The desire to have an accurate and complete view of an individual customer is not new for marketers. Ever since marketers were first able to access data about a customer, there has been the desire to understand and know more about what makes a customer buy. In a recent CMO Council study titled “Mastering Adaptive Customer Engagements,” only 20 percent of marketers said they had a comprehensive view of customer touchpoints and engagements, and only 7 percent felt they had a single version of customer truth.
So why is it—when marketing admits that the ability to deliver data-led, personalized, customer-centric experiences across channels, in-real-time and at scale is critical to their business—that we are still struggling to obtain this 360-degree view of our customers? Why is a flawed view somehow an acceptable replacement for an accurate and complete understanding of our customer? According to 30 percent of marketers, it is because the data that could create this unified view is trapped in silos across the organization.
Data is also at the core of the challenges marketers are facing specific to streamlining and optimizing marketing technology strategies. When senior marketers were asked what challenges most stymied the adoption of new technologies, 54 percent pointed to issues with integrating increasingly fragmented and complex customer data sources.
While the industry talks about CMOs needing to transform into everything from customer officers and marketing technology officers to revenue officers and beyond, one functional requirement stands at the center of marketing’s ability to truly accelerate in this customer-focused, digital age: silo busting. As the chief silo buster, marketing leadership finds itself needing to work with cross-functional teams, in partnership with IT, to aggregate and manage customer data to create a single vision of the customer that can not only integrate from across the organization, but also be shared with all parts of the company.
This raises a whole new series of requirements and complexities. With a growing marketing technology stack and an increasingly complex data repository, how can marketers start from where they are today? How can data actually accelerate growth, revenue and opportunity? How can marketers actually work to optimize performance by ensuring that complex customer data from new, third-party sources is validated when it enters the organization?
The CMO Council, in partnership with Trillium, hosted an interactive, one-hour webcast to discuss the key challenges and concerns marketers are facing when it comes to silo busting. Through conversations with brand experts, we explored how marketing can accelerate their strategies through more effective and efficient engagements, campaigns and operations while also learning more about their customers and building customer loyalty.
Speakers:
- Liz Miller, SVP Marketing, CMO Council
- Scott McAllister, SVP of Consumer Digital Marketing + Revenue, Time Inc.
- Denise LaForgia, Product Marketing Manager, Trillium
