The four pillars of good spend management – a key skill amid the Covid-19 downturn

Spend management is hardly the most glamorous component of marketing, but its impact can be game changing. That fact is particularly important as businesses react to the downturn ushered in by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Done well, spend management can free up marketing budget and serve both as a foundation to weather a storm and a catalyst for future growth. Effective spend management enables agile decision making within days (or even hours), allowing marketers to rapidly re-deploy...

26 May 2020 | Best Practice

Getting beyond the buzzword of ‘agile’ digital marketing to improve your customer relationships

Mention the word “agile” in a business setting, and it may lead to furrowed brows and scratched heads. Agility creates a lot of buzz — and a lot of misinterpretation.

To clear up any confusion, agile generally refers to optimizing and managing workflows. According to McKinsey & Co., it involves “using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly...

21 May 2020 | Content Marketing

Aimee Stone Munsell, CMO, Contentsquare: On leadership, learning, and lateral job moves

Aimee Stone Munsell, chief marketing officer at digital experience software provider Contentsquare, is a firm believer in the adage that a leader is only as good as their team. "A leader's job is to make themselves obsolete," she tells MarketingTech.

Realising the bluntness of that statement, Stone Munsell (left) laughs and clarifies. "What I mean by that is my job is to create at each level of management and leadership, to make the people underneath you successful and the...

18 May 2020 | CMO

Q&A: Nick Milne, Go Ignite Consulting: On data journeys and changing marketer – and vendor – expectations

The role of customer management at many organisations continues to evolve. Gone are the days when a simple CRM system would do the trick. With increasing data and workloads, alongside increased expectations for ROI, it is about balancing the requirements of multiple stakeholders and departments. 

Alongside this is the increasingly ludicrous martech landscape, which as of last year plotted more than 7000 vendors. Building out the...

1 May 2020 | Customer Experience

Five key digital marketing strategies during Covid-19: Redefining and redeployment

While nobody can predict  what a post-coronavirus reality would look  like,  one thing is certain for marketers: digital channels are more important than ever. Online channels now play an increasingly crucial role, as people continue to self-isolate and spend more time online. In Italy, for instance, once the government introduced country-wide quarantines in mid-March, online traffic spiked 30%.

Today, we are seeing similar trends occur globally. In  these sensitive...

28 April 2020 | Best Practice

Carol McNerney, CMO, Information Builders: Marketing through digital and business transformations

If you begin a career in marketing and have ambitions to go to the very top, you want to become a chief marketing officer (CMO). Or at least, in most companies you do. For others, it is a question of semantics.

IBM, where Carol McNerney, CMO at business intelligence software provider Information Builders, cut her teeth, had traditionally been cut up into silos, with vice presidents (VPs) in charge. Indeed, it was only 2016 that the Armonk giant ‘officially’ hired its...

22 April 2020 | CMO

Analysis: The four key methods for marketing measurement to maximise impact

When looking at organisations today, market research and marketing analytics now absorb around 13-16% of marketing operations budgets. However, evidence from Gartner’s Marketing Data and Analytics Survey (client access required) indicates that these investments are mismatched with their output and this presents a significant risk to the ongoing investment.

So, what does one do to find what works and what does not – which marketing activities should be doubled down on and which...

6 April 2020 | Attribution

How to ensure your marketing team’s BI dashboards are actually useful: A guide

No self-respecting marketing team would be without a business intelligence (BI) dashboard today. They’re immensely popular for good reason; a well-planned dashboard helps people to make sense of huge amounts of data in the blink of an eye, supports better business decision-making, and it looks good, too.

However, a poorly-designed dashboard can be worse than no dashboard at all. All too many companies are so eager to add dashboards to their business intelligence solutions that...

3 April 2020 | Content Marketing

Why your web team needs an invite to your strategy meetings now

I’ll give it to you straight: It is imperative that you invite your web team to your marketing strategy meetings. Your company’s website is one of its most valuable customer-facing marketing assets, so your website operations need to get serious about how web design enhances your marketing efforts.

New channels, new social media platforms, and other trends will come and go — and it will be important for your marketing team to experiment through each. But your company...

20 March 2020 | Customer Experience

Sisca Margaretta, CMO, Experian APAC: On increasing customer expectation – for insight and privacy

“I’ve always believed that anything fuelled by data, whether you’re trying to win an argument over dinner or building a business case to invest in marketing, means you have a lot more grounds to stand on.”

Sisca Margaretta, chief marketing officer of Experian Asia Pacific (APAC), speaks from experience on this. While it was already a maxim of hers before joining the company, the numbers Experian crunch to deliver its product, as well as additional services to...

19 February 2020 | Advertising