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FirstRain Buyer Persona

Market Trends: Chief Digital Officer

Jan 2016/in , /by

 This is part of the FirstRain Persona Series.  

Customers are demanding more of a digital experience, and the rise of a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) has soared to fulfill the need.  Providing customers with the most valuable digital experience is a CDO’s primary objective.

In the past, executives with digital oversight roles concentrated on magnifying a company’s online presence and brand.  Today, however, the role of a Chief Digital Officer is truly focused on the customer experience.

The fact of the matter is that buyers are no longer making purchasing decisions, or accessing portals solely from a desktop computer, but rather via mobile platforms, emails, and social media —on the go.  Thus, CDO’s are challenged with meeting the demands of a fast-paced consumer society that is always moving.

Customers access platforms and consume vast amounts of product information via different touch points: cell phones, tablets, emails, internal enterprise platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the web, video streams, vines, Periscope, etc. Today’s digital market demands seamless execution from all these platforms and CDO’s are leading that charge.

Coupled with a strong, robust digital strategy a CDO facilitates the customer experience, but how can that help grow your business?

A deep understanding of market trends and consumer behavior must be leveraged across all customer touch points; from small marketing campaigns, to large scale product launches.  This often involves leaders in business development, and becomes fundamental to helping a business evolve in today’s marketplace.

A recent McKinsey article on “The Transformer in Chief” stresses, “It’s up to the CDO to identify those functions where digital is critical: for example, investing in automation capabilities to rapidly respond to customer interactions, developing sophisticated reporting and analytics capabilities to interpret customer needs, building innovative interfaces to gather customer data (for example, an alternative payment method), and creating mechanisms to deliver content and offers across all relevant channels.”

Chief Digital Officers must identify the customer facing journey, drive customer engagement, and make sure that the dashboard touch points that she decides to implement for her company responds to market demands in real time. They are responsible for putting the tools in place to interpret customer insights with a main strategic goal of responding to customer engagement needs.

Customer intelligence tools such as FirstRain, helps interpret customer behavior via market trends, industry changes, and social media.  Target market analysis of what is trending in relationship to business goals and objectives are crucial for driving a business forward.  After all, the customer is always right, right?

Fundamentally understanding customer needs and how they intersect with revenue goals can make or break a digital strategy, making the role of a Chief Digital Officer pivotal for any industry.  A CDO must demonstrate agility to respond and adapt quickly to customer demands/needs, and are often faced with making bold decisions.

Wired.com asserts, “The CDO will drive the digital functional excellence from strategy to infrastructure and ensure that we have the right competence and capabilities to support and leverage the business from a digital perspective.”

CDO’s are not only the liaison between customer and product but become key partners with CIOs, CMOs, Sales Officers and CFOs.  They communicate the intricacies of market trends, new technology developments and customer behavior to create a digital strategy that is mindful of all these shifting plates, with the end goal to meet revenue objectives.

In today’s hyperactive commerce market, a strong digital strategy is necessary.  If done successfully, a CDO can move their company’s business platform to not only meet the demands of the customer, but also revenue goals of the enterprise.

For further reading from our C-Suite buyer persona series:

CMO-data scientist

Do CMOs need to be data scientists? Not with the right tools

May 2014/in /by

CMOs definitely need to understand how to interpret data, because “data science is all about predicting the future,” as Computerworld Executive Editor Julia King says. The responsibility of choosing and driving strategy based on where the market is headed lies with the CMO, but,if the CMO arms herself and her team with the right tools, she doesn’t need to be a data scientist—and she might not necessarily need one on her team, either.

FirstRain CEO Penny Herscher gives her take on the relationship between marketing and big data on The Economist’s Lean Back blog.

rocket science

Reducing Marketing Rocket Science: Understanding the Buyer’s Journey

Sep 2013/in /by

By Nora Weintraub

 

One of the latest buzzwords for sales and marketing is “the buyer’s journey,” which makes it sound like your customers are going through an epic voyage to purchase your product or service. Without customer intelligence as a backup, it’s difficult to identify the exact steps along a prospect’s path. If your company sells products to other businesses, the journey gets even more convoluted and tangled along the way. Knowing your customers can give you a better understanding of their pain points, how they found your products and what it will take to convince them to make a purchase.

 

If you ask a chief marketing officer about the buyer’s journey, he or she may have a very different opinion than the customers themselves. And because most people rely on Internet searches to find product information, the buyer’s journey usually begins from an online platform. The average CMO only manages to get a 5 percent email click-through rate, meaning most of these executives fail 95 percent of the time when trying to connect with their prospects during the journey, according to a column by Mathew Sweezey in ClickZ. There’s a definite disconnect between many of the best planned marketing campaigns and what customers are actually doing.

 

Buyer’s journey is more direct and has fewer stops than marketers think

 

Yes, it’s true that customers have more ways to reach your sales team and more sources of information on products and services than ever before. But in Sweezey’s research of B2B buyers, he found that the average client only does a few Google searches before making a decision. Although some people start out by asking their peers for recommendations, they will still consult the Internet at some point during their journey.

 

Many marketers know they need to provide different types of content for buyers in varying stages of the voyage, but some may not realize that the majority of customers prefer shorter reading material. Most prefer a length of under five pages. Companies need to understand what types of information are most relevant to their customers based on the stages of the buyer’s journey.

 

Shorter trip doesn’t mean you can get lazy with marketing

 

Although your customers are using the Internet to a higher degree to navigate the road to making a purchase, you need actionable insights to help them along the way. While you may employ a variety of marketing techniques, the end goal is the same: to get to know your clients and form a relationship, Jason Thibeault wrote in an article for Econsultancy. Your organization won’t be able to adequately meet your customers’ needs unless you have a deep understanding of their pain points and create appropriate marketing materials. The Internet has given companies far more ways to market and sell their products, but the basics are the same—personal connections still matter in the digital age.

 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t leverage customer analytics to form a better picture of your client base. Although the basic point of marketing is always the same, knowing where customers are in the buyers’ journey and how they got there is important to build on the relationship. Marketers that take advantage of chances to make personal connections with their prospects may be able to increase the odds of converting the lead into a sale. Even if the Internet has sped up the trip from prospect to customer, people still want to have a conversation.

 

The journey may be essentially the same, but everyone is different and may have different communication preferences. The better you know your customers, the more appropriately you can communicate with them, making the whole sales process easier.

 

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