CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) know that our world is always in flux, especially in the world of Digital Marketing. It is a challenging field, but full of exciting promises for those willing to adapt and innovate!
Marketing evolves every day, with each new technology launched (and these technologies emerge all the time). Therefore, it is essential that leadership is concerned with:
- Keep your team up to date with the latest news;
- And prevent your multiple teams from losing focus on what matters: selling more online !
This guide is another of my attempts to teach you everything I have accumulated in my more than 16 years as CEO of Enjoy Minder— the largest Inbound Marketing agency in Brazil!
I want you to take advantage of all the opportunities that only a CMO can seize, but without forgetting the challenges that end up leading to:
- The best way to optimize a Marketing budget;
- The right way to ensure a continuously positive ROI (return on investment);
- And to identify the main (or new) demands of your market !
The next few paragraphs have everything you need to know to start selling like hotcakes this year. All you need to do is follow me until the end!
The Challenges of Being a CMO: Key Insights
When I think about the challenges faced by CMOs, I realize that many of them are closely linked to people management and team development.
Maintaining motivation, dealing with conflicts and overcoming training and development difficulties are complex aspects that demand constant attention, whether in planning, in executing Marketing strategies, and certainly in data analysis!
After all, every stage of the process must be focused on making the goals and objectives that elevate the status of a business a reality.
For me, the biggest skill a CMO needs to develop is the flexibility to:
- Listen and observe what people really need, whether inside or outside the company;
- To then compare, analyze and assertively judge the different possibilities of meeting these needs with the brand’s products or services, or with a considerable reduction in waste;
- And transmit this information to the different hierarchies of employees within a company’s ecosystem, starting with the owners and partners, going through the employee base involved in making these plans a reality, and finally to the customers !
Another detail is that a good Chief Marketing Officer needs to have the energy to respond quickly to market movements.
This title can only be well executed when the CMO lives for what he does: when this person sees, thinks and acts with Digital Marketing in mind. It is a detail that has more to do with interest than profession, but it is what separates a top CMO from all the rest!
Mistakes happen in every profession, but the Chief Marketing Officer has to deal with the mistakes of others much more frequently than other roles within a company.
The same speed that this professional uses to respond to the market will also be used to get a business back on track as quickly as possible after a setback — and still find a way to get ahead of the competition, even with a slight delay!
Dealing with these challenges requires self-awareness, adaptability, and a collaborative approach to overcome obstacles and achieve success. Recognizing weaknesses and finding solutions to strengthen them is what makes the CMO such an important captain when navigating the wild ocean of the Internet!
It is something that translates into a decrease in CAC, an increase in ROI, and the type of innovation that elevates the size of a company to a multinational and, who knows, to a megacorporation!
Knowing where you want to go with your investments, you put the best Chief Marketing Officer on the deck of your vessel and pay attention to what he has to say.
This is the specialist who speaks the language of his entire crew and ensures that, when it’s time to turn right, no one tries to go the other way (whether through inattention or stubbornness)!
Below you can find out a little more about the areas of activity of a CMO.
Knowledge and adaptation to the market
A good CMO needs to stay up to date with the latest technological trends in the market and everything that involves consumer behavior.
With the popularization of the Internet, search engines and social networks, the behavior of different groups of people can be tracked in detail, providing clues about interests, challenges and desires, which can be grouped within target audiences and segmented within them.
Changes in consumer behavior happen subtly, over months and years, and what you see going viral on the Internet is just the end result of something that has accumulated from small trends and polarizations around topics of interest to a specific audience: yours!
Having sufficient market knowledge allows a CMO to see these small movements in the current and adjust the sails of the business to catch the right wind as soon as it hits. This requires continuous investment in:
- Market research ;
- Collaboration with data analysis teams;
- And active participation in conferences and other events in the sector in which the Chief Marketing Officer works.
It’s both a mental and physical challenge, but the results can be legendary!
Budget Management and ROI
Having to decide what would be the best way to allocate a resource (in order to maximize the ROI on Digital Marketing campaigns) is a colossal responsibility!
Starting with the budget: any mistake can be fatal, so accurate tracking of campaign performance becomes the best way to plug holes and fix blind spots.
To increase ROI, all prioritization goes to investments based on clear goals that meet the expected return without distractions, still counting on room for emergency maneuvers!
All with absolute transparency, thanks to the spread of artificial intelligence and the latest updates in algorithm technology spread across Digital Marketing tools.
Personalization and customer engagement
Speaking of artificial intelligence (also known as AI), anything that involves creating personalized experiences that resonate with customers and promote engagement with a brand — especially in a landscape as saturated as the Internet — is welcome!
By using this type of technology to collect and analyze data about ideal customers in an automated way — and then impact them with perfect content, always delivered when these consumers need it most — the CMO is able to see trends in the behavioral patterns of leads in order to nurture a profitable relationship that communicates through content:
- Valuable;
- Relevant;
- And interactive!
This advanced data analysis makes some details obvious that would have gone unnoticed in the past, such as the segments that emerge within the target audience and creative strategies for repetitive, or worse, invisible, problems!
Team management and interdepartmental collaboration
A person who acts as Chief Marketing Officer has the main task of promoting uniform collaboration between the different departments involved in attraction, conversion and sales, requiring:
- Implementing a culture of open communication and collaboration, with clear hierarchies, low barriers, obvious commitments and aligned objectives;
- And cohesion in work processes (especially in teams), encouraging professional development and investment in technologies that make remote collaboration easier, faster, and focused on each small action that leads to the final result!
Innovation and brand differentiation
Only after knowing the company itself, its target audience, and the employees who can help achieve its objectives (as well as knowing a bit about themselves) will a CMO have the resources and references to develop strategies that make the business stand out in this competitive and constantly changing market!
