REQUIRED READING POST

For more than two decades, marketers have embraced new digital tools to enable them to better understand all the data generated by customer behavior evolving online as ecommerce grew, through the impact of social media with its new data sets, and now the defining innovation of this decade: Artificial Intelligence.

AI is amplifying marketers' understanding of the customer even more, through the use of new AI programs to analyze unstructured customer data further. With our latest program, Advantage AI, we look at how to leverage AI for better customer engagement. The CMO Council, in partnership with HCLSoftware, will undertake new research and thought leadership initiative to explore how AI is super-charging marketing through audience targeting, hyper-personalization, and marketing optimization.

There’s a lot of opportunity to leverage AI in marketing for competitive advantage. A recent CMO Council survey of marketing leaders found that 30% of top performers use AI pervasively in multiple systems, while only 4% of bottom performers say the same thing. READ more

In fact, CMO Council has been tracking the move to customer personalization for over a decade and the journey is enlightening. In our bespoke report into High-Velocity Data Marketing, we looked at the state of the future marketing organization, which has evolved into an ALERT enterprise, where marketers are turning increasingly to data as a source of wisdom and foresight; and to get ahead of sudden disruptions and heightened consumer expectations. The CMO is at the epicenter of this data movement at a time when companies need strategic, intelligence-based direction more than ever.

The CMO Council, in partnership with GfK, hosted roundtables with marketers in Dubai, Johannesburg, Singapore, New York and London. Discussions explored the concept of ‘High-Velocity Data Marketing’ and ways to accelerate turning insights into action. The first of our strategic briefs provide valuable peer input on the need to become an ALERT Enterprise with the proficiency to Acquire, Listen, Extract, React and Track. This is essential to brand competitiveness in a digitally driven, ever-changing and increasingly complex, cross-cultural global market. DOWNLOAD free

Embrace Meaningful Personalization to Maximize Growth is a report that provides insights on the value of personalized CX. Consumers want to be heard, understood and respected. They don’t care about your customer experience — they want meaningful, personalized, human experiences. In this report, from our partners at Deloitte Digital, Embrace Meaningful Personalization To Maximize Growth, you will learn how savvy CMOs and CXOs are building durable business advantages and increased customer loyalty through experience personalization.

This research reveals the ways that next-generation experience personalization is driving transformative growth for businesses- and uncovers the gaps you need to close in order to take advantage of the opportunity.

• Want loyalty? Make it personal
• Most brands overestimate their personalization performance
• Personalization leaders are separating from the pack
• Bottom Line: Personalization pays if you get it right

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The Power of Personalization CMO Council report unpacks the impact and influence of individualized content delivery. Personalized marketing techniques are still in the early stages of being integrated into most company's marketing campaigns and budgets. While the need for quantifiable tools for gauging effectivenes and ROI Exist, marketers are lagging in their adoption due to the lack of accurate and reliable customer data sources. These are two of the top findings from the "Power of Personalization" research. This paper delivers guidance on the application of customer analytics, database profiling, personalized web content and collateral, and individualized communications.

Email, digital printing, dimensional mailers, personalized URLs and many other marketing tools present endless opportunities for today’s senior marketers to get to know their customers better and meet their individualized needs. But are they doing so? And what’s stopping them from doing more? Which communications media produce the greatest ROI? Which methods have been tested, but not put into action? And where do the top marketing executives at companies like AT&T, IBM, Comcast and Disney see future opportunities for personalized communications? Become a CMO Council member to access this report

Making Content Marketing Convert is a report that combines trusted content from channels of insight and influence with lead marketing science. Digital content is indispensable in driving business opportunities, market education and customer engagement. Yet, many marketing organizations lack the necessary capabilities and processes to keep pace with a growing content marketing imperative. This report sheds light into the problems marketing organizations face in elevating the business impact of content development, distribution and lead conversion. It goes further to offers commentary and advice on the top 10 essentials for effective authority leadership-driven content marketing:

1. Partner with credible + trusted sources
2. Produce relevant + compelling strategic insights
3. Add customer-contributed views + validation
4. Present authoritative, newsworthy and enriched content
5. Engage qualified, verified and predisposed audiences
6. Target the whole influencer, specifier + buyer ecosystem
7. Embrace multi-channel distribution, promotion + syndication
8. Authenticate content consumption and buyer engagement
9. Ensure lead legitimacy and compliance
10. Cultivate, Activate and convert prospect flow

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The lost customer was the subject of this Webinar from CMO Council: The Lost Customer: Bridging the Gap Between The Known and Unknown. There is a classic statement that you “can’t know what you don’t know,” and in today’s digital age of tracking and cookies and customer intelligence and tracking, the unknown is a terrifying thing indeed. Customers who are known through traditional channels enable a degree of personalization where the picture of the individual is clear. But digital channels offer customers more control and offer marketers opportunities to better aid, enable and empower our customers—if marketers can see the customer clearly. Through the lens of digital channels, however, the view of the individual customer can be quite a bit fuzzier.

The unknown digital audience sends us back into the abyss of marketing days past when we simply didn’t know what our customer was expecting or even anticipating… and personalized experiences were a far-off aspiration.

According to a eConsultancy study, individualization is a mandate, not an option… and revenue is at stake for those who cannot enrich the experience. According to the report, 94 percent of marketers believed that personalization was critical to business success. And for marketers who have been able to engage in personalized digital experiences, the reward was an estimated 20 percent increase in sales. It proves that we know our customers—we value their behaviors, their intentions and are ready to help, enrich, amaze and even entertain.

But individualization has been only possible with the known customer until now. The unknown customer, more often than not, is lost. Today’s marketer simply cannot afford to relegate the unknown visitor to being lost to individualization and engagement. Savvy marketers are bridging the gap between the known and unknown, getting smarter about the tools and technologies needed to identify key behaviors, cues and indicators that can quickly and seamlessly shift every engagement into a real-time interaction opportunity.

MORE excellent evergreen content from the CMO Council’s perennial publication, Peer Sphere. READ HERE