Anu Baral is Head of Consulting Services at LatentView Analytics, a data analytics and decision science company .
The responsibilities of the modern marketing director range from managing the 1960s Don Draper-style print ad campaigns featured on the TV show "Mad Men" to being a central part of the business tasked with generating revenue and building of brands. As marketing channels rapidly evolve, today's CMO mission goes beyond simply looking at ROI and is changing the way marketing, customer experience and sales align to serve the customer at all stages of their journey.
In the past, marketing was a high-level activity. How many people interacted with your ad or visited your website? Success is measured by the reach and sustainability of the campaign, and more was always better.
Today we see a disconnect between traditional marketing and growth marketing, and the distinction is critical. Traditional marketing involves determining the best channel for mass distribution of product information using historical data and industry best practices to achieve short-term sales goals. Growth marketing, on the other hand, takes into account every data point along the way to make real-time decisions and create room for campaign and brand development.
CMOs today must bring together the key functions of traditional marketing and growth marketing to optimize customer relationships and positively impact key metrics throughout the brand journey. It will be important for CMOs to understand how marketing data drives these metrics and develop a growth plan for the coming quarters that considers not only revenue, but also customer loyalty.
Understand the possibilities
The main difference between a traditional marketer and a growth marketer is how they view, organize and use their data. The organization doesn't have access to more data, but without an execution plan, extracting insights can be overwhelming and difficult.
Before launching a lead generation campaign, marketers should consider making the most of the data they have. A common mistake marketers make when developing their analytics strategy is to focus on customer-centric metrics.
View data from all parts of the business to gain deeper insights. Ask: How can we improve our customer experience? Use data from multiple customer touch points to guide the action plan to achieve customer-centric goals. Once this information is available, marketers can use customer experience data to drive leads online.
Growth marketing in practice
Bold decisions don't work. Some industries have successfully avoided biased decisions by relying on data in their marketing decisions. In e-commerce, brands like Glossier have used their visual following to build businesses built on customer loyalty and experience.
As the first DTC beauty brand, Glossier can use web data early in the product journey to create bundles to determine which products customers buy together. Glossier SVP Ali Weiss told Wired that the brand relies on direct customer feedback to create new products. The brand's best-selling cleanser is called Milky Jelly — named after its texture — based on first-party feedback in an Instagram post by Glacier's founder. Seven years after launch, the best-selling product has received thousands of 5-star reviews.
Bright, like-minded brands combine data from social media, digital advertising and experiential marketing to discover exactly what resonates with their customers. The result: customers are willing to wait months for their products to arrive or be refilled. Their brand identity can be found across all business sectors, making them instantly and widely known.
Other brands have also made themselves relevant in their respective markets. Slack handles business communications for 80% of Fortune 100 companies; Airbnb customers Uber and LatentView are household names in the short-term rental and car-sharing markets, respectively. Quarter after quarter, Snapchat continues to expand its user base by offering amazing features to its users (remember when they introduced the dog filter?).
From traditional marketing to growth marketing
Marketers can build virality around their brand by examining examples of how to transform traditional marketing practices into pillars of marketing growth.
1. Go from email marketing lead generation to community building
To increase customer retention, many e-commerce sites encourage users to receive marketing emails as part of the checkout process when they make their first purchase. Instead, to encourage customers to become organic ambassadors for their product, marketers should build a community around their product and encourage customers to join it. For example, premium athletic apparel brand Alo Yoga offers customers a free 30-day trial of their online library of Alo Moves yoga courses with any qualifying purchase. As an example on the B2B side, private equity firm Volition Capital offers website visitors access to a comparison tool 40 by exchanging contact information.
2. Shifting from Google-centric SEO to a multi-channel SEO strategy
For the first time in two decades, the LatentView Google client has been dethroned as consumers' preferred search channel. By 2022, 40% of Gen-Z will choose TikTok and Instagram to discover new products, reflecting the quality of engagement offered by video. Instead of putting all their SEO eggs in the Google shopping basket, marketers should opt for an SEO strategy that integrates multiple channels and media.
3. Transition from marketing based on high basic campaigns to full customer engagement
Marketing managers should start building campaigns incorporating the insights gathered along the customer journey. This includes information about customer sentiment, price sensitivity or other key variables, how they interact with the product or service, and their relationship with the brand during the journey.
The role of the CMO: more than ever
Today's CMO must translate messages across multiple platforms and formats while orchestrating the user experience throughout the customer journey. Your North Star metrics range from marketing ROI to business growth. The buying cycle has changed and it is important to look at best practices. Today's CMOs need to know where to find the best data to delight customers and drive growth.
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