Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) Top Concerns

Chief Marketing Officers and marketing executives are critical to driving success. CMOs are responsible for creating and executing marketing strategies that drive sales, build brand awareness, and increase customer loyalty.

In today’s business landscape, CMOs’ responsibilities have expanded beyond traditional marketing channels. Today, they face several challenges that require our attention. In this article, I will discuss the top concerns of CMOs and how we can address them.

CMO Expanding Responsibilities

The role of the CMO has evolved significantly over the past few years – expanding from developing and executing marketing strategies to larger scale responsibilities. CMOs are now responsible for overseeing customer experience, sales enablement, and digital transformation. They must also be knowledgeable in emerging technologies, such as AI artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain, and more. This knowledge then needs to be transitioned into understanding how technologies can be leveraged to drive business growth.

CMO Top Concerns

Balancing Short-term and Long-term Marketing Goals

One of the most significant challenges CMOs face is balancing short-term and long-term marketing goals. Ask any CMO and I am sure they will tell you that this balancing act is part art and part science. Generate leads and driving sales are critical to businesses, but balance that with longer-term goals of brand equity and customer loyalty. In today’s marketing landscape, digital marketing has become crowded and the landscape more segmented. It is important for CMOs to develop meaningful content that appeals to customer’s pain points, while focusing on lead nurturing strategies to allow for easier conversions. This requires a fine balance of both long-term goals and initiatives, with short-term demands of the business.

How do they achieve this balance? CMOs must develop a comprehensive marketing strategy that includes both short-term and long-term goals, and ensure their teams are able to prioritize these goals.

Optimizing the Funnel to Use Big Data

Data analytics is a massive concern for organizations. Marketers must be able to analyze data effectively to determine which marketing channels are driving ROI and adjust our strategies accordingly. Additionally, data plays a role in demonstrating trust. Marketers must provide data-driven insights to the board and executive teams to demonstrate the impact and learnings marketing campaigns.

What do we do? CMOs must invest in tools and technologies that enable their teams to collect, analyze, and visualize data effectively. The challenge is understanding which tools make sense for the job. It goes back to ensuring a defined strategy, and ensuring the technology can support the strategy. Additionally, you need the right skill sets to be able to leverage the technology, implement the right tracking to align with necessary metrics, and the right people who are capability of delivering o those insights.

Related article: How to Implement Data-Driven Marketing Solutions, Leveraging Your Own Data to Increase Profits From Digital Marketing

Building and Managing a Strong Marketing Team

Finally, building and managing a strong marketing team is a top concern for CMOs. We must hire and develop marketing professionals who have the skills and experience necessary to execute our marketing strategies effectively. We must also ensure that our team members are aligned with the overall business objectives and have the resources they need to be successful.

To build and manage a strong marketing team, CMOs should develop a talent acquisition strategy that attracts top marketing talent. We should also invest in training and development programs that enable our team members to stay up-to-date with the latest marketing trends and technologies.

CMOs must also balance between managing projects in-house and outsourcing more tedious labor such as web design and development and content creation.

Importance of Branding and Positioning

CMOs are responsible for the organization and product branding and positioning. In today’s competitive landscape, how a brand differentiates itself is its unique value proposition.

Be sure that organization’s have a brand and communications leader. This person is responsible for conducting market research to identify our target audience’s needs and preferences. From there, they must develop a consistent brand message across all marketing channels and ensure that our brand values are aligned with the overall business strategy.

Managing Budgets Effectively

Money matters. With the increasing number of marketing channels and technologies available, it can be challenging to allocate budgets appropriately. A focus on getting the best return on investment (ROI) for our marketing spend is one thing, but it is not often cut and dry. Similar to short-term goals and long-term goals, there is often a requirement to test and learn. There benefit long-term, but are billed in a short-term cycle.

A data-driven approach to managing budgets is another important opportunity. This includes implementing an effective attribution plan and platform. We must use data analytics to determine which marketing channels are driving the most significant ROI and adjust our budgets accordingly. We must also be willing to experiment with new marketing channels and tactics to stay ahead of the competition.

Staying Abreast of Technological Advancements

As technology continues to evolve, CMOs must stay up-to-date with the latest advancements and understand how they can be leveraged to drive business growth. From artificial intelligence to virtual reality, there are countless new technologies that are transforming the marketing landscape. The key for CMOs and other marketing leadership is to stay updated but also not overly distract the team on small projects that distract from the company’s goals. Investigate but not inundate.

To stay abreast of technological advancements, CMOs should attend industry conferences, read industry publications, and network with other marketing professionals. We must also be willing to experiment with new technologies and determine how and if they can or should be incorporated into our marketing strategies.

Ease Data and Security Concerns

With the increase in concerns regarding GDPR, cookie usage, and other data privacy legislation, it is critical for CMOs to partner with legal, compliance and IT teams and deploy strategies that best protect and preserve customer data. This includes:

• Setting up privacy policy for states, US and GDPR policies
• Deploying multi-layer authentication processes for customer sign ins
• Ensuring employees accessing customer data use MFA processes
• Using encryption for secure communications
• Hosting data on secure and trusted third-party platforms

Evolving Role of the CMO in Modern Business

As the role of the CMO continues to evolve, we face several challenges that require our attention. Balancing short-term and long-term marketing goals, managing marketing budgets effectively, staying abreast of technological advancements, understanding and leveraging data analytics, building and managing a strong marketing team, and focusing on branding and positioning are all critical concerns for CMOs.

To address these concerns, CMOs must develop data-driven marketing strategies that align with the overall business objectives. We must also invest in the right tools, technologies, and talent to execute these strategies effectively. As CMOs, we must be willing to adapt to the changing business landscape and embrace new marketing trends and technologies to stay ahead of the competition.