We’re seeing more CMOs and CEOs partnering together than ever before. Traditionally, the CEO’s focus has been on overall business ROI, and the CMO focused primarily on customer acquisition and retention. However, due to this closing gap at the C-suite level, CMOs are aligning their objectives with the more financial ROI growth goals, which is having an impact throughout the marketing and creative organization.
The first area of evolution in the marketing industry is the drive toward growth marketing and the increasing focus on micro-moments. This makes sense due to the extremely high potential to improve ROI while driving customer acquisition and retention through a more micro-targeted, content-centric and channel-agnostic approach.
Across multiple industries examples of success are found creating rapid growth through growth marketing activities. This shift in approach to marketing is more than a simple trend; this is a movement.
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The success of growth marketing efforts relies on all internal departments not only working together, but more importantly, working toward clearly communicated and common goals. In general, the closer the CMO gets to the growth vision of the CEO, the more sense it makes to bring the creatives even closer to marketing.
With the marketing team turning their attention to micro-customer segmentation backed by behavioral science, as they revise their goals to provide multi-channel and content-centric brand experiences, the creative team will need to drastically revise their approach to delivering creative executions with excellence and greater speed.
Now is the time to ensure that the creatives are ready for what they will need to produce and how they can work most effectively.
What Will Be Expected For Growth Marketing Creative Support?
Delivering growth marketing-specific creative products will be different. Rather than working on a specific overarching campaign, we will need to focus on a target customer profile and develop a content plan that will change a customer’s mindset from passive to active, or indecisive to ready to purchase.
Marketers will need a curated selection of messages and images that will be able to work interchangeably as a target customer is tracked and served a message. Creatives need to be able to build deliverables that work across channels that will be put together and served up by an AI delivery platform, while maintaining brand and content continuity.
We can do this. We can make this happen while maintaining creative and brand control and still push the limits of creative executions. A few changes will need to take place to support this new delivery type, and the good news is the first one is not new to us. It’s process. Specifically Agile process. The standard practices of Agile are what we will need to lean on to support this type of work. Agile workstreams are tailor-made for multi-touchpoint and iterative work, which growth marketing deliverables will most certainly be.
As marketers get more data on a target audience profile, they will need amendments to both the imagery and message of the content that will be delivered. Open and clear communication will be key and Agile practices such as stand-up meetings and frequency of sharing information is exactly what will be required. In addition, the standard role of a project manager will need to transition to an engagement manager, somewhat reminiscent of a Scrum master. In this instance, the engagement manager will ensure that the channels selected and assets created align. The engagement manager will also ensure that the responsibility and ownership of each cross-functional team member remains with that individual throughout their part of the content creation process.
Last year, we watched our workflow methods transform in a passing-of-the-baton moment of working. We went from a classic Waterfall method to an environment where we all know our common goals and play our part to achieve them.
Data uncovered in the Cella 2021 In-House Creative Industry Report underscores this approach. A combined 36% of in-house agencies reported that they relied on Agile either “more” or “substantially more,” again demonstrating the highly collaborative nature that our work has taken on.
The value proposition for in-house agencies increases in another way with this new wave of growth marketing. And that is our institutional knowledge. The amount of time saved and errors avoided will grow exponentially due to the speed at which these projects will be required to be delivered and the lack of onboarding to the brand and customer type of our creative talent.
Growth marketing will provide a platform for in-house agencies to grow. With our values clearly front and center, it just makes strong business sense to invest here.
Have growth marketing questions? Learn how Cella can help!
