Customer journeys are complex and every single task, such as making inquiries, browsing, or buying, often involves several steps, each touching a different part of the business. Designing a consistently positive, rewarding experience across all those touchpoints takes system-wide thinking and an integrated service-delivery approach. So, what role does the CMO (chief marketing officer) play in this? Why is marketing planning not a CMO Job anymore? In this article, we will share our thoughts on this matter.
Why is Marketing Planning Not a CMO Job anymore?
When consumer insights drive product design, the CMO (chief marketing officer) needs a strategic focus (3). Hence, the CMO needs to work with a multi-disciplinary team, including technology, digital, social, CRM, sales operations, and strategic talent during the marketing planning. However, marketing planning is not exactly a CMO job anymore.
Developing a marketing plan that has a strategic outlook and supports the achievement of the overall organizational goals needs:
- A team with diverse skills: Bringing the right stakeholders together to create a marketing plan is vital as they bring different skill sets and ideas. Relevant departments include research, product development, sales and promotion, administration, finance, and Tech.
- Alignment: For marketing efforts to succeed, everyone in the organization needs to be on the same page, aligned from top to bottom across all functions. Hence, everyone’s involvement is necessary when developing the market plan.
- Accountability: Involvement in the process enhances a sense of responsibility since everyone from the CMO down through the entire team participated in setting the goals and targets.
While the CMO is likely responsible for creating the marketing plan, they can’t do this alone. The entire team needs to be involved in the process.
The Most Important Piece of a Marketing Plan: Target Market/Audience
A target market refers to a group of individuals a company wants to serve. This group shares similar needs or characteristics, including demographics, income, buying power, and geography.
Identifying the target market is crucial when developing a market plan. Not knowing who the target market is can cost your company time and money (Kenton, n.d.).
Knowing your target market will help you:
- Have a better understanding of the market need: The only way for a company to remain competitive is by meeting and exceeding its customers’ expectations. To do this, the company must understand its market’s needs by defining its target market.
- Better Products and services offerings: Defining the target market and its most critical unmet needs are “essential to a company’s ability to bring successful products to market” (Quill, 2020)
- Design the right strategies: Knowing the target market’s needs and wants will help companies develop marketing plans with cost-effective strategies and processes. It also allows the company to focus its strategies on customers with the highest profit potential that attract and convert high-quality leads.
- Craft specific messages and campaigns that reach the right audience: Marketing messages resonate well with audiences when they can relate directly to the information.
- Build customer loyalty: The ability to stand out from competitors by creating a marketing plan that reaches your customers builds long-lasting relationships.
Understanding your market is essential to building successful businesses. Finding out what the customer wants helps you improve your product and service offerings. Any well-designed marketing plan starts with a clear understanding of customer needs.
SWOT Analysis—Critical Part of a Marketing Audit
“A marketing audit is a comprehensive, systematic analysis of an organization’s business marketing environment, both internal and external” (Majeed, 2019). One handy tool in a marketing audit is the SWOT analysis.
SWOT analysis is a model that analyzes the internal marketing strengths and weaknesses and the external market opportunities and threats.
Strengths: These are the internal capabilities or assets that give your company a competitive edge. By identifying what the business does better than competitors, the marketing team can leverage this to develop products and services with unique selling points.
Weaknesses: These are any essential skills or assets that your firm is lacking or needs improving. They include a lack of access to distribution channels, poor reputation, and lack of relevant skill sets (Scilly, 2016).
Opportunities: Analysing the external environment for opportunities that will maximize profit growth will guide the selection of marketing strategies that utilize available opportunities
Threats: These are external challenges. By identifying the threats that might inhibit a business from fulfilling its purpose, you can set up marketing strategies to guard against this.
“After SWOT analysis, the strategy has to be formulated based on the insights from the analysis” (Majeed, 2019). Some reasons for the SWOT analysis failure are the lack of proper focus during the analysis and the lack of in-depth information.
Check the following reference articles to learn more about why marketing planning is not a CMO job anymore:
- Milano, S. (2017, November 21). Team Working on a Marketing Strategy. Small Business – Chron.Com. URL
- The Rebirth of the CMO. (2014, November 5). Harvard Business Review. URL
- Why CMOs Never Last. (2020, November 5). Harvard Business Review. URL
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