Top CMO Priorities for Remainder of 2019

    Chief Marketing Officer

    For marketers, it is challenging to demonstrate measurable impact on financial outcomes to their C-Suite. Deloitte’s Chief Marketing Officer Survey Spring 2019 considers this issue as the No.1 challenge for Chief Marketing Officer. Other than proving RoI, putting customers at the center of storytelling, customer acquisition, and ensuring customer data drives healthy ABM strategies are some of the top priorities for CMOs.

    Proving ROI for CMOs is a constant issue. Experts have noted that marketing teams are underpaid, understaffed, and under-budgeted when compared to other departments. In addition, marketing teams are the last to get funding and, when budget are tight, they are usually the first on chopping block. CMOs believe that there is a universal confusion on the significance of the customer pipeline, and the costs involved in getting new users. For CMOs, it is important to explain the C-Suit with the customer acquisition costs (CAC). Unless CAC is not clear, products cannot be priced appropriately.

    With so much noise out there in multiple channels, CMOs in 2019, find it hard to segment the audience. This requires to meticulously track each channel and understand what is driving traffic and resulting in conversions. Hiring is also a challenge for CMOs as marketing teams have smaller budgets compared to operations or product, and more than that, it is hard to justify the added expense, which raises the CAC.

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    According to CMOs, customer data can drive the success or failure of ABM strategies. The more personalization of customers and their preferences, the higher the ability to make connections leading to sales activities. CMOs also find it important to create a customer 360 view to bring together a wide variety of data streams from mobile applications, cloud applications, and IoT devices.

    Beyond the usual demand-gen tactics, CMOs want teams to focus on making the most of buyer intent data compiled from different sources to work with ABM and outbound strategies. Then the marketing teams can pass this type of data insights to sales teams. One of the priorities for CMOs in 2019 is choosing a proper analytics software. While there are many readily available, using them effectively is the CMO’s prerogative.

    For the remaining months of 2019, CMOs plan to focus on getting people move from a fermium to a premium world. One of the greatest challenges is getting more paid users for the services that are partially free. CMOs address this problem by learning more about customers, using emails, surveys or calls to finding out the features that would make them pay.

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    Experts suggest starting with inbound as a strategy to improve marketing and ultimately showing the marketing’s worth. Building customer-based from the data of people looking for your solutions and proving that marketing does drive sales is better before spreading the efforts to lower converting channels.

    CMOs also suggest motivating the teams on a timely basis as nothing kills faith in the marketing team faster than wasted money, efforts, and no proof of the marketing efforts driving sales.

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