Introduction Stepping into the role of a Marketing Leader is both an exciting and daunting challenge. From the moment you apply or are approached for the job, the learning process begins. For new leaders, understanding and mastering the planning cycle is crucial—not just for setting strategies but for driving meaningful growth across the organisation. In this article, we explore actionable insights for new marketing leaders to optimise the planning process, leverage early learnings, and establish a powerful growth agenda.
1. Start Learning Before Day One Your journey as a Marketing Leader doesn’t begin on your first day—it starts the moment you decide to apply for the role. The interim period between leaving your previous position and starting the new one presents a golden opportunity for immersive learning.
Become Your Best Customer: If you’re entering a B2C company, dive deep into the customer experience. Purchase products, join loyalty programs, process returns, and engage through multiple channels to understand the digital and omnichannel journeys firsthand. For B2B’s, leverage connections with existing customers or gather insights from family and friends who might be users. This hands-on approach allows you to enter the role armed with invaluable customer-centric knowledge, giving you a head start in shaping your strategies.
2. Reassess and Reframe the Inherited Plan It’s common to inherit a plan crafted by predecessors—sometimes outdated or partially executed due to politics, resource constraints, or strategic shifts. The key is not to become a slave to the existing plan but to reframe it based on fresh learnings.
The Mini-Budget Approach: Take a cue from political transitions where new governments conduct a mini-budget review within six months. Similarly, consider initiating a “mini-plan” to reassess strategies. This approach enables you to evaluate what’s working, identify gaps, and introduce necessary pivots without discarding all previous efforts. Use this time to rally cross-functional teams and align them with a renewed vision focused on growth and customer experience.
3. Navigate the Pressure of Growth Expectations The pressure on new Marketing Leaders is immense. Studies indicate that 8 out of 10 CEOs expect their Marketers to drive growth, yet only 23% believe they are delivering on this mandate. The gap between expectation and execution is significant, making it imperative for Marketing Leaders to hit the ground running.
Influence Without Authority: In many organisations, growth is traditionally seen as the domain of the sales team, especially in siloed environments. Your challenge is to break down these silos. Adopt a “composite marketer” mindset—taking a 360° view of the organisation and influencing key areas such as product development, customer experience (CX), and sales enablement without needing direct control over them. This approach helps in reshaping perceptions of marketing as a growth driver rather than just a support function.
4. Build a Customer-Centric Culture Every annual report claims customer-centricity, yet the reality often falls short. Establishing a genuine CX culture is a powerful way for Marketing Leaders to drive growth and align the organisation around the customer.
CX as a Six-Month Goal: Focus the first six months on diagnosing and enhancing the customer experience. This involves mapping customer journeys, identifying pain points, and rallying teams across departments to improve touchpoints. By positioning CX at the heart of the strategy, you not only enhance satisfaction but also create a strong foundation for sustainable growth.
5. Digital Maturity Matters Conducting a digital maturity audit can reveal simple yet impactful gaps that are often overlooked. From broken customer journeys to under-optimised platforms, addressing these issues early can deliver quick wins that build credibility for the marketing team.
Quick Fixes, Big Impact: Often, the solutions are straightforward—streamlining online purchase flows, enhancing mobile responsiveness, or integrating CRM systems more effectively. By presenting these easy fixes early on, you can build momentum and demonstrate the immediate value marketing brings to the growth agenda.
Conclusion The planning cycle is about more than just setting annual strategies; it’s about leveraging early learnings, reassessing inherited plans, and creating a customer-centric growth culture. By approaching the first six months with a structured yet flexible mindset, new Marketing Leaders can bridge the gap between expectations and execution—transforming the marketing function into a true driver of growth.
Are you ready to turn your first six months into a launchpad for success? The planning starts now.
Australia has made significant strides in digital transformation, with many organisations embracing innovative technologies to enhance customer experience, streamline operations, and drive business growth.
However, when compared to global leaders, there remains a gap in execution.
To remain competitive Australian businesses must go beyond adopting new technologies and focus on optimising their digital presence, extracting maximum value. In today’s competitive landscape, businesses can no longer afford to take a passive approach to digital transformation. With digital acceleration reshaping industries at an unprecedented pace, companies that fail to assess and enhance their digital maturity risk being left behind. But what does digital maturity truly mean, and how can organisations leverage it to unlock significant growth opportunities?
