5 Ways Marketing Leaders Can Drive More Value in 2022

As we begin 2022, we face the third year in which the pandemic is transforming our business reality. The acceleration of digital behaviors isn’t abating, nor are your customers’ expectations.

As the crisis persists, this is a year for marketing leaders to redouble their commitment to accelerating transformation at scale. With the widespread recognition of their impact on sales, outcomes, and growth, 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.

The question is: How can CMOs drive change and create value fastest? Based on what I’m seeing as I work with CMOs on data-driven transformation of marketing, e-commerce, and every aspect of the customer journey, I recommend marketing leaders consider five actions to drive more impact:

1. Your company now recognizes that marketing drives revenue. Seize the shift.

It wasn’t fun when marketing was a cost center, particularly when the CFO needed to cut an area of discretionary spend. But now, marketing is understood as a revenue driver, integrally tied to sales.

Today’s media types, like social, search, and programmatic, are all highly measurable and have positively habituated leaders across the executive team to expect results from marketing spend. Certainly, over-indexing on performance-only spend (like last-click online sales) can sacrifice brand health and equity. The best strategies balance short and long-term results. But the productive impact of the performance dollar swing is that leaders outside of the marketing function now see the tangible impact of marketing at work.

This offers an opportunity for marketers to be on more equal footing with the traditional revenue leaders of the organization — sales — and marketers should seize this shift. In 2022, the key will be to make results understandable to broader audiences across the company. Attribution, or the math that allows us to know which marketing efforts drove results, continues to challenge us all, as mobile platforms, browsers, and walled gardens in e-commerce and social media continue to change the rules and fragment the landscape. But marketers shouldn’t be afraid to create “good enough” math to understand dollars throughout the full funnel — from top-of-funnel brand awareness to bottom-of-funnel click-to-purchase moments. The more holistically companies see spend as driving some form of performance, the better. The key is to focus less on each individual line of spend and more on the predictive and collective value of them in combination.

2. Grab the end-to-end growth agenda as the rightful domain of marketing.

Today’s growth agenda doesn’t respect prior organizational boundaries confined to conventional notions of marketing or other adjacent functions. Marketers must stake an explicit claim to drive the growth agenda and provide cohesive business leadership.

This is not about building a fiefdom to grab the data, analytics or technology agenda, teams, or budget. It’s about building the right internal connectivity through the lens of the customer journey. Customers don’t care about internal organizational boundaries — they expect their experiences to be intuitive, anticipatory, and relevant. Handoffs across organizational functions often stand in the way of that goal.

Take the fast-paced growth of social commerce, which is a great example of the seamless new growth agenda. Media put forward to consumers is targeted with tremendous precision and should connect directly to an effective, personalized e-commerce experience. The connected social commerce journey should also recognize users are most likely on a mobile device and therefore require a fast, frictionless, mobile-first payment experience.  Any barrier to check-out prevents marketing from turning into a sale. Marketers must work with their colleagues who create online product pages and payment mechanics to create an experience with minimal friction. Simply put, it all must flow naturally and that will take more real-time coordination than most current organizational boundaries allow.

A recent EY/Financial Times survey of approximately 200 senior marketing executives showed that 77% of the respondents believe the marketing function needs a stronger voice in setting corporate strategy as owners of the customer journey. Areas like data-driven marketing, e-commerce, and CRM cannot afford to be led in silos given how quickly friction must come out of the customer journey to accelerate topline growth.

3. Stop ignoring the foundational data work that enables digital transformation, even if it’s not sexy. 

The pandemic united C-suite leadership teams like never before, so digital transformation got an unquestionable acceleration at many companies. However, the success of a digital transformation relies on the success of the data transformation. Companies may implement technology like CRM or consolidate sources into a single data lake, but key questions often still need to be addressed, such as the true level of data quality and how to manage the ongoing health of data throughout the organization. Marketers should be keenly focused on the right sources of quality data fueling the engine. Value is created by more holistic analytics models driving last-mile decisions as opposed to siloed, one-off solutions hard-coded for a moment in time or a specific business use case.

It’s only through the true partnership of functional business leaders in sales and marketing, technology, data/analytics, and finance that more sustainable and meaningful change can happen. In fact, the EY/Financial Times survey heard from 600 cross-functional senior executive respondents in marketing, technology, and finance who highlighted that the data strategy is more distributed than ever across executive roles including the CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, CISO, and CMO.