The mundane exercise of measuring and analyzing marketing performance has gotten a much-needed boost over the past few years thanks to the development of advanced test and learn approaches, attribution modeling, and, even marketing mix modeling. Advanced marketers with rigorous marketing performance standards  must consider advancing their marketing insights, by bridging the gap between marketing performance and customer insights. In my latest report, I outline what CMOs need to do to revolutionize their insights.

  • Innovate With New Data Sources. Companies like Alibaba and Amazon use insights to inform other business decisions beyond marketing planning, using  insights to develop product recommendations and personalize marketing content — at scale. Take a page from these behemoths’ insights-driven playbooks and embrace insights to drastically change customer interactions.  Look towards other data sources, like emotion data, to better understand customer perception, intent, and value.  Emotion is a primary contributor to how a customer will interact with a brand. These data sources will help you create a more contextually relevant experience for your customers.
  • Accelerate Your Knowledge To Drive Deeper Customer Understanding. CMOs must lean on its Customer insights (CI) professionals for advanced data mining and analytics and bridge the gap between customer insights and marketing insight. Customer analytics approaches, like customer segmentation and churn analytics, combined with marketing insights, like ROI performance, will help CMOs target the right customers, across the right channels and content. CMOs must embrace AI to achieve this; AI will constantly iterate and increase the speed of insights.
  • Modernize With An Insights Driven Culture. Want to achieve all this? Great! But hold on. Make investments in talent and culture, because guess what? Technology alone cannot achieve advanced insights. Progressing an organization’s talent, culture, and organization is paramount for an innovative insights-driven business. CMOs must expand its marketing insights CoE to include other functions, like sales, finance, and technology, to refocus the analysis scope, identify new  data opportunities, and align cross-functional objectives. CMOs must promote and goal collaboration efforts with other groups by aligning managers across specific life-cycle phases. Doing this will help CMOs develop cross-channel marketing strategies that move customers from one phase of the life cycle to another.

Insights driven businesses will be the competitive advantage for companies; the more firms know about performance, and its customers, the better they can plan and identify expansion opportunities. CMOs must avoid the “check the box” insights mentality and always seek to innovate insights that will get them closer to understanding customers’ needs and driving experiences that will foster greater revenue growth.