Will the CMO transform to Chief Connecting Officer in 2022?

At this moment, as a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) you’re most likely looking forward to next year. What trends & developments are taking place, how has your team performed this year and what are the objectives for next year? It is also a moment to look in the mirror and evaluate your performance and role within the organization. In this blog, we’ll reflect on the transformation that many CMOs will experience in 2022.

What are the challenges of the CMO?

Gartner recently shared the latest trends and developments they see in an eBook. At the moment we see 3 key challenges facing CMOs:

1. Prove the value of marketing

For years, there has been talked about the importance of being able to provide insight into the contribution of marketing. But we still see that many CMOs are afraid to commit to objectives. And as a result, there is often no need to provide insight into the value of marketing.

2. Changing mission & scope

What we mainly see here is that digitization is increasingly becoming a top priority for other members at C-level. On the one hand, this offers opportunities in budgets that become available for digitization. But on the other hand, it is also becoming more difficult for the CMO to directly influence this.

3. Smaller marketing budgets

We all have gone through a turbulent period and, in addition, there are several signals at the macro level that cause uncertain factors. This resulted in significantly smaller marketing budgets in 2020 and 2021. Unfortunately, we see that it will remain a challenge next year. There is also a strong connection with the first challenge here. When someone looks at marketing purely from a cost-technical point of view, then marketing is a cost item. It is therefore extra important to prove the added value of marketing.

Consistency is the magic word

One of the first things that stuck with me during my studies when it comes to marketing is consistency. This has been emphasized from the start and I see examples passing by every day of how important this is. It is also good for a CMO to fall back on this and thus retain an important role at C-level. Because this gives you the reins to be involved in all kinds of things where consistency is important, such as:

• Strategy
• Digitization
• Customer experience
• Staff members
• Branding
• Partnerships

And so we can go on and on.

Ultimately, you want all these things to be consistent and connected.

And because marketing has common ground in so many of these processes, this is also an excellent opportunity to take back control. Because consistency is a nice word, but even that alone won’t get you results.

That is why you should also invest to tackle the 3 most important challenges. You can do this by getting started with our roadmap to success:

1. Define marketing goals
2. Insight into the target audience
3. Responding at the right time with the right message within the customer journey
4. Use the right tools & channels
5. Make this measurable and transparent with a dashboard

Meet the Chief Connecting Officer

For starters, the tools are not the most important, but the data is. Therefore, the CMO needs to transform to a Chief Connecting Officer and connect all data. How do you ensure that you have your marketing data in order and the right insights?

The first step that we often advise is to get started with marketing automation. This allows you to build your marketing database and enrich it with behavioral data. With marketing automation, you ensure that your marketing data gains more value and you can also distribute it to other platforms.

As soon as you collect data within marketing automation, you can also start building a dashboard. You can use tools like Klipfolio, Qlikview or PowerBI for this.

But with only your marketing data you are not there yet. It is also very important to integrate other data such as CRM data. When purchasing a marketing automation system, check whether your CRM has a standard / native integration. This makes integrating a lot easier.

Tip for the pros

Have you already integrated your marketing automation with your CRM and do you also have a dashboard to provide insight into the results? Then you have already a good start as Chief Connecting Officer. But you can think of other opportunities to get as much as possible relevant data about your customer journey within your marketing automation system. And turn this data into actions. Two options you have:

1. Create integrations through connectors like Zapier or Blendr
2. Implementation of a Customer Data Platform

Would you like to discover more?

We know from experience that it is nice to discuss with someone about your objectives, challenges or setting up the right Martech stack. Would you like this? Just schedule a discovery call with us!