There is no doubt that the role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) has changed significantly in the past decade. Once held up as a maven of creativity and brand, today’s technologies, customers, and pace of business demand CMOs have a wider handle on a variety of skill sets and a much deeper business acumen in order to move their team from cost to profit centers.

CMOs are still expected to be big brand and creative thinkers and organizations will always need this kind of talent to drive awareness, interest, and excitement in a brand. However, these somewhat intangible metrics have given way to hardcore month-over-month and year-over-year growth metric expectations, leaving some CMOs without the right people, processes, or technologies to deliver.

This is not a short-term trend either. One of the biggest shifts in the role highlighted by today’s CMOs is the demand for accountability and real contribution to an organization’s bottom line. Whereas marketing used to be all about generating “buzz” and vanity metrics, today’s CMOs are charged with building business cases around campaigns and reporting out post-launch ROI metrics to justify business value. While most CMOs agree this is a shift in the right direction, they also recognize they don’t necessarily have the right personal experience, team members, or skill sets to deliver on these expectations. In fact, in some organizations, more traditional “CMO ” titles have evolved into titles like “Chief Marketing and Data Officer” or “Chief Marketing and Growth Officer,” reflecting the very real business expectations of the role. This represents a significant shift in how organizations think about marketing and presents a welcome recognition that marketing is an important player in the entire value chain, not just the top of the funnel.

Along with expectations that marketing become inherently data-driven comes a modern CMO’s responsibility to understand the very real legal implications of collecting and acting on customer information. Under GDPR and CCPA, CMOs need to understand the current landscape of customer data privacy and data collection transparency laws and, moreover, how to address the experience of asking for and then acting on information captured so as not to alienate and lose customers they fought so hard to win. Therefore, CMOs are responsible for the entire customer experience from awareness to advocacy.

The industry’s response to the changing expectations of the CMO has varied ranging from headlines proclaiming the ‘Death of the CMO,’ to theories of ‘serial CMOs’ that posits companies need different types of CMOs at different periods depending on their maturity and lifecycle, to CMOs themselves leaving the positions after feeling overwhelmed and ineffective.

So do today’s CMOs need to be part brand whiz, part creative director, part data scientist, part lawyer, part UX designer, part…? The short answer is No. And Yes.

How to Get There

Digital transformation is business transformation and the CMO role isn’t the only traditional organizational role being disrupted as business needs and customer expectations evolve. Just like their C-suite counterparts, the CMO is first and foremost a leader, and a good leader recognizes their strengths and fills in knowledge and skillset gaps with team members who can educate and activate a marketing team as well as the entire organization.

So no, the CMO doesn’t need to be all things to all people, but they do need to continue to fill the traditional role of a strong organizational leader who doesn’t let ego get in the way of driving business goals and objectives. A modern CMO should understand enough to be heads up to the capabilities and disciplines needed to deliver on their goals, but always come back to the basics of leadership, creativity and agility that proved the role to be successful in the first place.

No matter a CMO’s background or how they’ve developed their teams, they are still responsible for the customer experience and as long as that is their North Star, a modern CMO only needs the ability to build and evolve their teams to respond to customer expectations.  If they can remain collaborative and agile in that pursuit, they will be able to deliver on the evolving expectations of the role.

CMOs are under increased pressure to show tangible return for their marketing spend while delivering on an expanded customer agenda. Providing a high-quality experience across multiple channels on a consistent basis is difficult, especially with competitive noise. To keep marketing efforts moving, some leaders have turned to cloud as a technology differentiator.

Cloud solutions are gaining steam for their ability to support sophisticated platforms and systems. Many organizations use cloud-specific marketing platforms-as-a-service, which are expertly configured process layers that sit on top of an organization’s existing cloud system. Just about any cloud platform will work with this kind of PaaS platform, be it software as a service, platform as a service or infrastructure as a service.

