CMO & CIO: Art + Science = Success | CMO.com.Jake Wengroff Global Director, Corporate Communications Frost & Sullivan

With the C-suite keen to see ROI for every dollar spent, marketing departments are under more pressure than ever–tasked with making sense of a complex media landscape, a range of new devices and endpoints, and shifting, demanding customer buying habits.

The rise of social media, search, and mobile channels has created a fight to the finish for customer attention. As a result, marketers increasingly need to know how to quickly adjust their marketing mix to deliver results. Granted, software and systems are available that promise to not only automate the process, but to also make life easier for marketers while providing that all-elusive ROI. The question is: How are CMOs and their teams supposed to make sense of all that is out there?

Enter the CIO, CTO, and other information technology folks.

Information, Please?
Marketers have been using software and other technology tools for quite some time. Marketing automation, campaign management, and databases have all traveled through agencies and corporate marketing departments. Such programs were used insularly, usually by only select staff members, and rarely needed the assistance of other departments. Social media monitoring and demand generation are perhaps the hottest marketing tools right now, as can be expected.

Such programs primarily focus on execution. However, to demonstrate ROI and measure marketing effectiveness, marketers need insights into buying patterns, audience interactions, and overall customer perceptions and behavior. Such insights are provided by analytics software, which is usually handled by the CIO’s organization and is only recently being adopted by the marketing department.

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