How to do more with less in marketing — a new approach for CMOs

In 2024, the remit of marketing leaders is expanding as they’re expected to deliver increasingly quick results with tightening budgets. According to research by Gartner, 75% of CMOs report being required to cut martech spending, with marketing budgets dropping from 9.5% to 9.1% of company revenue from 2022 to 2023.

Meanwhile, two out of three CMOs predict that content demand will rise by 500% by 2025 according to Adobe. It’s no wonder that businesses are pivoting and adapting quickly to seize the new opportunities presented by AI breakthroughs, pushing marketing teams to adopt new strategies, tools, and concepts. In every industry, CMOs are faced with an increasing scope of responsibility and impact on the business. These factors have led to a “doing more with less” culture that is sweeping through marketing leadership.

This pincer effect, with decreasing budgets on one hand and increasing responsibility on the other, has led average CMO tenure to decrease to its shortest in a decade, Spencer Stuart reports.

So, with all eyes on ROI and customer expectations for seamless, multi-channel experiences on the rise, how can marketers effectively monetize their investment into customer experience marketing technology? The answer lies in the content supply chain — the real arena for doing “more with less” in marketing leadership.

Streamlining the content supply chain

Today, CMOs need ways to deliver more content, faster and at scale, all while streamlining workflows, improving efficiency, and cutting costs. This might sound like a paradox. But by using a powerful tool like Adobe Workfront across a content supply chain solution and augmenting its capabilities with generative AI tools, CMOs can truly support their teams to deliver more for less.

With an end-to-end content supply chain solution, marketers are harnessing the power of generative AI and intelligent automation to extract the most value out of their content, and the technology that delivers it.

Built to power teams, Workfront is a robust work management solution that enables marketing teams to centralize and manage their content processes, across technologies. Leading organizations are using Workfront to map projects, automate approvals across platforms, and track their performance against key business KPIs.

It’s not just about surviving a “more for less” culture. Those who see this as an opportunity to link marketing spending to a healthy bottom line by cutting costs and maximizing productivity will be the ones to thrive in the new landscape.

Nonetheless, technology is just one piece of the puzzle: optimizing your content supply chain is really about people. Change management in this space means educating teams to embrace transformation, overcoming siloed ways of working, automating manual processes to free up capacity, and facilitating collaboration.

This brings us to a key puzzle in the “more for less” landscape. Mastering this challenge essentially requires us to delegate on a mass scale across the content delivery supply chain, whether that’s to non-specialists or to generative AI.

For instance, an asset could be generated by a designer, with its messaging personalized automatically, and dozens of variations generated at the touch of a button using generative AI. This results in more output with less input, and helps illustrate the concept, from recent Cognizant research findings, that generative AI could inject anywhere from $477 billion to $1 trillion into the US economy by 2032.

But with increasing reliance on automation and generative AI to meet content demand, how can we still ensure brand quality and consistency?

Democratizing design

The pressure to generate assets with fewer large-scale builds — without specialized designers and expert marketing stakeholder involvement — is leading to a democratization of design as a result of automation.

Experts estimate that as much as 90% of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026. This will widen profit margins and drive faster time-to-market, but opens up risks when it comes to governance, quality assurance, and maintaining a cohesive brand experience.

At Cognizant, the marketing leaders we work with often want to automate processes where possible, while retaining full control. There is some contradiction in this ambition; delivering more for less means delegating control wherever possible, with content delivery solutions in place to maintain the quality of that output. CMOs must become comfortable with setting clear rules and parameters for key assets, and then allowing those assets to be created automatically.

Generative AI is set to be transformative in setting branding parameters for visual or textual content too, providing the foundation for automated branding checks and approvals.

To prepare for this, brand managers need the workflow processes in place to define and police those parameters, whether that’s a design scheme, clear tonal messaging guidance, or component templates, so they can take advantage of the generative AI opportunity as it arises.

Do more with less: use your content supply chain solution

The pincer effect that marketing leaders face today is undoubtedly a significant challenge – but it also presents a tipping point, and the opportunity for teams to invest in the deep transformation that is needed to compete on a global level. Content supply chain solutions are the forum to make these changes, offering marketers the possibility of accelerating and augmenting their operations with generative AI. It’s time to seize this opportunity to do more with less.

Continue the conversation with us at the Adobe Summit

As Adobe’s trusted implementation partner and a Diamond Sponsor of the 2024 Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, Cognizant is here to connect with marketing innovators and leaders all over the world. We work closely with leading brands to make their content supply chains more efficient and cost-effective, enabling teams to do more with less, all while upholding an excellent standard of customer experience.

Experience where content and next-generation AI-powered experiences come together with our spaceship configurator, Solari Astrocraft demonstration of the art-of-the-possible. Discover the potential of content and generative artificial intelligence with us.

Skip the line – book your exclusive demo experience here.

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About Cognizant

Cognizant (Nasdaq-100: CTSH) engineers modern businesses. We help our clients modernize technology, reimagine processes and transform experiences so they can stay ahead in our fast-changing world. Together, we’re improving everyday life. See how at www.cognizant.com or @cognizant.