How do marketers get the most out of these systems for their buyer’s journey? We offer 3 ideas:

• Start with Analytics: Specialized processes can serve up detailed customer information with just a few clicks, allowing marketing teams to understand which stages of the purchasing decision-making process matter most to different value segments. Capturing data at these decision processes enables an even deeper and granular approach to successful marketing.
• Optimize Ad Spend: Marketers need to know how much to spend, how to split that spend across geographies and business lines, how to divide it across channels and touch points, and how to pull together the right mix of interactions for a given segment or campaign. All this is far easier when there is a platform to watch the effectiveness of this spend and help marketers gauge whether more should be spent, or if the program should be pulled.
• Aggregate Your Customer Service: Having 30 tabs open to respond to customer challenges is not the most efficient way to get things done. A PaaS platform dedicated to driving customer buyer’s journey outcomes is far better, by aggregating customer data, flagging common issues, cataloging client service histories, and quickly sharing, refining and pushing solutions across channels. Sometimes, customers want to be heard much more than they want to see your fancy marketing message.

With these insights in mind, marketing can finally take its efforts to the next level with customers feeling heard and marketing executives in control. It’s the best of both worlds.

Get Started

Are you looking to connect the cloud to your buyer’s journey? Speak to a sales specialist today at sales@perficient.com and download our portals guide below for more on-point information about customer experience.

Today’s organizations must be more connected to their customer than ever. As the buyer’s journey evolves, leaders must also adopt the right technologies to influence positive business outcomes. This post is a part of a series focused on helping enterprises develop the necessary strategies and best practices to better connect with their customers. Check out the other blogs in this series.

Did you hear enough about digital transformation in 2016?  Besides the U.S. presidential election, digital transformation was a big topic for a lot of companies.  Now that we have entered 2017, is digital transformation a fad, or is there more to come?
According to Adobe, digital transformation will be a hot topic again in 2017!  So lets not think of it as a fad.  It’s extremely important that companies understand what digital transformation is all about and begin to implement transformation if they haven’t already.

What makes up a digital transformation effort?

Over at CMO.com, a publication by Adobe, they have identified digital transformation as a top priority for 2017. In Adobe’s survey, customer experience tops the list of areas that need to be addressed.  In the survey, 1 in 5 marketers think that customer experience is the most exciting opportunity they are pursuing.

Additionally, 83% of marketers think that customer experience is central to their role.

When you think about customer experience, you may naturally gravitate to a web site design or user interface.  But customer experience is so much more.  You may design a great looking site, but if you can’t deliver products on time, your customer experience is poor.  If you can’t tell a consumer if a product is available at your store, they will look for it elsewhere.
So customer experience and digital transformation are not just for marketers to think about.  Leadership and management are critically important to making transformation happen across the enterprise and not just in one department.  In the Adobe survey, 80% of the marketing executives think they need to restructure to better support the business.
Technology planning has to be at the center of your digital transformation effort too – after all it is digital transformation.  Data is vitally important to manage – to understand customer behavior, to anticipating their needs and wants.   Marketing leaders are three times more likely to make decisions based on comprehensive data than are market laggards.
At Perficient, we remain focused on helping clients with digital transformation – you can learn more about what we’re doing on this blog as well as on our Digital Transformation blog.
 

This week I am back at home in Northern California celebrating Thanksgiving with my family. Our Thanksgiving dinner is unique, with a blend of American dishes like turkey and cranberry sauce mixed with Chinese noodles and dumplings. In all, there is something for everyone at the table and one can go home satisfied with what they’ve eaten.

Each year there are many things to give thanks for in the technology world. From mobile applications that facilitate efficient shopping experiences to games that pass the time, families can have more engaging, interesting, and successful holiday seasons.

Especially thankful these few years are technology executives and leaders, particularly those who have chosen to adopt cloud technologies for their organization. Here’s what we believe each technology leader is giving thanks for as they sit down to a hearty meal this Thursday:

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) is thankful for cloud because it has helped the organization adopt leaner ways of development while also enabling the gathering of more customer information. The CIO is thankful that the cloud no longer means having to research new innovations every few years as well – this process now takes care of itself.

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is thankful to have a seat at the table after years of being separated from the conversation. With digital experiences being developed in the cloud, the CMO is confident their skills, interests, and strategies can benefit the end customer in more ways than ever.

