Driving Leads to Profitable Conversations

Customers are not looking for extravagance. In fact, according to a recent CMO Council survey of 2,000 global consumers, conducted in partnership with SAP Hybris, customers crave simplicity. Customers want value and to be valued by brands. And customers expect brands to know and recognize them: 36 percent admit that they are often frustrated when they are not treated like a loyal customer regardless of channel.

Marketers, however, have admitted that there are significant challenges in meeting the very basic expectation of knowing, recognizing and responding to their customers. In the report, “Context, Commerce + Customer,” only one in four marketers has been able to leverage customer insights to advance troubleshooting in order to address customer issues before they become frustrations or problems.

As brands strive to deliver exceptional, connected, contextual experiences to their customer, marketers admit there are significant challenges to be resolved specific to data, analytics and the ability to leverage real-time customer intelligence to truly deliver value in the moment the customer most expects.

To discuss these challenges and the opportunities in exceeding the expectations of the connected customer, the CMO Council, in partnership with SAP Hybris and Deloitte Digital, invite you to join us for a live-webcast being held on Thursday, June 15, 2017. We will be sharing additional findings of our new consumer study including how consumers say they will react to continued frustrations. In addition, experts from SAP Hybris and Deloitte Digital will join the discussion to share where and how customer demands have shifted customer experience strategies, including the very ecosystem of cross-functional connections that organizations must forge in order to truly meet and exceed these expectations.

The latest research from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and RedPoint Global indicates that although customers are more connected across a multitude of channels than ever before, many organizations are still struggling to deliver the seamless, omni-channel experiences that customers seek, despite having a plethora of data, analytics and engagement systems implemented.

In fact, the research revealed that only 7 percent of marketers surveyed are able to deliver real-time, data-driven engagements across both physical and digital touchpoints, and only 5 percent are able to see the bottom-line impact of engagements in real time. The gap between strategy and delivery of these experiences stems primarily from fractured execution systems and siloed customer data.

This executive briefing will discuss:

• What are the next steps that marketers can take to bridge this gap?
• What internal capabilities and changes are needed in order for organizations to create the frictionless, omni-channel experiences that today’s connected customers expect?
• Where can organizations start when it comes to connecting their data and insights, to better orchestrate engagement in real time and across all journey stages and touchpoints?

Join the CMO Council for a half-hour executive briefing, which will also include a live interactive Q&A on research findings, data implications and real-world prescriptions. John Nash, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, RedPoint Global, will join us to provide industry insights and next best actions for marketing executives looking to overcome the roadblocks that prevent organizations from capitalizing on profitable omni-channel efforts.

As social data streamed into systems, the voice of the customer became distinct and immediate. But as sentiment became the table stakes of today’s intelligence, marketers started to look for more out of their social engagement and listening programs. This shift has brought about a call to identify points of opportunity in social data that drive the business forward.

This new mandate reveals new challenges: social media data can be messy, filled with lots of noise and few signals that point to definitive action. The mass of unstructured data that floods into systems is often incomplete and constantly in flux. One minute, a customer is “liking” a brand, and the next minute, that customer is telling the world about negative experiences and defection intentions. Wires get crossed. Sentiments can shift without warning. And slowly but surely, a marketer’s trust in social data can begin to erode.

The conversation around social needs to evolve—breaking away from the endless opportunities to chat, mix and mingle with the customer and turning toward an intentional strategy of leveraging social data to reveal business-driving opportunity. These signals must point to where a business can make money or where a business may be missing the mark…or it must deliver real-time alerts to problems that can lead to customer defection and discord.

In the world of marketing, these principles have been applied through the application of a marketing supply chain, effectively connecting customer and company demand for marketing materials (typically marketing consumables like printed content, promotional items, etc.) into a transparent, technology-powered network of suppliers and users to streamline processes and optimize budgets and utilization. Just as with manufacturing supply chain management, marketing supply chain optimization has led marketing leaders to realize great customer satisfaction and profitability, particularly through significant savings and the reduction in material obsolescence.

