As a Chief Marketing Officer, you have a colossal responsibility. Your decisions directly impact the profitability of the business. Depending on your business vertical, a successful marketing group can propel a business' performance forward in various amplitudes of success. On the other hand, a failing marketing group can literally take the entire business down. So how can you stay on the winning team?
The role of a CMO these days is excruciatingly complex, and the future outlook doesn’t suggest it’s gonna get any easier. The days of just defining a target audience, the brand and messaging, analyzing competition, setting a budget and deciding on the marketing mix are long over.
Today, CMOs are still required to understand and control to the highest levels the ins and outs of offline marketing (e.g. TV, print, radio). TV advertising is still one of the most impactful channels. But I have seen far too many Head Marketers avoid this area like the plague because they either don't know how to tackle it, lack the experience or they don't know how to accurately track its performance.
And then of course, you have the online marketing realm. Each inbound and outbound channel is really a world of its own. Managing all your paid, earned and owned media effectively is like a crazy juggling act.
Lastly, there is the honorable task of translating all of this into a coherent and executable marketing strategy. And it's ALL.ON.YOU.
You Are Running a Marathon - Get Prepared!
If the above "classic" marketing activities would see your job start-to-end, it would be a blessing, but I’m sorry to disappoint you, it’s really not. Take Customer Support for one. Is it a distant, separate entity or an extension of your marketing?
Are you up to date with all the latest Google features and betas?
Keeping up with all the new social platforms popping up like mushrooms after the rain? Each one opens up a new potential competitive edge, allowing for more personal communication or simply allows you to reach your target audience more efficiently.
What about prediction and attribution models, cross-platform marketing, new growth hacking techniques, the next CRM corporate platform, or BI and CMS infrastructures? You want, heck, you MUST be instrumental in making these decisions and more.
This list can just go on forever, but all of these affect your KPIs, the marketing group's efficiency and eventually, the business' success in one way or another.
In times of despair I say, try to seek insights by observing different business verticals. Ones that have similar behavioral characteristics and demands. Found one? See if you can learn anything useful.
Combining two domains that are close to my heart, marketing and food, I decided to take a look at how gourmet chefs operate their restaurants.
So Culinary? Chefs? Really?
What can we learn from these analogous people? Apparently, quite a bit. The resemblance of a CMO's challenges to that of a Chef's is striking.
I call them the Chef.M.O’s.
Observing leading chefs at work, you will find these guys are juggling multiple activities at a fast pace. I am guessing that if I were to ask some of you (and not a marginal few) if you ever dreamed about owning a restaurant of some kind, you would say yes. Well, you may appreciate the difficulty of running an efficient restaurant operation; however, I'm not sure if you really understand how hard it is.
Let’s play “make-believe” for a moment and pretend that we are chefs, about to open the next hottest brasserie in town.
When opening a restaurant, you have to decide on the location and food type. Together, these will define the target customers that will step through the doors. Choosing the restaurant name, design and generating the buzz will be second but still instrumental in attracting your target audience.
Now comes the hard work really; the on-going management of the restaurant. Conventional wisdom suggests chefs are busy concocting the next dish that will dazzle the city. Well, they do spend their time doing that, but not most of it.
Leading chefs split their time mainly between three main responsibilities:
Planning: composing the next menu - secluding himself, the chef is trying to bring out his ingeniousness out in a form of a dish that will knock your socks off and bring you and your friends back.
QA: dishes that come out are regularly inspected - making sure that the flavor, texture and presentation are all balanced, as devised by the master originally.
Operations: The chef makes sure that from the moment dishes are ordered to the time they get to the customer's table, everything is moving on time, professionally and in an efficient manner.
Now if you ask chefs on what they spend their time the most - it’s operations. The chefs I talked to said that in order to have a successful restaurant, the chef needs to be a highly-skilled, a tough manager, and not necessarily a culinary phenomenon. That is the secret sauce!
Where Does This Meet Us Marketers?
Don't Have It? Don't Lose It
Sometimes, because you are standing at the top of the pyramid, it seems like you need to spend a lot of your time inventing that one campaign, that one idea, TV ad or one banner ad creative, that will knock down your competition and win your customers' hearts; having them all running to your website like crazy and buy whatever it is that you are selling them.
Chefs show us that coming up with the next ultra-amazing dish, is not the key issue. It is more about the rhythm of the marketing operations. So, if that one campaign doesn’t hit you over the head, don’t kill yourself over it, force it, or spend a disproportionate amount of time and budget on an agency to invent it for you. If you built the infrastructure to enable in-house creativity to flourish for you and your teams, you will have a steady flow of other great ideas that will keep your brand and performance moving in the right direction.
QA Your Dishes - It's Enlightening and Rewarding
In large-scale operations, appearance may be misleading. Sometimes it seems like everything is working. You invest so many man-hours, in order to produce dozens of promotions. You react to industry changes, you adjust the product, perfect the messaging while keeping the sensitive channels close to you. The usual suspects are PR, the website homepage, the TV ad script, etc. But there is that feeling that the brand messaging is not in control. You aren’t quite sure if every automatic email matches the new creative changes, that your affiliates are using the right banners, that the thousands of dedicated landing pages that receive significant portion of your traffic are aligned with that ingenious messaging you came up with.
Investing time in QA-ing your “dishes”, or so chefs teach us, is no less important than coming up with that ingenious dish. At the end of the day, the idea you came up with, that amazing product twist, needs to meet your customers. The dynamics and rhythm of an online operation is paralleled to creating these dishes, every day in a restaurant. Your campaigns can and will get out of tune very easily if you don't set proper “watchdog” processes and skilled teams in place. You want to ensure quality, consistency and alignment of the message and service are maintained at the highest levels. Otherwise, your customers will start getting medium-quality dishes, and you don’t want that.
Marketing Operations - DIY - No Fear
Last but not least - operations. If anything, chefs teach us we need to invest most of our time and emphasis on maintaining a highly tuned, efficient marketing operation. One which can react quickly to changes. Just as with a restaurant, when the kitchen gets a surge of orders, the chef will insist on getting them all out in a timely manner and in high quality. And so should you. You want your ongoing acquisition, conversion, retention, cross-sale and up-sale campaigns, to run in sync, reacting to competitors' moves, industry changes, seasonality or a PR crisis.
This means you need to be in rolled-up-sleeves mode at all times. As most of us can do the strategy part, "issues" arise when it comes to the details. For example, if your AdWords performance is going nowhere and you don't see results from your team after implementing every leadership trick in the book, then don’t be afraid to personally dive in and look at your SQRs, negative KWs list or whatever it is that you need to do. Challenge your teams. You would be amazed at what you'll discover. In our chef’s analogy, you would find it ridiculous if I told you there is a chef out there who doesn't know how much time it takes to cut a basic salad or doesn’t know where the raw ingredients are bought from and how fresh they are.
Make sure you know the minute details the weekly and monthly plans and steer them fiercely, with no compromises about it. A delay in a campaign's launching due date should be treated in the same severity and urgency as if your website is down. When the marketing teams are in this state of mind, you know you are on the right path.