5cmoIf you haven’t heard it yet, this year the CMO Council has set up a dedicated research center focused on measuring and tracking the effectiveness, relevance and value of online marketing programs and spends.

Its Digital Marketing Performance Institute (DMPI) examines and advocates the need for more unified and integrated approaches to manage and optimize the fragmented interactive marketing discipline, especially across leading vertical markets.

Authority leadership and content aggregation programs by the Institute intend to drive best practice adoption, audit and assess competencies and proficiencies, establish measurement models and techniques, evaluate enabling platforms, solutions and technologies, and help marketers increase visibility, compliance, accountability and ROI. To achieve all that, the CMO Council leverages continuously its worldwide affiliate network and collaborates with leading solutions providers, analyst groups, consultants, functional marketing organizations and media partners, to explore various facets of online market engagement, lead acquisition and conversion, customer experience, individualized relationship management, as well as word-of-mouth advocacy.

Just a few months ago, the Institute released a 76-page Acceleration  report titled Integrate to Accelerate Digital Marketing Value that deals intensively with the fact that marketing, from operations through campaign execution, has become increasingly technology dependent, and that the rise of big data will continue the push toward a dominant digital marketing future. When asked e.g. which digital marketing processes and functions had the most appeal, according to the report everybody pointed to data-rich technologies such as:

  • Customer data integration, analytics, and personalization of market interactions (62%);
  • Website performance improvements and richer online engagements (61%);
  • Lead acquisition, conversion, and upselling/cross-selling of customers (60%);
  • Behavior-based insight gathering for more effective segmentation and messaging (41%);
  • Search marketing and online advertising optimization (39%).

“Marketers have more advanced technologies, data, and analytical tools at their disposal than at any other point. However, the capabilities and skills required to embrace this new digital dynamism in order to provide insight and sustainable business benefits are in short supply,” says Jacques van Niekerk, CEO of Acceleration. He further notes, “With sophisticated marketing endeavors, there is no silver bullet, and as we shift focus from the tactics of search, display, social, and mobile to the strategic value of customer data integration and ownership, the winners will be those who best architect and orchestrate their marketing resources around their technologies and customer data.”

“Clearly, there are lots of pins without the right pincushion to ensure digital marketing initiatives have the right underlying strategy, architecture, and technology infrastructure to meet management expectations,” notes Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council. “One of these is the promise of greater productivity, visibility, and accountability in marketing, which 49 percent of marketers noted was a key driver of management interest”, he added.

Together with professional organizations like SEMPO, SOMA, WOMMA and eMetrics, the CMO Council constantly conducts strategic briefings and workshops for senior marketing executives to provide new content based on best practices and process improvements from innovators and leaders in global digital campaign design, development, localization, execution, and performance measurement.

We at Asian e-Marketing think that marketers should welcome any advice they get to face the increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies that are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked, especially since "the next five years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did”, according to a recently published IBM Global Media & Entertainment Business Services paper titled, The End of Advertising as We Know It.

So, take a look at CMO Council’s offers and join the experts.

By MediaBUZZ