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Jim Davis, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer, SAS
Trends Impacting our Marketing Initiatives
The forces of Big Data and empowered digital customers are impacting everyone’s marketing operations. At SAS we’re enriching our customer segment profiles by aggregating social media and other digital customer data into our marketing interactions for more relevance. We’re also applying more predictive analytics and visualization to enable our marketers and executives to explore data visually on PCs and tablets using selfservice reporting or mobile dashboard models. The result isn’t just quicker business decisions, but better, factbased insights—with a minimum of IT intervention. That’s better for everyone. I’m also closely following trends in cloud platforms.I am convinced that cloud computing will increasingly influence how we adjust and market our offerings, especially as a complement to on-premises transactional systems.
For example, I see our marketing initiatives evolving dramatically to support how we deliver analytic services in the cloud— enabling businesses to purchase and implement exactly the capabilities they need.
The Transforming Role of a CMO
When I took this role on, it was more about what our collateral and website looked like. Do we have enough whitepapers? Where do we allocate our media spend? The need for speed or agile marketing was barely on the radar.
"Marketing has become more of a science and as such is quantifiable"
Now I spend time thinking about how we orchestrate content curation across our channels—advertising, events, web properties, mobile and so on. I focus on deepening our social media insights— to listen and not just broadcast. Today, marketing is an integrated effort, with various touch points along the way to turn prospects into legitimate leads and then customers. All this takes place with an eye toward speed and adaptive marketing.
The good news: marketing has become more of a science and as such is quantifiable. My responsibility now is to bring more transparency and accountability into our marketing processes and customer-led communications, so my sales and delivery teams are spending their time on highvalue, revenue-generating activities.
It’s no question that CMOs and the marketing function are moving quickly from a communications service to shaping corporate strategy.
Weekly Brief
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