The Modern CMO's Guide to Mapping Digital Strategy to Outcomes.
Into the Wild The Modern CMO’s Guide to Mapping Digital Strategy to Outcomes
A pragmatic approach to unlocking customer insight and structuring an agile marketing organization.
Table of Contents
Exploring the New Landscape 04
The Digital Navigator: A New Breed of Marketer 05
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Preparing for the Journey: A Proven Framework to Lead Cross-Functional Teams and Unlock Customer Insight
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Get Help Navigating Marketing Transformation
Exploring the New Landscape
CMOs are in uncharted territory. Cardinal directions have shifted, leaving many CMOs searching for a way to navigate to the right path. Marketers are uncovering new priorities and are unsure if they have the right tools to succeed.
How does this change look?
As we anticipate the future of digital strategy, customer experience (CX) is at the forefront. Unfortunately for CMOs, they have a data problem, and it’s a big one.
The modern consumer demands an experience tailored to their needs. While 81% of companies expect to be competing mostly or entirely based on CX 1 , only 4% currently personalize information throughout the CX 2 . To truly understand the experience that consumers crave, CMOs need a consistent view of customers across systems. The challenge is that much of the data needed to position their brand strategically sits in disparate silos, resulting in discrepancies and an inability to execute and measure success consistently. But dawn is coming. The rise in cloud migrations coupled with the skills from a new breed of marketer present CMOs with an opportunity to simplify data access, reinvent how they deliver strategic value, and improve the customer experience. Now is the right time to address the data problem and unlock customer insights. By embedding more IT capabilities within their team and providing input in cloud-driven initiatives, CMOs will navigate these dynamics and achieve real results. This guide will help CMOs explore the new marketing landscape, discover the skills needed to succeed, as well as a framework for navigating towards creating a more agile and outcomes-based digital strategy that’s customizable to your organization and will take you into the future.
Pack your bags; it’s time to explore.
Ryan Decker Director of Digital and User Experience, Concord
Eric Carr Chief Delivery O icer, Concord
Ivaylo Guenov Chief Technology O icer, Concord
Into the Wild: The Modern CMO’s Guide to Mapping Digital Strategy to Outcomes
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The Digital Navigator: A New Breed of Marketer
To plot a successful course towards the future of digital strategy, the modern CMO needs to embed more IT competencies within their team. And to do that, you need to straddle marketing and IT—emphasizing this is lacking or missing altogether today. Enter the Digital Navigator.
Think of the Digital Navigator as your compass.
The most significant benefit is their ability to get the marketing team closer to customers, align CX across platforms and unlock insights from data to make better decisions.
To achieve success, the Digital Navigator delivers two key capabilities that marketing needs:
BRING CROSS FUNCTIONAL TEAMS TOGETHER TO SPEED UP PROGRESS AND SUCCESS
By providing a balanced perspective between IT and marketing, the Digital Navigator cuts through functional jargon to decipher pros and cons and facilitate faster decision-making and troubleshooting. They understand and articulate trade-o s at every stage in the journey. The Digital Navigator isn’t a classically trained digital marketer. They are a hybrid of IT, combining development knowledge with marketing. They have a foothold in understanding what it takes to create meaningful, di erentiated, and intuitive experiences across the brand’s various touchpoints, including customer service, product development, sales, employee portals, and so on. And they are uniquely qualified to communicate in a way that both marketing and IT specialists understand.
Into the Wild: The Modern CMO’s Guide to Mapping Digital Strategy to Outcomes
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It’s no secret; the ability to bring cross-functional delivery teams together is increasingly important. With more organizations moving toward departments that are structured to deliver end-to-end CX using agile methodologies, a marketing team full of only marketers is no longer. This gap is where Digital Navigators play a critical role—helping CMOs better understand agile methodologies and manage a full-scale product delivery team. These cross-functional marketing teams reach their destination faster because they’re more agile, flexible, and adaptive. When you couple that with easier access to data in the cloud, they can also e iciently test marketing concepts because they’re able to rapidly and cost-e ectively spin them up and down in various environments. Plus, they can continuously optimize their approach.
