Tracking Consumer Behavior to Gain Competitive Advantage

Rishi Dave, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet

Building a customer first strategy

You have to start with your customer, not with the channels. Who exactly are you targeting? Where do they go for information at the various stages of the buying process? Who do they listen to? What messages resonate at each stage? Then, based on this, you have to prioritize your marketing mix and go to market.

Initiatives for digital marketing programs

To organize for digital marketing programs, they will need to:

1. cover a more sophisticated analytical capability than ever before
2. drive high volumes of high quality content
3. manage a sophisticated and integrated marketing technology stack
4. Manage owned, earned, and paid media platforms
5. Manage many types of influencers including analysts, press, bloggers, etc.

Data integration for optimal marketing triggers

The biggest trends are using data to optimize marketing investments, target the right customers, track customers on their buying journey, and initiate the optimal marketing triggers. This requires enterprises to integrate their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data with unstructured web/social data to gain insights to drive these activities.

Secondly, marketing technology has evolved enough that marketing can address an increasing percentage of the customer’s buying journey before a buyer needs to go to sales. This is great for sales productivity and creates a better experience for the customer. Companies that figure this out fastest will have a strong competitive advantage.

Global scalability challenges stalling best practices sharing

The number one technology issue that keeps me awake at night is the lack of global scalability in today’s marketing technology. It is challenging and expensive to maintain multiple global instances of marketing technology stacks around the world and it severely hampers the ability to share best practices around the world.
Multifaceted role of a CMO

CMOs need an increasingly diverse set of skills that combine left brain analytical thinking with right brain creativity! They need to be at once a sophisticated analytical expert, data scientist, and tech expert and also be incredibly creative and communicate well.