Growth Marketing – Key Priority for CMOs

Growth Marketing is generating a lot of buzz across marketing organizations. Building the growth marketing function in the organization has climbed up on the list of top priorities for data-driven CMOs.

Growth marketing brings to life the intersection of art and science of marketing. This is the marketing of the future in action.

Growth marketers are the modern marketing professionals who are going beyond the traditional marketing execution role and are leveraging data and analytics to continuously optimize execution and demonstrate measurable results. They actively engage with the sales and finance teams to sign-up for driving top-line revenue for their organizations.

With our extensive background in marketing analytics services and marketing database management at marqeu, we have been lucky to have the opportunity to work closely with some of the finest growth marketers and enable CMOs to build growth marketing functions in their organizations. Growth marketing is a lot about data and analytics. For us,

It is super exciting to see how these fine marketers blend their creativity with analytics to come up with the winning strategies to drive revenue and pipeline.

They are relentless when it comes to leveraging analytics to validate their plans and demonstrate with numbers the impact their work is making across the organization.

These are the marketers who are re-defining the marketing function and are some of the most successful CMOs and marketing leaders across different industries.

Armed with these insights,

Growth Marketers are leading the charge to transform marketing into a revenue-generating function.

These are the kind of marketers CEOs are beginning to rely on for driving growth across the organizations. According to McKinsey, 83% of the global CEOs would like to rely on marketing as a key driver for growth provided they can run marketing as a revenue-generating function. This expectation from the c-suite has been a tough transition for marketing leaders across the board especially the CMOs. Shortened tenures of the CMOs are a good indicator of this transition.

Across most of the organizations, marketing function includes key areas like demand generation, marketing operations, branding, public relations and alignment with sales. Data-driven CMOs are transforming marketing organizations by adding the growth marketing function to lead the charge for driving revenue and demonstrating the quantifiable impact marketing organizations are making.

We believe that having the

ability to leverage data and analytics in real-time across the life cycle of a campaign from planning, execution to optimization stage is what defines success in growth marketing.

It is fascinating to see how our marketing analytics services enable growth marketers to repeatedly deliver extraordinary results. Across all our engagements, we see that the growth marketers have a set of KPIs that they like to track in real-time via self-serve dashboards. At marqeu, we have been working with growth marketers to define marketing analytics frameworks and implement marketing tech stack infrastructure, dashboards to help them get real-time visibility into key metrics so that they can quantify the impact in terms of driving short and long-term value. Marketing analytics is just a set of tools that growth marketers have in their toolbox, which gives them the confidence to make strategic decisions and foster cross-functional collaboration across the organizations, especially with the c-suite and finance teams.

Most growth marketers track following strategic metrics:

1. Marketing ROI and attribution: is the most valuable of all the KPIs as it powers the marketing investment decision making, which in turn drives the results for the marketing organization. Whether it is the First Touch, Last Touch, Multi-Touch, Equal Weight Multi-Touch or Weighted approach to marketing attribution, when implemented correctly and validated, the insights provided are of immense value for the marketing organization. Our advanced marketing analytics consulting services provide strategic insights to growth marketing leaders and CMOs.
2. Pipeline goals attainment and contribution: Driving new pipeline has always been the most important KPI for any marketing organization and its importance has only grown manifold for the growth marketers. 2 commonly used metrics that demonstrate the impact of marketing are Marketing Pipeline Acceleration/Influence and New Pipeline Sourcing. With these 2 metrics, organizations can quantify marketing-driven engagement across the accounts and relate them to the impact on pipeline. These pipeline correlations of the marketing activities provide valuable insights when it comes to understanding “when” the new opportunities were created in marketing engaged accounts and for the accounts with existing opportunities, how marketing was able to influence deal expansions and accelerate deal closures.
3. Demand Waterfall goals attainment and conversions: Performance against the goals they signed up for both in terms of volume and quality (demand waterfall conversions) is what drives growth marketers. With our marketing analytics services, we enable real-time visibility into the health of the funnel. Cohort based funnel conversions are a key part of evaluating the health of the funnel to get a good read into the quality of the leads flowing into the funnel and discover what kinds of leads are moving faster through the funnel, what the velocity looks like.
4. Alignment of strategy and execution with the customer journey: with our customer journey analytics frameworks, we provide the ability to look at 1 deal or combination of deals right from the very first marketing touch across each persona to the last touch for deal closure. This is very insightful for growth marketers to look at general trends (clusters) of marketing tactics that work for each sales segment, the industry of customers, for new business vs cross/up-sell, etc. along with the insights into what decision-makers vs practitioners engage with and in what phase of the deal cycle. All these insights are like a gold mine when it comes to leveraging data for personalized and contextual experience for customers.
5. Health of the database with insights into historic behavior and engagement data: Our Marketing Database Management Services help marketers to get real-time insights into the health of their data spread across the marketing tech stack. Database health metrics reports and dashboards have proven to be super helpful for growth marketers when it comes to planning for new marketing campaigns, inquiry/MQL goals, understanding what channels are bringing in quality/engaged leads and planning the spend for database augmentation and enrichment projects so as to get maximum returns for such database related investments.

Expectations have changed a lot and the marketing leaders who are adapting to this new marketing paradigm are leading the charge to transform their organizations.

Marketers now are adopting the mind-set of a CFO to establish marketing as a driver of value and revenue-driving function. Such modern marketers incorporate analytics rigor as well as revenue mindset for every decision they make. They demonstrate that marketing led by a growth mindset is accountable towards driving the top-line revenue.

We are always on the lookout for inputs and examples from the marketing community to keep adding value for our customers. We welcome the inputs from other leaders and practitioners around growth marketing in their organizations. What does growth marketing function look like at your organization? What are the key metrics that growth leaders are using to demonstrate the impact marketing is making at your organization?