So now, savvy CMOs are turning to the customer and asking whether these same principles of supply chain dynamics can be applied to a process that actually reaches, engages and connects with customers. The answer is surely yes…but before we take that leap, the same rigor and advancement used to establish a marketing supply chain must be paid to content itself. Now is the time to realize the state of the content supply chain.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 32 percent of a B2C organization’s budget and 28 percent of a B2B organization’s budget is spent on content. In a recent CMO Council study on the impact of the connected omni-channel experience, 60 percent of marketers admitted that the new connected customer has necessitated a shift in content strategies and a call for the rapid development of new content in new formats and sizes. Yet despite the clear budget priority content has taken—as well as the clear call to rapidly advance our content development and management skills to meet the demands of our customers—why is content still developed in campaign and functional team silos, often lacking effective paths for cross-functional collaboration and distribution? Are we giving content the respect and attention it deserves?

When the CMO Council recently asked more than 200 senior marketing decision makers how effectively they have aligned physical and digital experiences, half admitted that these integrated experiences were selective, at best. Yet it is alignment, consistency and connection that drive the foundational relationship between the brand and the buyer.

The CMO Council, in partnership with IBM, will host a one-hour interactive webcast with industry-leading media, entertainment and telecommunications marketers to discuss how audience insights across the digital and physical experience have been turned into action, allowing these brands to personalize and enrich each engagement.

Multiple case studies will also be discussed during the webcast that focus on the power of segmentation and innovations around cognitive computing. Speakers include Liz Miller, Senior Vice President of Marketing for the CMO Council; Jody Sarno, Dedicated Client Partner, Communications Industry for IBM; Chris Crayner, Chief Digital Officer for NBC Universal Parks and Resorts; and Gayle Bock, Director of Customer Engagement for T-Mobile.

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Orchestrating Optimal Interactions: Establishing and Implementing a Customer Data Platform to Get Moving Forward

Most organizations are unable to deliver their brand promise in a consistent manner. Many marketers strive—but struggle—to present high contextual relevance across all channels and touchpoints that span everything from marketing to sales and service. Fragmented engagement systems create data silos that make it difficult to leverage all data sources in real-time to deliver the hyper-personalized experiences that customers expect today.

Solving this problem requires a customer data platform that provides key foundational elements, including:
1. A unified view of customers that is continually updated over time
2. The ability to leverage this unified view in combination with in-line analytics to intelligently orchestrate interactions in real time across all channels and touchpoints.

Join the CMO Council, in partnership with RedPoint, for a one-hour, interactive webcast featuring an expert panel of experience and data experts, including special guest Brandon Purcell, Senior Analyst–Customer Insights Professionals from Forrester Research. Through the course of this webcast, senior marketers will hear how unifying and activating data through a customer data platform enables organizations to better engage with consumers/customers while optimizing marketing campaign performance, building brand affinity and increasing customer lifetime valuation.

There is little doubt that marketers have embraced the need for a connected and cohesive customer experience. But while the new customer experience, especially the digital experience, has changed the way most organizations reach and engage with their customers, not all marketers are overjoyed with their current results. In a recent study conducted by the CMO Council and IBM, 38 percent of senior marketers admitted that the new engagement strategies in place have yielded mixed results, with some campaigns yielding expected results while others have not hit the mark.

Similar to results being spotty at best, marketers also admit that their goals for delivering a truly connected customer experience have also fallen short as only 6 percent say they have completely connected physical and digital experiences with all touchpoints, connecting and informing the next relevant and valued journey for the customer. In fact 42 percent of respondents indicated that their primary goal for the year ahead was to better connect and integrate loosely tied campaigns into a stronger, more cohesive experience that can actually drive engagement across the customer’s lifecycle with their brand.

So with that goal in mind, what needs to actually happen to deliver real customer experience success in 2017?

Architecting today’s customer journey is a top priority for senior marketing leaders, who must guide the customer through the path to purchase and craft experiences across a multitude of channels and devices, all while keeping sight of the ultimate goal: guiding a customer through to conversion. But there is a channel that often goes unrecognized and unsupported in this new digital age: the phone call.

According to a recent BIA/Kelsey report, “call commerce” is a $1 trillion influence engine as analysts estimate that click to call influences some $1 trillion in U.S. consumer spending. The firm went on to project that some “169 billion mobile calls to businesses (will be made) by 2020, driven by smartphone penetration, high commercial intent and the natural handoff between mobile engagement and phone calls.”

The digital experience has brought rise to an influential channel of profit in the phone call that must not be overlooked. As customer satisfaction is measured in quick clicks and frictionless engagements, tools like the Google call button have made it even easier for brands to actively connect digital experiences to profitable inbound calls. This call commerce demands a new set of strategies, campaigns and executions, in addition to new measures and metrics to better track these online to offline conversations.