The Case for Digital Maturity
Too many Australian businesses have stalled their digital returns by not focusing on customer expectations. Digital underutilisation results in inefficiencies, lost revenue, and poor customer experiences. Organisations need to undertake a digital maturity audit to better meet evolving customer expectations. Ensuring they are leveraging all elements of their digital presence across an omnichannel spectrum.
Our clients have seen an increase in revenue and a large increase in digital utilisation when they undertook an f(v)advisory digital maturity audit —a clear indication that understanding and optimising digital capabilities directly impacts the bottom line.
At f(v)advisory, our digital maturity audit benchmarks businesses against global best practices, drawing insights from international brands covering all CX touchpoints by leveraging our extensive global data information hub. This intelligence empowers organisations to not only gauge their standing but also implement proven strategies that drive real, measurable improvements.
Identifying High-Impact Digital Acceleration Opportunities
Once an organisation’s digital maturity is assessed, the next step is implementing targeted digital acceleration initiatives. To ensure maximum impact, businesses should adopt a strategic approach by prioritising initiatives that align with ROI potential, cost-effectiveness, and feasibility within their existing structure.
Some key focus areas include:
Each of these opportunities should be assessed in terms of their ROI impact, implementation cost, and feasibility within the organisation’s current structure. By prioritising initiatives that offer the highest return with minimal disruption, companies can fast-track their digital transformation journey while minimising risk.
The Competitive Advantage of Digital Maturity
In an era where digital excellence is the key differentiator, businesses that invest in their digital maturity will gain a significant competitive advantage. By leveraging data-driven insights, best-in-class benchmarks, and a structured approach to digital acceleration, organisations can drive sustained growth, improve customer satisfaction, and future-proof their business.
The question isn’t if your business should assess its digital maturity—it’s how soon you can start. Those who act now will be the ones leading their industries tomorrow.
In a data-driven world increasingly powered by AI, companies have unprecedented access to customer data, allowing greater personalisation and insight into customers behaviour. Customers are demanding companies use their data to provide a better service, while wanting companies to protect their data and be privacy conscious.
Personalisation and privacy can be a real opportunity for differentiation. Companies have the opportunity to take a customer-led position to privacy, not just compliance process. Being pro-active about changes and letting customers access and manage their data. Creating greater visibility and trust.
Customer value can be realised by having transparent collection practices, clear privacy policies and providing customers with control of their data. AsAI beings to power more data collection, it is critical that all data collection sources are documented and compliant. Customers will share their information, in fact according to McKinsey 71% of customers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions. With increasing privacy compliance measures, there is the risk that companies will lessen the use of customer data, and decrease the application of personalisation.
Companies who prioritise customer trust and privacy, offering transparency and control over data whilst providing real value, will ultimately be more successful in a privacy-alert world.
Personalisation can reduce customer acquisition, lift revenues and increase marketing spend ROI. Hence the journey to further personalisation should be symbiotic with privacy compliance, to unlock performance and create a growth momentum
Companies can take a customer-first strategy into the privacy requirements, enhancing personalisation efforts. By taking this customer-first position, companies can lead and enhance their customer relationships by collecting permission-based data that is centred on trust and customer benefit.
Over the past three decades, the marketing function has evolved organically, often without experienced oversight to define its responsibilities and accountabilities. This evolution has seen marketing departments lurch from one new activity to another—digital, social media, customer experience (CX), artificial intelligence (AI), and more—resulting in increased headcount but diminishing influence and value. The core role of marketing, which is to drive growth, has been overshadowed by these changes.
Today, Marketing Leaders are deemed responsible for every aspect of CX, spanning technology, data, analytics, and account growth, often without full accountability. This broad scope has led to cross-functional inefficiencies that constrain profit and digital-enabled growth. According to McKinsey, companies that excel in CX can achieve revenue growth rates 4-8% above their market average1. However, the lack of clear accountability and the complexity of managing CX across multiple functions often hinder these potential gains.
Growth remains a marketing priority, but the tools and control necessary to achieve it are often outside the marketing department’s purview. This leads to a significant gap between strategy and execution. A Harvard Business Review study found that two-thirds of executives believe their organisations struggle to bridge this gap2. This disconnect contributes to the high turnover rate among senior marketing executives, which LinkedIn reports as the highest of any job function at 17%3. The inability to meet growth KPIs is a primary reason for this turnover.
