Digital Marketing: Personalization, Data, and Best Practices (Robert Tas, McKinsey) CXOTalk #256

How is marketing changing? Robert Tas, vice president of McKinsey & Company, tells CXOTalk about digital transformation in the marketing operating system. How and why is it changing? What should a company do? Tas shares practical advice for personalization, insights, design, technology, speed, and agility.

For more information: https://www.cxotalk.com/episode/digit...

In his current advisory work, Tas helps financial-services companies reinvent marketing for a digital world. He has designed agile marketing organizations that can operate at a faster pace, using best-in-class marketing technology, including next-generation measurement systems. The goal is to digitally enable the entire customer decision journey. He previously served as CMO at a leading software company, and as head of digital marketing at a top-ten U.S. bank.

From the transcript:

Michael Krigsman:

(00:02:07) Well, I'm very excited to talk with you. You work with a lot of different clients from very large organizations who are doing sophisticated things with digital marketing and with data and analytics. Maybe a good place to begin is, when you're out there roaming the world providing advisory service and working with your clients, what are some of the key digital marketing trends or issues? What's really important to your clients?

Robert Tas:

(00:02:40) Good question. I think there's a lot of buzz out there, and a lot of people are trying to figure out a number of things. I like to think of them in some categories.

• (00:02:48) The first one that I look at and I hear a lot of people talking about is personalization. I think the idea of not treating every customer the same is really, really important in today's world. A lot of companies are trying to figure out how to do that better.

• (00:03:01) The second one is data. You talked about it a little bit in the beginning in your intro. Data, data, data: everyone is trying to figure out how to harness the volume of information we now have and actually put it into action.

• (00:03:14) The third is design. I think this is one of the newer areas that's getting a lot of traction. Really understanding how to do user centric design and how do I make my experiences relevant to my customer base.

• (00:03:26) The fourth that I like to talk about is marketing technology, one of the biggest buzzwords going there, but really understanding the components of the martech stack, and CMOs are now becoming integrators.

• (00:03:38) Then the fifth one, which is probably the most evolving one, is this new concept of the operating model, the speed at which we work. The reality of digital marketing today is the tools we have. We can do things a lot faster than we've ever done before.

(00:03:54) I think CMOs are trying to figure out all five of those things to really transform their marketing organizations.

I think the best in class marketers are leading the way in the use of data in the way they approach their marketing programs. They're leading the way in testing and learning. They're leading the way with agile approaches to their marketing where they're constantly thriving for more information around the customer to be smarter about it.

(00:10:57) Like you said, there are challenges. The first one that comes to mind is the data silos that exist in organizations, especially larger organizations. It's hard to connect all those customer touch points.

(00:11:08) The second piece is understanding who owns the customer experience and how is that managed and implemented across the board within my organization. Often we have silos that create the upper brand, the upper funnel team, the bottom funnel team, the post customer experience team, and things like that. We've got to figure out how to build our strategies more holistically.

(00:11:29) The third bucket is, there's a lot of technology, a lot of legacy systems in these organizations that need to be cobbled together. You really need a diligent strategy to go do that.

(00:11:39) Then fourth, like you said, is you've got to start thinking more from that last click conversion campaign thinking to really enabling the customer journey. How do you go about delivering that? How do you remove friction through that process? How do you get more data to enhance it and help the customer get what they want?

Michael Krigsman:

(00:11:59) But you also mentioned design. Where does that now fit into this picture?

Robert Tas:

(00:12:23) Yeah. It's a really interesting piece because the creative guys have always been on either the ad side or certain pieces of the journey. I think it's really important that we start getting them involved into the entire journey and understanding how to map those pieces together. It's no longer enough for the marketer to say, "I drove the traffic to the website and I did my job." You've got to be able to design those experiences and have consistent experiences end-to-end.