CMO: Roles, Responsibilities, Pain Points & More

Business sustainability is one of the key essentials owners aspire for attaining while discussing the project requirements with the development team. However, what if your business, even after having the best products and problem-solving services, does not witness the horde of customers? That would be terrifying and a dreadful nightmare for any business leader. This is why marketing is important. Marketing is obviously an effective way of engaging customers with your brand and how you market your business apparently determines if the enterprise will be successful or not. 

Once you appraise your brand and its expertise to your potential customer, it will help to understand the customer preference concerning the brand as well as how likely they are taking interest in the same. It sometimes gets impossible for enterprises to look into every aspect of planning, developing, and executing the organization’s marketing initiatives therefore, they hire a dedicated person commonly known as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).

Marketing leaders hold accountability for their company’s growth and ROI more than ever and during this continuously evolving marketing space, CMO needs to navigate through various challenges sprouting up in the ecosystem. Along with the growing demands of marketing in business, there are some considerable and top pain-points of CMO organizations often overlook. Besides being responsible for the marketing initiatives of the company, a successful CMO is driven by effective team leadership, adeptness with data, and a bunch of traditional skills.

In this article, we will discover types of CMOs roles, CMO pain-points, and focus areas of CMO along with many other attributes.

What Is A CMO?

One of the Forbes articles describes CMO as the most dangerous title around. Managing a company’s marketing plan is definitely not an easy feat and this is what lurks the dangers of the business world. While many people think that CMO is the manager of all marketing dynamism, CMO’s role makes him act more than just a marketing guru. An organizational definition of CMO is – An executive responsible for activities in an enterprise that have to do with creating, communicating, and delivering values to the customers, clients, or business partners. The primary objective of any CMO is to facilitate growth and increase sales of a company and for that CMOs are involved in developing a comprehensive marketing plan that will promote brand recognition and help the organization gain a competitive advantage. 

What Does A Chief Marketing Officer Do?

Before jumping headfirst to knowing the top pain points of CMO, let’s gain a sufficient understanding of the types of CMO roles and what responsibilities he/ she is accountable for. Each company has its own set of qualifying processes that they put in while selecting the perfect CMO for their company. Since CMO is a person who oversees the strategies for business transformation and works with others in the organization to roll out marketing ideas, he is also primarily responsible for measuring how everyone who is related to the company perceives everything which ultimately concludes to raising awareness to increase business. 

The responsibilities of CMO have expanded even further in complexity to include sustainable growth of an enterprise. So all those who are pondering how does today’s CMO adapt to their evolving role, they actually pay heed to advanced marketing innovation. Wondering what is the role of CMO? Here I have enumerated the most important duties and responsibilities that additionally describe tech and CMOs working process for a company. 

• Set company’s marketing goals and objectives.
• Contribute to the overall growth of the enterprise.
• Review and manage content marketing strategy.
• Work with sales and development along with customer success teams.
• Determine KPIs for the marketing department.
• Plan, implement and manage marketing strategy.
• Keep the marketing budget in check.
• Track KPIs on a regular basis and present reports.
• Create and present the annual marketing plan and strategy.
• Build an extremely skilled team of marketing professionals.
• Create a solid network of strategic partnerships.

Besides there are plenty of other roles and responsibilities Chief Marketing Officer involves himself/ herself into which is rendered in the given image. On the other hand, The CMO makes sure the transmission of information is consistent across the entire organization, so whether interacting with the brand online, in print, or on broadcast media, the same messages get communicated and in an effective manner.

What Are the Things CMO Pays Extra Attention To?

CMO makes an important contribution to the strategy development for a business. Although, CMO is also responsible for bringing his/ her specialist knowledge to other board members such as CFO, COO, CEO who have to make strategic decisions in an increasingly complex business environment. In order to yield the possible results for marketing initiatives in the company, the Chief Marketing Officer takes notice of some pressing topics related to trends, insights, and intelligence. Some of the most crucial topics for CMOs are represented in a graphical form.

