Clare Cahill is Adobe's Digital Media Marketing Manager for Australia and New Zealand. Here are her thoughts on digital marketing:

1. What do you consider essential skills for a marketing team these days?

   As a marketer today you cannot dismiss the basic skills of good strategy and planning, but as we move to a world of digital first, being able to react quickly and optimize are key. 

   The key benefits of digital marketing are speed to market and data to measure accurate ROI. Marketers who recognize this value are able to respond to competitor campaigns quickly and effectively, and build comprehensive customer profiles to deliver a more personalised experience for their customers. 

2. What do you feel are the most underrated skills in a marketing team these days?

   Not so much a skill, but operational silos are a significant barrier to successfully using data and insights to deliver improved customer experience.  A customer can touch any part of an organization so the ability to pull all activity data into a single view is crucial. The CMO needs to be the nerve centre of customer insights, working closely with the CIO / CTO; they must have a seat at the boardroom table and input into the business strategy. Incumbent marketing solutions and dis-jointed integrations continue to be a barrier to holistic ROI insight. Alignment across an organization will foster agility and nimbleness and drive business growth. 

3. How did you get the background and skills necessary for your role?

   My degree and background is in design, so working with creatives and around the creative industry is something I have done all my working life. The rest I have learned on the job or by doing training courses as I have progressed through my career. I don’t believe any marketer can grow unless they learn along the way. Marketing has changed more in the last 3-4 years than it has in the last 20. For marketers to keep their campaigns fresh we must always find new or more innovative ways to communicate with our customers in the way they want to hear from us. As a brand it is imperative that we keep our skills up to date and challenge our thinking all the time.

4. What advice would you give to young people who want to do community management some day?

   Understand what social means for your brand. Make sure all stakeholders buy in to this plan and make sure everyone who has a social presence is trained and understands how they need to behave when representing the brand they work for in their social presence. At Adobe this has been key and as an organization we encourage our teams to interact with customers. Staff can be the best ambassadors for your brand and can have a much more trusted voice than the brand itself.

5. What do you see as the biggest challenges for marketing professionals over the 3 years?

   Keeping up with the pace of change will be the biggest challenge. 
   
   

   The explosion of data and what this can do for an organization, and the marketing teams supporting it, is the trend to watch. Big Data is the buzz phrase of the moment, but how you use the intelligence it provides to shape your go-to-market,  and how you can work in real time on your campaigns, will be challenging for marketers. Using data to put customers at the center of your organization, and developing products or services based on their needs, is incredibly powerful.

   I also think social is a challenge for marketers – it can make or destroy a brand very quickly. Having a strong social strategy and keeping abreast of all the new ways we can interact socially with our customers over new channels will be essential. As the mobile market continues to gain momentum and move towards wearables, social will be a key tool for us to communicate with our customers.

6. What excites you the most about your industry?

   At Adobe we often say that despite the challenges, there is no better time to be a marketer. 

   I’m in a very lucky position where I work with the creative industry; they are my customers and I am constantly amazed by what they do and create with our software. As design becomes intrinsically more important, the emergence of design- led organizations is something I find super exciting. Companies that put designers at the heart of what they do, from strategy creation to the development of products or services, blow me away. 

   We are living in a time where consumers expect a much richer experience across all channels, as well as product delivery, and as a result we are seeing this tectonic shift:  a change in the importance of design in the whole process. For my customers this means being part of the process of product creation, not just being brought in at the end to add the branding. 

   The next couple of years will be amazing and I can’t think of a better job than the one I’m in - being at the forefront of innovation, watching and being part of this period of incredible change. 

   

   Originally heralding from the UK Clare has been with Adobe almost 10 years and in the IT industry for just over 20 in various marketing roles. From client side to reseller, agency and then on to vendor, she has transitioned from the old days of traditional marketing to the world of digital first. Clare is currently responsible for the marketing of Adobe¹s Creative Cloud in Australia and New Zealand.