The Data-Driven CMO

Anoop Sahgal Senior Manager, Suite Marketing Adobe Systems

In today’s multichannel marketing world, characterized by the rapid and consequential changes in digital and social marketing, the ability to measure and optimize marketing initiatives is more challenging and important than ever. Marketers need to bring data and channels into a single, comprehensive, and integrated solution. The online marketing suite, according to Forrester Research, is the key to improving marketing return on investment (ROI), as well as enhancing the customer experience. Integrating multichannel campaign execution, content management, and analytics into a single platform is crucial for today’s online marketers. Also vital is a central hub incorporating management, measurement, data, and integration points.

Demonstrating Value And Business Impact
In this new marketing environment, data is paramount and channels are proliferating. At the same time, chief marketing officers (CMOs) and their teams are being asked to demonstrate the value of marketing initiatives and campaigns and their overall impact on the business. Today, decisions and marketing programs can and must be formulated based on data—rather than intuition, past experiences, or hunches.

“Intuition is no longer a marketing strategy,” said Josh Hanna, executive vice president and general manager of Ancestry.com, a global company that offers customers the world’s largest online collection of family histories. “At Ancestry.com, we evaluate everything, from attribution of our marketing spend across channels to the customer experience and even the value of our content. Using data from an online marketing suite, we can attribute traffic and conversion spikes to specific TV spots—a marketing medium that has traditionally been difficult to measure. Our team can even assess the impact of specific spots across channels and creative executions.”

A New Set Of Best Practices 
CMOs play a crucial role in constantly updating the boardroom and CEO about the latest customer preferences, and how well corporate resources are aligned to meet those evolving customer needs. Among others, there are a trio of practices CMOs can employ to become more successful in the new, data-driven marketing world:

1. Build a data-driven organization: Data-driven marketing, as CMO.com blogger Brent Dykes has emphasized, requires new skill sets and places new demands on organizations and their cultures. The data requirements for success as a CMO now extend beyond counting advertising impressions; instead, data must demonstrate solid ROI in the form of profitably generated leads, conversions, and other metrics that the business has established for success. The information must then be distilled and continually analyzed to help drive the business forward. The upshot is that data and its related pros and cons now fall into the hands of CMOs and their marketing organizations. Today, CMOs must leverage data to not only solidify their decisions and their campaigns, but also to become income earners and innovation drivers within their organizations.

The influx of marketing data is a double-edged sword. CMOs now have a seat at the revenue table, but they need the numbers and a solid understanding of what the data means to back them up. With marketing at the center of a data maelstrom, CMOs are flooded by feeds of information—Web analytics, transaction histories, behavioral profiles, industry aggregates, social community feedback, and more. This new trend is forcing organizational and cultural change on a massive scale.

CMOs are under more pressure than ever to successfully convert customers and drive higher revenues. Rather than simply bringing in analysts or Web analysts, CMOs must build their own core skill sets around data and adapt, expand, and train their teams. Marketing teams today must care about information, understand metrics, and see how the data maps to overall key business objectives. The digital world has not just brought about new mediums—it has ushered in an entirely new type of marketing.

Several companies are transforming this challenge into a tangible competitive advantage. Build.com, the third largest and fastest growing online home improvement retailer, has mastered the art of data-driven marketing, incorporating information, testing, and ongoing analytics into the fabric of the company. “We measure and optimize every facet of the online shopping experience, from pay-per-click advertising to category product recommendations and even providing pricing and other data from our competitors for comparison shoppers,” said Brandon Proctor, vice president of marketing for Build.com. “We’ve seen impressive results from taking a data-driven, integrated approach to online marketing.”

Next: The way forward for CMOs.