Why I wrote this
Over eight years in marketing I have watched chief marketing officers in different companies do what look like completely different jobs:
- one buys advertising like a god;
- another runs research;
- a third delivers the largest number of marketing projects (redesigns the website, connects end-to-end analytics, sets up call tracking) and so on.
There are so many directions that it is hard to say what a CMO is actually supposed to do. A few months ago I asked myself that question and could not give a strong answer. Google in Russian did not help either: all I found were opinions.
So I had to look for the answer myself: go through foreign studies and ask respected CMOs for their view. I decided to turn what I found into an article, because nothing like it had existed in the Russian-speaking internet.
What came out: everything laid out step by step. 16 international studies, 12 statistics. Comments from 5 CMOs I asked to weigh in: Asya Chelovan (ex-Tinkoff, Sber), Pavel Astafurov (SkillFactory Group), Margo Kashuba (Owox), Roman Epishin (Playkey), Kirill Babyshkin (SkillFactory). Plus Evgeny Lebedev from Yandex Practicum.
1Apply the “marketer’s common base”
Skip this point if you are a marketer and the basics are clear to you.
The first thing a CMO must have is the common base of a marketer: knowledge and skills, creativity and analytics. Evgeny Lebedev, CMO of Yandex Practicum, put it well:
Digital marketing is an alloy of creativity and numbers, so a director has to be a strong analyst and have developed emotional intelligence to understand the deep insights of the target audience.
— Evgeny Lebedev
Understand the audience
Notice that the paragraph above does not say “have the basic skills of a media buyer.” Marketing is not only about advertising. It is first of all about the market, the audience and the market capacity, and only then about influencing it with advertising.
Know and apply marketing analytics
Today marketers should have analytical skills first and marketing competencies second.
What does this mean in practice? At a minimum, being able to get qualitative and quantitative data, read it correctly and draw conclusions. At a maximum, building reports in Google Analytics and exporting SQL queries into Power BI.
Market assessment, audience analysis and marketing analysis are extremely important and heavily underrated parts of a CMO’s job. Not understanding market conditions, market capacity and development trends means not understanding your place on the market and your direction. You can make brilliant ads and still sell the wrong thing to the wrong people, fail to foresee the loss of your advantage and fail to build a new one in time.
Marketing analysis and working with data should be at the level of basic skills. Data is our eyesight and our navigator in the world of marketing, an advantage you can use while others are still learning.
A CMO’s task is to build a marketing strategy that brings the company the best result over a long period, not just to attract leads.
— Margo Kashuba
Write the unique selling proposition
“USP” (unique selling proposition, sometimes just the offer) is often associated with “how to make a landing page.” In fact the landing page is secondary. What you offer the user comes first, and the work begins with questions (in the classic “5W of marketing” version):
- who is the offer for;
- how many of them are there;
- what do they want;
- what exactly can we offer them;
- what touchpoints exist on the customer journey map;
- what does the person need to hear at each touchpoint;
- what is the funnel;
- what is the decision-making structure;
- what in our USP matters, and to which decision maker.
Understand brand and content marketing
Brand marketing and content marketing are two different things. The first answers “where are we going and what are we saying.” The second answers “how and through which channels.” There is one important overlap: in both cases you manage what people think about you.
You can buy as much advertising as you like, but if there is nowhere for the user to read about you and learn why you do what you do, life will be harder, even if not dramatically so.
That is why you need to know:
- who you are;
- who you were created for;
- how motivated and involved the people you serve are (where your audience sits in the Rossiter-Percy matrix);
- what you want people to know about you;
- through which channels you tell them;
- how often, and so on.
Understand media buying, at least at a high level
The USP is defined, the landing page is built, you are announcing yourself. Now you need as many people as possible to learn about you. If the unit economics of the product allow paid promotion, great:
- reach your audience through targeted ads in social networks or search;
- buy integrations from resources or bloggers;
- launch CPA networks and so on.
If you cannot do it yourself, that is fine. You are a manager, not a media buyer, and you do not have to be able to work in all of it. Perhaps you should master one paid channel; for the rest a good conceptual level is enough.
Of all paid channels, performance advertising deserves the highest priority, because it lets you target any audience in any corner of the world quickly.
Work with the owned channel
Working with the owned channel means working on the retention of the customers marketing brought in. In some companies this is not marketing’s job: sometimes it belongs to the product manager, sometimes to CRM. A CMO should in any case understand how to retain and monetize their base, whatever it is:
- phone numbers;
- email subscribers;
- social network followers and so on.
