marketing

An Open Letter To CMOs, Part 1

Dear CMOs:

First and foremost, you have my utmost respect.

While I have never been a CMO myself, I do have a lot of real-world marketing (and advertising) experience, I was a featured writer for the CMO Network of Forbes for nearly 10 years, I have interviewed well over 2,000 leaders just like yourself, I coach and counsel CMOs and I have very close relationships with many of your peers.

So while having never served in the role per se, I know the role quite intimately. I know of the struggles and challenges you go through on a daily basis. I know all about the daily ride you go on. Boy, do I ever.

Ok, just wanted to set the table for those who I have not had the pleasure of getting to know. I like to joke that I collect CMOs like I used to collect sports cards. As a kid, my brother Greg and I spent arguably just slightly less than the GNP of Sri Lanka on football, baseball, basketball, and hockey cards.

Of course, none of said cards still exist today else my brother and I would be living in the lap of luxury in, well, Sri Lanka.

But I digress.

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“Unsubscribe” Does NOT Mean Send Me More Emails!

Ever unsubscribe from a mailing list only to keep getting emails from the brand in question? You’re not alone. It’s actually one of my biggest pet peeves, and here’s why. 

Isn’t it great when you unsubscribe and start getting more emails?

Signing up for any type of email marketing list is always a leap of faith, but when everyone is professional about the process, the risk is supposed to be minimal. I sign up, see what you have to offer, and decide whether I want to stick around for more. You hold up your end of the bargain by sending quality content or offers and providing an easy way to unsubscribe if I decide it’s not for me. If I do choose to unsubscribe, then that should be the end of it. But that’s where things most often get tricky these days.

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Want To Reach Customers? Think Like One!

Why EMPATHY for your CONSUMER will always result in a Better, More Effective Marketing Plan.

It’s pretty easy to sit in a room and come up with a flashy marketing plan that’s sure to please other marketing experts. That doesn’t mean it will be a good marketing plan or that it will be at all relevant to your consumers, but you’re certainly free to try the locked room method. Plenty do. The plan often fails; the team repeats the process all over again, and somehow nobody realizes that the key ingredient for success has been missing the whole time.

I’m not talking about data here. It’s easy to get seduced by numbers and graphs and demographics. However, if you want to create effective marketing for your consumers, then you need to walk a mile (or ten) in their shoes.

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Beware The Risks of Arrogance and Pride in Business

Buzzing off those results you secured for your company? Feeling confident? Maybe even a little self-important? Time to check yourself people. 

Ever work with someone who always had all the answers, even if they weren’t paying any attention to the questions? Have you ever been that person? It’s human nature for success to breed confidence; however, allowing that confidence to veer into arrogance is a dangerous thing in business and marketing. It’s hard to build a team-first culture when key members of the team think they are above the rules and above the rest of the group. And when a whole team becomes arrogant, success gives way to complacency. Beware of these risks at every level of your business.

When confidence turns sour

It’s hard to overstate how important confidence is to success, and how easy it is for confidence to become arrogance. It can grow from little things. Maybe you contributed a big idea to the project but felt that you didn’t get enough credit. Or maybe you got too much credit. Perhaps you see the positive trajectory of the team you’re a part of and overstate your part in it. It’s OK to be proud of your work and to foster pride in teamwork, but when that morphs into feelings of superiority, your whole team can start assuming that past results guarantee future success.

“A confident, level-headed leader knows that arrogance is bad for business, and that times of success are when they need to temper confidence.

No matter where it originates, arrogance is bad for business. A confident, level-headed leader knows this, and knows that times of success are when they need to temper confidence. You want team members to feel they’ve contributed, but not that they are more valuable than the rest of the team. As a leader or a team member, you also need to check yourself constantly, to make sure you’re not sowing the seeds of over-confidence in your business and marketing.

