Recently I’ve seen a slew of articles about “modern” marketing and the explosion of marketing technology and data-driven systems. These two images below show the sheer magnitude of the issue facing “modern” CMOs. And it seems to be accelerating as evidenced by the fact that every week someone on my team sends me PO for some new must-have software/system/tool. I did an inventory and found that we use well over 120 different things [by way of background we’re a $500M company with 20+ in marketing]. So on a regular basis my small team [mainly creative/content folks] has to install, configure, use, monitor, analyze and update over one hundred systems. And that’s just the table stakes since the real trick is to integrate these systems together and extract the insights we need to run our programs, measure our ROI and optimize our efforts.
So as a “modern” CMO you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- How many different systems do you have installed? How many do you use? What does right look like?
- How do you integrate the various systems across your channels and down your funnel?
- Do you have the right people on your team with the right skill sets? How/where can you find employees with these new skills?
- How do you get accurate, quality data and insights out of the systems in order to make good decisions?
