According to an IBM Global CMO Study, which surveyed more than 500 CMOs around the world, 94 percent believe advanced analytics will play a significant role in reaching corporate objectives. However, 82 percent say their organizations are underprepared to capitalize on the data revolution.
These responses are both optimistic and worrisome. What can CMOs do to strengthen their advanced analytics capabilities? What obstacles must they overcome to achieve their goals? In this post, we’ll explore how advanced analytics are changing the CMO remit and what CMO's need to do to keep up.
CMOs need to rethink the role of marketing in their organization
The ultimate goal of marketing analytics is to increase growth and marketing return on investment. Taking an integrated analytics approach is the key to uncovering meaningful insights and driving above-market growth. Everything, from mobile apps to social media to e-commerce, is a new data point from the customer.
So what does this mean for today’s CMOs? You need to take this data and constantly refine and polish your messaging and offers to customers. Personalization is key. In other words, marketing’s place in an organization is shifting. The goal isn’t just to create compelling offers, but to personalize and improve the customer experience, enhance promotions and improve pricing at an individual level – and at scale.
CMOs need to understand and incorporate advanced marketing analytics
With this in mind, CMOs need to adjust their strategies and processes to incorporate advanced analytics. Some examples include:
- Gathering real-time data to fully understand campaign performance and inform future investment decisions.
- Collecting data from relevant consumer touchpoints, including websites, mobile apps, email, social channels, advertising, content marketing and public digital displays.
- Coordinating known and anonymous profiles into a single view of the customer for persona-centric — rather than aggregated — insights over time.
- Incorporating nontraditional data sources, including location, social relationships, text and speech analysis, voice of the customer, and sources related to the Internet of Things (IoT).
- Applying analytics to non-relational database and big data stores, including Hadoop and NoSQL.
- Using predictive and prescriptive analytics to improve customer experience, particularly around next-best-offer and content recommendations, brand and churn propensity, profitability, and lifetime value.
CMOs need to work with and learn from others
Your enterprise shouldn’t have departments working in silos. If anything, advanced analytics requires collaboration across many teams to ensure data is being sourced and analyzed properly. This means turning to data scientists, IT and developers to further marketing efforts.
For CMOs, in particular, this means working closely with others in the c-suite. According to a Gartner Study, CMOs now exert more influence over IT spending than CIOs. That's because, thanks to big data and advanced analytics, organizations have a clearer picture as to what is driving ROI.
CMOs can take the advanced analytics imperative head-on
Data and analytics are changing enterprises of all kinds as well as the departments within them. Marketing is no exception. CMOs need to adapt. Yet despite these changes, marketing and branding still center around establishing relationships with customers. CMOs must not lose sight of this goal as they move forward with implementing more analytics-based processes and goal-setting.
Today's CMOs are obligated to do everything they can to learn about their customers, maximize ROI and drive growth. Advanced analytics is the latest resource at your disposal and something every CMO should welcome.
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