Growth is the primary reason CMOs are looking to technology to help them grow their business, strengthen their brands and reinvent marketing initiatives relative to the 360 consumer experience pre-purchase and post-purchase. Today’s CMO needs to drive the digital functional excellence from strategy to infrastructure and ensure that the right competence and capabilities are available to to support and leverage the business from a digital perspective.
3 Major Marketing Drivers of Technology
- Monetizing Marketing. Utilizing better tools that measure marketing efforts, CMOs are freeing up more of their marketing budgets for demand generation through multiple channels (search, social, and mobile) because they can measure the impact. This requires an increase in investment both in the tools to collect and analyze digital data, but in their marketing operations capabilities to track the ROI in areas outside of demand generation such as offline channels and brand affinity – and all together in dashboards that allows for ongoing tactical campaign measurement and optimization as well as for informing overall strategic direction.
- ‘Digitizing’ Marketing. Social is all grown up and now commands almost as much lion share of marketing budgets as traditional digital channels such as search and advertising. The marketing mix consists of campaigns that are run via technology and as a results, the CMO sees an increasing need to improve the skills and level of expertise for social media, mobile, and web marketing to support this trend.
- Integrating Marketing. CMOs are finding that they can’t segment their traditional offline marketing from their online/digital marketing programs because to their customers, the brand experience is singular if it’s going to be effective. To support this trend, CMOs are taking a holistic approach and coordinating their campaigns based on customer experiences (or solutions) which focuses less on individual products and more on their experiences with the brand. This requires a marketing engine that can continuously create offline and online brand experiences that directly supports sales enablement. Content generation is applied in many different formats and requires a “content strategist” and “community manager” to develop and facilitate the customer experience.
Infrastructure Requirements for Marketing Automation
All this requires technology to support the pace and speed to create, measure and interact content through multiple devices (web, tablet and mobile) and CMOs have increased the role of marketing operations to support their systems, data, planning and reporting. At the very least, becoming technology capable requires the following:
- Enterprise CMS – that supports multiple sites with a number of domains and subdomains and any HTML compliant control or functionality.
- Frameworks – such as Foundation and TwitterBoostrap (with controls used out of the box).
- Controls – an array of JavaScript controls are acceptable.
- Languages – JavaScript, HTML, PHP.
- Application Platforms – marketing automation (Marketo) and CRM systems (Salesforce).
- Sharing Plugins – such as AddThis.
- Application & Mobile Platforms – such as Wildfire and Woobox.
- Social Media Management & Monitoring– such as HootSuite, Radian6, and Spredfast.
- Analytics & Reporting – such as Google Anlaytics, Simply Measured, and Tableau.
The Data Supports the Claim
CMOs whose organizations are technology-driven are seeing better results than those that aren’t.
- Marketing departments that spend 5% or more on technology have 35% or higher conversion rates than the ones who don’t
- According to Gartner, CMOs are predicted to outspend CIOs on tech by 2017
- In a recent planning survey, 70% of CMOs said they intend to increase their technology spend
Technology driven initiatives developed by CMOs thus become crucial factors incorporated with the delivery of campaigns. As a result, the right technology infrastructure will be a critical component in supporting such numbers.
Additions & Feedback
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