Yogita Tulsiani
A clever digital campaign, captivating brand activation or a smart app – what constitutes modern marketing? Does one need to think beyond activation and digital strategies to become a modern marketer in the true sense of the term?
More than 83% of CEOs of global corporations consider marketing to be the driver for the lion’s share of their company’s growth. Most senior leaders are of the opinion that their marketing strategies have to modernize, but they have little idea of how to actualize their ideas.
Modern marketing not only needs new capabilities but also select enablers to support these new capabilities to meet the new demands of the market. The third and fourth quarters of 2020 will usher new challenges that modern marketers have to address for their company’s growth.
Mindset Shift: What You Need to Become a Successful Modern Marketer!
A majority of the CMOs are facing stagnation due to the lack of knowledge about the full set of changes necessary. Without the clarity of the inter-dependencies of the elements needed for a shift in mindset, most marketers gravitate towards isolating only the elements they are familiar with.
Ignoring some elements necessary for developing modern marketing solutions can lead to the creation of blind spots, which may lead to frustration, delays, and loss of ROI. A successful development of modern marketing solutions requires three mindset shifts.
Making a Modern Marketer: 3 Necessary Mindset Shifts
Here are three mindset shifts that act as the foundation of the development of the modern marketer –
- Working together with all CxO
It’s impossible to drive company growth while working in silos. It is now the responsibility of the good modern marketer to collaborate with all the departments from production and sales, to creative and designing.
Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) can drive greater and faster growth by working with C-suite colleagues as partners by acting as “unifiers”. The “unifiers” collect information on how working together can help the CIOs, CEOs, CFOs and the other CxOs.
CMOs should serve as the role model for every member of the marketing team. They should lead by example, and show the marketing team members how to collaborate with other colleagues from other teams with respect and ease.
- Putting the Customers Before Everything Else
Companies have held a customer-centric mindset for a long while. “The customer’s always right” or “the customer always comes first” isn’t a new concept.
Modern marketing involves the CMO and the rest of the marketing team knowing and facing the set of challenges a company must overcome to achieve customer-centricity and to scale at the same time.
These steps can include –
- Addressing customer pain points to solve them and meet their evolving necessities
- Setting up a centralized data platform for easy access to all customer profiles by authorized employees
- Generation of real-time insights from customer journeys
- Measurement of customer interactions and site analytics
- Using the insights to design customer-centric journeys and address consumer concerns
Customer segmentation and micro-segmentation are two essential tasks that can enable the CMOs to develop a more customer-centric mindset ideal for the modern marketing team.
- Focusing on Reallocation of Assets, New Investment Opportunities and Monitoring Returns
Today, it is possible for every marketer to measure the returns from every channel they have used and are using for marketing their brand/products/services. For example, even when upgrading a company’s website design, one has to measure the impact in terms of organic traffic, by A/B testing. And use the data to make underlying changes to the design or content.
The ROI mindset requires CMOs to work with the concept that the money they are investing is their own. Therefore, it demands close monitoring of the assets, quantitatively measuring the returns every quarter and drawing insights from market trends before reallocating any resources.
The ROI mindset demands a close working relationship between the CMO and CFO of the company. It will not only build the company’s financial profile but help unlock additional investment opportunities for the company leaders. Moreover, it will demonstrate the importance of modern marketing to the board of directors of the company.
These three mindset shifts are inevitable and indispensable for any corporation that wants to adopt modern marketing. A marketer has to rely on modern data sciences, technology, consumer feedback, market surveys and unified working conditions to transform themselves into a modern marketer.