7 Top Pain-Points of CMO That Gets Challenging to Get Grips With

In a world where consumers are overwhelmed with so much content and information that eventually leaves them in quandary, how do you think a brand can lead its name and thrive? An organization needs an A-level marketing leadership to thrive in this competitive ecosystem. A company needs to make all the marketing initiatives and strategies keeping customers in mind and that’s the main reason why CMO are onboarded. However, in the majority of cases, the rendering of the responsibilities for an organization appears to be unclear and challenging. CMO reports directly to the COO and CEO of the company and many times come across a unique situation to identify the distinct issues. Some major CMO pain points are discussed below.

Handling Market Uncertainties

Either because of inflation, a vicious pandemic, or any other reason, the market situation is never certain which leads business owners to panic in near future, majorly the CMO of the company. While it is evident to be shell-shocked in such a situation, it ultimately does not bring any solution to the current standards. Nonetheless, cutting through the noise is always a solution in which CMOs too have to act realistically. During the situation of uncertainty, one of the top challenges faced by CMOs is to adapt to a new ecosystem and plan for the future keeping the opportunity in hand

Maintaining the Customer Experience

Customer experience is a top priority to businesses for the next five years and beyond. It has been noticed that the companies that focus on customer experience reduce churn and increase revenues. But do you know what is more back-breaking than creating strategies, planning, and implementing the customer experience? It is to sustain the CX for a longer period and this is where most CMOs fall into the pit. Enhancing and maintaining a good customer experience for a brand is one of the focus areas of CMOs at present (Read – How To Improve Customer Experience In COVID Era). However, once the CMOs understand the behavior, buying pattern, and the other models, the journey becomes easy.

Leveraging New Technologies in Organizations

One of the top pain points of CMO to tackle is deciding technologies to embrace in the business. Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) has a pivotal role to play in the digital transformation of an enterprise. With the emergence of new technologies every day, deciding which one is suitable to smoothen the business function could be contesting for the CMOs. While the CTO shoulders the common technological-related ideas and decisions for the company, CMO is the one who is accountable for making changes. In order to drive the right technology in the business space, the CMOs should need to pay attention to customer management. A solid understanding of customer’s expectations can help to settle upon a decision of deploying an appropriate technology.

Managing Organizational Change

In this rapidly evolving and advancing world, businesses keep changing their dynamics and models in order to adapt to every touchpoint. When it comes to clearly define the changes and align the same to the business goals, the organization’s CMO finds himself in a concerning state in which he needs to act carefully, majorly with tech and CMOs working process in lieu of organizational change. He first needs to articulate the changes and conduct a critical review against organizational objectives and performance goals that ultimately ensures the changes business needs at present.

Measuring Marketing Initiatives Against Meaningful KPIs

Do you know how esteemed companies measure success? They verify their marketing initiatives taken against KPIs. While generally, CMOs are responsible for analyzing the marketing initiatives and measuring engagement, sometimes the other market leaders also contribute to the trend. In the current business trend, brand-building without accountability is no branding at all. One of the major concerns and focus areas of CMO is to identify the marketing initiatives that stand against meaningful KPIs. Keeping track of marketing efforts becomes important for companies in order to espouse the importance of what they do. 

Controlling Privacy & Security Regulations

A business collects a variety of information from its customers from personal to some conformational data. Since data security is an important aspect of running a business successfully and assuring your customers that their data is secured with them, for CMO, this is one of the tasks that need wide attention. The CMO of an organization considers implementing a data privacy principle so that they can fiercely deal with data protection requirements as well as reduce the number of data breaches. Nowadays, there are plenty of tools used by CMOs with the help of which they can ensure tough security for the data.

Delivering Personalization to Users

If you think that maintaining customer loyalty and providing them exceptional experience is an easy job to pull off, you are living in a distant dream world. Ask the CMO how difficult it is. Ever since the term customer experience has been introduced to the business, the CMO’s job is getting tougher in delivering personalization to the users and maintaining a spectrum. It is believed that providing thoughtful and attentive customer service can give your business a competitive edge in today’s crowded marketplace. Among the top pain points of CMOs to counter with, this one still stays significant.

