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In the age of intelligent marketing, the CMO is tasked with leading a profound shift to data and AI — and delivering real business outcomes from them. Put another way, the traditional notion of marketing and the role of marketers are quickly expanding from brand stewardship to data-driven profitable revenue growth.

CMOs everywhere feel the pressure, and far too many struggle, according to a key finding from a CMO Council and Zeta Global strategic brief, CMO at the Crossroads: Assess Where You Need to Progress in the Intelligence-Powered, Marketing Technology Era.

“The CMO role is in transition, evolving from a focus on branding to a metrics-driven, revenue-oriented role,” says Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council. “CMOs must adapt to these new expectations or risk becoming obsolete.”

Marketing Success Is Business Success

This isn’t alarmist speak, either. The CMO Council found that over half of marketing leaders are now expected to deliver on revenue growth. The road to revenue goes through today’s connected customer who often ignores typical marketing.

The way to unlock these connected customers is through data and AI. In fact, the CMO Council found that 80% of business leaders believe GenAI will deliver a competitive advantage in the coming months, although 60% lack confidence in their data-AI readiness to achieve this value.

Connected customers leave digital breadcrumbs about their buying intentions and are hard to engage because of all the noise vying for their attention. GenAI promises to get in front of them with personalized content at the moment of need.

Disconnected Marketing vs Connected Customers

But disconnected organizations and poorly integrated technology stacks make harnessing GenAI a real challenge. The stakes are high considering at least some of your competitors are doing a much better job engaging, winning and retaining them.

Another problem is that a CMO’s revenue growth mandate doesn’t replace traditional marketing operations and execution. CMOs already feel overwhelmed with day-to-day demands, from strategic planning, branding and campaigning to multiple meetings and peer-level politicking.

“This is placing a real burden on chief marketers to stay abreast of the latest marketing technology innovations and become more adept at evaluating, sourcing and implementing new applications,” Neale-May says.

The Intelligence Gap

With so much on their plate, how can CMOs also deal with the abundance of data, extraction of actionable intelligence, and the crafting of personalized experiences at scale? There’s a lot that goes into this, and many marketers struggle to source the right technology and better map and model the marketing mix, let alone validate marketing spend.

Our report, “CMO at the Crossroads” saw significant deficiencies in a CMO’s ability to:

• Achieve a 360-degree view of the customer through data consolidation
• Segment, target and tailor messaging to customer audiences
• Integrate online and offline campaigns and marketing supply chains
• Deal with the explosion in unstructured data and content
• Convert lead flow into sustained customer relationships
• Extract value and insight from multiplying customer touch points

These are only a few of the deficiencies cited in the strategic report.

Assess Where You Need to Progress

Before you can begin to address your deficiencies, you need to have an understanding of where you are in the marketing intelligence era and be honest about where your gaps lie. How is your access to customer data? What are your marketing automation capabilities? Are you collaborating effectively with IT, C-suite, line-of-business executives?

A soon-to-be-released self-assessment tool from CMO Council and Zeta will give you a general sense of where you stand, that is, your digital marketing maturity. This can be followed up with domain expert consultation, guidance and direction on how to overcome the marketing intelligence gap.

As marketing undergoes one of the most transformative periods in its history, CMOs must rise to meet the moment. The pressure to drive measurable business outcomes—particularly revenue growth—isn’t going away. In fact, it’s intensifying.