To Optimize Your Customer Journey, Look At Your Marketer Journey

The marketer journey is an organization’s path to true consumer centricity—when all data, operations, and resources are organized around a single, connected view of the consumer.

The role of today’s CMO is evolving and expanding to include complete P&L accountability ensuring the highest return on every marketing as well as technology dollar spent. As a result, many are boosting resources devoted to optimizing the consumer journey, as it’s become the epicenter of customer acquisition and retention success.

When consumer journey optimization efforts come up short, it’s often because marketers have not fully considered that success is equally dependent on their organizations knowing where they are in their own internal journeys. This “marketer journey” is an organization’s path to true consumer centricity—when all data, operations, and resources are organized around a single, connected view of the consumer.

CMOs who focus on accelerating their marketer journeys are typically most effective in optimizing the consumer journey and are outpacing others in acquiring and retaining more customers. They realize that optimization efforts must work within their particular real world operational constraints and business realities.

As a first step, this shift in strategic focus requires marketing leaders to assess where they currently are in their marketer journeys. Here are three questions designed to help CMOs gauge the degree to which their organizations have progressed or incorporated the most critical internal and external factors that determine their position.

1. Is Your Organization Aligned Around The Consumer?

Aligned organizations typically have leadership that has established clear, measurable consumer-focused goals to rally the organization.

The organization and its marketing/technology partners are not organized around channel or product silos, but around the consumer.

2. Is Your Consumer Data Connected?

Technology enables data connection and management of the entire consumer journey. In connected organizations, data is captured and integrated at the consumer level, and intelligence that was previously unattainable is extracted from that data.

Even when IT infrastructure constraints and siloed data systems appear insurmountable, useful data connection is still possible.

3. Is Your Marketing Performance Driven By Insights?

In these organizations, performance insights across the entire purchase path are integrated and produced in real time. Analytics are used to predict behavior, budget allocation optimization, and critical business outcomes.

Environmental data, such as competitor activity, weather, media, and economic sentiment are being incorporated into forecasting and budgeting applications. Analytics are used to incorporate intelligence into actionable media buying and segmented/personalized user experiences that lead to improved conversion results. Nimble, ongoing conversion optimization machine learning testing is the norm.

Moving to a truly consumer-centric orientation is not easy, but those CMOs who are succeeding in advancing their marketer journeys have established a distinct competitive advantage.