As Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) focuses on leading marketing through disruption’s next wave, there are three priorities they must keep top of mind for 2024, according to Gartner.
Build AI-Enabled Marketing Teams
With executive leaders exploring emerging technologies, such as generative AI (GenAI) and other commercially-critical innovations, CMOs must transform their organizations and augment marketer skills with new tools to execute the highest-leverage work.
With GenAI skills still in their infancy heading into 2024, CMOs risk prioritizing the wrong mix of abilities as they continue to emphasize “hard” data skills, such as coding, more so than “soft” data skills, such as analytical thinking.
A Gartner survey of 407 cross-functional leaders (including 329 marketing leaders) conducted in July and August 2023 found that only 8% of cross-functional leaders report that they aren’t planning to use GenAI for the initiative, and 73% are currently piloting or using GenAI. With this pivot in plans also comes a pivot in team structure.
Recast Marketing’s Value for an Evolving Enterprise
Although marketing takes part in three out of five digital growth initiatives, over 40% of non-marketing collaborators agree that marketing gets involved where marketing is not needed.
As companies rethink their business models in light of tech disruption, CMOs need to focus on how marketing delivers value by building business-wide alignment on new customer growth strategies:
- Connection to enterprise strategy – how marketing contributes to guiding and executing on top-level strategic priorities through business evolution narratives.
- Critical-project impact – how marketing scopes its involvement in high-profile, cross-functional business initiatives to energize leaders around shared goals and demonstrably accelerate transformation.
- Empowering Others – how marketing scales its impact by helping other leaders understand their role and how to best deliver combined customer impact.
Orchestrate Profitable Growth Across Functions
While marketers spend 17% more of their time collaborating on cross-functional initiatives than non-marketers do, cross-functional complexity is holding back the pursuit of growth opportunities. Seventy-nine percent of cross-functional leaders experience high collaboration drag on digital growth initiatives, leading them to be 37% less likely to exceed revenue and profitability objectives when compared to their low collaboration drag counterparts.
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