Digital transformation isn’t a buzz phrase. It’s here. And it’s helping companies create better customer experiences — and ultimately driving revenue growth.
According to Gartner, within the next five years, companies will see CMOs spending more on new digital technology than CIOs. And a recent Economist study showed that 86% of CMOs and senior marketing executives believe they will own the full end-to-end customer experience by 2020.
Yet 22% of marketers cite their absence of the right tools or technology as a concern, and 61% say they struggle to access or integrate the data they need — even if they do have tools and technology at their disposal.
Where’s the disconnect?
Drowning In Marketing Tools And Data
Marketing has become reliant on an ever-expanding landscape of new technologies to enable customer acquisition and retention, driving everything from prospect awareness to nurture programs.
Ongoing innovation has delivered a staggering number of marketing-related tools, including CRM and marketing automation products, as well as personalization and segmentation technologies that help micro-target customers with relevant, timely and appropriate messages. We’re now able to connect with customers across paid, earned and owned media, as well as social channels.
These customers all have one thing in common: they all demand high-quality and high-performance Web and mobile applications. But how do we define “high quality” and “high performance?” And who owns this responsibility? Increasingly, these definitions and objectives fall under the marketer’s umbrella.
Connecting The Dots Between Marketing Programs, Customer Experience And IT
CMOs and other marketing executives are constantly striving to deliver a customer experience (CX) that can be benchmarked and improved. This important responsibility makes marketing a tightly integrated partner with IT, operations teams and lines of business.
The new marketing imperative is to understand the empirical relationship between customer experience and marketing programs. No longer a cost center, marketing has become a responsible party when it comes to top-line revenue.
