By Linda Bustos
One trend in over the past few years which continues to impact the success of ecommerce and omnichannel companies is the rise of the tech-savvy CMO, as it’s technology that drives digital awareness, experience and action, and it’s technology that measures the impact of marketing strategies and keeps the CMO accountable. And increasingly, CMOs are responsible for part or all of IT budgeting for digital, and have direct reports in technical roles.
In the Huffington Post, our own CMO Matt Dion shares his top 5 obsessions every digital CMO must embrace to keep pace with ebusiness today:
1. Own the customer experience and lifecycle across all channels. The days of physical plus Web are over thanks to the smartphone, and the days of blissful ignorance of customer behavior across channels is over thanks to data and analytics. Keep experience siloed at your own peril.
2. Embrace marketing technology. Matt suggests gaining an in-depth knowledge of the available digital experience platforms, such as marketing clouds and API frameworks. We’ve discussed the concept of “platform-as-a-store” on GetElastic, and how leading edge ebusinesses are more and more using ecommerce as a centralized hub to a “platform” of interconnected technologies.
Forrester Research’s Adam Silverman suggests the retail “store of the future” will “realize greater value by connecting enterprise and point systems together to enable the digital store to operate in real time.”
3. Tear down silos. According to a recent survey by Forrester Research commissioned by Elastic Path, more than 60% of digital experience projects fail. If the CMO and CIO aren’t working closely together and don’t share the same customer-obsessed vision, failure is more likely.
4. Be data driven. Matt reminds us pragmatic marketers know gut feel won’t cut it. “Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.” Smart CMOs’ lives depend on data and analytics.
5. Embrace the mobile mind shift. Though mobile accounts for more than half of email opens and ecommerce traffic, 1 in 4 CIOs have no mobile strategy. The technology-and-customer-experience-obsessed CMO must embrace and drive a mobile mind shift in the organization, making its investment a priority.
Check out Matt’s full article at HuffPo: Reinventing Marketing: 5 Obsessions Today’s Digital CMO Needs to Succeed
Via:: Get Elastic eCommerce