IDENTIFY THE NECESSARY STEPS TO DELIVER THE VISION SUCCESSFULLY
It’s not enough to map the digital strategy. The secret sauce is combining that with the ability to deliver continuity from strategy to on-the-ground delivery. That’s where marketers achieve outcomes and transformation happens. To get there, the Digital Navigator points out gaps in goals during the strategy stage and identifies a clear path of tangible action items to reach your goal(s) while troubleshooting along the way. Without the Digital Navigator providing continuity between strategy and execution, the delivery team can become disconnected, stalling progress or stopping altogether.
Into the Wild: The Modern CMO’s Guide to Mapping Digital Strategy to Outcomes
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The Digital Navigator can guide large initiatives or single projects end-to-end, including:
• Developing a digital strategy roadmap to create an executable plan • Mapping IT and marketing business capabilities to align strategy across the organization • Connecting marketing systems through data integration to access insights • Enhancing user experience and improving customer satisfaction through website strategy and redesign • Increasing engagement by improving employee and member portal UX • Designing and leading the development of mobile applications to create real-time o ers and insights
So, what’s the framework you need to leverage this new skill today?
Into the Wild: The Modern CMO’s Guide to Mapping Digital Strategy to Outcomes
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Preparing for the Journey: A Proven Framework to Lead Cross-Functional Teams and Unlock Customer Insight Align, define, deliver —this is a pragmatic framework we developed to guide every aspect of our internal initiatives. We apply this approach to access data, close the digital strategy gap, and improve outcomes. It works well with agile methodologies and you can tailor the framework to fit your team’s unique needs and capabilities. Under the framework, a cross-functional team takes advantage of data to engineer a solution that gets at the right information at the right times. Once you turn data into information, you can inform your CX strategy. By gaining alignment with your delivery team and having a crisp definition of the end goal, the path to understanding customers and delivering outcomes becomes clearer. Success looks like an agile-delivery methodology provided e iciently and iteratively at the lowest cost and includes providing an experience that the market will reward. Start small with an individual project. Then build to larger-scale programs over time using a proof-of-concept model to test if a strategy works. If you don’t have a cross-functional team that can deliver end-to-end, you have options to get here. You can build the team by hiring directly, borrow a team from your IT department, or buy a temporary team from a third-party to test the idea.
Into the Wild: The Modern CMO’s Guide to Mapping Digital Strategy to Outcomes
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LANDMARK 1: ALIGN: RESEARCH & ANALYSIS
Alignment with a cross-functional delivery team is the first step. To gain alignment, you’ll need to conduct research and analysis with IT and your broader team to determine existing constraints, where the data lives, and what each function needs to achieve success. This is the basis to chart your course. For HealthPartners, as an example, a shift to a more cohesive digital strategy created clarity on priorities. People no longer had to guess what they should be doing in the digital domain, and it produced immediate outcomes. “ We shifted strategies... and ended up accomplishing more in three months than in the previous three years. For example, in a matter of weeks, we were able to stand up video visits across our 3,800 clinician multi-specialty group to provide another option to an in-person experience."
START YOUR JOURNEY HERE Team up with your CIO counterparts to get in front of data migration initiatives. •
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Identify what problems IT is solving and the challenges marketing needs to solve. Identify the critical goals of the application. What does marketing need? What does the user need? Identify who should take part in the on-going conversation from strategy to delivery. Find alignment with IT in building a strategy and processes that balance innovation and stability.
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ASK QUESTIONS LIKE: What updates are taking place as part of our company’s cloud migration? •
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Is the move a literal transfer of the tooling to a server in the cloud versus on-premises? What are the limitations of the data, web services, and CMS platform? Will the migration address technical debt or data issues on the backend that make marketing requests for IT easier?
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What modernization can marketing expect?
– Mark Hansberry Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing O icer at HealthPartners
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What version updates are happening?
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What tools are available in the technology stack?
