For more than a decade, marketing organizations have struggled to cope with the deeper relationship consumers now crave with products and brands. Customers need to be engaged through an expanding array of touch points, yet chief marketing officers are working with the same or fewer resources. They’ve tacked on social media staff to engage with customers online, and built internal publishing units to create and deliver content. They’ve conducted new types of research to achieve deeper insight into customers, and adopted marketing management software to automate and integrate processes. They’ve rethought approaches to strategy development and internal collaboration, altered reporting structures, and overhauled governance systems to ensure accountability. And yet the demands keep rising.
That’s only likely to continue. “Push” marketing has been subsumed by a complicated two-way relationship that begins well before a product is ever purchased and then continues indefinitely. A consumer’s ongoing experience with a company—which directly influences whether they choose to buy a product or service and determines their subsequent loyalty—today results from every single interaction they have, planned or unplanned, whether or not it’s within the marketing organization’s control. That’s why we believe that in the era of engagement, marketing must become pervasive: the marketing function needs to renegotiate its role and the role of other functions in driving customer engagement through every touch point. Everyone, everywhere within a company needs to recognize their unique role and responsibility in attracting, satisfying, and retaining customers. We’re all marketers now.
Don’t try to do it all yourself
Against this backdrop, it’s no wonder that keeping pace has proved difficult for most CMOs. Our advice? Don’t even try to do everything yourself. The era of customer engagement demands many capabilities that the vast majority of marketing organizations not only can’t but shouldn’t own. CMOs instead should focus on building an engagement ecosystem. Think of it as having three concentric rings: in the first are capabilities owned and operated by the marketing function; in the middle ring are capabilities inside the company but outside of the marketing function itself; and in the outer ring are capabilities provided by a network of external partners.
Of course, marketers have a lot of experience working with external partners for communications touch points—that’s the classic advertising agency and PR firm model. But that traditional external ecosystem is no longer nearly enough in the era of engagement. In this era, marketers require digital content production for websites and social networks. Advice on brand strategy and innovation. Help in building deeper relationships with interested stakeholders such as governments and social-interest groups. Collaboration with information and analytics companies to translate petabytes of customer data into usable information such as sales leads. Usability testing on web landing pages. Social sentiment analysis to provide near real-time feedback on brand performance. Design firms to optimize the customer experience with the product and with the retail or service experience. In short, you today need help from a lot of parties to design and deliver on your customer engagement strategy.
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