing to competitors is to treat them as if they’re total strangers. The old approach—fragmented views, disconnected profiles, inconsistent records, and a basic lack of awareness of what customers care about—is deadly, and powerful new technologies can help the CMO build and deliver a unified view of customers and prospects across the enterprise. As one CMO put it, “Data and technology are the lynchpin that connects the experience together across channels, sharing data signals that reflect and predict consumer behavior and using marketing technologies to deliver the most contextual, relevant, and personalized messaging to the
 right person at the right time, at 
a channel and touchpoint of her choice.”
  3. Stuff the Marketing org with great digital talent. As buyers’ behavior trends more and more toward digital, they’ll demand parallel capabilities from sellers. And CMOs hoping to unleash the full power of new customer-centric marketing technologies will need digitally native talent across the organization—not just high-end data scientists, but a full range of expertise that can fully exploit the insights offered up by that new technology.
  • Modern Goals
  1. Blaze the trail for Digital Transformation. World-class CMOs have a huge opportunity here to show the way forward by building data-driven processes and metrics that squeeze the guesswork out of the marketing business and instead offer precise forecasts, targeting, timelines, approaches, and insights. As CEOs recognize this achievement at the front end of the revenue chain, they’ll demand similar data-driven precision throughout the entire enterprise—especially as the Internet of Things evolves rapidly from buzzword to reality, and threatens to flood unprepared marketing organizations with masses of data they don’t know how to interpret or leverage.
  2. As the Customer Experience becomes top priority, who owns it? Beyond leads and contacts and transactions and territories, CMOs are in an ideal position to earn the right to lovingly but purposefully own the end-to-end Customer Experience. But that right won’t be conferred unless the CMO can show unmistakably that she can deliver more value to that customer—and in turn generate more business value for her company—than was possible under the old balkanized world where everybody owned a portion, which left the customer feeling like a stranger to all.
  3. Marketing-based revenue growth becomes a KPI. Glance again at the comments from marketing leaders in item #1 above about the strategic significance of Attribution: Best-in-class CMOs will build on that foundation to grab responsibility and accountability for new and enhanced revenue streams stemming from the powerful new tools at their disposal and their end-to-end ownership of the Customer Experience. Conversely, any CMO who hopes to lay claim to that entire Customer Experience without simultaneously taking responsibility for revenue growth will be severely disappointed.
  • Modern Approaches
  1. Omnichannel customer management is the foundation for everything. Just as a unified view of the customer or prospect is an indispensable component of modern marketing, so too is omnichannel customer management because it’s what allows marketers to leverage data about real-time behavior to deliver truly individualized experiences no matter which channel or channels the buyer chooses. By knowing in real time how the customer will behave, marketers can offer up relevant messages in the most-appropriate format: email, mobile, social, web, or display advertising. Today, it’s a breakthrough approach and technology; but soon, it will provide a set of capabilities customers will demand. And as one CMO put it, “Never think solely in terms of channel, rather in terms of customer engagement and content. Are you providing high-quality content that brings them closer to your brand and encourages them to engage further?”
  2. Social impact: turbocharge, measure, modify, and optimize. Social marketing—and indeed, social relationship—continues to outstrip predictions of how quickly they’d have top-level impacts on customer behavior and buying decisions. In the data-driven businesses world-class CMOs are helping to shape, social strategies and the right technology can blend together to help businesses displace quantity with quality in ways that generate greater loyalty for buyers and better results for sellers.
  3. Exploit the power and ubiquity of mobile. Today’s social/mobile behavior has torpedoed traditional marketing approaches. Legacy marketing models have been rendered unappealing—and thus unsuccessful—by modern tools, such as rich mobile-marketing campaigns with SMS and MMS that modern CMOs are integrating seamlessly with broader omnichannel marketing campaigns via text, push notifications, and in-app messaging. And coming soon to a modern marketing campaign near you: the ways in which the Internet of Things will open up huge new opportunities for digitally optimized marketing organizations.
  4. Earning a first-class seat on the Executive Committee—plus boardroom access. This list isn’t an evolutionary step, or a plan to trim marketing expenses by, say, 3%. Rather, it is something that is simultaneously revolutionary in its scope, but also essential in today’s tumultuous business world. Those companies that can’t make these profound changes will be at great risk of becoming irrelevant—so the Modern CMO who’s able to achieve these strategic objectives for the company, for its customers, for its employees, and for its future will not just earn a seat at the big kids’ table, but also access to the board of directors as they help steer the company into a customer-centric and digitally driven future. As one CMO put it, “Boards are looking for maximum departmental integration and collaboration among executive leadership so that there are process improvements. The larger the organization, the greater the need for collaboration.”

Indeed, these challenges and opportunities are so new and compelling that we actually worked with The CMO Club to develop a guide specifically geared toward CMOs called The CMO Solution Guide to Leveraging New Technology and Marketing Platforms.

“For 20 years we’ve been talking about gaining a complete view of the customer and managing an end-to-end customer experience, but no one has been able to deliver on this promise until now,” said Kevin Akeroyd, SVP and General Manager, Oracle Marketing Cloud. “With modern marketing technology, today’s marketer can finally manage a complete customer experience in real time and directly impact the bottom line.”

To all of you CMOs, best of luck, enjoy the adventure, and as you help remake your companies and build fantastic relationships with customers, recall the words of renowned French microbiologist Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

For more, visit Oracle.com: