Why CMOs should partner with smart tech

Marketing today is a multifaceted discipline. To be excellent at it, marketing organisations must rely on a number of resources to power the perfect combination of science and art that is needed to drive impactful outcomes.

While these encompass an extensive repertoire of talent, partners, platforms and integrations, any seasoned marketer can tell you that nothing is more valuable than direct access to data and the technology needed to harness it.

However, using data and technology in the right ways can be a learning curve for even the most sophisticated of marketers, and strong collaborations with CIOs, CDOs, CTOs and their organisations are instrumental to success.

Here are some ways successful marketers rely on data, technology and their inter-company experts to deliver top results.

Mastering the art of scientific targeting

Personalisation is a baseline expectation for modern marketing, and marketers can lean on a lot of software and data, both internal and external, to design strategies that make the most of audience engagement.

A prime example is software that looks across channels and measures intent, which is critical to understanding customers. The key is to connect this with customer relationship management (CRM) software to look at all the signals and understand where the best targeting opportunities lie — an example of this is leveraging intent signals through a data intelligence platform to identify new versus existing customers for highly personalised and targeted campaigns. Getting to this can require highly technical integrations that must be managed with expert governance and oversight.

Organising these resources and activating the insights requires close collaboration with data and technology experts across the organisation. It pays off with a much better foundation for deploying resources that marketers can use both for active strategic targeting and to formulate plans for increasing, improving or shifting existing marketing efforts.

Mobilising the science behind meaningful reporting

Data-driven thinking informs more tailored and effective strategies, but the benefits go beyond the art of planning. Using data effectively creates a much-needed bridge from showcasing channel metrics to proving and optimising marketing’s impact on high-level business objectives.

One of the first mistakes marketers make is reporting on activity — impressions, email open rates and event attendees, as examples — without underlining impact to the business. While these numbers are valuable within the team to track improvements to marketing activities, the cardinal rule of executive reporting is to add business context to numbers.

Identifying outcomes that move the needle is an important place to start. For example, how do brand awareness activities translate to brand perception improvement? How well do marketing qualified leads convert across the funnel — to sales accepted leads, qualified pipeline and closed annual contract value? The unifying thread is to focus on the impact marketing has on driving the business.

Smart marketing leaders will turn to their data and tech expert colleagues to pull all of their marketing data into a single source that reveals the full orchestrated impact across the organisation. With a centralised, user-friendly data view at their fingertips, marketers can make better, more data-driven decisions and tell meaningful stories about how they are transforming the business.

Ultimately, it’s important for marketers to always be open to learning about their data and adopting new technology to harness its power. The landscape moves quickly, and partnering with the right technology and data experts across the company empowers marketers to sharpen both their science and their art, and to multiply the impact of marketing for the entire company.

Image credit: iStock.com/putilich