Why CMOs need to digitally transform the brand conversation?

Part 3 of 3 in The Missing Middle article series. If you missed out on the previous articles in this series, then you can read back Part 1 'Empowering CMOs to grow their brand ', and Part 2 'The Missing Middle and why it matters '.

Author: Ravleen Beeston - Listen to this LinkedIn article on Spotify below:

Digital transformation has become an essential part of the job description for senior marketing leaders. As the pace of technological change has accelerated during the pandemic, it’s often the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) that leads the response. For the CMOs themselves, digital transformation holds an important promise – an opportunity to push marketing to the centre of business strategy.

In the latest CMO Survey from Deloitte, Duke FUQUA and the American Marketing Association, 73% of CMOs say that they’ve been asked to lead broad, business-wide digital transformation for their companies. At the heart of those transformations is the need to accommodate digital buyer journeys – and to elevate understanding of those journeys through data and analytics. Two-thirds or more are currently investing in digital media and search (69%) and data and analytics (66%). Over a third (38%) expect to be giving Artificial Intelligence (AI) a key role in marketing optimization within the next three years.

The objective of these investments is to tie marketing more closely to the bottom line of the business. In fact, 39% of CMOs say they are investing in digital marketing with the goal of driving direct business outcomes like increased revenue, sales, volume and profit. It’s a wise move. Research from the Institute for Real Growth and headhunters Spencer Stuart found that successful businesses seek CMOs who are “speed and impact obsessed”. To maintain and grow their influence, marketing leaders need to make decisive calls that deliver demonstrable results and give credibility on strategy and revenue leadership.

That credibility won’t come from technology alone, though. It depends on a new level of ambition when it comes to making the entire marketing strategy accountable.

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1. CMOs can’t operate on theory alone

Marketers today have a greater understanding than ever before of how their profession drives growth. Analysis from the likes of Binet and Field and the Ehrenberg Bass Institute has shown the crucial role that long-term investments in brand marketing play, building relevant mental awareness that translates into a sustainable competitive advantage. They have formulas for balancing such brand-building activity with shorter-term performance marketing that can be more closely linked to direct actions. They know what the marketing budget needs to do – but they have struggled to make the case for doing it in terms that the rest of the C-suite finds credible.

The problem is the conversation around the brand portion of the budget. For years now, the consensus within marketing has been that brand is hugely important – but not conducive to measurement. Marketers make a hypothetical case for this part of the strategy – but struggle to make it accountable. Participants in the CMO Survey are 60% less likely to prove the value of long-term marketing quantitatively – and this lack of a robust business case has driven a wedge between CMOs and their C-Suite colleagues. According to Forrester, 43% of marketing leaders describe brand as a priority – but only 26% of financial leaders agree.

The real promise of marketing’s digital transformation lies in closing this disconnect. Rather than building awareness on the assumption that it will eventually lead to demand, marketers can use new sources of data to analyze exactly how that process happens. In doing so, they can develop more effective and measurable frameworks for influencing it. They can start to illuminate and explore what Microsoft calls The Missing Middle of the marketing funnel.

2. Time to train data and analytics on the Missing Middle

The most important part of any buyer journey isn’t the awareness built by long-term marketing or the activation campaigns that help people through the final few yards towards purchase. It’s the extended period between the two when awareness turns into relevant mental availability; familiarity turns to favourability, and intent and preference form, often without the buyer being aware of how it happens. This is the phase of the funnel that’s crucial to realizing the value of all marketing investments: from the brand campaigns that create initial awareness to the performance ads that turn intention into conversions and revenue.

By using digital transformation to illuminate the Missing Middle, marketing leaders can offer a new and more relevant perspective on how brand investments are building the bottom line - Ravleen Beeston

The digital investments that those marketers are making will increasingly bring the Missing Middle into focus. Using digital marketing and search data, AI and analytics, they will be able to build detailed models of how exposure to brand ads influences engagement with other touchpoints, and the frequency of exposure and length of brand investments that are required to start driving these effects. We can analyze share of search for early indicators of mental availability in buying situations.

We can track how brand and demand touchpoints contribute to the overall customer experience. Brand may do its best work over the long term – but all advocates of brand marketing acknowledge that it has an impact in the short term too. It’s time to bring the nature of that impact into focus and use it to generate meaningful indicators that give a sense of how the long-term picture will shape up. It’s time to make sure the digital transformation of marketing delivers a digitally transformed view of the case for it.

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For more on The Missing Middle of the marketing funnel – and how engaging with it can lead to a new view of brand impact – explore our full White Paper: The Long, The Short and The Missing Middle.

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