Year over year, new strategies and plans are developed in an effort to boost the bottom line, ramp up customer engagement and establish profitable competitive advantages that elevate strategies to proven industry best practices. But in reality, even the best-laid plans get sidetracked. They are adopted only in part, stalled by organizational silos or tabled because of budget concerns. When implemented, results can be less than hoped for or forecasted—customers react differently…or not at all.

As we head into the second half of the year, the CMO Council, in partnership with Vindicia, will host a one-hour, interactive webcast to discuss the new opportunities in business models, digital engagements and experiences, including subscription services and recurring payments. We will also be discussing how leading brands, led by fearless marketers, have pushed through issues of complex processes and customer journeys rife with gates, stops and requirements and instead taken the path that feels counter-intuitive yet delivers a frictionless experience for the customer.

Among the questions and topics to be discussed in this hour are:

•Where and how are we unintentionally stopping our customers from engaging, transacting and lengthening their lifetime relationships with our brands?
•What are industry disruptors doing to change the experience and make waves, and how can we apply that same thinking to our businesses today?
•Are we so focused on creating processes and experiences that we are actually making it harder for customers to be loyal?
•New ideas and thinking around monetizing experiences and turning content into opportunity

Winning hearts and minds is a continuing challenge for marketers seeking to connect with consumers on an emotional, cultural or behavioral level. Whether you run marketing for a distinguished, dynamic or developing brand, there is always a need to continually search for ways to stay relevant, real and rewarding for customers.

Drawing on best practices and perspectives from the CMO Council’s latest report, titled “Building Brands That Attract and Engage Fans,” this upcoming webinar will feature both brand leaders and domain experts.

Topics to be explored include:

-The roots of brand attraction and cognitive connection
-How to survive and prosper amid market diversity and change
-The intersection of cultural and behavioral economics
-The essential ingredients for authenticity and credibility
-Fresh thinking on new ways to invigorate and magnetize brands 

Webinar participants will include Liz Miller, SVP Marketing from CMO Council, Jennifer Grabenstetter, Executive Director of Global Communications- Product Care at Sealed Air and author John McGarr, President of Fresh Squeezed Ideas.

In today’s expanding marketing landscape—not to mention today’s increasingly complex matrix known as the customer journey—the chief marketing officer is faced with sheer and unadulterated chaos. From the multiplying channels that our customers are defining as their most valued to the massive amounts of customer data and intelligence flooding (i.e., clogging) our analytics and intelligence systems, CMOs must wrangle and tame the complexity in order to make better decisions faster and have true visibility and transparency into performance, outcomes and value to the business.

Unfortunately, the old standards of marketing operations no longer apply, and new approaches, alignments and agility must be included. To delve into the issues of chaos, operations and the mandates to make bold business decisions, the CMO Council, in partnership with Aprimo, will host a one-hour interactive webcast to discuss the complexities and opportunities of modern marketing management. Among the topics to be discussed are:

•How to deliver marketing results at scale with total accountability and transparency in operations
•Best practices to create order from chaos, bringing actionable insights from marketing programs to enhance results and prove ROI

Joining the CMO Council for this best-practice dialogue will be brand leaders who are transforming the chaos across the organization, as well as marketing operations experts who will share examples of where and how transformation can help tame the chaos and turn it into a profitable process.

In today’s omnichannel world, consumers engaging with digital marketing convert in four ways: online via a website or mobile app, in person, and via a phone call. This last conversion—the phone call—can be the source of one of the most costly mistakes made by marketing teams: not understanding how digital channels, campaigns, ads and website content drive customer calls.

Smartphones have fundamentally changed the way consumers engage with businesses online. Instead of filling out web forms, consumers are picking up the phone to call. According to recent CMO Council research, 45 percent of marketers agree that while their customers primarily research purchases online, they still want to call at different moments throughout the customer journey.

So why are call conversions often left out of digital performance metrics? Are we missing the opportunity to connect our customers’ digital journey to the phone calls they want to make? What data does the organization need to capture in order to allocate budget to the digital channels, ads and web content that drive customers to the most successful outcomes?