Till now you might have come to the terms that being CMO and managing the marketing initiatives for a company is not an easy job. It requires decisiveness, accuracy, and the capability to abide by the directives. Though rounding the scope of marketing is difficult for CMO, there are tools that are proving to be a sigh of relief for them. But how CMOs are managing the work culture via tools and technologies? Let’s find out real quick.

Top Five Tools & Technologies Every CMO Should Be Using

Gone are the days when marketers used to be picky while arranging a PC or a desk for themselves. The digital era has brought myriads of transformation and a host of new tools that CMOs can use and sort the marketing initiatives of the company. However, the biggest challenge with the tools is to integrate them into the team’s workflow. 

But CMOs do have the strategy to come out of such hurdles. Now, you might be thinking how is technology helping CMOs carrying out different marketing strategies for enterprise? The interactive and latest digital marketing tools are establishing relationships between the company and the customer automating many functions for CMOs. These operations are resulting in easing down the top pain points of CMOs and making marketing function work easier. Let’s have a look at the five best marketing tools for CMOs.

Digital Asset Management System

Digital asset management (DAM) is a system that stores, shares and organizes digital assets such as videos, music, photos, documents, and other media in a central location. DAM makes all the storage with proper synchronization and is becoming one of the integral tools used by CMO to carry out the asset management for the enterprise effortlessly. Apart from organizing and storing digital assets, DAM tools are responsible for managing permissions through extensive copyright functionality as well as automating watermarking for images.

Google Analytics

You might be wondering how Google Analytics being an analytical tool can be lessening down the top pain points of CMOs. Well, Google Analytics does more than just keeping a closer on the customer behavior towards a product. It, in fact, gives a holistic perspective of data-driven marketing. CMOs use Google Analytics to ensure the visitor data and identify what they are doing on the website. In general, Google Analytics is used to track and understand your customer’s behavior, user experience, along with device functionality, and more.

Moz

Moz is a tool that is used to carry out SEO plans and campaigns. Since SEO is an essential part of any business, the tools like Moz can be proven to be a boon for CMOs. Moz eludes all the top challenges faced by CMOs. With advanced features like audience analysis, crawling/ auditing, and site ranking, Moz is a package to the CMOs helping them to decide with the best SEO practices keeping the company’s objective in mind. Starting an SEO + marketing process can be overwhelming for a company’s CMO, however, Moz makes it an easy feat by providing multiple SEO insights.

Marketing Automation Software

Marketing automation software is often compared with CRM tools due to shared functionality. However, they both are way different than each other (Read – Why CRM App Development- The Need of the Hour). With so many different marketing automation tools on the market today such as Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, Pardot, etc., it’s important to have an understanding of what they offer as well as how they differentiate themselves from one another. This is where the role of CMO becomes essential. The focus area of CMO is to look into the right integration and check a lot of right boxes before settling upon one tool.

Dreamdata.io

When it comes to monitoring the overall business marketing strategy, a CMO needs to take care of all the business purposes to the core. Dreamdata tool strengthens the CMO’s efforts profoundly. Dreamdata is a world-class B2B revenue attribution platform that simply takes multiple analyses and processes the revenue insights for the business. Moreover, Dreamdata.io brushes up all revenue data to present a transparent and usable analysis of the elements generating B2B revenue. This becomes easy for CMO to conduct market research.

How Appventurez Can Help Cmos Making Marketing Decisions Effortlessly?

When an enterprise comes to a decision of hiring a suitable Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for their firm, they undergo discussing several aspects such as how does today’s CMO adapt to their evolving role, how CMOs will manage the work culture along with many supportive responsibilities that not only enrich their business in the market but also lessen down the top pain points of CMO in making considerate marketing decisions for the enterprise. Vision and agility are the major traits a company should be looking into while employing CMO. 

Being a leading app development and digital marketing firm, we at Appventurez lay a helping hand to organizations and make them choose a reliable CMO after contemplating various elements from a business perspective. Not just the companies but if a company or chief marketing officer needs suggestions regarding the latest marketing tools that ease down their work and help them with the development and placement of the creative elements in a company.

So if you are an enterprise or a CMO looking for some provocative business and marketing advice, connect with our experts right away.