Top skills CMOs need in the Digital World

A recent study conducted by BCG on “Agile Marketing Organizations” focuses on the changing role of CMO’s and how marketing’s role has expanded in organizations.

Non-agile marketing is already dead, thanks to digital marketing. There was a time when marketing processes took months or years of planning — especially when it comes to new product planning. 

The idea of building prototypes without input from customers and vendors or vetting everything before it comes out is obsolete now. Today’s marketing organization needs to be agile, which means the CMO needs a vastly broader skillset to be relevant.

What today’s CMOs need

All the skillset like — team management, deep knowledge and experience with the marketing concept, market research, strategic planning, branding, and creativity — today’s CMOs also need skills in:

Agile management

Just like tactics used in software development, marketing departments can use agile processes that involve quick sprints rather than massive campaigns. Constant improvement is the key. The entire process is a series of initiatives that improve over time.

Data-driven insights

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few years, you realize the impact big data has on marketing. No longer can agencies survive with metrics on “awareness“, brands want to know more about customers, consumer behavior, and, increasingly, what’s going on in the customer journey.

A deeper understanding of consumers based on data is what CMOs in the digital world need. Therefore skills like business intelligence are extremely critical as they don’t want to be at the mercy of a BI person to run the queries for them. Understanding analytics and hiring top talent who can run manage big data repositories and construct marketing stories that resonate with customers; is the bare minimum skill CMOs need today.

Presumably, CMOs have input in building analytics teams that manage data, ensure its validity, possess advanced analytics modeling skills to turn data into actionable insights, and then marry that data with marketing concepts.

Marketing effectiveness metrics

Metrics only about “awareness” or “conversion” are gone. Most CMOs today understand that managing (and monitoring) the entire customer journey is necessary for effective decision-making.

Understanding the customer journey is just the beginning. CMOs need to understand which marketing actions feed into the customer journey and how segmentation variables impact what the customer journey looks like.

Programmatic buying

Speaking of data, more companies used programmatic buying in 2015 than in prior studies and most “best in class” companies have mastered programmatic buying not only in their digital marketing but traditional marketing, as well.

Marketing innovation

Think about the argument with John Scully that cost Steve Jobs his job at Apple. Scully wanted to focus on making improvements to the Apple II (which accounted for most of Apple’s sales) while Jobs wanted to create a totally different computer (and user) experience. Jobs wasn’t happy just making continuous improvements; he wanted to revolutionize the computer industry (and later the music and phone industries). If Apple hadn’t eventually woken up to the long-term cost of improvements, Apple would likely be defunct now.

Products aren’t the only thing needed innovation. Marketing functions and how the customer preferences are integrated into the entire approach; all this needs constant innovation. You need to build strategies around the areas that your customers care about. For example, today’s customers care a lot about the health, nutrition and well being of their families. CMOs need to think about how they can extend their marketing efforts and involve these issues.

Agency management

In the old days, organizations managed their agencies by either choosing a single agency with multiple products including traditional marketing, email marketing, digital marketing, PR … or they hired a general agency that managed smaller, specialty agencies.

Neither of these options works well today.

Traditional marketing is still the major focus of CMOs and that needs to change. Agencies with expertise in specific domains can do much better work in plugging the gap. And not necessarily this has to be a marketing agency. A company having excellent insights and analytics on consumer nutrition and food patterns can serve CMOs much better by bringing and plugging their knowledge into the overall marketing efforts of your organization.