Marketing that creates deeper customer connections, via personalization and otherwise, doesn’t happen without new levels of collaboration and coordination between the marketing team and its wide range of functional partners. The new marketing superpower is multidisciplinary competency. In our experience, success follows several key principles:
- Making marketing capabilities a first-rate strategic priority. Strengthening marketing capabilities can’t be an outsourced afterthought. Company executives and marketing leadership should quantify the value at stake and declare it a revenue imperative, not a cost.
- Connecting the dots across teams. It’s not just digital team members and traditional brand marketers who need to be upskilled. Leading companies extend their learning programs to include other key stakeholders and cross-functional partners, both internally and externally.
- Curating a program that leverages best practices for adult learning. Learning programs should support the acquisition of new skills, as well as help marketers apply these skills and knowledge in their jobs. Hybrid models often work best, with learning journeys that combine self-paced digital learning, live workshops, fieldwork, and on-the-job training and coaching.
- Taking a test-and-learn approach and adapting the program as you go. While some demands modern marketers face are universal, there are variations by region, industry, and organization. Learning programs should be piloted with an initial audience to be able to refine the program before scaling broadly.
- Viewing capability building as an ongoing journey, not an event. Learning new marketing skills is an ongoing process, evolving at pace with customer expectations. Organizations should prioritize building on existing knowledge, as well as evolving and developing new resources.
- Celebrating wins to drive cultural change. Collaboration and the use of new tools and processes don’t necessarily happen on their own. When marketers understand the value of doing something differently, they are more likely to want to change how they work.
While there’s no universal solution to marketing capability building, it pays to experiment. Finding the right approach can boost marketing performance through improved campaign execution time, customer engagement, and cost savings.
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/why-is-collaboration-key-to-cmo-success
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