Into the Wild: The Modern CMO’s Guide to Mapping Digital Strategy to Outcomes
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START YOUR JOURNEY HERE Provide IT with marketing insights to guide any data migration strategies. Steal a page from Amazon’s playbook and draft a two- to six-page “narrative memo” to shape the purpose. •
LANDMARK 2: DEFINE: COLLABORATIVE DESIGN
Defining your strategy is the second step in the framework. Work collaboratively with the cross-functional team to identify what you’re looking to achieve and to solve problems as you go. Write a plan for what you’re trying to build first before investing in the process. A clear plan and end goal will almost guarantee success. It might sound simple, but it’s a step that is often overlooked. Tammylynne Jonas, a former Vice President of IT at Kohl’s, credits much of the success with the brand’s digital wallet, Apple Pay, and loyalty program to both projects starting with a crisp idea of what the company needed to do. Having a well-defined roadmap allowed the team to approach the project iteratively first, paving the way to expand, and the leadership team was able to get quick buy-in because the problem was easy to explain.”
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Set and describe clear goals and a vision for how you want the future state to look. Go in-depth. Clearly articulate the “what” and the “why” of what marketing needs to do. Provide a crisp and elaborate description of the business value you want to deliver and the capabilities you want IT to deliver. Be clear about what you would like to build, including how it makes the company money, saves money, or defends the business. Know the answer to the question, “why do you want to do this?” Provide examples (i.e., “use cases” and “stories”). Walk IT through a day in the life of how marketing wants the experience to be. Provide logical steps and a linear progression in explanations—it orients IT to requirements quickly and expedites planning.
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AMAZON’S “NARRATIVE MEMOS” Amazon famously adopted this practice to create a competitive edge with what the company calls “narrative memos,” a six-page narrative that should take days to write. Je Bezos expects his senior leaders to draft the memos and think through their ideas in high-resolution detail. Why? It’s impossible to hide inconsistencies in thoughts when written as a detailed memo, rather than PowerPoint.
– Tammylynne Jonas Global CIO at Self Esteem Brands
Into the Wild: The Modern CMO’s Guide to Mapping Digital Strategy to Outcomes
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LANDMARK 3: DELIVER: ITERATIVE WORKFLOW
Delivery, using an iterative workflow, is the third and final step in the framework. Delivering on the strategy is a simple equation: Did you get what you asked for, and was it on time and within budget? The assessment should be based on metrics, and the outcome should match the strategy. For example, easily demonstrate a better CX by finding something you can measure. Did you receive fewer complaints or calls to customer service? Are more people using the system? Whatever the outcome, it should move the needle.
Matt Gilliss, a former Vice President of User Experience & Design at a well-known health insurance company, was early to adopt digital strategies. Incorporating a cross-functional team using an agile process and aligning, defining, and delivering the framework, the insurance provider achieved member-centric business goals. When we first started working on the member portal, our satisfaction score was in the 40s. With digital navigators’ help, our scores toggled between 79 and low 80s, which is comparable to most retailers. To take healthcare to this level is pretty impressive.”
START YOUR JOURNEY HERE Read The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing by Jim Ewel, a foremost agile marketing expert. •
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Amp up iterative work processes that move away from “big bang” (i.e., waterfall development strategy) marketing releases. Engage a digital navigator to deliver: an agile workshop; an assessment on areas that may benefit from an agile framework; an analysis on how to structure and scale up agile fully; or an initial proof-of-concept.
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Kick o a proof-of-concept project with IT.
– Matt Gilliss Former Vice President of User Experience & Design at a Fortune 500 Health Insurance Company
Into the Wild: The Modern CMO’s Guide to Mapping Digital Strategy to Outcomes
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Get Help Navigating Marketing Transformation Now is the right time to close the digital strategy gap. With cloud-driven initiatives, you have an opportunity to gain access to relevant data faster than ever before. It’s time to prioritize customer insights and apply them to everything from business-level decision-making to incentivizing customers and personalizing the CX. Suppose you have questions or are looking for additional support, like a team to act as a project owner and toggle between marketing and IT. In that case, we’re here to meet you where you are today and help you navigate your way into marketing transformation that drives business transformation.
Mark Hansberry sees embedding more IT skills within marketing as a massive need for CMOs to achieve digital transformation.
It’s more of an opportunity cost than something tangible for most organizations. For HealthPartners, the lost cost of opportunity equates to the potential savings of $70 million in operations. That’s the company’s goal and what we think we can achieve by transforming the business using digital.”
– Mark Hansberry
REFERENCES
1 Gartner: Key findings from the Gartner Customer Experience Survey 2 TCS 2019 CMO Study
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