The Data-Driven CMO: From Brand to ROI

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The traditional chief marketing role is dead. Rising in its place is an expert who combines brand-building with revenue generation.

Today's CMO must be a strategic business partner who drives measurable results.

Many companies are eliminating the standalone CMO role and having Marketing report to Finance. That shift signals a change in what's expected of a chief marketer—from merely creating a broad marketing strategy to actively contributing to the bottom line. Although creative campaigns remain valuable, CEOs want to see concrete returns on investment.

CMOs who built their brand on being marketers must quickly adapt to this new reality, or they will find themselves out of a job.

A successful CMO is a master of above-the-line creative as well as martech investments.

Pressure to Prove Performance

Businesses have begun to view Marketing as a revenue generation function rather than a cost center. With more pressure to deliver shareholder value, the C-suite is demanding more tangible results from every department, including Marketing. CMOs must quantify KPIs, such as...

Quantifiable increases in revenue, sales, and top-line growth directly attributed to marketing initiatives and campaigns
ROI metrics, such as marketing percentage of customer acquisition cost (CAC) and ratios of customer lifetime value (LTV) to CAC
Marketing-sourced pipeline and funnel metrics

Unfortunately, that task is not easy. Demonstrating the impact of marketing actions on financial outcomes is the top challenge facing marketers, a Deloitte survey revealed: 61% of respondents listed it as a struggle.

How to Make the Transformation

The new generation of CMOs must build new skills and adapt strategies.

Learn how to gather and analyze data

Successful marketers embrace numbers. Data is the foundation of an effective marketing strategy, providing the information necessary to prove business value.

Cultivating data analysis skills allows marketers to uncover valuable insights into the customer journey and campaign performance. Having gained that sort of perspective, Marketing can develop short- and long-term strategies to attract new customers, nurture relationships, and optimize campaigns.

Data also empowers CMOs to more accurately attribute revenue to specific marketing campaigns, channels, and activities, giving them concrete numbers to prove ROI to stakeholders.

Invest in an agile, integrated martech stack

More than one-third of CMOs are looking to expand their tech stacks.

Technology can serve many purposes, not the least of which is assuming the burden of repetitive tasks and analyzing data, allowing CMOs to be more strategic and creative.

Monolithic martech falls short in today's market. Instead, CMOs should build customized—and integrated—tech stacks that address their specific needs.

A platform that collects customer data is critical to an effective martech stack. Information on customer actions, preferences, and journeys unlocks a deeper knowledge of the target audience, allowing the marketing department to identify pain points, optimize conversion paths, and make data-informed decisions that drive business growth.

Fully 71% of consumers expect customized interactions, and more than 60% of executives rank delivering a personalized customer experience as a top priority. Personalization software empowers marketers to master and activate customer data for audience segmentation. Teams can then create tailored content, product recommendations, and promotional offers. Such customization optimizes marketing spend by delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time while driving conversions, loyalty, and lifetime value. Nearly 80% of consumers say personalized content makes them more likely to buy from the brand again.

AI-powered automation supercharges customization efforts. Marketing teams can craft a wide variety of creative assets that align with brand-specific guidelines and overall business goals and then use AI to execute end-to-end campaigns. AI uncovers patterns in customer data to create individual profiles and predict future needs and preferences. With that information, AI tools can automatically build dynamic, personalized marketing campaigns using human-created assets and determine the optimal send time and frequency. Those capabilities allow marketers to execute more customized campaigns faster and at lower costs.

An effective tech stack requires integration among platforms. Data silos created by disparate systems generate more work for marketing teams and potentially result in missed opportunities for campaign optimization. A savvy CMO should prioritize integration capabilities when selecting tools, as a comprehensive view of data from across the organization is imperative to improving efficiency and effectiveness.

Collaborate with merchandising, analytics, and finance teams

Marketing doesn't happen in isolation. Particularly in retail, driving business value requires input from the merchandising, analytics, and finance teams. To promote items effectively, marketers must understand available products and their features, as well as merchandising priorities. Coordinating with the merchandising team ensures marketing campaigns support overarching business goals.

Customer data from the analytics and merchandising teams provides valuable insights marketers can use to create more targeted content.

Working with finance helps CMOs track campaign ROI, justify spending, and tie marketing activities directly to revenue outcomes.

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Marketers' intuition and "gut feelings" don't cut it in today's business environment. Though creativity and storytelling remain integral to the CMO role, marketers must couple those skills with a data-driven mindset. CMOs today can harness their unprecedented access to customer insights to maximize and prove marketing results.