The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and their accounting team are thankful for the cost-savings of the cloud. In the past, the CIO would purchase more technologies than necessary, often to guard against the potential lack of resources. With a solid public cloud strategy now, the company can save more money earned through revenues and be better prepared for rainy days or the opportunity to innovate.

The Lead Technical Architect and their team of developers are thankful for a more efficient development process. In the past, development meant having to manually check the quality of applications, raising the possibility of human error. Now armed with DevOps technologies that empower continuous deployment and innovation, the technology team can rest easy knowing that launch days won’t be chaotic.

The product manager and marketing managers are thrilled with the arrival of the cloud. With the competition fiercer than ever, knowing that the development team can deploy features and innovations is an exciting prospect, especially as the holiday and winter conference season heats up. This year, the elusive breakout session speaking opportunity a possibility.

Perhaps the most excited this Thanksgiving is the customer. Having discovered the application through the recommendation of a friend, the customer can depend on their favorite brand to come through with the latest updates, innovations, and so much more, keeping their eyes glued to the screen. One can only imagine that this customer will be a loyal one for years to come.

What are You Thankful For?

Learn more about our IBM expertise here.

As you bite into your turkey or apple pie, what are you thankful for in the cloud this holiday season? Share your thoughts in the comments below and download our guide, Getting Started with Hybrid Cloud to see what your technical teams can achieve through cloud adoption.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, Michael Porter, a colleague of mine, was live-blogging at last week’s Forrester CXNYC event, a conference for customer experience leaders, innovators, and practitioners.

During one of the presentations he attended, George F. Colony, the CEO of Forrester, discussed how customer experience has become the most critical barrier to gaining and keeping customers. While he shared a handful of stories from a mix of industries, George mentioned an example from banking that I wanted to pass along.

Nine months ago, George visited the CMO of a very large bank to provide her with her company’s new Forrester CX Index score. Upon review, she remarked that her next biggest competitor, who spent one-fifth the amount as she did on customer experience, had a better score. George explained that it was likely because the way the two companies approached their customers was vastly different. The CMO asked for evidence and George obliged. After reviewing letters from the CEO to shareholders, he found their competitor used the word “customers” much more often. He extrapolated that this was probably indicative of the company culture, and that there was a lesson in it – for all of us.

My colleague, Mark Polly, wrote a post on Perficient’s digital transformation blog that highlighted the current state of digital marketing across various industries, including financial services. An infographic from CMO.com, an Adobe-operated website that offers digital marketing insight for chief marketing officers and senior marketing executives, indicates that digital channels are increasingly influencing product sales and, therefore, commanding more advertising dollars by companies. 

Digital marketing in financial services:

• In 2015, digital accounted for 29% of all sales across North America and Europe. Financial institutions estimate that number can grow to 38% by 2018.

• A 2015 survey found that 63% of 200 financial services companies in North America and Europe are planning to spend more money on their digital marketing efforts.

• 27% of financial service companies said growth was their top digital marketing priority and objective, while 59% said it was one of their top three.

Across all industries, most companies agree that continuous investments in digital need to be made in order to provide customers with what they expect: a good customer experience. And most financial services companies agree that it’s the best way to grow their business and retain customers.

According to eMarketer, a source of information on how to do business in a digital world, ad spending for desktop/laptop consumption is only slightly more than mobile. Among all industries, financial services remains one of the biggest spenders in digital advertising in the US.

In a recent post, I laid out three reasons why you should be a believer in Oracle. The article highlighted Oracle’s transition from focusing on solutions that were historically implemented on-premises to specializing in the development and sale of cloud solutions. 

CEO Safra Catz mentioned in the company’s Q3 2015 earnings call that Oracle started going through the “operational transformation” more than 10 years ago. Now, according to Larry Ellison, executive chairman of the board and CTO, Oracle is “…selling more new SaaS and PaaS [solutions]…than any other company in the world.”

Soon after I published that post, Oracle’s other CEO, Mark Hurd, published a post on LinkedIn on digital disruption and provided some examples that included pharmaceutical companies’ ambitions to cultivate customer relationships on their own, as well as the threat that tried-and-true financial services companies continue to face from newer FinTech companies.

