Why Marketers Will
Rule the World
Today
I’m delivering the keynote at Marketing
Magazine’s 2012 Social Media Conference, and I’ll be speaking about something I’ve been
thinking about a lot lately: that the explosion of customer data provided by
social and digital have put extreme power in the hands of marketers, if only
you’ll learn how to wield it. We’re entering a new era of big data, automation
and the ability to drive business strategy by delivering real-time access to
the voice of the customer. One of the questions I’ll be asking is whether your
team is ready to let go of decisions made based on “gut feel;” and get ready
for the Chief Marketing Technologist, who’s much more of a “quant” than a
“qual”. Savvy, forward-thinking marketing leaders who “get it” can position
themselves to deliver enormous business value and take a seat at the big table
if they can figure this stuff out – and keep up.
The
average lifespan of the CMO has increased from 23 months in 2006 to over 43
months in 2012. Forbes magazine suggests this is a
reflection of the growing strategic nature of the role – and there’s
enormous opportunity to solidify this position by delivering measurable
business results, thanks to big data. Technology is playing an important role
in this. By 2017, Gartner analyst Laura McLellan
predicts that CMOs will spend more money on technology than CIOs.
At
the moment, however, most marketers are falling down on the job – badly,
especially when it comes to technology. A recent survey from ITSMA and
VisionEdge Marketingpaints
a stark picture of marketers and their ownership of their own technology
choices:
•
59% don’t specify marketing technology
• 45% don’t recommend marketing technology
• 46% don’t select marketing technology
• 15% DON’T HAVE ANY SAY AT ALL
• 45% don’t recommend marketing technology
• 46% don’t select marketing technology
• 15% DON’T HAVE ANY SAY AT ALL
This
is a shockingly hands-off approach, and one that could very well come back and
bite you if you allow it to continue. Just this past weekend, the Wall Street
Journal ran a story that suggested CIOs, not
CMOs, should be responsible for digital leadership in most organizations. The article predicted
that a new role, The Chief Digital Officer, would fall to IT because “IT is
everywhere”. Russell Reynolds, one of the world’s top recruiting companies,
describes the CDO as “[someone] who can oversee the full range of digital
strategies and drive change across the organization.” (I don’t know about you,
but that sounds like something marketing should own).
And
it’s not just technology where marketers’ chops are being questioned: it’s also
the ability to deliver business and operational intelligence (real-time insight into business
performance); two things that are of enormous value to the entire organization,
and two things that marketing is uniquely well-positioned to deliver in the
digital age because of your access to that same massive data stream. In
July, Oracle released a survey of more than 300 US and Canadian
executives that showed 93% of them believe
they’re losing revenue because they aren’t able to access or act on information
already available to them. And they are missing out on something
– the New York Times recently referenced a
study of 179 large companies that found those adopting “data-driven
decision making” achieved productivity gains of up to 6% – that couldn’t be
explained any other way.
So
what’s your opportunity? To blend the “Art and Science” of marketing; the art is the
storytelling (something you’re so very good at) and the
science is the technology and strategic business value that you can deliver by
leveraging big data generated by social media and other customer interactions
online. This is a wellspring of fantastic intelligence, if you have the
technologies and skillsets to process and analyze it. In Inc. Magazine, Brian Halligan
recently described it as delivering to a “segment of one” – think about sites
like Netflix and Amazon, which use a combination of individual leverage (the
more I use the site, the more it learns about me) and group leverage (the
more people like me use the site, the better the site can predict what I may
want or like) to deliver a better customized, higher-revenue experience.
There
are many examples of marketers who have leveraged big data in order to deliver
business value. Steve McKee, who writes for BusinessWeek, has written about how his team took a
look at simple web metrics and their relationships, the increases and
decreases in media buys, and used that data to increase the effectiveness of a
clients’ media spend by 9%. Pamplin College in the U.S. did a large-scale study to see what
the relationship was between social media mentions and automotive recalls, and found a direct,
predictive connection.
One
of the biggest challenges behind turning social media data into business and
operational intelligence is the need to make structured and unstructured data play nicely together (structured data is the stuff that’s easy to put into a
database – often things like sales numbers, or numbers of clicks; things that
are easy to count and don’t require any interpretation. Unstructured data, however, are text-heavy, things like
conversations and facts. Unstructured data is irregular and requires analysis
to be understood by everyone – it’s complicated). This will require skillsets
you are unlikely to see in a typical marketing department today (unless you’re Target). McKinsey predicts that
in the U.S. alone, right now there’s a need for 200,000 people
with skillsets in data analytics. And the way you attack data will also need
to change; Avinash Kaushik, Google’s digital marketing evangelist says
that the ideal breakdown for big data
resources should be 15% data capture, 20% reporting and 65% analysis. At the moment, for most
of us, that’s flipped, with most resources devoted to capture and very little
to analysis and actionable insight.
So
what’s next? Like many others, I think it’s the age of
the Marketing Technologist – the person who, in the words of Scott Brinker, is “Someone who
has a hybrid between business and technology, a strong background in
engineering and IT, is an early adopter of technology, but someone who also
understands the pragmatic realities of scaling technology. But most
importantly, someone who brings those skills and combines them with a deep love
and passion for the marketing mix. This is a technologist that reports to the
CMO, not the CIO.”121203
Maggie Fox
http://www.fastcompany.com/3003455/one-minute-change-will-transform-your-company
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