Marketers need to be absolute experts on consumer behaviours and trends and hyper-aware of the competitive landscape. The relentless, ever-changing media and communication landscape adds to this challenge. Despite having access to advanced analytics and insights, marketers often lack the bandwidth or skill set to fully understand the holistic world their customers live in. A McKinsey report highlights that only 42.1% of organisations use marketing analytics effectively for decision-making4.
Producing a visionary strategy today requires it to be both dynamic and adaptable. Without responsibility and control over execution, marketers lack the ability to follow through and achieve business goals. This issue is compounded by the fact that many marketing leaders define their roles and teams too narrowly or too broadly. A narrow focus leads to over-reliance on costly third-party agencies, while a broad focus results in significant overlap, multiple handling, and increased costs.
Marketing leaders often define their roles and teams in ways that create immediate biases. A too-narrow role relies heavily on third-party agencies motivated by output rather than successful strategy implementation. Conversely, a too-broad role leads to significant overlap, multiple handling, and increased costs. Marketing teams are currently not empowered to correct cross-functional inefficiencies, causing collaboration mismatches, missed opportunities, and cost blowouts.
The current construct of marketing departments is not working and is getting worse. Here are some critical next steps to address these challenges:
By addressing these issues and implementing these steps, marketing departments can reclaim their role as growth drivers and adapt to the rapidly changing business environment.
Supporting Data and Statistics
Would you like to explore more about any specific aspect of this transformation?
Get in touchThe team at f(v) advisory have been monitoring the trends across the globe and validated with several customers in Australia and New Zealand. No surprise that AI has been raised consistently over the last 8 months, but what is a surprise is attaching AI to opportunities. In the following expression of the key trends, we have taken a few on AI can be applied.
A deep dive into the 5 big trends:
Customer-first: Customers are seeking responsiveness, transparency and frictionless experiences. But are reporting that their experiences are much lower than their expectation. Companies who invest in a true omni-channel experience can start to put the customer first and see positive lifts in loyalty and growth. AI can play a major part here. As customers can use up to 6 different channels to ability to analyse the interactions and activity across channels combined with market and environmental data can create a frictionless, positive connection.
Personalisation: Creating an audience of 1 is one of the key drivers of growth with companies driving 40% more revenue from personalisation that slower moving companies. Investing in personalisation drives lifetime value leading to better revenue, retention and loyalty. AI can enhance data collection and insights, enabling companies to build personalised, one-to-one relationships across multiple channels. Customers are happier to share their data if they know it will enhance their experience. Customers want to be treated harmoniously across all channels and quality businesses use customer data as the ‘lifeblood’ of a best-in-class personalised experience across online, app, social and store.
Loyalty Re-imagined: Loyalty programs can increase customer lifetime value but have been seen by customers to be ‘generic’ with no differentiation. A loyalty program done well can increase customer advocacy by 70% and 60% of customers on a well-run loyalty program are likely to spend more. The opportunity for companies is to expand beyond just offering discounts and spending rewards. Include rewards for relationship building activities such as user-generated-content (UGC), community activity, FAQ content or rating and reviews. AI can enhance how the data, behaviour and activity is presented and delivered in real-time to your loyal customers.
Product Availability: Product and service availability is a significant pain point for customers. Customers are looking for real-time information on inventory status including stock quantities, out-of-stock information, flexible fulfillment options and delivery status. Customers claim, ‘fast delivery’ and ‘low shipping costs’ as the 2 most important aspects of a positive delivery experience. But the most important factor is that customers have visibility in being able to know when to expect a delivery. 85% of consumers will not shop with a retailer again after having a poor delivery experience. Using AI to gather real-time information on all aspects of inventory management can deliver a quality experience for customer’s number one CX expectation.
Trust: Companies need to ensure that their gathering and delivery of customer data is aligned to dynamic government data protection legislation. It is critical that customers have full visibility to their data and collection methods and can influence on how their data is collected. Use of AI is becoming increasing important for companies to present how it is being used and presenting to customers the complete dta sources and their compliance to legislation. Companies can use the ways the handle customer data and privacy as a source of competitive advantage. Customers will spend more with companies who protect their privacy and provide co=more control of their data. Quality companies provide customers with the ability to edit, delete and withdraw their consent, by individual channel, content and timing.
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