CMO Priorities That Move the Business Forward
CMO priorities have never been harder to sequence. You are responsible for brand, demand, product marketing, data, agency relationships, internal alignment, and increasingly, board-level reporting on commercial outcomes. The question is not what matters. The question is what you do first, and what you stop pretending is working.
The CMOs who last, and who build something worth building, tend to share a few habits: they are ruthlessly clear about what marketing is actually causing versus what it is merely accompanying, they protect long-term brand investment even when the CFO is circling, and they treat their team’s time as a scarce resource rather than an infinite input.
Key Takeaways
- Most CMOs under-invest in brand and over-index on lower-funnel performance, capturing existing demand rather than creating new growth.
- Proving marketing’s commercial value to the board requires honest approximation, not false precision built on attribution models you cannot defend.
- Team structure and capability gaps are almost always the hidden constraint on marketing performance, not budget or strategy.
- The best CMOs sequence priorities ruthlessly: fix the foundation before adding channels, and stop funding activity that cannot be connected to a business outcome.
- Longevity in the CMO role comes from commercial credibility, not creative ambition or technology adoption.
In This Article
- Why Most CMO Priority Lists Are Wrong Before They Start
- What Does the Board Actually Need From Marketing?
- Brand vs. Performance: The Allocation Question You Cannot Avoid
- Team and Capability: The Constraint Nobody Wants to Admit
- Technology and Data: What to Prioritise and What to Ignore
- Agency and Partner Relationships: The Hidden Time Cost
- How to Sequence CMO Priorities Without Burning Out Your Team
- The One Priority CMOs Consistently Underweight
Why Most CMO Priority Lists Are Wrong Before They Start
When I ran agencies, I sat across the table from a lot of CMOs in transition. New role, new mandate, 90-day plan already drafted. The list almost always looked the same: fix the website, audit the agencies, reset the brand, build a data capability, improve attribution. Sensible on paper. Mostly wrong in practice.
The problem is not the items on the list. It is the assumption that all of them deserve equal urgency, and that the CMO’s job is to make progress on all fronts simultaneously. It is not. The job is to identify the one or two constraints that are genuinely limiting commercial performance, and concentrate effort there until they are resolved. Everything else is maintenance.
I spent years overvaluing lower-funnel performance marketing, partly because it was measurable and partly because clients rewarded the numbers it produced. It took time, and some uncomfortable conversations with myself, to accept that much of what performance channels get credited for was going to happen anyway. Someone who already knows your brand, already wants your product, and searches for you by name is going to convert. The channel that captures that click is not the reason they converted. You need to reach people who do not yet know they want what you sell. That is where growth actually comes from, and it is where most CMO priority lists are weakest.
If you want to go deeper on the commercial and leadership dimensions of this role, the Career and Leadership in Marketing hub covers the territory that tends to get skipped in standard CMO playbooks.
What Does the Board Actually Need From Marketing?
This is the priority that determines whether you last. Not your creative output, not your campaign awards, not your MarTech stack. Your ability to translate marketing activity into language that a CFO or CEO finds credible.
That does not mean drowning them in attribution data. Attribution models are a perspective on reality, not reality itself. I have seen CMOs present last-click attribution reports with the confidence of someone reading from a court transcript, when in fact they were presenting a story that the data had been set up to tell. Boards are not stupid. They sense when the numbers are being managed rather than reported.
What actually builds credibility is honest approximation. You can say: “We believe this brand campaign contributed to a 12% improvement in aided awareness among our target segment, and we saw a corresponding lift in organic search volume and direct traffic over the same period. We cannot isolate causation precisely, but the directional evidence is consistent.” That is a more trustworthy statement than a dashboard claiming 4.7x ROAS on a channel that is largely retargeting people who were already going to buy.
Forrester has written clearly about the kinds of business shifts that catch marketing leaders off guard, and the pattern is almost always the same: marketing was not close enough to the commercial reality of the business to see it coming. The CMOs who avoid that fate are the ones who have earned a seat at the table through consistent, honest commercial reporting, not impressive slide decks.
Brand vs. Performance: The Allocation Question You Cannot Avoid
Every CMO has to answer this question, and most answer it wrong, not because they lack the knowledge but because the incentive structure pushes them toward performance. Performance is measurable. Brand is not, at least not in the short term. And when budgets are under pressure, measurable wins.
I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend across 30 industries, and the pattern holds almost without exception: companies that cut brand investment to protect performance numbers in a downturn spend the next two to three years rebuilding the awareness and consideration they lost. The performance metrics look fine for a quarter, sometimes two. Then the pipeline starts thinning. Then the cost per acquisition creeps up. Then someone in the boardroom asks why growth has stalled, and nobody connects it to the brand budget that was quietly redirected eighteen months earlier.
The clothing retail analogy I keep returning to: someone who walks into a store and tries something on is many times more likely to buy than someone who walks past. Performance marketing is excellent at serving the people who are already in the fitting room. Brand marketing is what gets people into the store in the first place. If you only fund the fitting room experience, you are competing for a shrinking pool of already-interested buyers. That is not a growth strategy. That is managed decline dressed up as efficiency.
The right allocation varies by category, competitive position, and growth stage. But if your brand spend is below 30% of your total marketing budget and you are in a category with meaningful purchase consideration, that is worth examining seriously.
Team and Capability: The Constraint Nobody Wants to Admit
When I grew an agency from 20 to 100 people, the hardest lesson was that strategy is only as good as the team executing it. You can have the clearest CMO priority list in the industry and still underdeliver if the people responsible for execution are in the wrong roles, under-resourced, or working without clear accountability.
