The chief marketing officer role must require an understanding of technology.

The Chief Marketing Officer role is becoming more involved with marketing technology selection, implementation, and use.

Marketing is becoming one of the most technology-dependent functions in business. Today, a company’s chief marketing officer spends more on technology than its chief information officer. That oft-quoted claim seems more credible every day.

Today, technology is integral to nearly every business’s marketing strategy. Without embracing it and optimizing its application, a business risks its ability to compete effectively and connect to a customer base.

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), therefore, plays a major role in selecting and purchasing marketing technology. You need marketing technology if you want to:

• Test your marketing programs
• Scale marketing campaigns and reduce customer acquisition cost
• Track, monitor, and adjust marketing programs

Don’t think you need marketing technology. Try doing it manually. Good luck.

As a CMO, you are uniquely positioned to define best what technological tools will be needed to better connect with customers and drive growth.

This is because of your intricate knowledge of your customers and their relationship with your product or business.

This is in addition to the insights that you have regarding future growth plans and the goals of your business.

To be successful with this, you need to analyze key avenues where technology is vital to growth and competition through the lens of your business’s needs.

The Chief Marketing Officer’s Role is to Gather Information on the Target Market

Never before has so much information on the customer been instantly available, and information on how to better interact with the customer is key to marketing. Using measurement and analytics, from social media metrics to KPIs to CRM, it has never been easier to track customer interaction.

Marketing technologies like IBM’s Watson, SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft, and HubSpot, among others. New AI tools help CMOs with content generation. But don; fire your copywriter yet.

They can be tracked from the web when they discover and search for your product or service. They can gather information and build a relationship with a brand. And when they close the loop and buy a product, the sales are complete.

Social log-ins are easy and provide the vendor with useful information.

Social media provides information on age, gender, location, and more, giving marketers even more information on their key demographic.

Beyond basic information gathering, though, technology can organize this data into patterns that can reveal opportunities for a business to improve itself drastically.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is promising for chief marketing officers.

The Chief Marketing Officer – Reaching Niche Markets

With technological growth, more channels are available for businesses to reach out to their customers, be seen, and build a brand. With careful research, you can:

• Tap into new niche markets
• Target your desired demographic
• Improve conversion rates
• Build a fan base
• Create lifelong customers

To do this, an understanding of the current customer base, built through analytics, must merge with a knowledge of which channels to invest time and money into.

As CMO, you will design this research to understand where future marketing for the business is headed and which channels are used to build customer-facing technology solutions.

Keeping Brand Established and Networks Synchronized

As the marketing network of your business becomes more niched and spread out, it cannot become fragmented or lose brand identity. It can take time and resources to keep moving forward coherently on various marketing fronts.

Technology must keep everything organized, updated, and synchronized with the business’s overall message.

As CMO, your relationship with the brand and customers will play a major role in selecting the best marketing operations technologies for managing buyer interactions and intent.

Customer Experience and the Chief Marketing Officer Role

With the world surging forward with new online trends and devices, it’s important to keep up and provide the customer with an experience suited to the times.

Businesses are losing opportunities and eroding their reputations by using outdated websites or technologies that are not device-compatible. You must know how your customers’ experiences should go and match those expectations with the right enabling technologies.

Increasing Lead Conversion and Marketing ROI

All the work and investment to better connect with customers and identify technologies and channels is all an effort toward increasing long-term ROI. The technologies selected, whatever their cost, must provide more value in the long term to be successful.

While this always involves some risk, the CMO should be able to select the greatest possible investments based on a business plan.

When applied well, technology can enable a business to grow in ways that could never have been imagined without modern tech’s help.

Looking Toward the Future of Marketing Technology and the Chief Marketing Officer Role

Investing in marketing technology is not a task to take lightly. With a huge range of technological solutions available, careful research and planning must ensure that money is spent wisely.

The CMO must take the time to build a map of where the business needs to go in the future. With these specific goals in mind, you can research which technologies will make that journey easier.

Because you have laid out a specific plan, you can view each vendor and tech purchase information through the lens of whether it is a specific fit.

New skills may need to be developed to fully understand the products being reviewed, especially if you are not already familiar with marketing technology.

This may make the research phase slow and tedious, highlighting its importance.

Careful evaluation during this phase can lead to advantages later on, as the right tech selections can exponentially boost the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and interactions.

It helps to work with your IT team, especially if you lack experience with technology. However, gaining an understanding of technological workings is preferable because it will allow you to gain an advantage over your competitors.

Putting the Pieces of Marketing Technology Together for the Chief Marketing Officer Role

What the role of the chief marketing officer is will surprise you. The CMO is responsible for creating a holistic brand strategy and executing it through innovative marketing tactics.

They drive the customer journey from awareness to loyalty, establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success, develop the infrastructure needed to support marketing operations, and manage resources effectively.

This rise in digital budgets is not merely a migration of spending from traditional to digital media. A growing portion of marketing’s budget is now allocated to marketing technology.

A recent Gartner study found that 67% of marketing departments plan to increase their spending on technology-related activities over the next two years.

In addition, 61% are increasing capital expenditures on technology, and 65% are increasing budgets for service providers with technology-related offerings.

Armed with knowledge and research, you can evaluate the technology options to see which products fit together like puzzle pieces to help grow your business.

This allows you to create an optimized custom tech solution. A specifically designed system will be more effective than any out-of-the-box generic solution. By investing time and money now, your marketing engine will run smoothly and pick up speed miles down the road.

At first, glance, selecting the best technology purchases may seem better suited to the IT department. However, as CMO, you hold the key to making the right decisions in this area.

As technology continues to evolve and allow us to better understand and interact with our customers, it becomes our most important marketing tool. A CMO who understands this will want to be strategically involved in designing the ideal marketing machine to carry its business forward in its endeavors.

The CMO’s role in technology is vital to a business’s growth. Does your team have the tech skills needed to carry out your vision? If not, there are marketing pros that can help.

Download this free business case on marketing outsourcing, and learn how outside support will help you leverage technology and improve performance.

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