Customer Engagement A Top Priority For CMOs

Acquiring customers attention is easy, gaining their trust is difficult, but engaging them is even more challenging. Customer engagement is the most essential element that unfolds your customers’ feelings for your brand. If you are able to successfully engage your customers with your brand, you will be able to earn a loyal customer for the lifetime. It’s a personal, intangible yet very powerful indicator that drives customer interactions and provides seamless customer experience.

Every year, companies lose about billion dollars as they fail to offer the best customer experiences. That’s where CMOs are expected to do magic and merge art with science. With a solid customer engagement strategy, CMOs can drive personalized engagement. Jonathan Martin, CMO at Pure Storage said, “today, the primary task of CMOs is to deeply understand customer buying behavior and intent; and the context of where someone is in their decision journey; be able to predict what they’re most likely primed to do next, and be ready to influence them at the right moment.”

Harvard Business Review stated, “most CMOs, we’ve observed, have a few areas of core responsibility. More than 90% are responsible for marketing strategy and implementation, and more than 80% control brand strategy and customer metrics. But beyond that, the range of duties—from pricing to sales management, public relations to e‑commerce, product development to distribution—is mind-boggling.”

Why it’s important?

As our world is becoming more tech-savvy, fulfilling what customer wants has just become mainstream. Right at this moment, customers are demanding greater experience for each brand they interact with. CMOs must augment real-time customer marketing to productively engage their customers with the most recent approach and help their enterprise to successfully transform from the conventional marketing method.

“67% of CMOs plan to increase their spending on digital advertising”
-Gartner

If you are able to engage customers with a remarkable experience they will come back. According to Forrester’s research, “86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience.”  To offer great customer experience CMOs must acknowledge digital transformation in their organization to grasp the opportunities of digital technologies and transform the entire operation processes. Increased engagement drives an upsurge in ROI as well as builds a lifetime relationship with your customers, which is why customer engagement must be a top priority for CMOs.

Strategies To Follow

• There are multiple ways to reach out to customers as soon as they go online. CMOs must know their customers’ interest and figure out a right, creative and personalized approach to engage them. They should be able to create an outstanding experience every time they interact with the customers.
• Around 80% of CMOs believe their customer engagement approach is effective. However, only 50% of customers agree to that. If you want to sell your product or service and make a profit out of it, then you must listen to what customers have to say or want. Spending more time listening to customers will help CMOs to pick the most effective approach and add value to their customers.
• CMOs are responsible to build a strong identity of their organization. They have to work closely with CIOs to be fluent with all the technologies or digital trends. Understanding all the marketing aspects, CMOs need to keep evolving it, adding innovative stuff and keep spreading their wings to remain on the top.

According to Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), “CMOs will focus on interactive channels. The top three channels CMOs report to focus more in 2020 are social media (63% of respondents), the World Wide Web (53%), and mobile apps (47%) and mobile web (46%).

Challenges & Opportunities

CMOs are required to be proactive in dealing with customers because one wrong move, your customer will replace your brand. CMO’s work is far more challenging than you think. They need to have immense expertise in incorporate customers’ data and deliver a right message at the right time via the right channel.

It has always been a challenge to meet customer expectations. Emerging technology brings opportunities and at the same time opens up the portal for expectations which keeps changing with the trend. It is expected from CMOs to have an expertise in all areas and generate ROI for the organization. In short, CMOs will be given limited budget from which they have to strategize their investment plans and rethink before they make MarTech investments to offer personalized customer experience and enhance their customer engagement.

According to “The Gartner 2016-2017 CMO Spend Survey”, “marketing is responsible for critical customer-facing, revenue-generating systems, and applications. Enterprises need to appoint a chief marketing technologist who will look after this emerging technology estate. Which means, marketing has a responsibility to collaborate with enterprise IT.”

Future For CMOs

CMOs are responsible to apply innovative insights to market challenges, with the right metrics while building seamless customer experiences across multiple channels and keep customer engagement on the top priority list. Although CMOs have budgetary pressures, they will keep investing in the right technologies and innovations and 23% of CMOs have fixed annual innovation budget and 10% is earmarked for innovation, according to Gartner CMO spend survey 2017-2018.

Forbes published CMOs’ plan for 2018, where Nuno Teles, CMO, Heineken USA said, “I would say that my biggest marketing breakthrough in 2018 is to focus on Max Impact Marketing to drive top-line growth: At Heineken we are looking forward to having more and more ambidextrous marketers that are able to deliver on the art part of marketing, the outstanding creative quality work, as well as on the science part of marketing, with numbers and analysis that drive relevant business insights. We want our four priority brands, Heineken®, Dos Equis, Tecate, and Strongbow, to be actively part of the digital, social conversation of our relevant audiences, and that’s only possible with science and storytelling.”

Innovation is happening everywhere, every minute, and marketers have to outperform to become the most customer-centric organization. CMOs have realized that advertising product features and benefits are not just enough to stay competitive. As we have already stepped into 2018, CMOs need to think out of the box or become a bit more creative and discover new ways to deliver a fabulous customer experience. This will help them secure an advantage over their competitors and win customers for a lifetime.