To take advantage of them, you need to nurture a culture of innovation within the Marketing team, and encourage experimentation to unleash creative thinking.
Since creativity is what we call the most practical and effective ways of solving a problem or achieving something, there is no better fuel for a brand’s profitability than:
- Customer feedback;
- Team complaints;
- And monitoring emerging trends !
It is in the search for better, faster, more economical and more profitable solutions that a good CMO can transform a pumpkin into a carriage — or a Casas Bahia into a Mercado Livre.
Emerging Trends in Digital Marketing
I didn’t mention artificial intelligence twice for nothing — and here’s the third: machine learning is shaping the future of Digital Marketing, and this trend brings as many opportunities as challenges.
The most obvious challenge is that if the CMO doesn’t get a handle on these trends before they become a standard in the market, he or she will put the company at risk by being slow to act (or by assuming, without consulting any data, that a trend will be temporary).
Sometimes trends really are fleeting!
But in the case of an AI-powered tool, the type of opportunity that opens up is too radical because highly intelligent automations, which could previously only be done by human beings over many hours, can now be done in seconds — and on an absurd scale!
Another trend is the continued growth of video content as the most effective way to impact people.
This is because videos are more humanized than other media formats. They can be both watched and listened to, and are easier to understand for people of all ages and in all walks of life.
Using video content provides exciting opportunities for audiences and businesses to connect, drawing viewers into experiences that elevate a deal between a buyer and a business to the level of a conversation between friends about solving a complicated problem!
An extension of video content is augmented reality: another trend that has drawn attention to the fact that the more emotionally impacted a lead is (that is, the more immersed they are in the experience provided by a company), the greater the chances that they will leave that relationship as a repeat buyer — and not just as another curious person!
It’s a key role for a Chief Marketing Officer to analyze which of these trends deserve immediate attention and which don’t need to be pursued right now. But it’s imperative that the CMO knows about all of them.
How a Chief Marketing Officer should handle personalization
As you can see, content personalization is essential to win over and retain the right customers: those who buy what your business sells!
The same technology used to better understand a company’s target audience is the technology that is also available to its competitors, which makes the task of being relevant and authentic (to the point of capturing the public’s attention) even more difficult.
The best CMOs see personalization as a way to serve their audience and, as a result, profit significantly from being a good service provider or salesperson — not the other way around!
To serve well, you need to look within , and you need to answer questions like:
- What is the PUV (unique value proposition) of the business;
- How can a brand effectively communicate its PUV using audience data?
- And what kind of person is part of the target audience and who can benefit from this product or service like no other alternative!
This can be done by implementing detailed segmentation strategies to target specific messages to different interest groups (or categories) of leads within your customer base.
Any other personalization strategy that does not rely on real data is at a disadvantage when it comes to Digital Marketing, since, without knowing for sure who your perfect customer persona is, the chances of a brand selling more online (or becoming an authority within the niche in which it operates) drop drastically!
The strategy based on real data
The soul of Digital Marketing lives on the border between personalization technologies and customer needs.
This fact suggests that the best type of strategy is one that relies on data collected from real human beings interacting with your brand’s campaigns!
Investing in advanced analytics tools to gain deep insights into the behavior of your ideal buyers is more than recommended: it is essential for a CMO’s success!
Every campaign or action needs to be measured non-stop, and data from different platforms needs to be integrated into one place to consolidate all the information collected and communicate it effectively, in a way that leads to the business’s financial objective.
In addition to collecting numbers, understanding what they mean is what makes or breaks a brand, since obtaining a holistic view of the public through a quality analysis, which goes beyond quantity, strengthens the impact of actions and cuts down on wasted attention, money and time before it’s too late!
Predicting the future is impossible, but a good CMO makes a great effort to understand the market in the present and anticipate some of its movements over the coming months or weeks.
Everything is free from guesswork and with colorful reports to support the choice of priorities!
What defines a Chief Marketing Officer?
It is the ability to listen, plan and communicate strategies to increase a brand ‘s profitability , the work that defines the role of a Chief Marketing Officer.
It is the CMO who:
- Need to balance the interests of partners and executives with the effective execution of partners who make those interests a reality;
- Responsible for understanding the market and adapting profitability strategies through Digital Marketing to reduce waste and increase conversions;
- You have to keep an eye on budget limits, resource and personnel allocation, and still stay the course in a direction that achieves the expected ROI ;
- You need to know the trends, technologies and quality audience in the market to guide the company in making decisions with these factors in mind;
- You have to manage teams and ensure that all departments involved communicate clearly;
- And you are still responsible for using all these facts, research, experiments and studies to seize the opportunity to innovate in a saturated market!
But anyone who thinks that the Chief Marketing Officer does all this work alone is mistaken!
The CMO does not act alone!
Despite carrying the weight of major decisions based on data and practical experience after years of guiding companies to profit, the CMO cannot act alone!
Because a CMO:
- Can’t be everywhere at once;
- You don’t have access to everyone in the company when you need it;
- And, because of this, it needs to appoint leaders to extend its own operational capacity and guide the boat to the X that marks the treasure in the changing terrain of the Internet!
To ensure that you are being the ideal CMO for your brand — and even what roles your teams will need to play to ensure that your business achieves the profits it desires to survive and grow — I recommend that you participate in the free Digital Marketing Diagnosis here at Enjoy Minder!
Our diagnostic can immediately point out some of your company’s blind spots — while also illustrating what you’re already doing right.
This analysis is no substitute for the role of an experienced CMO, but it’s the best start you could hope for!
Apply now and don’t look back (unless it’s to say goodbye to low sales and communication crises between your departments!).