Like Safra, Mark mentions the disruption Oracle itself is going through, albeit rightfully self-induced:

“We at Oracle are not retooling our applications, infrastructure and platforms for the cloud because it’s easy or safe. Far from it. We’re doing it because we’ve seen the incredible importance of cloud computing to our customers, and we realize that if we don’t provide them with the tools they need (or that at some point they realize they need), another provider will do it in our place. So yes, we’d rather disrupt ourselves than be disrupted by someone else.”

So, take it from Safra, Mark, and Oracle. Not only are they helping disrupt the world, they’ve challenged their own proven business model in order to maintain a leadership position in business.

Mark Hurd’s three steps to succeed in today’s digital world:

1. Create a flexible, scalable computing infrastructure that allows people to turn data into information faster than ever.

2. Customize decision-making across the board, using analytics to empower front-line staff to serve their customers in the moment, rather than when it is convenient for someone to get back to them.

3. Adopt a culture and infrastructure that supports initiative and risk-taking.

In my tenure here at Perficient, I’ve contributed to a number of guides for the life sciences industry. Each one has been informative and useful, but I can’t remember ever being as excited about any of them as I am about the newest one: Life Sciences is Going Digital. 

I think what’s most valuable about this particular guide is that it captures a ton of real-life examples of how digital technology is being used in life sciences: 30 examples, to be exact. That’s useful in two ways: 1) It can be hard for us in our technology-wary industry to imagine how to effectively use new technology, especially for regulated activities, and 2) the proprietary nature of our industry makes it hard to gain insight into what our peers are doing and how they’re doing it.

So, what we’ve done in this new guide is to pull together a bunch of examples for you, in addition to some guidance about “digital transformation” and what it means for life sciences. The guide even includes an in-depth interview with Bharat Tewarie, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for UCB Pharma!

Download your copy today to learn more about digital transformation, from both Perficient and your peers, including Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Genentech, Quintiles, ICON, Roche, GSK, FDA, MHRA, and more!

The term “Headless CMS” has come up in the past year and it has started to generate some buzz in the industry.  “Headless CMS” is basically a concept and not a product or technology. But it has potential to help in our digital transformation efforts by making content delivery and marketing more flexible.

Traditionally, content management systems have been built not only to create and manage content, but also to manage the entire web experience, from displaying content, to managing navigation, to tag management and so on.  As content management systems grow to take on more and more duties, they tend to become more rigid and limiting in how we build websites.  Say you want to implement a new, cool technique, but find that you can’t do that with your current CMS.  In the early days of responsive web design, many content management system could not provide this feature and left us with a lot of work arounds for our mobile sites.

This is where “Headless CMS” comes into the picture.  What if you could have a content management system that did a good job at managing content, but left the presentation of the content and the website (the “head”) up to somebody else?  In this case you could do anything you want when building the site, but still display content that is managed in a nice, clean way. Many years ago (before REST become popular) we developed a Content Services Framework at Perficient to help our customers with this concept.

Technologies like REST and Javascript frameworks have really pushed these ideas to the forefront.  If our CMS can produce RESTful forms of content, then I can use AngularJS, Node, etc. to build a truly custom and interactive site and pull in content when I need it.

To go further, what if I can produce a public API or content service that can be consumed by others?  I could potentially charge for that service (remember when news organizations did that? – they still do).  Advertisers work that way – here is an ad that you can embed on a website, just call this Javascript library.

So its not a stretch to think of a content management system as a content service.  That service can provide content to web sites, web applications, mobile applications, marketing tools, etc.  All you need is for your CMS to have a well defined service contract (API) so all these other applications know how to access content.