It’s important to stay vigilant because arrogance can destroy a successful business or team from the inside. When one team member feels they’re more important than the rest and their attitude goes unchecked, suddenly the rest of the team may not be so willing to engage and share their own ideas. An arrogant team member is willing to sacrifice the good of the whole to continue to feel important.

It starts with you

Of course, this isn’t just a risk for teams. It’s also something that we all must address on a personal level. When you come up with a great idea, put in the work to bring it to reality, and see your idea lead to success for your business, of course you should be feeling confident! However, stay humble and don’t let complacency creep in or the damage can escalate. You feel the confidence of success, so maybe next time around you put in a little less effort and expect to get the same results. Then, what happens when that lesser effort doesn’t lead to the results you hoped? Well, it’s got to be someone else’s fault, right? Arrogance might tell you to look outside of yourself and place blame, when the real problem is much closer to home.

Practice self-reflection

The cure for arrogance is a willingness to look at your actions through a lens of humility. Honest self-evaluation can be hard, but it’s incredibly valuable. In good times and bad, it starts with asking: How can I do a better job? No matter how well you and your team are doing, there is always room for improvement. Just as importantly, no matter how well something has worked in the past, there’s no guarantee that it will continue to be the best thing for your business moving forward. The old saying that “pride goeth before the fall” is true! People who take a step back and reflect periodically, often find more ways to improve their performance than their self-important colleagues.

Beware the dangers of pride and arrogance in business. You never want to feel like you have ‘arrived’ – no matter how well things are going, how hard you worked to contribute to that success, and how much your team values your input. Confidence is a powerful, positive thing, but only when it’s tempered by a healthy dose of humility.

#FollowThePath… #NoLetUp!

Originally posted at TedRubin.com

The Five Main Challenges Facing CMOs Today

From employee advocacy to peak data, let’s lay down the big challenges CMOs around the world are facing right now – and what they can do to improve their marketing in each area.

1. Understanding and embracing the power of employee advocacy

Empower your employees and they will power your brand. In today’s hyper-connected world, brands simply must embrace new ways of engaging with customers online, and your employees can help if you’ll let them. If you’re not looking for ways to involve your employees, then you are missing a huge opportunity.

Your employees are the best way to humanize and personalize your brand… and truly the best way to scale relevant, contextual content creation

Did you know that employee created content (ECC) receives eight times more engagement than content shared from the company itself? On top of that, employee content extends brand messaging by over 500%. Crazy, right? So why aren’t more companies getting employees engaged in content creation? It’s well known that companies with engaged employees outperform their peers; involving employees in content creation can help to create a sense of common purpose.

2. Brand personality and connection

It’s time to stop making excuses, and start bringing in-person social skills to the digital world. All of the positive benefits are out there waiting, and it’s up to us to make the effort to realize them.

3. Delivering a truly omni-channel, integrated experience

This requires you to connect the dots internally as well—which means connecting your employees so they can collaboratively deliver that seamless experience. You can’t be omni-channel to the outside, if you don’t take down the silos and become omni-channel inside. We often hear a lot about omni-channel marketing from an external viewpoint, but I think it’s also important to look at it from an internal perspective. Is your internal communication structure helping to build consistent company messaging and culture, or is there infighting about who handles what?

Before an organization can have an effective omni-channel marketing strategy, it’s important to examine the internal communication structure. I think the CMO should be heading this up, because brand messaging (whether internal or external) is really a marketing function, even though there are different departments that feed into it. However, very few companies have a CMO who has broad enough oversight of everything that’s happening within a company regarding brand messaging. They’re in charge of consumer messaging, but brand messaging also affects employees and vendors.

4. Overabundance of data

CMOs need to always remember that data will only take you so far; it’s judgment and instinct that will win the day. My advice is to make absolutely certain that your CMO and CIO have close ties, and learn to not only “play nice”, but to do their best to understand the vital role they play as a team. The kind of communication required to deliver the ultimate customer experience needs to run across and run through both channels. For them to be successful requires an enterprise-wide cultural shift.