To discuss these issues and more, the CMO Council, in partnership with DialogTech, will host a one-hour, interactive webcast focused on the new measures, metrics and fundamental connections required to fully optimize the customer journey. The webcast will include real-world case studies and examples of how savvy digital marketing leaders are connecting online and mobile experiences directly to calls and conversions that drive the bottom line.

How do consumer brands stay relevant, authentic and differentiated in a rapidly evolving and culturally complex global market? With 195 countries and 6,500 languages around the world, the challenge is daunting as brands seek new methods and motivators to connect and engage with audiences in social media, experiential and advertising channels.

John McGarr, author of Reincarnation and President of Fresh Squeezed Ideas, suggests that the most successful brands today have learned that building these
strong bonds with current and future consumers requires:

• Developing a deep understanding of those they want to connect with
• Having a clear brand purpose
• Creating a brand engagement model that is based on attraction

So where do brands need to start in order to begin reaching a better understanding of their customers? And how could deeper understanding impact how and where brands engage?

To explore how marketers can create and optimize contextual, authentic engagements with consumers, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council will be hosting a live webinar, in partnership with Fresh Squeezed Ideas. During this interactive, hour-long session, we will be delving into the key questions that marketers need to be asking as they strive to better connect with and engage audiences across a multitude of channels.

Some of the topics to be explored during the live webinar include:

• How marketers are managing the cultural context of their brands
• The cultural forces that influence brand perception
• How marketers are tracking brand resonance and relevance
• What is missing from what brands know about their customers

The shift to digital experience has forever changed the marketing landscape, heightening the need for new expertise, new campaigns, new content and new data-rich repositories for marketers to gain intelligence and insight about their customers. According to a new study from the CMO Council in partnership with IBM, this new business environment has altered content strategies, demanding new forms and formats of engagement, has made the customer journey more complex as brands must manage how and where customers are actively choosing to engage, and has turned customer engagement into a real-time, 24/7 opportunity.

However, according to 43 percent of senior marketing respondents, this new era of digital transformation has also revealed cracks in the very systems and processes across the organization…cracks and gaps that make it more difficult than ever to centralize and aggregate data and intelligence across the entire organization.

These gaps are doing more than challenging how brands are engaging today—they are putting the future at risk as far too many marketers feel they have yet to master “simple” marketing analytics, making them feel as if gaining business traction through new technologies like cognitive computing is a far off dream. But excitement for these innovations is growing. More than one in four marketers said that they are excited about the possibilities that advancements like cognitive computing hold for the future. So the real challenge will be readying organizations for a future that is here today.

Join the CMO Council and experts from IBM as we delve into the findings of this most recent study and share thoughts and perspectives on how these new shifts and challenges are fundamentally changing where and how marketers must address the holistic customer experience. The interactive roundtable will invite questions and commentary for the live webcast audience, along with active debate and discussion among the expert panel for the webcast.

According to a CMO Council study, “Closing the Gap: Understanding the Sales and Marketing Alignment Imperative,” some 46 percent of sales and marketing executives felt that in order to maximize sales across the organization, the level of action on opportunities needed to be boosted, and the speed to action needed to be accelerated.

Despite this clear call to work smarter and faster, sales productivity improvements have been slow to materialize. According to CSO Insights, only 33 percent of a sales representative’s time is spent actively selling. Not only is sales struggling to push away the inefficiencies to build those critical relationships, but it can also be hard to actually get sales teams up and running. According to Accenture, 42.5 percent of sales reps take 10 months or longer to become productive enough to contribute to company goals.

So where and how can businesses empower the front line while sparking profitability through accelerated sales productivity? Are there new calls to action that sales leaders can respond to in an effort to streamline inefficient processes, eliminate waste and remove friction from sales engagement? How are smart organizations growing at scale while remaining compliant and error-free in their engagements with customers and prospects?

These are just some of the issues that the CMO Council, in partnership with Oracle, will explore in a one-hour, interactive webcast focused on productivity, profitability and opportunities to foster revenue. Joining the discussion will be experts and market leaders in sales and operational effectiveness to share where and how they are maximizing profitability while empowering sales teams and resources to work in a more nimble, agile and lucrative environment.

According to a study from the Content Marketing Institute, 65 percent of B2B marketers in the manufacturing industry believe that producing engaging content is their top challenge specific to maximizing the impact and efficacy of their content marketing initiatives. In this same study, B2B marketers revealed that, on average, they are leveraging some 13 different content marketing tactics across six social media channels and an average of three paid media resources.

