admin For any business to succeed in the world of today, it is very important for a company to bolster its sales and make sure that its products and services are sold with good profit. This is not something that happens on its own. It is imperative for every company to think things through and come up with good strategies to achieve its goals.
One such strategy is customer relationship management. While brand, digital, direct and promotional marketing initiatives are still important to marketing strategy of today, customer marketing has been put in a spotlight on the importance of building and maintaining strong long term relationships with customers. Paying attention to the emotional value your customers place on your brand, the economics of each customer relationship (today and tomorrow) and the role customers play in revolutionizing your business is crucial. Since a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) has to take charge of developing strategies to increase the sales of a company, the shoulders of a CMO are loaded with massive responsibilities.
Here are some key steps to become a leading CMO.
- Setting Up Goals and KPIs and Tracking Them
KPIs are key performance indicators that help you with improving your business plans and make the path towards your goals more streamlined. By setting KPIs the company enables the team to make smart business decisions about the direction of all current projects. There are a lot of different KPIs and metrics one will need to track as they and their team work towards achieving this goal. Some common metrics that one needs to focus on are: Returning visitor metric, Brand awareness metric, Web traffic sources, Total website visits, Customer lifetime value, Customer acquisition cost and Funnel conversion rate.
Once the KPIs are decided, the next step is to decide on how all these metrics can be brought together in one place. Information is important, but clear representation of information is also equally important. For that, a CMO should pick the right dashboard to have access to data in a clear visual manner.
- Proper Allocation of Budget And Resources
CMOs and Marketing Leaders must allocate their marketing budgets to focus on growth amid financial and geopolitical uncertainty. Setting a marketing strategy that reprioritizes channels, programs, and resources to remain competitive and efficient is paramount, especially in the current world that is rife with uncertainty. There’s no question that budget allocation is a critical part of a marketing plan. Marketing budget allocation is a needed skill for businesses and typically combines input many c-level from CEOs, CFOs, and CMOs. It also affects marketing, sales, and accounting teams and departments. Decisions regarding how much to spend for different channels, platforms, and campaigns will get you the results needed to hit your goals. Employees, software, training, freelancers, and consultants hired should be factored into your campaign-specific tracking. Taking a bottom-up approach to your marketing, and invest more in marketing that targets the bottom of the conversion funnel. Invest in lead generation (for example, SEO, or Google Ads) to maximize bottom-of-funnel marketing. Investing in those close to converting online minimizes your risk and increases your potential marketing ROI.
- Making MQLs More Easily Accessible To The Sales Team
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a website visitor whose engagement levels indicate that whether the visitor is likely to become a customer. While it may seem that the transition of MQL from the CMO to sales team would be easy, it most likely is not. Some common problems are marketing and sales disagree on the criteria for vetting leads, the system for delivering leads is slow and manual which causes sales to delay in their response to a lead, leads can receive nurture sequences from marketing simultaneously with follow up sequences from sales that ends up resulting in a bad experience for the lead. The appropriate fix of these issues needs to be addressed and prioritised to increase the chance of lead conversion. One way is to test the channel and processes using multiple campaigns and funnels. Another good approach is to bring the marketing and the sales team together to identify and sort out any differences. The more the teams are aligned, the smoother would be their operation.
Stepping into the shoes of a CMO could look like a daunting task. Indeed, the responsibilities and everyday tasks are no joke. However, if you tackle the right problems at the right time, then the sky is the limit. Taking on the challenges head on with proper planning and execution can not only be less overwhelming but will help you achieve greater success.
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