Thank you for joining us today as we bid farewell to March, Mélange readers. In this week’s post, we’ll learn why one author suggests that CMOs must become as adaptable as chameleons unless they want to suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs, will find out why your Customer Effort Score is a metric that matters, will get a reminder as to why the intangibles are also important to our marketing efforts and will gather a few tips on making our demand gen plans practically foolproof.
Got a lead on a story we should include in next week’s edition? Please get in touch.
To survive and thrive modern CMOs must adapt
“The challenge for CMOs is to be adaptable — to the highest degree” says Daniel Gilbert in an opinion piece on the eConsultancy blog, where he makes the case for CMOs needing to become “expert generalists” in an increasingly complex industry. Gilbert admits he doesn’t envy modern CMOs, who must be able to separate the fads from the useful and are expected to both intuitively know which creative best represents the brand image and the difference between CPC and eCPC in Google AdWords measurement.
Gilbert doesn’t just point out the issues facing CMOs, however; he offers actionable advice on overcoming these challenges, including a CTA for CMOs to embrace data strategy by making investments in HR, training and technology to become experts. Read Gilbert’s whole piece here and then let us know—is he on the right track or is he oversimplifying a much more complex issue?
Improving your Customer Effort Score…and why it matters
If you use metrics like Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT) to help gauge how well your business is serving customers, there’s another metric you’ll want to pay attention to. Harvard Business Review’s Customer Effort Score (CES) allows businesses to measure the ease of achieving specific goals by asking customers a single question: “How much effort did you personally have to invest to get your request handled?” The more effortless the experience for the customer, the better the overall customer experience.
According to Ford Blakely in Customer Think, improving your Customer Effort Score can be as simple as reviewing your interaction data and analyzing touchpoints for opportunities to speed up communication. Blakely points to text messaging as an underutilized but valuable channel for connecting with customers who may otherwise be stuck on hold or waiting for an email when a quick text is all they need to solve their issue. Read all of Blakely’s tips for improving your Customer Effort Score here.
Don’t forget the big-picture intangibles
Certainly as marketers, metrics and data are always on our minds; we’re constantly looking for quantitative ways to tie our marketing activities to revenue and to prove the ROI of our campaigns. But as Scott Olford reminds us in Entrepreneur, it’s important to focus on the long-term, big-picture of the business, lest we get caught up in short-term, “How can I take advantage of this situation?” thinking.
For example, Olford says, if you think of your audience as simply a group of people who buy your product or a commodity, that’s all they’ll ever be. But if you take the time to build an audience of like-minded people and you work to position your business as the go-to expert and leader of that tribe, the intangibles you’ll reap as a reward for your hard work will bring your business success for as long as you choose to provide your audience with value. It isn’t a strategy that creates results overnight, but it’s one that can be hugely successful if you do it well.
Creating a “can’t fail” demand generation plan
Developing an effective demand generation program means getting the right balance of the right content served at the right time to the right targets via the right channels. If even one small element of the program is off or less-than-stellar, your can count on your results being equally poor. That’s why it’s so important to make your demand generation plan as foolproof as possible, says Hannah Swanson in Business 2 Community. And by following a few of Swanson’s tips—like creating a messaging map that helps tie your key messages and content to your relevant accounts, personas and buy stages, and taking advantage of automation tools to improve lead quality—marketers can focus your efforts on developing an demand generation plan that will meet or exceed your goals.
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