5. Programmatic and digital spam

Brands are running headlong into brand equity destruction through incessant programmatic and digital spamming. The rise of retargeting and digital yield techniques is killing brands, and brand equity for the long-term. It makes me wonder how many brand managers, and more importantly CMOs, bother signing up for their own email distribution lists, or shop their brands from an anonymous browser to experience what their customers are being subjected to. Customer experience is no longer simply about product, delivery, and service, but about how the customer experiences our marketing.

My hope is that as the new marketing world matures, building better customer relationships will become everyone’s primary objective, from sales, to marketing, to customer service — even IT departments. If that’s the true objective, then “customer relationships” truly has a chance to be the x-factor in achieving Return on Relationship and enhancing ROI for the long term.

#RonR … #NoLetUp!

Originally posted at TedRubin.com

Two New Yorkers Collaborate to be the Voice for Restless Brands

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Anyone who knows me knows I am all about the power of relationships. Every once in a while, something unexpected happens that seems almost too good to be true.

So two months and 53,000 YouTube views ago, I had no idea something this unpredictable would happen….

Over the course of 5 episodes, we’ve:

I am talking about this new collaboration I am super pumped over: The David and Ted Talk Show.

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IBM Delivers Online Merchants New Cognitive Capabilities That Turn Commerce Insights into More Powerful Customer Experiences

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Watson Analytics Allows Brands to Use Everyday Language to Identify Hidden Data Connections and Drive Better Business Performance

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today (Dec 3rd) announced new commerce capabilities that help online merchants easily gain the insights needed to evaluate category and product performance and make quick and effective merchandising decisions. Leveraging cognitive capabilities from Watson Analytics, IBM Commerce Insights allows practitioners to gain a real-time view into customer behavior and market factors that are impacting their business, proactively identify opportunities and roadblocks and take informed actions to increase sales and business performance.

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This is the Top Publication Shared By CMOs

Leadtail is a social strategy firm that has built a panel of over 1,000 B2B and B2C CMOs and marketing executives located in North America and active on Twitter that develops social insights reports on CMOs and other decision makers.

They recently released the results of analysis of over 60,000 Tweets during the month of October and determined Forbes to be the #1 publication shared by CMOs during that month. As a Forbes contributor myself, specifically to the CMO Network, I am not surprised to see it come in #1 for we have a great group of contributors for sure.

Here’s a quick legend regarding the colors and what they represent followed by the full list:

Blue = Did not rank in the Top 50 in the previous month

Green = Moved up in ranking over last month

Red = Moved down in ranking over last month

Black = No change over last month

CMO_Domains_October_Chart

 

The CMO Technology Conundrum And How To Solve It

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” —Bill Gates

Given the vast array of technology, data points, channels, and tactics available, new technology and marketing automation has stepped in to help CMOs bring all their activities together and support the delivery of the ultimate customer experience. But has it really helped so far? Or has it simply created another overwhelming challenge for the CMO who now must become a technology expert to apply it efficiently?

The above is an excerpt from a recently-released guide the Oracle Marketing Cloud created along with The CMO Club entitled the CMO Solution Guide to Leveraging New Technology and Marketing Platforms. The guide, which I co-authored, contains results of a survey of over 100 marketing leaders plus the five key solutions we identified to help CMOs and marketing leaders tackle the challenge of providing a seamless customer experience across all marketing channels via the use of technology – the right technology that is.

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Cause Marketing: Making the Most of your Marketing Dollars

Trillions of dollars are spent each year on all aspects of brand and product promotion, the vast majority of which generates little in positive social benefit.

Many would argue why should it, as the purpose of these expenditures is only to sell as many products to as many people as possible. However the emergence of Corporate Social Responsibility in all major business organizations is leading to a rethink and refocus of all expenditures and actions of the organization to maximize the firm’s positive social impact.

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