3 critical things CGOs (and CMOs) absolutely need to drive growth campaigns

In the simplest possible terms, a chief marketing officer’s role is to implement strategy that ultimately increases sales. A chief growth officer’s role is even simpler and more explicit: grow the company.

But how?

And what tools do they need to achieve those goals?

Singular is privileged to work with growth marketers at companies like Lyft, LinkedIn, Rovio, Wish, AirBnB, DraftKings, StitchFix, plus many more. We’ve seen what the best growth marketers the planet do, and we know what technology they use.

We also know how much data they have.

In a recent survey, 200 CMOs told us that their biggest challenge isn’t marketing data. Quite the opposite, in fact — they have plenty of data. They have avalanches of data.

And that’s the core challenge.

Drowning in data

“Marketers are drowning in data,’ says Jo Ann Sanders, a VP at Optimizely.

That’s the problem.

“With the exponential growth of data over the past decade … it’s becoming harder daily to turn information into action,” says SurveyMonkey CMO Leela Srinivasan.

Marketers are drowning in data thanks to the unprecedented data exhaust of our digital lives.

We browse the web, we install apps, we watch four million videos on YouTube every minute, we search on Google 40,000 times a second. The world will soon have almost six billion mobile subscribers, and American adults now spend more than 3.5 hours a day on their phones in branded apps, sponsored media, and ad-supported sites.

At the same time, marketers are dealing with an exponential rise in tech tools, more digital channels than ever before, and more billion-user platforms every year.

Add in global competition, and 76% of CMOs say they can’t measure marketing performance accurately enough to make truly informed decisions.

Marketing intelligence platform

What marketers need most is actionable insights for growth. So CMOs’ (and CGOs’) biggest challenge is simply mining nuggets of gold from all that data. That requires real-time measurement and analysis at scale across potentially hundreds of platforms, partners, and channels.

That’s why Singular built what we call a Marketing Intelligence Platform.

The new marketers are different. They speak data and write code. They form hypotheses and run experiments; then measure results and optimize. These new marketers are marketing scientists, and they need tools of their trade.

With a Marketing Intelligence Platform, marketers achieve three critical things:

1. Unprecedented visibility at scale
2. On-demand flexible reporting
3. Full customer journey insights

That’s seeing not just your data, but your ROI on every activity. It’s slicing and dicing not just by campaign, but getting CAC per creative asset. And it’s measuring not just conversions, but cross-device and cross-platform journeys that led to customer action.

This requires at least nine components, combined into a single platform, grouped in three sections. We’ll take a very brief look at each. For a full in-depth overview, however, check out our complete Marketing Intelligence Platform report.

The three things that CGOs and CMOs need to drive and accelerate growth are …

One: Unified marketing data

You can’t get the golden nuggets of actionable insights without mining your data, and that starts by unifying it.

Unifying marketing data includes:

• Data governance
• Data ingestion
• Data processing
• Attribution
• Dimensional data combining/synthesis

Data governance ensures clean data from every source, and enables processing, enriching, and combining later on.

Ingestion is getting all your relevant data from every source, and it’s not easy. Processing is essential to standardize and normalize it, at which point you can conversion outputs to marketing inputs. Combining and synthesizing top-funnel and low-funnel data reveals deeper trends and granular results.

Two: Intelligent insights at scale

At a high level, marketers need to know the score: across all their campaigns, are they winning or losing? At more granular levels, they need to know if a specific campaign, partner, publisher, or creative is performing.

Generating intelligence insights includes:

• Reporting and visualization
• Actionable insights

Reporting and visualization shows marketers what’s happening, and actionable insights provide clues for future profitable growth. Some of those insights are pull, but some need to be push: alerts about out-of-scope campaigns, click-through rate drops, poorly performing ad partners, and so on.

Three: Automation

The volume of data flooding marketers’ dashboards, reports, and spreadsheets cannot be handled manually at scale. Automation is required, and it includes:

• Data transport
• Alerts, fraud, audiences
• And much more

It is not useful to have a system that only ingests data. Marketing data needs to move from systems of deployment to systems of analysis to systems of engagement, and sometimes in multiple directions. So building in the ability to do that via API, exports, or S3 to internal BI systems and hundreds if not thousands of external partner systems is critical.

And while modern scientific marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it activity, marketers increasingly need to be able to automate actions within set parameters.

That includes automated creation and distribution of audiences for retargeting, look-alike campaigns, or suppression lists. It also includes built-in on-by-default configurable mitigation of fraud, along with both whitelisting and blacklisting of sources and publishers in paid media campaigns.

And at higher levels, it includes automation of bids and buys for ad campaigns at scale.

Results: what a marketing intelligence platform delivers

What does a marketing intelligence platform deliver?

Find out soon in part two of this blog post, coming next week.

Or, click here to access Singular’s entire Marketing Intelligence Platform report right now.