Marketing: How CMOs could be this year's winners.

Marketing is often - rightly or wrongly - underappreciated as a function that drives growth. As we hit the new FY, 2024 feels like the year that CMOs can truly take the reins of driving commercial performance (if you haven't already!).

We're seeing green shoots of recovery to both the economy and marketing budges in the next 12 months after post-pandemic cuts - but with consumer confidence low, and competition for share of the (still limited) consumer wallet, marketers and marketing departments have an opportunity to own and drive commercial success, differentiate their organisations and prove their value both a customer and commercial function.?From conversations with colleagues, clients and marketing experts, we've collated our top five opportunities that we think will drive the biggest change this year.

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1. Get ahead of cookieless advertising?

It's not new news, but it is super important for marketers. From Jan 1st, Google started trialling phase-out of third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users, aiming for complete removal by Q3. Many businesses were ready for this, but a lot are still coming to terms with it.

Make it a core part of your strategy to make sure your new FY objectives are sound, and bring in your media agencies for help. Consider alternatives such as second-party data agreements or improving customer data acquisition through owned channels (e.g. loyalty and membership programmes), and you'll be able to continue to reach customers, drive revenue and foster stronger relationships.?

2. Use data better: join up commercial and marketing, and truly understand your customers

While this feels obvious, be crystal clear on aligning your marketing strategy to the overall business and commercial objectives: focus on maximising ROI and meeting (and reporting on!) the metrics that matter.?As a marketer, I've experienced the stereotype first-hand that what we do is 'fluffy'. Let's beat that in 2024 and ground our performance in cold, hard numbers driven from accurate data.

Intelligent marketing can act as a catalyst for growth; align your strategy with the wider business, develop detailed segmentation and 360 view of your customers, use intelligent reporting, and really, finally get under the skin of customer lifetime value modelling and be recognised for commercial success through accurate attribution. When you sit down with the MD, CEO or Board, it gives you the tools to show the value you bring to acquiring, engaging and retaining your customers.??

3. Rejuvenate your long-term brand building?

Post-pandemic marketing budgets pivoted to short-term sales activation activities, in order to plug the gap in profits. As it feels like we're shifting back towards a more settled landscape, CMOs must consider building a longer term brand to provide resiliency against shorter-term impacts.?

Suitable levels of investment in brand-building activities have been proven to generate more sustainable and higher levels of growth for a business over the long term. As we start to see marketing budgets increase, consider how you might use that to invest in your brand – and ideally prove the value in the long-term. Some experts have proposed that CMOs should be looking to spend 60% off the budget on brand building - while this isn't relevant for all industries, consider how you drive long-term, relationship-based loyalty.

4. Optimise your MarTech and invest in the teams that develop it

Despite new technologies – marketing platforms, AI etc. - consistently growing, Gartner reports overall MarTech stack utilisation is actually declining (58% in 2020 to 33% in 2023). While we might feel at feature saturation point, by not taking advantage of these, marketing departments are working at an disadvantage.

CMOs who are able to halt this decline and build both talent and tech to drive efficiency will be able to put their teams in the position to succeed. Strategies to achieve this should join up business context with available talent to ensure a cohesive and realistic plan that can achieve marketing and business goals. With tools at your disposal to better target and engage customers at each stage of the journey, it would be wasteful not to.?

5. Enhance your loyalty programme

From recent Antavo research, 90% of businesses want to launch or revamp their loyalty programmes within the next 3 years. Coming out of the pandemic, we're seeing it as a common strategy to better understand customer behaviour, differentiate your brand with customers, and command greater market share. Loyalty programmes are long-standing hygiene factor for most airlines and hotels, and other sectors like retail are following suit; adopting subscriptions, gamification, partnerships and rewarding non-transactional behaviour.

Pair that with the decline of cookies, there has rarely been a better time to consider enhancing your loyalty proposition. If you can provide your customer with high-value relationship benefits across reward, recognition, content – ultimately a reason to share their data with you – and wrap it in a great CX then it should make your marketing effort more effective and cost-efficient in the long-term.

Although a word of caution: successful loyalty programmes are harder to pull off than meets the eye – walking the tightrope between customer benefit, commercial profitability and operational feasibility is not easy.

If any of these resonate with you or there are opportunities we've completely missed - please do reach out through LinkedIn or [email protected].