How marketing can chart the future of corporate decision-making

In an article written for marketing industry publication Ad Age, Williams outlines several key ways she believes CMOs can help their organisations chart the way forward:

To meet the moment, look to marketing

Business leaders must embrace the digital world or be left behind. In particular, this signifies a sea change for marketers, who must now be driven as much by digital tools and processes as they are by traditional marketing tactics. And while digital marketing technology has promised smooth sailing, the reality has seen rough waters. It’s in this storm that a new paradigm will emerge.

There’s currently no collective understanding of what a digital experience platform is and how best to leverage it. This has created a widening rift between what business leaders and users expect and what teams can accomplish. 

Without science-led systems to guide teams forward, new value creation remains out of reach, and organisations struggle to think bigger, but without insights enabled by quick iteration and easy experimentation. Navigating the unprecedented complexity of this digital reality requires marketers to be at the forefront of innovation.

Digital defines the moment

Traversing disjointed tech stacks and dealing with unorganised data can feel like navigating the open ocean without a compass. To be a marketer today entails experiencing and embracing tremendous change. The future of work will undoubtedly thrive on optimised insights drawn from the limitless digital potential that defines the present moment.

The rise of digital has accelerated changes in customer expectations – every time customer demand shifts, it impacts the way marketers must reach them. Mobile technology, for example, has created a seemingly infinite number of customer touchpoints. The face of a brand no longer belongs to a customer service representative or a static web page that’s essentially a brochure on a desktop computer.

Future-facing digital experiences require meaningful personalisation, community, interactivity, immediacy and the ability to look beyond the bottom line to cultivate a positive social impact. Marketers need purpose-built tools and processes, not hand-me-downs from developers and manufacturers.

Where marketers lead, the business will follow

Without a great marketer experience, there is no great customer experience. To unlimit what marketing can do, we must unlimit how marketing works. It must be prepared to converge with the only global constant, which is ever-accelerating metamorphosis.

Read the full article here.