Skills CMOs Look For When Building a Modern Marketing Organization

Enhancing the skill set of the marketing organization has become a top priority for today's CMOs. Research from The CMO Club and Oracle Marketing Cloud shows that CMOs pay a great deal of attention to specific skills to modernize their operations. 

Customer Insights

This function, which historically has been the center for managing primary and secondary research, is going through significant change. There is an increasing desire among CMOs to use documented customer decision journeys as foundational planning tools for marketing. Customer insights specialists must become adept at mining data, asking consumers new questions and seeing patterns of behavior that inform the development of the CDJ maps. 

Digital Marketing

Engaging customers through websites, mobile apps, digital ads, email and other digital means is no longer simply an “extension” of the broadcast campaign. Creating digital experiences is now a central part of any marketing plan. This has shifted the need for digital marketing expertise to be contained in a center of excellence (COE) to having digital expertise ingrained in the skills portfolios of line marketing and brand managers. The role of the digital COE is shifting from “doing” to “enabling” and focuses on assessing new digital tools and enhancing the skills of the line-marketing teams. 

Social Media

The unprecedented popularity of social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest over the past five years has had a significant impact on the marketing plans of most companies. As with other digital marketing activities mentioned above, there is a need to build the acumen for leveraging social media platforms within the broader marketing organization. 

Integrated Engagement Planning

Creating seamless experiences for customers across all touch points has become an increasing challenge for marketers, as has developing plans that effectively incorporate emerging digital, social and data-driven capabilities. Brand managers at consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies who were well schooled in television-centered advertising need to broaden their expertise, and skill-enhancing initiatives are underway at many of those companies.

Other organizations that have managed their marketing communications activities through siloed departments are beginning to structure new roles for integrated planning. And in smaller marketing organizations the CMO fulfills this responsibility. 

These are just some - SOME of the skills CMOs are looking for. To learn the other skills CMOs look for plus the other 3 key themes that informed the organizational decisions that CMOs make identified in the research, download The CMO Solution Guide For Building A Modern Marketing Organization.