The customer is the CMO’s comeback [Monthly Marcom]

Must read articles from across B2B marketing, public relations and social media

Trends ebb and flow.

For many years, CMOs were on the out and out.

Every week, another big brand company was replacing their CMO. Those who kept the top marketing job were given a short leash and shorter tenure.

That all seems to be changing. CMOs are back, their tenures are longer, and it seems, after a period of exile, their absence has bolstered their credibility.

Why? No one was advocating for the customer.

And that leads us to the featured stories -- there’s a pair this month -- in this edition of the Monthly Marcom.

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Featured

• CMO problem: "No one owns the customer"

• CMOs should be the voice of the market

Leadership, CMOs and CCOs

• Consultants perform poorly as CEOs

• The 'sea of sameness' is marketing's job to solve

• Study: Reduce marketing turnover to improve performance

Marketing

• Trust, fatigue plague influencer marketing

• Marketing is spending more on events amid economic uncertainty

• A decade of ‘more with less’ is ending in burnout

B2B Marketing

• Framework for defining your ICP

• Self-service buying upends B2B

• 74% of "B2B buying teams have unhealthy conflict

• High-growth companies spend 40% more on marketing

• The B2B marketing playbook must shift from tricks to education

• Gartner survey finds paid search is the biggest line item

• 41% of buyers have a single vendor in mind

• Purchase decision: "It matched my needs"

Customer marketing

• Brands are forgetting the middle funnel

• "73% of churned customers said they never saw value”

Psychology

• The difference between persuasion and manipulation

• Sales & Business Development

• How many ‘leads’ turn into sales?

• Distrust and deluge overwhelm buyers

• B2B tech buyers want pricing transparency from vendors

Public Relations

• Surveys, open rates and traffic are the top internal comms metrics

• “Gen Z just doesn’t buy into the usual PR fluff”

• x/Twitter still used by more journalists

Content Marketing

• The biggest myth about content marketing

• Benchmarks for guiding how gated content is best used

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SEO & SEM

• 5 ways generative AI is changing organic search traffic

• Search has more depth than generative AI for product discovery

Marcom technology & AI

• Chatting with the robots inside PR software [PR tech summary no. 62]

• 12 new KPIs for generative AI

• 44 marketing initiatives where AI alone will fail

• CMOs see opportunity for genAI in CX, personalization and analysis

Measurement & Analytics

• Why multi-touch attribution doesn’t work

• Measuring time of attention as a better marketing metric

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Frank

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