Before we get all nirvana on this idea, there are some real hurdles that enterprise content management systems have already overcome:

• Secure content – its fairly easy to secure content, but making sure permissions and user credentials are shared across all applications can be tricky.
• Content in context – sometimes snippets of content don’t mean a whole lot unless presented in a larger context.  For example, getting a description of a conference event doesn’t do a whole lot unless you also have the dates, times, speakers names, etc.
• Personalization and targeting – this is a two edged sword.  If the CMS knows a lot about the user, it can personalize content for them.  If your “head” is passing along a limited amount of information about the user, your content system may not be able to serve very personalized content back.  On the other hand, if you pass a good amount of user information to the CMS, it may slow down the submission.  Think of trying to pass along a list of pages the user visited on your site, plus their location, language, past buying habits, etc. so the CMS can present an offer on a page.
• Content formatting – content management systems have evolved to show previews of content, to edit content in the context of a page, etc. All this is done because content – the size of images or tables – can affect how a page is displayed.  If you are grabbing content through a service, you may not get a good looking page unless you do a lot of upfront work to anticipate this problem.

In summary, headless CMS has a lot of potential benefits, but does pose some significant technical hurdles.  At this stage of the technology, if you don’t have great skills in the “head” area, then sticking with a full-featured CMS may be your best option for now. Luckily for us, many (or all) of the enterprise CMS vendors are including content RESTful services in their products.  These systems provide the option to use the CMS fully or to use it as a content service for your custom applications.

The term “Headless CMS” has come up in the past year and it has started to generate some buzz in the industry.  “Headless CMS” is basically a concept and not a product or technology. But it has potential to help in our digital transformation efforts by making content delivery and marketing more flexible.
Traditionally, content management systems have been built not only to create and manage content, but also to manage the entire web experience, from displaying content, to managing navigation, to tag management and so on.  As content management systems grow to take on more and more duties, they tend to become more rigid and limiting in how we build websites.  Say you want to implement a new, cool technique, but find that you can’t do that with your current CMS.  In the early days of responsive web design, many content management system could not provide this feature and left us with a lot of work arounds for our mobile sites.
This is where “Headless CMS” comes into the picture.  What if you could have a content management system that did a good job at managing content, but left the presentation of the content and the website (the “head”) up to somebody else?  In this case you could do anything you want when building the site, but still display content that is managed in a nice, clean way. Many years ago (before REST become popular) we developed a Content Services Framework at Perficient to help our customers with this concept.
Technologies like REST and Javascript frameworks have really pushed these ideas to the forefront.  If our CMS can produce RESTful forms of content, then I can use AngularJS, Node, etc. to build a truly custom and interactive site and pull in content when I need it.
To go further, what if I can produce a public API or content service that can be consumed by others?  I could potentially charge for that service (remember when news organizations did that? – they still do).  Advertisers work that way – here is an ad that you can embed on a website, just call this Javascript library.
So its not a stretch to think of a content management system as a content service.  That service can provide content to web sites, web applications, mobile applications, marketing tools, etc.  All you need is for your CMS to have a well defined service contract (API) so all these other applications know how to access content.
Before we get all nirvana on this idea, there are some real hurdles that enterprise content management systems have already overcome:

• Secure content – its fairly easy to secure content, but making sure permissions and user credentials are shared across all applications can be tricky.
• Content in context – sometimes snippets of content don’t mean a whole lot unless presented in a larger context.  For example, getting a description of a conference event doesn’t do a whole lot unless you also have the dates, times, speakers names, etc.
• Personalization and targeting – this is a two edged sword.  If the CMS knows a lot about the user, it can personalize content for them.  If your “head” is passing along a limited amount of information about the user, your content system may not be able to serve very personalized content back.  On the other hand, if you pass a good amount of user information to the CMS, it may slow down the submission.  Think of trying to pass along a list of pages the user visited on your site, plus their location, language, past buying habits, etc. so the CMS can present an offer on a page.
• Content formatting – content management systems have evolved to show previews of content, to edit content in the context of a page, etc. All this is done because content – the size of images or tables – can affect how a page is displayed.  If you are grabbing content through a service, you may not get a good looking page unless you do a lot of upfront work to anticipate this problem.

In summary, headless CMS has a lot of potential benefits, but does pose some significant technical hurdles.  At this stage of the technology, if you don’t have great skills in the “head” area, then sticking with a full-featured CMS may be your best option for now. Luckily for us, many (or all) of the enterprise CMS vendors are including content RESTful services in their products.  These systems provide the option to use the CMS fully or to use it as a content service for your custom applications.