According to “The Evolved CMO,” a report by Heidrick & Struggles, far from all CMOs consider this the main goal:
Roman Grozykin, ex-PMM at Netology, summed up the question of tools in one sentence:
A CMO does not have to be a specialist in every direction of digital marketing, but should command all the tools at a basic level: understand how they work and what results they can bring.
— Roman Grozykin
2Be a growth driver
The next six roles come from “The 5 Roles of the CMO,” a report by the consulting firm Deloitte. One of its points I split into two.
According to the report, the CMO role today requires qualification not only in marketing but in many other functions. Ultimately the 21st-century CMO should:
- be a growth driver;
- build capabilities;
- be the best expert on their audience;
- bring innovation into the company;
- build the brand.
Let us start with the first Deloitte role: being a growth driver.
A CMO should take on their share of the plan for revenue or profit growth, like the other key players. A 2018 Deloitte survey of CMOs showed that 95% of them consider revenue the main indicator of an organisation’s growth.
Heidrick & Struggles also provides statistics on what a CMO should focus on (rather than on leads and sign-ups, for example):
3Know the market
The second Deloitte role is to build capabilities.
That is the ability to accumulate marketing capabilities: technologies of influence, market insights, growing expertise inside the company.
In general this point can be split in two:
- know the market;
- influence it.
Knowing the market means:
- calculating how many percent it grows in money and in customers;
- identifying who the players are;
- understanding what drives their growth;
- understanding trends, both global ones such as data security and industry ones;
- seeing how the buyer is changing;
- seeing which markets to enter next;
- and knowing your own position in all of this.
This takes marketing research. Every CMO does it differently:
- some look at secondary data (see the article “How to run market research for free in 2020: 35 authoritative sources”);
- some commission paid research;
- some do it in-house;
- some simply play the third Deloitte role and are the best experts on their audience: they know it well and extrapolate research to the whole market;
- and some set up external and internal information flows so that they sit at the centre of the connections.
I wrote about the last one in “20 methods that helped me stay an energizer in the team (and will make you one too).”
And here is HubSpot’s research:
4Influence the market
Only 32% of CMOs said they are ready to affect market share. That is strange: if a CMO does not know their market share, it is hard to make strategic decisions about:
- Whether to increase share, and if so, at whose expense.
- Whether to hold share. When the market is growing and competitors are too aggressive, you can simply hold your share and grow with the market.
- Whether to differentiate or diversify. A CMO should know the difference between these concepts better than anyone.
- Whether to enter new markets. As in the Ansoff matrix: new or old product in new or old markets, or stay where you are.
5Be the best expert on your audience
The third Deloitte role.
It means having “top-level awareness,” as Susan O’Brien, CMO of Just Eat, puts it.
Part of the work of understanding the audience falls to the product manager or product director, part to the CMO. Either one of these roles or both should build customer orientation in the company (literally, be “CX-centric,” where CX is customer experience): know their audiences, measure them and understand which one to go after.
In most cases this is solved organically: the product manager or the marketer brings an idea, and both departments bring it to implementation together.
Let us look at the CX studies by Heidrick & Struggles to see how important this is. 72% of B2C CMOs and 63% of B2B CMOs note that the importance of CX in their company has grown over two years:
And 44% of CMOs are looking for ways to increase their influence on CX even more:
Deloitte also cites research showing that 55% of CMOs somehow lack a proper understanding of their customers.
Being an “audience expert” does not mean being a representative of the audience. To sell a product to entrepreneurs, developers or gamers you do not have to be one of them.
But standing completely apart from the product is not an option either. It is important at least from time to time to walk through the basic scenarios: not to review the customer journey map in Miro, but to go through it as a customer. If you work with B2B or B2G, or complex products for developers, it is important to do literal ethnography: sit next to a representative of the audience and watch them go through every stage.
In many ways a marketer’s work resembles the work of an ethnographic researcher: you talk with representatives of the audience and study what matters to them and in what context they live and use your product.
— Asya Chelovan
6Bring innovation into marketing
The fourth Deloitte role.
A CMO should achieve breakthroughs in marketing through innovation: new technologies, platforms, tools, analytics services, alternative channels.
Most CMOs who play this role in their company single it out as the key growth factor.
However, according to Gartner reports, for several years in a row CMOs have said they are dissatisfied with how analytics is used in their companies and want to make the changes needed to introduce a data-driven or data-informed approach, yet they do not allocate investment to analytics in the coming year.
7Build the brand
The fifth Deloitte role.
I translated this as “build the brand,” while Deloitte says “be the best brand storyteller.”
