How CMOs Can Facilitate Global Growth

Every organization is as individual as a fingerprint and each one has its own challenges. To me, the role of a CMO is to determine how best to lead an organization's advertising and marketing activities. You identify the challenges, then create strategies and tactical objectives to best position your organization for global growth.

A big part of that is understanding the customer experience, the market, what market you're going into, the buyer's journey, personas, and domestic versus international audiences.

Understanding the Importance of the Customer Experience?

As a CMO, you’re in a unique position to understand the customer experience. You can see how the domestic markets grow and change, but also how they become saturated.

As you continue to grow a business and move into international markets, you must first give due attention to your customer experience. It's the first indication of how and why your global market will respond to the products and services you're offering.?

I see it as the canary in the cage in a coal mine; areas of severe customer dissatisfaction often point to failures in tactical and strategic decisions. By gauging customers' experiences and working to turn those objections, feedback, and negativity around, you can better prepare the company for global growth. While negativity and poor responses may be part of the territory, valuable lessons are there to be learned. We should see these are opportunities for improvement as we work to better connect with our customers.??

Understanding What Market You're Going Into?

To be successful, you need the power to develop supplier and customer relationships, but you also need operational control over where and how your company enters various channels. Based on this experience, you need to determine what types of marketing strategies and techniques you'll use.??

Will you offer a loyalty program? Or will it be a promotional discount? Perhaps, you'll enter the market by offering licensing agreements to domestic and foreign partners. With your knowledge and understanding of entering the global market, you have a start on running international operations from your office.??

To be most successful, you’ll need complete operational say-so on how, when, and what you will do as a global business to best position yourself in the international marketplace.

Understanding the Different Buyer's Journeys and Personas?

Understanding the buyer’s journey is all about digging into the data related to your customers and prospects. You need to understand the stages of how they go about making a purchase decision. It starts from the moment they first become aware of your brand and includes any interactions or exposures to your marketing materials, up until they move forward with buying your product or service.??

Personas are the profile you develop representing the type of clients who are most likely to buy your product and services. To develop personas, you'll typically need to interview (or survey) your prospects and buyers. It would be best to focus on what events have caused them to consider what you're offering. Your sales teams are fantastic resources of this kind of information as well.?

If you have access to customers that didn’t move on with their purchase, ask about their pain points, priorities, and what held them back. In addition to the basic demographic details of your customer base that are hopefully already in hand, you’ll need to seek to understand what is affecting their current decision-making process. I think about what strategies will move them through Awareness -> Consideration -> Decision? Then, ultimately, I think about what I need to do to support and retain them as long-term clients.

Understanding Domestic versus Foreign Audiences?

A thorough buyer’s journey map and associated personas help you to understand and better articulate the differences between domestic and foreign audiences. A big part of your strategy will rely on your interviews with various prospects and clients in domestic and international spheres. You also need to pay close attention to your analytics to gauge if you're reaching the desired audiences as expected.???

Understanding the Market??

In the end, most of these efforts come down to gathering actionable research and data together. This strategy helps to develop a better understanding of how a business is currently positioned in the marketplace. It's not just about looking inward, though; you should always give consideration to trends, benchmarks, and conduct periodic competitor analysis to determine how best to grow and compete in this ever-evolving market.