A massive paradigm shift is happening in the media and marketing realm. Sectors that were non-existent a few years ago – social media, native advertising, and in-app advertising, to name a few – have now become highly competitive stages to grab user and marketer attention. According to Datareportal, at an average of 143 minutes per day, per user, the world spends 720 billion minutes per day using social platforms. Over an entire year, that adds up to more than 260 trillion minutes, or 500 million years of collective human time. With the continual growth of mobile usage and multitasking, watching video is no longer a television-centric experience. A recent Harvard Business School study showed that the percentage of TV ads getting great attention had decreased dramatically, from 97 per cent in the early 1990s to less than 20 per cent today.

Modern marketers are faced with a cascade of challenges day in and day out. But one of the most persistent and prominent challenges is figuring out the right marketing mix – the best combination of platforms to reach, engage and connect with consumers. Solving this dilemma is hard enough, even in the best times, but this task becomes even more daunting during a downturn. In the traditional marketing value chain, each player – the marketer, the agency that was the primary service provider, the media publisher, and the end consumer –had a clearly defined role. Work proceeded linearly through a sequence of regulated touchpoints and clear baton passes. But in today’s new tech-driven marketing ecosystem, end users have taken centre stage. They dictate on which platform they can be found and what information and messages they choose to view. Touch points have increased as marketers expanded their direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels while diversifying their media investment. What was once a lengthy “funnel” has suddenly condensed into a hyperaccelerated, more focused, and interactive path to purchase.

When faced with budget constraints, picking where to transfer promotional funds was simple because digital platforms were relatively inexpensive. However, digital CPMs have increased so quickly in recent years that the math is more complex than it once was. One study published in April 2023 found that the average CPM for Meta (Facebook and Instagram) increased 61% year-over-year, while TikTok’s average CPM jumped 185% YoY. Compare that to an average cost increase of approximately 25% for direct mail. In the past, marketers have frequently reacted reflexively when print prices rise, cutting back on volume and dumbing down formats. However, by working with clients, they have discovered that this ultimately comes at the expense of customer response. Furthermore, the use of direct mail has historically been seen by many marketers as a production-and-procurement endeavour. Beyond the rising digital CPMs, there are several challenging factors at the consumer media consumption level, including digital fatigue and falling engagement rates across multiple major digital platforms. While digital marketing continues to be the most prominent medium, brands which focus only on it at the cost of other channels are witnessing a decline in response. It’s worth noting that research released in 2022 by the Association of National Advertisers showed that direct mail generated an average ROI of 112% — topping email (93%), paid search (88%), social media (81%) and digital display (79%).

BRAND BUILDING VS PERFORMANCE MARKETING

In today’s fast-paced world, businesses face a conundrum – should they invest in brand building or focus on performance marketing? This question has been a topic of heated debates among marketers, with advocates of both arguments aggressively defending their effectiveness. However, the truth is that long-term success in the current marketing ecology requires a careful balancing act between performance marketing and brand creation. Building a brand’s identity, reputation, and emotional bond with its target audience is the long-term strategic goal of brand building. It seeks to leave a lasting impact on customers, eventually encouraging advocacy and loyalty. The brand building combines creative material, narrative, and consistent message to increase brand equity. Essentially, it’s about building a solid brand presence now to invest in the future. Contrarily, performance marketing is a short-term, goal-oriented approach that aims to produce quantifiable, instantaneous actions like clicks, conversions, or purchases. Its real-time campaign optimisation is primarily dependent on data and analytics. Channels that aim to provide a noticeable return on investment (ROI) as soon as possible, such as pay-per-click advertising, affiliate marketing, and social media advertising, are prime examples of this strategy.

THE EVOLVING CMO ROLE

The CMO, who has long been at the forefront of tackling the problems and possibilities posed by digital transformation, is gaining influence throughout the system of customer experience touchpoints. The fundamental shifts in the CMO job have resulted from shifting consumer needs and behaviours. Previously, the purpose of marketing included promotional strategies, but two-way consumer conversation and the rapid speed of change in today’s culture have enlarged the goal of marketing leadership. The need for CMOs to take a more strategic approach is familiar, but the techniques frequently draw them back in. The expanding number of technologies available to marketers only fuels their drive to learn more and use them. However, with all these platforms and techniques, there is greater pressure to connect customers while delivering on growth objectives. This friction may explain why, on average, the CMO role has the shortest tenure in the C-suite. Organisations are entrusting CMOs to satisfy increasing expectations, but they are only sometimes given the authority to make the necessary choices. To execute more effectively, the evolving role of the CMO revolves around three key areas:

• TIRELESSLY PROTECTING THE CUSTOMER

Organisations rely more than ever on a deep understanding of their customers’ expectations and needs. The CMO’s expanding function necessitates a focus on gaining a comprehensive understanding of the consumer. To achieve enterprise-wide success, take full advantage of data and analytics to understand the client journey. With this understanding, CMOs may form significant strategic partnerships with their C-suite counterparts. Are your clients mostly purchasing online? CMOs and CIOs should be on the same page. Does in-person contact with front-line employees heavily influence the customer experience? Human resource leaders should have CMOs on speed dial.

• SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE OF THE C-SUITES

Effective C-suite relationships begin with the ability to convert marketing concepts and insights into words relevant to their stakeholders’ objectives. Marketing leaders who communicate successfully are often better positioned to contribute to long- and short-term organisational goals and get senior executives’ backing. The CMO’s growing position includes considering what is relevant from the perspectives of other executives and communicating in a language they understand. While measures to improve the customer experience may be of the highest importance to CMOs, colleagues in finance and other business areas will be more interested in turning that attention into improved sales and revenue.

• DEVELOPING A “CENTRE BRAIN” MENTALITY

Marketing has always been seen as a largely right-brain, creative activity. Nonetheless, the advent of analytics has increased the demand for CMOs to broaden their more left-brained skills. However, the demand for greater analytical abilities should not be prioritised over those for creativity. The objective is to cultivate a “centre brain” approach that infuses a creative spark into data-driven insight for you and your colleagues.

CHANGING MARKETER NEEDS

Solving the marketer’s dilemma will not be an easy task. The same innovations that provide greater insight, engagement and connectivity for marketers disrupt the established audience-building and monetisation playbooks. Although precise strategies for success differ from industry to industry or even player to player, the winning formula is becoming more apparent every day. Marketers need five critical capabilities to navigate the new digital ecosystem.

• FIRSTHAND INSIGHTS

Big data could be in right now. However, “small data” on a customer’s previous interactions is frequently more helpful in figuring out how to improve the experience to increase the likelihood of the following engagement or, increasingly, the next sale. Going straight to the source is the most effective method to gain a deep insight into the consumer base. Even in cases where direct transaction is not possible, building a direct relationship with the consumer is the ultimate goal for any brand. Understanding how people use and consume websites may help businesses create more precise message targeting and segmentation. To get close to their customers, more marketers are building DTC capabilities. To execute DTC strategies, marketers need to reduce silos between marketing and other operating functions — especially sales and customer service — and become more integrated.

• INTEGRATED BRAND EXPERIENCES

Every marketing action in a nonlinear environment must be linked to several other possible actions – and can be no more than one step away from the point of sale. Businesses need to create connections between the silos in their media and advertising decisions and the organisation’s technical infrastructure, which are still stubbornly present. Marketers should prioritise spending more on the important moments in a consumer’s experience after recognising them to develop more integrated brand experiences. Companies that want to follow this route must educate all employees to live out the organisation’s mission and then create appropriate measures to gauge their success.

• BREAKTHROUGH CONTENT

If brand material is shareable, educational, and entertaining on social media, younger customers are likelier to interact with it. Marketers are increasingly moving away from “traditional” advertising service providers in search of such enticing content. Creating high-quality content increases brand awareness, establishes authority in the industry, drives traffic, engages users, and generates excellent leads for brands. It also simplifies marketing strategy.

• EXPERIMENTING WITH ROI

Coca-Cola famously has an approach that focuses 70 per cent of resources (e.g., time, energy, effort, or money) on “tried and true” investments with a history of working, 20 per cent on scaling experimental investments, and 10 per cent on truly new endeavours. Regardless of the combination a business decides on, whatever works must be evaluated and scaled up as quickly and thoroughly as possible; if the return is negligible, it should be abandoned. CMOS must carry out these tests concurrently with optimising the technological framework supporting marketing. Furthermore, everything must go swiftly and integrate into a continuous experimentation, measurement, and implementation cycle.

• BUILDING TRUST

In a seeming paradox, transparency and the availability of data and metrics coexist with a high and rising level of distrust. The distrust directed at the new breed of digital mediators – advertising technology platforms that connect publisher inventory with audience demand – seems to have extended to marketers’ trusted long-term allies, agencies of record. Marketers must initiate proactive requests for transparency from their partners and establish a routine for routinely evaluating the analytics.

Many marketers will bring more capabilities in-house. They will prioritise their spending with those providers (publishers, agencies, technology companies, or consultancies) that deliver the most effective solutions combined with the least executional complexity. To put it concisely, these winners will accept the marketer’s dilemma rather than using it as an excuse to reinvent their marketing skills. They will see it as a calculated chance to improve their companies, outperform rivals, and make their goals more apparent to partners, consumers, and users. Here, the classic Latin saying certainly rings true: Fortune favours the daring. The ones who embrace new models and techniques head-on, show that they can implement them quickly, and gain experience and expertise through practice will emerge victorious.

Author: Amar Chowdhury