Image: iStockphoto/Jirsak
It's no secret that CMOs are controlling bigger and bigger technology budgets, as digital transformation has swept through the marketing department and changed what they do and the expectations they have to meet.
One CMO I talked with this week at the co-located Midmarket CMO Forum / Midmarket CIO Forum in Orlando said that the marketing department has changed more in the past five years than in the previous 50.
In a keynote "Analytics: The Intersection for Marketing and IT to Collaboratively Turn Data into a Winning Strategy for Growth," Laura Patterson, president of VisionEdge Marketing, explained to CMOs and CIOs how their biggest opportunity to work together and bring value to organization was in big data analytics. And gave them concrete steps to get started.Patterson stated "only 28% of businesses believe they are generating strategic value from the data they collect," based on numbers from Business News Daily.
As marketing has become much more measurable, the C-suite's opinion of marketers has plummeted. Patterson showed the chart below that visualizes how 55% of the C-Suite used to consistently give marketers a "B" grade. That dropped to 30% in 2012, and it's never recovered. And then in 2015, "C" grades passed "B" grades.
Image: VisionEdge Marketing
As a result, the pressure is on for CMOs get good at data—asap.
Patterson said that boils down to the fact that marketers need to become behavioral scientists—while IT professionals are becoming data scientists.
"The best in class marketers are using data to understand the customer journey," said Patterson. "They're understanding the customer experience through the data."
She emphasized that what's needed to create wins is the mashup of structured and unstructured data—that's where the real magic of big data happens (as TechRepublic and ZDNet have also written). Patterson targeted the six data sets as the most important for businesses:
- Market/Business/Customer Activity Data (mostly structured)
- Social Media/Comments/Reviews (mostly unstructured)
- Transactional data
- Website data
- VoC/Telecom/Call Center data
- Images/Graphics (unstructured)
In order to take this data, analyze it, and turn it into insights, a company needs to create standard data models. When it comes to working together on big data, this is the best place for IT and marketing to start, Patterson said. She provided a list of the 12 most important data models to build:
- Segmentation
- Personas
- Journey Maps
- Touch Point Allocation
- Pricing
- Opportunity Scoring
- Campaign Lift
- Attribution Mix
- Predisposition to Purchase Likelihood
- Defect/Customer Risk
- Portfolio Management
- Customer Value
"These are the 12 models marketers need, and they can't build them without the CIO's help," she said.
Patterson recommended that CIOs and CMOs get together, look at the list to see which ones their companies already have and which ones they still need and start building the ones they're missing.
SEE: The Power of IoT and Big Data (ZDNet/TechRepublic special report)
She also circled back to why they were doing all of this, so that in the midst of all this data wrangling they keep their eyes on the prize. She used quotes from Peter Drucker and Philip Kotler to remind them that the purpose of business is to create customers and the purpose of marketing is to create and extract customer value. To do that in today's world means creating better experiences for customers than ever and that's what the data models are ultimately working toward. If both CMOs and CIOs own that, then there's a lot they can do.
Patterson said, "Create common ground around improving the customer experience. That's the opportunity."
Also see
Source: http://techrepublic.com.feedsportal.com/c/35463/f/670841/s/4ec9f60d/sc/28/l/0L0Stechrepublic0N0Carticle0C120Edata0Emodels0Ecios0Eand0Ecmos0Ecan0Estart0Ebuilding0Etogether0C0Tftag0FRSS56d97e7/story01.htm