Know the key steps

There are multiple steps between each level of maturity, but some can’t be skipped. We identified three game-changing steps that CMOs should prioritize:

To get the most out of your marketing activations, the data behind them must be scaled, actionable and quickly accessible. Yet marketers are often stymied by intermittent access to their data and disjointed reporting from legacy resources.

That must change. Staying competitive means adopting an agile approach.

Marketers should:

• Establish a framework that allows them to govern their data assets.
• Work with all third-party data providers and partners to ensure real-time access and control over their data.
• Be empowered to deploy predictive analytics at pace to fuel business growth.

Commoditized tasks beset every company, and marketing is not immune. Marketers must frequently tackle low-value exercises – time that would be better used for content creation, experience design and other more strategic activities.

Automation can help by managing commoditized tasks like optimization, dashboarding and reporting. It can drive efficiency while freeing human talent to pursue more complex, high-value work.

We partnered with a multinational pharmaceutical company to automate a variety of tasks related to their delivery of digital content around the globe. As part of a new, integrated operating model, this automation played a critical role in scaling the pharmaceutical company's marketing operations to serve 40 markets and over 50 brands.

Production turnaround times shrunk 30%, while speed to market surged over 20%. Perhaps most important, marketers were able to devote more of their energy on the sophisticated work of devising healthcare content, and medical professionals were able to access that information faster—a healthy outcome all around.

As a business grows over time, its various functions tend to develop different key performance indicators and objectives. This creates internal fragmentation.

But customers aren't interested in a fragmented experience: They expect a consistent, satisfying experience with a brand regardless of which platform they're using in today’s omnichannel world.

Organizations must think the same way. As customers embrace totally new ways of interacting with and experiencing brands, future-ready businesses go beyond simply improving the customer journey. They are excelling at what we call the "Business of Experience" by responding to rapidly changing needs.

This requires breaking down barriers among functions—from the front office to the back office—and aligning KPIs to ensure consistency in the customer experience. CMOs should take advantage of new tools and capabilities that present a clear picture of how marketing activations contribute to customer conversions. In doing so, they can establish a new level of connectivity between front, middle and back-office functions, supported by a unified infrastructure and common objectives and measurement criteria.

As marketers become more connected with other functions, they'll connect better with their customers, too.