Most CMOs inherit a team that was built for a different version of the marketing function. A team optimised for campaign production in 2019 is not automatically equipped for performance measurement, content strategy, and data analysis in 2025. The gap between what the strategy requires and what the team can deliver is almost always the real constraint, not the budget, not the technology, not the agency relationships.
The priority here is honest capability assessment before you hire, restructure, or invest in new tools. I have seen CMOs spend six figures on analytics platforms that the team lacks the skills to use properly. The platform becomes shelfware, the vendor gets blamed, and the underlying capability gap remains. Tools like Hotjar can surface genuine user behaviour insights, but only if someone in the team knows how to interpret what they are seeing and connect it to a decision. The tool is not the answer. The thinking is.
A useful diagnostic: list the five most important things marketing needs to do better in the next 12 months. Then ask honestly whether your current team could deliver them if given the resources. If the answer is no for more than two of them, you have a capability problem, not a strategy problem.
Technology and Data: What to Prioritise and What to Ignore
The MarTech landscape is vast and getting larger. Every vendor promises to solve a problem you may or may not have. The CMO’s job is not to stay current with every platform. It is to identify the data and workflow gaps that are genuinely limiting marketing performance, and find the simplest tool that closes them.
In practice, most marketing teams need three things to work well before they need anything else: a reliable CRM with clean data, a clear view of website performance and user behaviour, and a consistent process for connecting campaign activity to pipeline or revenue. Everything beyond that is either optimisation or distraction, depending on how mature the foundation is.
On website performance specifically, understanding how your site is actually being used, not just how many people visit it, is foundational. Hotjar’s UX design tools offer a way to see where users drop off, where they hesitate, and where the experience breaks down. That kind of behavioural data is more actionable than most CMOs realise, because it connects directly to conversion performance without requiring a six-month data science project.
On the question of website value more broadly, if you are making the case internally for investment in digital infrastructure, Semrush’s analysis of how website value is calculated is a useful reference point for framing the commercial case.
AI tools deserve a mention here, not because they are significant in the way the vendor community claims, but because they are genuinely useful for specific tasks: first-draft content, research synthesis, brief writing, and campaign ideation. The CMOs who are getting value from AI are using it to accelerate work their team was already doing. The ones who are not getting value are using it to replace thinking they should be doing themselves.
Agency and Partner Relationships: The Hidden Time Cost
I ran agencies for a long time, which means I understand this dynamic from both sides. The client-agency relationship is one of the most consistently mismanaged aspects of marketing operations, and it costs CMOs more time and money than almost anything else on their plate.
The most common failure mode is ambiguity about who owns what. The agency believes it is responsible for strategy. The client believes the agency is responsible for execution. Neither has said this explicitly, so both are operating on different assumptions, producing work that satisfies neither party, and billing hours into a relationship that is quietly deteriorating.
The fix is not a new brief or a new agency. It is a clear written statement of what the agency is accountable for, what success looks like in measurable terms, and what decisions the CMO retains versus delegates. That conversation is uncomfortable to have, which is why most CMOs avoid it. But it saves an enormous amount of time over a 12-month engagement.
When I was turning around a loss-making agency, one of the first things I did was audit every client relationship against a simple question: does this client know exactly what we are responsible for, and do we know exactly what they expect? In almost every case where performance was poor, the answer was no on both sides. The problem was not capability. It was clarity.
How to Sequence CMO Priorities Without Burning Out Your Team
The sequencing question is where most CMO plans fall apart. Everything feels urgent in the first 90 days. The temptation is to run multiple workstreams simultaneously, show momentum on all fronts, and demonstrate that you are across everything. The result is a team that is stretched thin, producing mediocre work across ten priorities instead of excellent work on three.
A more disciplined approach: identify the two or three things that are genuinely limiting commercial performance right now, and make those the only priorities for the first six months. Not the only things you do, but the only things that get your personal attention and the team’s best resources. Everything else runs on maintenance mode.
Early in my career, I asked my MD for budget to build a new website. He said no. I could have accepted that and moved on. Instead, I taught myself to code and built it myself. The outcome was not perfect, but it existed, it worked, and it demonstrated something important: constraints are not always blockers. Sometimes they are the thing that forces you to find a better path. The same logic applies to CMO priority setting. Resource constraints, when they are real, force clarity about what actually matters.
A practical sequencing framework: in the first 90 days, diagnose. In months four through nine, fix the one or two highest-impact constraints. In months ten through eighteen, build the capability and systems to sustain the improvement. Do not start building until you have finished diagnosing. Do not start scaling until you have finished building.
The leadership dimension of this role extends well beyond campaign management. If you are working through questions of team structure, board relationships, or career positioning as a marketing leader, the Career and Leadership in Marketing section covers the kind of territory that tends to get left out of the standard CMO playbook.
The One Priority CMOs Consistently Underweight
Internal alignment. Not with the board, though that matters. With the commercial teams: sales, finance, product, operations. Marketing that operates as a separate function, producing outputs that the rest of the business does not understand or trust, is marketing that will eventually be cut or marginalised.
I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically designed to reward marketing effectiveness rather than creative merit. The entries that win consistently share one characteristic: the marketing was built around a commercial problem, not a creative opportunity. The brief started with a business challenge, not a campaign idea. The measurement framework was agreed before the work ran, not constructed afterward to justify the spend.
That kind of marketing does not happen in isolation. It happens when the CMO has built enough trust with the CFO, the CEO, and the sales leadership that marketing is treated as a commercial function rather than a cost centre with a creative department attached. Building that trust is slow, unglamorous work. It involves sitting in commercial reviews, understanding the P&L, and occasionally pushing back on campaign ideas that are interesting but not connected to a business problem. It is also the work that makes every other CMO priority easier to execute.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
