CMOs must centralize strategic insights

CMOs want a marketing organization that is agile and strategic, which can meet a variety of work demands. 60% marketing organizations centralize some or all functions to improve operational efficiency.

Many CMOs are faced with micro-teams that don’t work well together, and have multiple teams across their function. They may find themselves struggling to manage disparate teams who do similar work. Strategic insights that feed future activities are affected by a lack of structure and unification.

How a CMO can overcome this problem by creating a unit for strategic insights

Building a solid base for success

CMOs need to build an organization that is stable enough to achieve business goals. This foundation is essential to success, given the need to achieve more with limited resources.

In order to build a solid foundation, it is important to gather and act on information gathered from business intelligence and consumer trends. Customer insights are especially important. These insights can be used in a variety of ways, including creative briefs, new initiatives, strategic marketing plans, and content strategies.

Centralizing or consolidating marketing teams has the primary benefit of increasing the overall impact. It is easier to justify technology investments, and internal stakeholders can access unified services – from consulting to self service – making research and insights widely available.

Gartner’s data shows that 57% organizations that have linked all their data sources agree that marketing analytics hasn’t had the impact that they expected.

Users of marketing analytics were asked what their team should do to maximize the value of their analyses. They cited exploring data to gain new insights (37%), and meeting with decision makers to understand their needs (34%).

The business can be confused as to which team they should contact or what kind of data, insights or research is provided by each. This results in investments being wasted and underutilized, which is not what any CFO would like to hear when they are on a tight budget.

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Setting up a central unit to increase business value

CMOs need to reevaluate the entire ecosystem of their resources in order to address this issue and maximize the contribution that marketing makes to the business. By combining similar functions, you can eliminate silos, improve collaboration, and increase marketing’s influence.

CMOs should merge smaller teams that offer insights, research, and intelligence into a central unit that operates like an internal agency.

This marketing organization can use insights to create unique content, improve brand messaging, and innovate products or services.

This unit’s ideal state should be:

• Hire synthesizers with critical and strategic thinking abilities and who can formulate insights into action plans and recommendations.
• Use a service agency within the organization as its operating model for internal servicesregardless how it is called internally. Some work could be categorized as best practice or center-of-excellence-like work, particularly in highly decentralized or global organizations.
• From a newly formed or combined unit, to a fully-fledged in-house consulting agency. Starting from scratch, a unit can have between 5 and 10 people. The unit can start with between 20 and 100 people if it is combining several existing teams. Roles must be re-defined. Some mature insights consulting units for larger, more complex companies have 200-300 employees. This is similar to large in-house content studios and creative agencies.

In addition to the titles of team members, it is important to consider their skills. Of the skills most difficult to develop within their teams, CMOs cited strategic thinking (69%), collaboration/leadership (62%) and messaging (50%) in the top five.

The CMOs cited a mix-up of their market research team’s specialist and generalist ratios. 32% intended to hire more specialists, while 22% planned on hiring more generalists.

How to establish the insight unit

CMOs should take a few steps to build a solid foundation for their insights unit.

• Perform a discovery audit in order to identify all the current sources of insight provided by different teams, including external resources such as market research firms, audit skills, and audit competencies.
• Combining similar and existing teams into a single centralized unit is more efficient than individual siloed units.
• Hire or appoint a head for insights to lead the unit. Assess current staff, identify gaps, and develop a hiring plan, service plan, and measurement plan. The head of the unit should have experience in consultancy, agency, or advisory, as well as management and measurement skills.
• Use the insights unit as a creative agency to prioritize and manage incoming requests for projects, much like an in-house agency. Align resources and talent to the business, as needed (e.g. a single point of contact or regional office for major business units).
• Offer a range of services, including DIY (do-it-yourself) and consultant services.
• The number of staff will depend on whether the unit was created from scratch or if it was formed by merging existing teams, such as those in market research, customer insight and business intelligence.

CMOs can boost their marketing strategy, digital experience and innovation initiatives by centralizing their insights unit.

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