The CMO guide to finding allies in the C-suite

There’s a lot of optimism in the air about the pandemic coming to an end, thanks to increasingly widespread vaccine deployment. People hope to resume normal lives at home and at work. But marketing executives already suspect there’s no going back to the way things were in 2019. Many CMOs saw huge budget cuts in 2020 and are wondering what comes next.

One thing seems certain: digital ad spending, which outpaced expenditures on non-digital forms of advertising for the first time...

7 April 2021 | Best Practice

Forget headless: Why agile CMS delivers the goods for marketing teams

Brands are trying to keep pace with new technologies and trends and even the terms that are adopted to describe them. ‘Agile CMS’ has recently been coined by Forrester, and it sounds great, but what does it mean in practice?

Disparate content systems rife with duplications and impossible to search cause delays and difficulties in enterprises today. Headless CMS, which separates frontend experiences from the backend content repository and management, had potential, but failed...

9 March 2021 | Commerce

The business case for a strong CMO-CIO partnership: A guide

Digital transformation has been a trending topic in the business world for several years, but out of necessity, efforts to upgrade digital capabilities accelerated sharply in 2020. With social distancing measures in place, millions of office workers tackling their workload from home, and consumers and business buyers researching products and making purchases online, companies had little choice.

Digital marketing accounted for more than half of ad spending in 2020 for the first...

4 February 2021 | CMO

Why it’s time to tailor your omnichannel marketing strategy to fit the now

The Covid-19 pandemic has profoundly altered consumers’ needs. Specifically, customers who once settled for basic customer service now crave brands that make them feel valued, safe, and happier. Adjusting omnichannel marketing strategies to adapt to changing needs is always important, and now it is essential for building brand preference and loyalty.

Companies that instinctively pivot to “now” are thriving. For example, Tesla simplified its online vehicle purchase process...

26 January 2021 | Attribution

Q&A: Jake Athey, Widen: On common mistakes marketers make with DAM – and realigning content post-Covid

For marketing professionals today, a lot of the job depends on their ability to not let things get on top of them. Data and data sources are increasing, as are the number of tools at hand to deal with them. What companies need, therefore, is something to centralise processes and smooth out the rough edges.

Ahead of his session at DMWF Europe Virtual on 24-25 November, Jake Athey, VP marketing and customer experience at digital asset management (DAM) software provider Widen, spoke...

11 November 2020 | Content Marketing

Three guiding principles for building better marketing analytics dashboards

Modern marketing campaigns are constantly churning out data that can allow companies to continually improve customer engagement. But for that data to be useful, it has to be organised and presented in a way that key stakeholders can understand and act upon.

Enter the marketing analytics dashboard. These visual data representations provide a single, unambiguous source of truth about campaign performance. They allow stakeholders without a background in data science to easily see...

28 August 2020 | Big Data

How ‘digitally mature’ retailers can stand the test of a digital-first marketplace

Let me start by defining ‘digitally mature’ retailers. They have a solid commerce platform that enables new and existing customers to easily find products on the device of their choice – and ensures that promises regarding delivery, pricing and availability can be consistently met. But the advantages of this type of platform are huge for business intelligence. It allows a business to collect insightful customer data, process it faster and adapt to meet evolving customer...

17 October 2019 | Commerce

Solving the CRM headache with AI: Finding the missing pieces of the data puzzle

CRM has the potential to be an extremely useful tool for sales teams. It has transformed the way businesses store their data, interact with customers and prospects, and forecast growth. However, it has also presented sales reps with the headache of manually collecting all the data.

This is a mundane and often neglected task that has resulted in organisations having incomplete and broken data in their CRM systems and a massive leakage of value throughout their funnel due to the human...

28 August 2019 | Automation

Selling with a plan: Bridging the gap between customer experience and expectations

Despite the paradigm shift that CRM brought to the world of sales, enterprises are still struggling with failure rates wildly disproportionate to the sales teams’ talent and hard work.

Customers and prospects today are smart, data savvy and very well informed before they even speak to a salesperson. This makes them more educated and demanding than ever before. However sales teams are having a hard time adapting to the needs of the digital era: many still tend to approach...

22 August 2019 | Commerce

How to build the best martech stack for data-driven marketing: A guide

20 years ago, when Salesforce launched its SaaS CRM platform, times were simpler. The majority of customer relationships were managed by a single sales team who manually added their (copious) customer notes to the CRM. 

We’ve since evolved to a multi-channel world, where customers engage with brands across everything from mobile to social media. The sales team’s input into a CRM platform no longer captures the whole customer relationship and doesn’t give...

19 July 2019 | Advertising Technology