Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) endure daily challenges that stretch the bounds of mobile devices and apps required to satisfy their unique role in the organization.
With primary or shared responsibility for areas such as sales management, product development, and marketing communications, CMOs are faced with a diverse range of specialized disciplines in which they are required to be knowledgeable and perform productively under a range of geo-contexts. The CMOs’ world is compounded by day-to-day activities of these functions, which include highly analytical tasks such as pricing and market research, to creative objectives like advertising and promotions.
iPad (and iPhone) apps present significant advantages for the CMO because they provide a variety of productivity opportunities and point solutions that are simply not available in any alternative contexts. More than any other senior executive, the CMO must influence partners, service providers and peers in order to achieve their own goals. Clearly, this necessity to persuade, compel, and communicate ideas, data, and strategies, is reason enough to conclude that iPad is an ideal solution to meet the complexity of challenges faced by the CMO.
There is no simple answer to selecting a collection of apps germane to the CMO role, but there are some essential apps, without which, iPad performance in this role would be less than optimal. The marketing role has much to do with managing the creative side of a business, but without ample means to collaborate on ideas and communicate strategy and findings, the CMO’s mobile agility will be constrained. Addressing these requirements, three categories of iPad apps emerge. This Appolicious list contains additional apps for consideration.
Creative
While creative tasks are typically handled by artistic and graphical specialists, CMSs can benefit by sketch ideas to proffer ideas and general creative direction. It’s not uncommon for marketing leaders to invest heavily in creative idea research while also capturing ideas based on ideas employed by competitors.
Two apps come to mind in this category for creating and shaping new ideas, SketchBook Pro and Penultimate. Sketchbook (from AutoDesk) is ideal for marketing professionals comfortable with PhotoShop and other advanced artistic applications. Penultimate is ideal for CMOs who simply want to take notes in meetings and use a stylus to sketch diagrams and rudimentary ideas. Both apps work well with a stylus.
A third app I recommend is IdeaWell, an app that helps you visually track and measure ideas based on mostly subjective rankings. This app is pretty simple, but that’s one of the benefits. With just a few taps you can add your ideas and visually assess which are most likely to provide the best results.
Collaboration
When teams have documents at their fingertips they perform better. On average, enterprise information workers spend more than 25% of their workdays just trying to find the information they need to do their jobs. Collaboration performance can be chopped to shreds if documents aren’t readily available for a meeting. A well-implemented Box.net sharing and collaboration strategy can enhance your teams’ performance and the Box iPhone app is ideal for this.
If your company has a GoToMeeting account, this is an ideal app to help you keep partners and staff in sync while engaging in meetings. You can’t take control of the meeting from iPad but the audio feature works great with or without earbuds and the mic. Few realize that this is the ideal app for multi-casting training and educational content to a group of people with iPads and/or iphones.
Communication
There’s only one way to get more done if you need to communicate with lengthy messages or compose marketing prose on iPad and iPhone – dictation – and Dragon Dictation will help. In addition to sending lots of staff-related email messages to delegate tasks, the CMO is typically at the center of all corporate messaging. Dictating messages and documents is far more productive than typing and provides a highly productive solution.
In a world dominated by Microsoft Office, teams must be able to work on common turf and Documents To Go Premium – Office Suite delivers. With support for Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint slides, this app provides a comprehensive feature set for the most demanding Office document production requirements. Seamless integration with Google Docs and Box.net makes this a no-brainer for the CMOs tool chest.
As a CMO, you’ll be making lots of presentations. The iWork Keynote app is ideal for on-the-go presentation development and showing with the Apple iPad VGA Adapter. You can also import Microsoft Powerpoint slide decks from Documents To Go with ease.