This punctuates the increasingly complex web of engagement channels that, woven together, craft today’s customer experience. It also sheds light on a critical issue: the mass of content being produced might not be the most impactful or effective, thus missing the intended target and diminishing the return on content investment.

How are marketers confronting these issues of meshing content marketing and customer experience strategies across a growing digital landscape? In an age when customers expect the world to be available to them in perfect local context, how are marketers responding with highly relevant, contextual, impactful, content-rich experiences, regardless of channel or location? What silos need to be broken down in order to realize real ROI from both content and experiences? As the digital world enables rapid globalization, how have customer expectations for intense localization made content and engagement strategies even more rewarding?

According to IBM research, fully engaged customers spend three times more and are twice as likely to recommend your company. Yet time and time again, customers are being met with experiences that are not meeting their needs. Today’s buyers expect the right content to fall into place at just the right time, but only 21 percent say the marketing messages they receive are “usually relevant.” These heightened expectations—and the heightened reward from the new basic expectation of customer experience—present new questions for today’s marketing teams: Are you doing everything you can to provide a superior customer experience that is purpose-built to build loyalty and drive repeat business?

In this webinar, the CMO Council will be joined by Rosie Judd, the Georgia Aquarium’s Digital Media Manager, as she shares the underlying strategy for one of the biggest public aquariums in the world, in addition to the incremental steps taken that directly led to increased engagement. We will also be joined by Keith Meade, Senior Account Director for IBM, who will share real-world success stories that will inspire ideas for enhancing the buyer experience before and after key customer interactions.

Some of the topics covered in this interactive event will include:
• New approaches to capturing and leveraging data to better drive engagement
• Building a lifecycle marketing strategy that enhances every touchpoint and thinks beyond a campaign
• Getting back to the basics of relationship building, including setting up welcome and post-transaction experiences that turn buyers into relationships
• Measuring beyond opens and clicks, but making a splash with the business through loyal, engaged advocates

There is little doubt that marketers have made a commitment to customer experience—from developing roadmaps to an uncompromising customer journey to the development of data-rich personalized engagements. But what is next? Has customer experience become too buzzed about? Are we really re-thinking customer experience strategies, or are we just applying new buzzwords?

How we think about customer experience must evolve. Without this continuous evolution, transformation becomes impossible. To debate and discuss the big question of what’s next, the CMO Council has invited three marketers to join an interactive roundtable discussion that will focus on everything from transformation to the next conversation around experiences and expectations. Join us for this hour-long conversation, where live viewers will be able to ask questions and provide their own insights and thinking and where we will take on issues around media, lifecycle and insights.

Some of the early questions being asked of the panel will include:

•How has the landscape changed, and how are customers valuing and weighing new points of engagement?
•Where have we gone wrong with CRM and campaign management? Are we just automating reactions, or are we building relationships?
•What are the new points of insight and customer voice that need to be incorporated into our strategies? Has our quest for data moved us farther away from the real voice of the customer?

The 360-degree view of your customer has become something of a marketing unicorn—that thing you know is worth chasing for better customer engagement, retention and acquisition but feels impossible to find in today’s climate of slow corporate change and legacy infrastructures. In the past, we could afford to put off the hunt, saying that perfection was costly and that sales goals don’t wait for magical creatures. In today’s age of the customer, the opportunity to place corporate before customer or product before personalization is a thing of the past.

As the CMO Council continues the ongoing dialogue around customer engagement and the search for the single point of customer truth, we invite you to join us for a one-hour interactive webcast, where peers will gather to debate and discuss:

• Transitioning the conversation from if we can build a better 360-degree customer view, to how we start the journey and begin organizing the construct
• The role played by new technologies and channels, including a case study on how interactive personalized videos are shaping more impactful engagements

We will be joined by Forbes Insights writer and researcher, Lynda Brendish, along with Pitney Bowes Unicorn Catchers and Customer Engagement Leaders Liz Roche and Kristin Rahn, who will be sharing primary research and insights from the Forbes Insights report, “Engagement in the Age of the Customer.”

There is no single silver bullet to drive consistent customer engagement, but the strategies and technologies discussed in the webcast will set the stage for greater marketing success and will provide a glimpse of that magical unicorn. Thanks to our partners at Pitney Bowes, attendees will also receive a complimentary copy of the Forbes Insights report.