Making Money On-line: To Be Agile CMOs Must Align Digital and Traditional Marketing Strategies

Tuesday, 31 January 2017

To Be Agile CMOs Must Align Digital and Traditional Marketing Strategies

One of the definitions of the word align is to bring into cooperation or agreement with a particular group. According to the findings of a newly-released survey, presented by The CMO Club in partnership with Accelent Consulting and Oracle Marketing Cloud, CMOs the world over would be wise to bring into cooperation digital and traditional marketing.

An attribute of digital excellence that emerged from the survey was the ability to align digital strategies – within marketing and across all business functions. Although all respondents indicated that traditional and digital marketing strategies are at least “somewhat aligned," only 12% claimed "complete alignment."

But, in world-class performers, the level of alignment was found to be much higher. All world-class respondents felt that digital and traditional marketing was "well aligned" and close to two-thirds claimed that it was "completely aligned."

This distribution is similar for broader organizational alignment of digital marketing with digital activities in other functions. Looking at the overall numbers, the vast majority of respondents claimed that the digital marketing organization is "well aligned" with other functions but only 9% claimed that it was "completely aligned."

Once again, in world-class organizations, three-quarters of respondents claimed that digital activities between functions were at least "well aligned and a staggering 42% claimed they were "completely aligned."

Singles Only

No, this is not about the latest dating site or the next chapter meeting of your local community association. This is all about the inherently important need for your organization to have a single customer identity that unites behaviors across digital and traditional channels into one comprehensive profile.

Today, certain technologies can link all the unique cross channel identifiers of a customer back to a single unique identifier. Once you have a single unique identifier, you can really know who your customers are across all channels, and begin to:

Personalize interactions based on channel preferences and behaviors.
Reach a more precise level of targeting and segmentation by using cross channel behavioral information in real time.
And most importantly, integrate cross channel communications and speak to each customer with a single voice regardless of channel.

Many marketing technology vendors can execute on some aspects of personalization. And some might even be able to help marketers target their customer better. But the ability to actually use personalization and targeting to integrate cross channel communications differentiates Modern Marketing solutions from other, less comprehensive alternatives.

By unifying cross channel identities and creating campaigns on a scalable cross channel program canvas, the right technology empowers marketers to reach new levels of digital sophistication.

Reach For This

While you're reaching for new levels of digital sophistication, reach for and download Digital Agility Survey: CMO Insights on the Journey Towards Digital Agility and get insights directly from your fellow CMOs and marketers as to how they stay agile in our digital world.