5 Key Takeaways from CMO Roundtable: Maximising the Marketing Moment

Leading CMOs from 17 brands joined for the power breakfast at the #NetcoreCMORoundtable jointly hosted with Paul Writer. The discussion revolved around customer-centric marketing, data privacy, and increasingly, how the collision of marketing and technology is transforming the role of Marketers in delivering true customer experience.

Here are the 5 Key takeaways from the insightful morning:

1. Today’s Customer Journey: Shorter and Interactive

In today’s “Age of the Customer”, customer is more empowered than the marketer. With the rise of apps like Facebook & Whatsapp, they are always connected and have access to loads of information. They trust others reviews and feedback rather than the brand’s advertisements. This information overload has led to a dramatic reduction of customer’s attention span.
Marketers have to do more with less to get their message heard. They need to understand customer’s preferences to different marketing channels like email, sms, voice & push notification and optimise for the “WOW” impact. It’s a shorter, transparent, 2-way journey focused on automation and technology. Cross-channel marketing automation solutions enable marketers to execute this at scale.

2. Customers Expect Personalised & Real-time Marketing

Customers today access information on more devices and their journey is not at all linear. It’s like a maze. They discover a brand on one device, say mobile; engage with them on desktop and finally transact on another device, say tablet. Keeping the message personalised, relevant and contextual across the entire journey is what matters the most. Marketing, today is a mix of art & science. Marketers need to invest in marketing technology solutions that can help them personalise communication in real-time across all touch points.

3. Data is the Primary Pillar of Personalised Marketing

Customers leave a lot of data through their digital footprints and offline interactions throughout their customer journey. This has led to creation of new positions like Data Scientist who can help in mining this data to derive actionable insights and profiling. It’s the marriage of marketing and analytics which can help identify gaps in the customer journey. Marketers need to invest in CRM solutions that can help them derive intelligence from this data and keep enriching it for data-driven personalised marketing.

4. Data Privacy Where to draw the Line?

With so much data available of customers and focus on data-driven marketing, marketers need to make sure they don’t invade customer’s privacy. It is the customer’s decision on data sharing. Customers share data with a brand based on the trust that they won’t misuse it. But implicit behaviour can take preference over explicit permissions without violating the data privacy. Marketers can ally with others from complementary categories for relevant promotions.

5. Customer Experience is the Modern Marketer’s Path to the Future

Marketers have to move beyond their traditional role of branding and customer acquisition. They have to own the customer experience as brands are built over time and communications across every touch point needs to be analysed and optimised for competitive differentiation. Marketers have to embrace the collision of traditional & digital marketing as customers continue to consume information online and transact offline. They have to become the change agent and weave creative ideas with big data to lead this transformation to customer-centric marketing for driving business growth.

How are you maximising the marketing moment? Share your thoughts in the comments below.