One of the company’s most significant and influential groups of people exists within the C-suite. Achieving this level of success requires a wealth of expertise and well-honed leadership abilities. These top-level executives work together to ensure the company’s strategies and operations are in line with its defined policies and future goals.
When you require a new or replacement executive for your C-suite, you need to ensure this new team member is not only highly qualified for the position but is a good fit with existing top management. MarketPro has a 20+ year track record of placing top marketing executive talent in companies nationwide. Whether adding a new position to expand into new markets, remain technologically relevant, or replacing a C-suite executive member, you can trust your chief digital officer executive search to us.
Our chief digital officer executive search team has a combined total of 100 years of top executive marketing experience, giving us a competitive edge in identifying top talent.
You’re going to get a chief digital officer. The only question is whether you’ll do it in time to stay ahead of the competition or wait until you’ve fallen behind everyone else.
Marketing is evolving faster than most people can keep up. In just a few years, you’ve seen how huge trends in social media, mobile technology, big data, the cloud, and more have drastically changed the face of marketing across the board. If you’re already struggling to maintain a modern strategy amidst all this change, how are you going to deal with the next big thing on the horizon?
You can’t rely on your traditional marketing professionals alone to keep you on the cutting edge of digital. They all have their own specialties and priorities to focus on day-to-day. Your marketing team needs the support of a high-level digital authority to advise and direct the overall strategy. How is digital (or the lack thereof) impacting your revenue, your growth, your customers, and your future?
A talented and innovative Chief Digital Officer can serve as your CMO’s right-hand person, devoted to utilizing the digital landscape to more effectively reach customers and prospects and decrease the friction with which you conduct commerce, therefore preparing your company for the future and enabling growth.
Defining the Role
The position of chief digital officer is not brand new, but the role is ever-changing and growing into its potential and can encompass different responsibilities depending on an organization’s structure. The Chief Digital Officer exists to bring a fresh culture and perspective to your organization, innovating the way you do business and transforming it to align with the needs of your clients in today’s world. This executive leader must possess the skill set to maintain current business while proactively positioning your organization to adapt seamlessly to the changes coming tomorrow.
Today’s customers are accustomed to the flexibility and convenience of completing almost all interactions, from shopping and purchasing to customer service and engagement, online, within their timeframe, and using a wide variety of electronic devices. The Chief Digital Officer leverages technology, data, and user experience knowledge to improve company processes, and strategically contact consumers at the best possible times, and ultimately drive more business.
Here’s Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director of McKinsey, on the chief digital officer:
Who within your organization is well-equipped to best define this position and its potential impact on the business? Some organizations are leaving the Chief Digital Officer role to IT, and while these two entities need to work synergistically, their roles are significantly different. While the CIO is often primarily responsible for the infrastructure of the company’s information technology and data management, the CDO handles strategic responsibilities related to the entire scope of the digital transformation journey.
For instance, they will provide support to numerous other departments: accounting, HR, legal, and more. Can you think of a department within an organization that is not reliant on digital tools? A good Chief Digital Officer will look for opportunities to streamline the digital process across the entire organization.
In many ways, their goals will resemble those of the CIO and CMO, and they will often serve as team partners, translators, and mediators for the two; however, they won’t share the same direct focus on branding, advertising, hardware, and technical logistics as theirs will be a more panoramic, strategic, and growth-oriented approach.
You need a Chief Digital Officer who can help you grow, and the CMO, along with the rest of the “C” Suite, needs to take the lead in outlining the specific vision for this role.
Do You Want to be a Digital Leader, or Follower?
Despite past speculation that the Chief Digital Officer would be just another fleeting trend, the role has defied naysayers and is becoming a standard across industries. In fact, today about 27% of medium-to-larger companies have implemented the CDO position which is up from 15% in 2015.
While the role may change and evolve, the chief digital officer is here to stay and will remain a valuable asset within organizations of all sizes for the foreseeable future. Or, at least, as long as humanity is using the internet and attached to computers all day, every day. CMOs and companies that continue to delay this acquisition may see their tenure or place in the market cut negatively. If you want to stay competitive in your market, it’s a classic case of WHEN—not IF—you’ll hire a Chief Digital Officer.
Put a Digital Expert in Charge with a Chief Digital Officer Executive Search or Risk Falling Behind
The bottom line is that businesses that want to stay in business or grow to new heights need someone in the C-suite to oversee their digital presence. From pioneering new ways to engage customers to coordinating internal digital processes, their insight and experience will improve corporate efficiency and ultimately bottom-line profits.
This isn’t just another expense to be chalked up to the marketing department budget and pushed off indefinitely. It’s an investment, and an essential, time-sensitive one that directly impacts your company’s competitive future. And, unlike many other investments, digital offers unprecedented responsiveness in demonstrating real-time ROI because you can see exactly how the capital is being used and how it’s being translated into revenue.
No matter how digitally savvy your marketing leaders are, they are still marketers first, and they are not technologists, software fortune tellers, or digital diviners. You need the right talent who can yield the responsibility and resources to keep the company relevant and ahead of the competition and the corporate authority to step in, take direction, and provide advice with finesse so that it is taken seriously at all levels.