5 Ways To Drive More Traffic In 2022

 

As we begin 2022, we are in the third year of the pandemic’s transformation of our business reality. The acceleration of digital behaviors, as well as your customers’ expectations, is not slowing down.

As the crisis lingers, this is the year for marketing executives to redouble their commitment to accelerating transformation at scale. Marketers have a new mandate to take center stage in their organizations, connecting the dots across customer needs and data, business priorities, and the digital agenda to aggressively drive growth and create value, thanks to widespread recognition of their impact on sales, outcomes, and growth.

The question is, how can CMOs drive change and create value as quickly as possible? Based on what I’m seeing as I work with CMOs on the data-driven transformation of marketing, e-commerce, and every aspect of the customer journey, I recommend that marketing leaders take the following five actions to increase their impact:

1. Your company has realized that marketing generates revenue. Take advantage of the opportunity.

It wasn’t fun when marketing was a cost center, especially when the CFO needed to cut a non-essential expense. However, marketing is now recognized as a revenue generator that is inextricably linked to sales.

Today’s media types, such as social, search, and programmatic, are all highly measurable, and leaders across the executive team have become accustomed to expecting results from marketing spend. Over-indexing on performance-only spending (such as last-click online sales) can certainly jeopardize brand health and equity.

The best strategies strike a balance between short-term and long-term outcomes. The productive impact of the performance dollar swing, on the other hand, is that leaders outside of the marketing function can now see the tangible impact of marketing at work.

This provides an opportunity for marketers to be on a more equal footing with the organization’s traditional revenue leaders — sales — and marketers should seize this shift. The key in 2022 will be to make results understandable to a broader audience across the organization. As mobile platforms, browsers, and walled gardens in e-commerce and social media continue to change the rules and fragment the landscape, attribution, or the math that allows us to know which marketing efforts drove results, continues to be a challenge for us all.

Marketers, on the other hand, should not be afraid to create “good enough” math to understand dollars across the entire funnel — from top-of-funnel brand awareness to bottom-of-funnel click-to-purchase moments.

2. As the rightful domain of marketing, seize the end-to-end growth agenda.

Today’s growth agenda disregards traditional organizational boundaries confined to marketing or other adjacent functions. Marketers must make a clear claim to driving the growth agenda and providing cohesive business leadership.

It is not about establishing a fiefdom in order to control the data, analytics, or technology agenda, teams, or budget. It is all about establishing the proper internal connectivity while viewing the customer journey through the lens of the customer journey. Customers don’t care about internal organizational boundaries; they expect intuitive, anticipatory, and relevant experiences. Handoffs across organizational functions frequently obstruct that goal.

Take, for example, the rapid growth of social commerce, which is an excellent example of the seamless new growth agenda. The media that is presented to consumers is extremely precise and should connect directly to an effective, personalized e-commerce experience.

The connected social commerce journey should also recognize that users are likely to be on a mobile device and thus require a quick, frictionless, mobile-first payment experience. Any impediment to checkout prevents marketing from converting into a sale.

Marketers must collaborate with their colleagues who design online product pages and payment mechanisms to create a frictionless experience. Simply put, everything must flow naturally, which will necessitate more real-time coordination than most current organizational boundaries permit.

According to a recent EY/Financial Times survey of approximately 200 senior marketing executives, 77 percent believe the marketing function, as owners of the customer journey, requires a stronger voice in setting corporate strategy.

Given how quickly friction must be removed from the customer journey to accelerate topline growth, areas such as data-driven marketing, e-commerce, and CRM cannot afford to be led in silos.

3. Stop ignoring the foundational data work that enables digital transformation.

The pandemic brought together C-suite leadership teams like never before, resulting in an unquestionable acceleration of digital transformation at many companies. The success of a digital transformation, on the other hand, is dependent on the success of the data transformation.

Companies may implement technology such as CRM or consolidate sources into a single data lake, but key questions such as the true level of data quality and how to manage the ongoing health of data throughout the organization must often be addressed.

Marketers must pay close attention to the sources of high-quality data that will power the engine. More holistic analytics models driving last-mile decisions create value over siloed, one-off solutions hard-coded for a specific point in time or business use case.

More sustainable and meaningful change can occur only through the true collaboration of functional business leaders in sales and marketing, technology, data/analytics, and finance.

According to the EY/Financial Times survey, 600 cross-functional senior executive respondents in marketing, technology, and finance stated that data strategy is more distributed than ever across executive roles such as the CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, CISO, and CMO.

Scaling results necessitates complete alignment of data, technology, and business transformations — and the solution is not simply a better “dashboard” or data visualization. The work of integrating data into digital technology and processes can be daunting, especially on a global scale, but if done correctly, value creation will build momentum and belief.

4. Address talent issues as soon as possible, and don’t be afraid to try something new or radical.

Despite all of the talk about data and technology, the most difficult challenge in 2022 is likely to be finding qualified candidates. Based on extensive conversations with CMOs from consumer goods to technology to manufacturing over the last year, there is broad agreement on the talent challenges, which include data-driven skill scarcity, overall retention challenges, and incentive alignment.

Today’s marketers must have diverse and detailed expertise, breadth, and depth in order to succeed. This is forcing leaders to reconsider how they structure and train their teams, manage and collaborate with external partners such as agencies, and embrace new labor models while maintaining the appropriate balance of consistency and independence.

Many leaders are taking matters into their own hands and developing new curricula to transform their existing talent into modern, full-stack marketers. These actions increase consistency and even mobility within the organization.

5. Don’t lose your creative spark as you become more data-driven.

The data revolution has resulted in far more forward-thinking. Marketers should spend less time looking in the rearview mirror to analyze previous results and more time using predictive analytics to forecast the future.

These new superpowers enable marketers to drive both growth and operational efficiency in profound ways, as they can, for example, not only target advertising but also ensure that it is only run when the company’s supply chain is ready to deliver the products.

However, if marketers become solely data-driven and overly reliant on automation, they will lose their most distinguishing characteristics, which revolve around human intuition and creativity. The craft of storytelling will be more important than ever to ensure that creative messaging connects with humans even when targeted well and quickly.

From retail media networks in the physical and digital worlds to virtual branding and transactional experiences in the metaverse, new marketing options and formats will continue to emerge. There must be room to experiment and be unique, regardless of whether the math is fully understood at the outset.

Marketing leaders will have the opportunity in 2022 to connect the customer journey to the full-growth agenda, retaining their creativity while scaling data and technology in more meaningful ways than ever before. The rate at which decisions must be made will only increase, as will the number of variables, connections, and complexity.

Those who can build the internal connective tissue will transform their companies’ competitiveness and unlock new levels of value creation, taking center stage in growth strategy and the C-suite.

Original Post: https://hbr.org/2022/02/5-ways-marketing-leaders-can-drive-value-in-2022?utm_source=contentideas&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ci