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3 strategies every CMO needs to know in the age of growth hacking
Brian Plackis-Cheng, CEO at SALESmanago
As we head towards retail peak season, it's a timely opportunity for ecommerce businesses to reflect on their strategies and ensure alignment with the rapidly evolving marketing landscape. A recent report from Gartner highlighted three mission-critical areas that should be at the forefront of every CMO's agenda: building AI-enabled marketing teams, redefining marketing’s value within the enterprise, and orchestrating profitable growth across functions.
These core focus areas have ushered through a new era of growth hacking, with the emphasis now on rapidly increasing conversion rates and sales using minimal resources. Originally a technique for tech startups and SaaS companies, growth hacking has since become a versatile strategy across the ecommerce industry.
Growth hacking focuses on fast-paced experimentation to optimise elements like content, social media, email marketing and more. By quickly identifying what works and discarding what doesn't, growth hackers can implement effective marketing strategies without wasting resources on ineffective efforts. This approach provides early insights into the sales funnel, empowering businesses to invest in strategies with the highest potential for success.
It almost sounds too good to be true, but it is attainable with the right tools in place. In this article, we explore three essential strategies every marketer needs to know in the age of growth hacking.
Assess AI integration
To build AI-enabled marketing teams, you need to assess the level of AI integration within your team and then find areas of improvement. This integration may have happened through both ‘managed’ resources and technology, such as your CRM system and martech, and ‘unmanaged’ sources – also known as shadow IT.
For resources managed by IT, you need to evaluate what AI is being used for and the value it is delivering. Is it being used effectively to enhance automation and process customer data? Is it used in several tools but they lack integration and so you suffer from data silos? Or is it hardly being used at all? This assessment illustrates how effectively or not AI is being utilised to drive marketing processes and brand growth.
Shadow IT is when employees or departments use software/hardware without the oversight of IT or, in this case, the CMO. ChatGPT is the most popular current example of this. Why does this matter? Without oversight, you can’t see how employees are using such tools and whether they are getting the best value out of them. It’s also a sign your marketing tools aren’t giving them the capabilities they require. Therefore, asking your staff if they are using such tools is a good way of both assessing your AI integration and finding areas needing improvement.
Identify skill gaps
Being able to integrate AI effectively also depends on ensuring your marketing team has the knowledge and skills to use it. The use of AI-powered tools will make their work more value-driven and rewarding – but to get there, they need to know techniques for best leveraging them, instead of them spending lots of time trying to understand them or not getting the most value out of them.
Can you identify areas where marketers need to be upskilled? For example, a marketer may be able to see AI-generated data on customer preferences but is unsure on how best to analyse and use the insights to build marketing campaigns. Or a company might have inconsistency in how its employees provide ‘prompts’ into AI tools to produce engaging and relevant content for email marketing purposes.
To plug these gaps, CMOs should plan targeted training sessions to ensure effectiveness in the use of AI tools throughout the department. Any new tool shouldn’t be integrated without training, and there may also be AI tools already in use which are not being maximised to their full value.
Prioritise personalisation
Skills gaps can also emerge from marketers grappling with too many tools. There are over 14,000 martech solutions to choose from, and this choice can mean companies become overstacked or integrate solutions that don’t suit their processes.
The key aspect of growth hacking and marketing in today’s landscape is gaining a deep understanding of your target audience across the omnichannel experience. This enables you to develop highly personalised and tailored campaigns for individuals and groups of consumers through a whole variety of channels, whether it's a web or mobile push notification, WhatsApp message or email.
The latest AI-powered customer engagement platforms can integrate with your business- and marketing-critical systems and show all relevant customer data in one location. AI can then segment this data and provide a granular picture of individual customer activity/preferences across the omnichannel, while also suggesting the most effective channel to use to communicate with each person. These platforms can also be embedded with ChatGPT technology, meaning that rather than having to use one tool for content generation and another to automate sending emails, you can do these tasks from the same platform.
All of this helps to prioritise personalisation. It’s expected by consumers and has to be at the centre of any growth hacking strategy.
Equipping CMOs for the age of growth hacking
A key part of a CMO’s role is to ensure that marketing is a key revenue driver for their business across its various functions. There is now an emphasis on increasing conversion rates and sales while using minimal resources – a strategy known as growth hacking.
To succeed in this era of growth hacking, how you use AI is crucial. You should assess the current level of AI integration in your organisation and identify skills gaps in your workforce. This can tell you which AI tools you need to use or cut and what training to carry out. In particular, using an AI-powered customer engagement platform allows you to streamline your processes and, crucially, prioritise personalisation across the omnichannel.
Ultimately, by taking on these three strategies, you can put in place the tools and processes that maximise growth with great efficiency.