Finding the Right Marketing Tools and Leading Change

A recur­ring trend in our exclu­sive con­tent at CMO.com for the past cou­ple weeks has been a con­sid­er­a­tion of the tools avail­able for mar­keters to use. The mar­ket is always chang­ing with cus­tomer expec­ta­tions dri­ving those changes. What worked yes­ter­day may not work today, and what works today may not work tomor­row. So what are mar­keters to do to keep ahead? Sev­er­al of our recent con­trib­u­tors have spent time look­ing at the tools that will best reach cus­tomers and offer some help­ful advice on how to dri­ve change in an organ­i­sa­tion when it comes to adopt­ing new tools.

In an exclu­sive inter­view with CMO.com, Susie Dent, cus­to­di­an of Dic­tio­nary Cor­ner on the UK TV game show Count­down, shared a pre­view of her Adobe Sum­mit EMEA 2016 ses­sion, “Words that Work.” Accord­ing to sta­tis­tics, Dent said, vocab­u­lary improves the way peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate and helps peo­ple be more open to new ideas. How­ev­er, lan­guage is “often a low pri­or­i­ty in busi­ness.” Dent’s ses­sion focus­es on the role of jar­gon in busi­ness. She notes that not all jar­gon is ter­ri­ble; some of it, in fact, can be very help­ful as a mark­er of group iden­ti­ty and short­hand for impor­tant ideas in the company.

Dave Chaf­fey, dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing author, con­sul­tant, and train­er at Smart Insights, dis­cussed the chal­lenge of select­ing mar­ket­ing tools. He shared how Smart Insights has met the chal­lenge with a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tools visu­al­i­sa­tion guide called the “Essen­tial Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Tools Wheel.” The tool is divid­ed into the 30 cat­e­gories that sup­port a com­pa­ny across the life­cy­cle of a cus­tomer and rec­om­mends five tools for each cat­e­go­ry. The visu­al guide will be help­ful for mar­keters to dis­cov­er oppor­tu­ni­ties to reach more customers.

Thomas Bar­ta, CMO lead­er­ship advis­er, keynote speak­er, and author, shared why CMOs should lead change in their organ­i­sa­tions. Bar­ta argued that pro­vid­ing a mem­o­rable per­son­alised cus­tomer expe­ri­ence “often requires advanced IT solu­tions and major changes in how a com­pa­ny is organ­ised.” CMOs under­stand cus­tomer expec­ta­tions, but they need to devel­op the con­fi­dence and com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills to help dri­ve these changes to bet­ter reach customers.

CMO.com spoke with Cameron Hulett, chief com­mer­cial offi­cer at EVRYTHING, about the Inter­net of Things (IoT) for mar­keters. Hulett’s com­pa­ny man­ages dig­i­tal data for con­nect­ed prod­ucts. He sug­gest­ed that mar­keters can begin to think about util­is­ing IoT to con­nect with con­sumers through con­nect­ed con­sum­able prod­ucts and wear­ables. He offered sev­er­al spe­cif­ic exam­ples of cus­tomer engage­ment activ­i­ties that mar­keters can try.

The “2015 Adobe Mobile Con­sumer Report” took the opin­ion of 4,000 mobile con­sumers from across the UK, US, Ger­many, and France and revealed the emer­gence of a “mobile elite.” This group accounts for 20 per­cent of the mar­ket, yet it’s respon­si­ble for 80 per­cent of brand inter­ac­tions on mobile. This and the fact that the mobile elite expects more per­son­alised brand expe­ri­ences give mar­keters rea­son to pay atten­tion. Brands must reframe the cus­tomer jour­ney around the mobile device, where “con­ve­nience and per­son­al­i­sa­tion are the guid­ing philosophies.”

We hope you’ll find some help­ful insights in our exclu­sive con­tent on CMO.com. Please let us know what you think.