You have probably heard this statement before—“it’s a journey, not a destination,” and chalked it up to a simple cliché. But the drive toward digital transformation mirrors this statement.

Digital transformation does not occur in a day or a month and it is not only front-end but includes all of the back-end solutions and integration strategies that are far reaching inside your company. It is a journey that impacts every area of the organization from vision and strategy to architecture, technology, operations, and culture.

We sat down with Michael Porter, Managing Principal with Perficient who explains how, in 2016, it is more important than ever to be able to effectively engage customers at every touch point in the customer experience life-cycle and over time, build the capabilities to support your customers in the best way possible.

Michael is leading a conversation on Thursday Feb 11, 2016 with guest speaker Nigel Fenwick, an analyst from Forrester, on how to overcome 5 obstacles companies face in their digital transformation journey.

To join us for this webinar, please register below.

Digital marketing is one of the fastest growing disciplines within the overall “marketing” ecosystem. One of the main reasons is due to the quantifiable nature of the insight provided in real-time. While one may receive a large amount of data related to their business, the reviewer of data or even senior leadership may not be using the appropriate key-performance-indicators (KPI’s) to measure each specific marketing tactics impact.

Many companies are oftentimes blinded by the overall mission of their business, which may be to simply “sell more product.” This could be a hindering approach to developing successful marketing campaigns. In order to understand whether or not a campaign is effective, we should be identifying the most relevant metrics aimed at providing this insight for each and every strategy/tactic.

Julie Krueger, Retail Industry Director at Google, shared three main focuses when approaching measurement:

1. Define the objective of each marketing tactic – don’t default to thinking that everything will directly drive a sale.
2. Align the measurement for each tactic to the objective you are trying to achieve – don’t judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree.
3. Identify the influencers + stakeholders in your organization and get their buy-in on the measurement plan before you run.

It sounds simple, but as we work with customers within retail and other industries, this advice needs to still be leveraged daily. Krueger also came up with a methodology to help understand the key types of customers and target efforts. These included SEE, THINK, DO, and CARE.

• SEE: Largest addressable qualified audience
• THINK: + have some commercial intent
• DO: + have loads of commercial intent
• CARE: + are current, loyal customers

To put this in context, Krueger leveraged Home Depot as an example:

• SEE: Consumers who play a role in maintaining their home
• THINK: + are starting to think about a home project
• DO: + are ready to make a purchase to do a home project
• CARE: + are current, loyal Home Depot customers

In order to add even more context to her point, Krueger mentioned another example where AT&T was trying to target millenials to drive higher brand affinity within this demographic. They decided to develop a channel on YouTube which presented episodes of “SummerBreak”, a show specifically developed for this audience. The show was a hit; millennials began adding comments on the channel, asking for additional episodes to be developed, questioning what happened to specific characters, and sharing the content with friends.

At large, AT&T most likely primarily measures their business by the shear number of subscribers in television or mobile they generate. Whereas this initiative was introduced to simply generate a higher brand affinity for this specific target demographic. Measuring the success of the channel and content by number of subscribers generated from this content would have been a HUGE miss. Instead, Krueger mentioned possibly leveraging KPI’s more relevant such as Interactions, Conversations + Amplifications + Applause, Brand Awareness, New Visits.

Below are KPI’s mentioned to the retail audience that are related to the different types of ways to measure content/tactics:

SEE (Exposure)

• Interactions (# or % interactions – platform/ads)
• Conversations + Amplifications + Applause
• Brand Awareness (Indexed increase in brand awareness)
• % of New Site Visits

THINK (Engagement)

• Click-thru Rate
• Watch time
• Per Visit Goal Value
• Page Depth
• Percent Assisted

DO (Commitment)

• Visitor Loyalty
• Checkout Abandonment
• Conversion Rate
• Profit

CARE (Love)

• Repeat Purchases
• Likelihood to Recommend
• Customer Lifetime Value

There are obviously many other KPI’s that one could develop for your specific marketing initiatives. The main point here is to treat each tactic as one that is unique and that is only measured on what it was intended to achieve, not by the default KPI of the site. Remember to define the objective, align the measurement, and identify the influencers and stakeholders to bless the selected metrics.