A CMO should be the architect of the brand and find ways to broadcast its values outward. But this is not an end in itself. The CMO must bring money, and for that there are strategies in which, at a certain stage, the company needs a certain perception of its brand among consumers. According to Deloitte’s research, more than 40% of CMOs do influence the brand.
This point may be hard to grasp. Let us look at examples.
First example of how to build a brand: those who play the fifth Deloitte role should track how their work with the brand affects measurable metrics. For example, how a billboard affects search queries and site visits (Nielsen research):
Directors usually say you have to build a brand. But very often you need to find the golden mean and reduce effort to a minimum: understand where the company is now, write down the priority of brand marketing tasks and match them to resources.
— Kirill Babyshkin
Second example: how (1) and why (2) that very site visit matters for the user’s trusting relationship with the brand. Marketing Week published these statistics:
Third example: how (1) and why (2) to manage the user’s expectations of the brand. Here is the research:
Since “build the brand” is the last point of “The 5 Roles of the CMO,” it is a good moment for some positive criticism of Deloitte’s work, to bring it down to the real business world:
I think 99% of professional marketers will never become the ideal CMO by Deloitte’s standard. First, probability: in August 2021 the hh.ru database had more than 1.4 million resumes of candidates with marketing competencies. And the CMOs you hear about number 1,000 at most. Second, it is simply not in demand, and investment in developing the roles Deloitte describes will never pay off. The real demand of the lion’s share of business looks like this: you understand digital well, so drive traffic and make sure CPO does not grow. You know how to work with the business, so make current customers buy again, and then we will see. You know offline, so cover everything in billboards, put more flyers in mailboxes and lay out the tastiest buffet at trade shows. The fact is that exactly such real actions make a business successful. You will either drop out quickly chasing all these “must know and must be able to,” and burn out, or find your own mojo and build a career on it, maybe even a business.
— Pavel Astafurov
8Be a full member of the board
The Think with Google report “Why the CMO should be part of leadership meetings” says that a CMO must prove marketing’s role in business development and speak on behalf of the consumer to give recommendations on improving touchpoints.
A CMO affects practically every indicator you can find in the P&L, so CMOs increasingly work with the key people in the company:
This means a CMO should:
- understand adjacent areas at least at a conceptual level (the better a CMO understands the business and the P&L, the more they can influence the result);
- take an active part in board discussions (rather than waiting for decisions, for example);
- be able to argue a position when other departments’ decisions lead to damage for marketing and risk for the company as a whole.
A CMO should understand better than anyone where the company is moving, where the turns and U-turns are, ideally even initiate change and work very closely with the product team, the sales team and Customer Success.
9Manage at least three kinds of resources
Human resources
In my view, the most important role is building the team: finding and training the specialists who will grow profit in marketing’s zone of responsibility, and creating a working atmosphere that gives birth to productive ideas and well-coordinated, effective work.
— Roman Epishin
Hire the team, make sure everyone is busy, that the work is really needed and that the people keep developing. A CMO is nobody without a team: all the strength is in it and in interaction with others. Building the team, developing it, managing the team’s mix of competencies against the department’s goals, assessing missing or weak competencies and managing the risks in this area is the most important part. Very often all failures come from poor team management. People are not developed in time, a missing competency was not foreseen at some stage, a vacancy was not closed in time or was closed with the wrong specialist. And sometimes the team cannot work with other teams, and the CMO instead of strategic tasks sets up cross-team work.
— Margo Kashuba
Financial resources
At a minimum, the marketing budget; at a maximum, investments in projects, staff expansion and so on.
A successful CMO inevitably becomes a good specialist in unit economics and the financial indicators of the business. P&L reporting should not be difficult, and the unit economics of your business should be at your fingertips, at least the basic metrics. Without this you cannot build effective advertising campaigns with positive ROMI.
— Roman Epishin
Time resources
Marketing is a broad profession. To attract a customer you need to set up analytics, run research, build media plans, buy media correctly and another hundred things. All of this takes time, and time must be managed properly.
Conclusions
So, the 9 functions a CMO performs:
- Apply the “marketer’s common base”
- Be a growth driver
- Know the market
- Influence the market
- Be the best expert on your audience
- Bring innovation into marketing
- Build the brand
- Be a full member of the board
- Manage at least three kinds of resources
Of course, not every CMO will perform all nine points perfectly. And they do not have to:
- every CMO has their own mix of strengths, so they should assemble a team that covers their weaknesses, while their strengths unlock the team’s potential and cover the weaknesses of others;
- every company has different goals;
- every market is at a different stage.
What is definitely important is the ability to adapt each competency to the conditions of the external environment: when changing jobs, when processes inside the team are rearranged, when the company changes and so on.