A report released today found that few CMOs claim to offer a consistently engaging and personalized customer experience across all channels. Over 20 percent of the CMOs surveyed said they had trouble understanding their customers’ experience end-to-end, and needed help in evaluating new marketing technologies.
The report, “The CMO Solution Guide to Leveraging New Technology and Marketing Platforms,” was produced by The
CMO Club, a community of senior marketing executives, in association with Oracle Marketing Cloud, and was based on a survey of 110 CMOs.
In the report, Mayur Gupta, global head of marketing technology and innovation at Kimberly-Clark said:
Most brands and marketers only utilize 15% of technologies and capabilities they are already paying for, so the focus should not be in the number of technologies that need to adopted, but in “applying” them to solve business needs and changing consumer behaviors.
One CMO surveyed said: “I need help with such things as evaluating the right marketing platform (and) which analytics to use to best match up to my goals.”
The report describes the basic architecture of marketing technology–marketing data, marketing applications, and media, and suggests CMOs need to focus on five solution areas:
- Data management platform;
- Cross-channel marketing;
- Content marketing;
- Social marketing; and
- Analytics and testing;
and argues for a modular infrastructure, designed to evolve over time as new opportunities and technologies arise. This implies adopting an open platform architecture, affording the “agility to integrate third-party applications and data quickly and seamlessly into your marketing platform so you are not limited to vendor-specific applications and proprietary data sources.”
A clear majority of CMOs expected their role to expand in the next five years, as the customer experience becomes a key part of brand building, and platforms and tools make it easier to measure success.
