Peer Q+A: Lessons from CMOs Elevating Marketing’s Role

Paula Serios, Chief Growth Officer, ab+a, conducts a Peer-to-Peer Q+A with
Kevin Snyder, SVP / Chief Marketing, Communications & Brand Officer, Nicklaus Children’s Health

Highlights

• Future-CMOs are expected to be strategic general managers: metrics, growth, and customer-centricity top the scoreboard.
  Alignment with CEO and CFO is no longer optional; it’s foundational for marketing to drive enterprise impact.
• AI, data, digital journeys, and omnichannel touchpoints will define marketing excellence in healthcare.
• CMOs must build credibility through financial literacy, operational collaboration, and demonstrating measurable outcomes.
• Leading with clarity and partnership shifts marketing from cost center to growth engine.

Building a Future-proof Marketing Team

Paula: Kevin, there’s a lot of buzz now about the evolving role of the CMO in healthcare. Based on what you’re seeing at Nicklaus Children’s—and what firms like McKinsey and HBR are writing—what do you believe the CMO of the future looks like?

Kevin: Great question, Paula. The CMO of the future is less of a marketer in the traditional and more of a strategic growth steward. McKinsey’s recent work talks about CMOs needing to be deeply embedded with the CEO and CFO around customer-centric growth.

Here are a few characteristics I see playing out:

General Manager Mindset

— Someone who understands not just campaigns and brand perception, but also margins, revenue streams, and the enterprise P&L. As HBR put it, marketing’s scope is expanding because digital, AI, data are increasing expectations around optimizing strategy, not just executing tactics.

Custodian of the Customer Journey

— Owning the voice of the patient / family / community across channels, ensuring consistency, trust, relevance. McKinsey notes that companies where marketing leaders are involved in strategy see significantly higher top-line growth.

Data + Digital + Tech Fluency

— Understanding attribution, modeling, AI tools; embracing omnichannel, personalization, measurement. The CMO needs to translate complex data into simple insights for every exec and board. HBR talks about using tech and data not just for speed or automation but for meaningful strategy shifts.

Strategic Alignment with C-Suite

— The future CMO doesn’t work in a silo. We must align tightly with the CEO and CFO on goals, budgets, and metrics. McKinsey’s research recently showed that organizations where the CMO sits at the table with the CEO & CFO and shares accountability for growth are significantly outperforming others.

Agility, Innovation & Ethical Trust

— In an era of disruption, regulating privacy, shifting behavior, new expectations—CMOs must lead not only with creative innovation, but also with trust, transparency, and ethical use of data. It’s one thing to collect insights; it’s another to use them responsibly.

Paula: Very helpful breakdown. Given that vision, how are you putting it into practice at Nicklaus Children’s? What shifts in strategy, structure, or mindset have you made or are making?

Kevin: We’ve made several intentional moves to shift the team and the work toward that future-CMO model.

• We restructured marketing communications, data, and patient experience teams to reduce silos and create cross-functional squads. For example, the group that manages referrals, patient digital journeys, and post-visit engagement work together rather than separately. That allows faster learning cycles and more unified patient touch.
• We built dashboards focused not just on brand or awareness, but on things like cost per new patient, retention, referral leakage, and patient lifetime value. This lets us speak in terms the CEO, CFO, and board understand—growth, margin, efficiency.
• We’ve invested in predictive analytics and personalization tools, so outreach isn’t just reactive. We want to anticipate questions, personalize follow-ups, reduce patient friction—and do it in a way that feels helpful, not invasive.
• Lastly, we are setting up regular executive alignment sessions. I meet with finance and operations leaders quarterly with shared metrics and joint accountability. It’s part of making the CMO role a strategic partner in decisions about both investment and risk.

Paula: One challenge that comes up a lot: proving ROI in healthcare marketing can be harder than in consumer sectors. What are your approaches to measurement that are working or that you believe will work going forward?

Kevin: True—healthcare has unique challenges: regulation, patient privacy, long decision cycles, multiple stakeholders. But there are ways to overcome them.

• First, define what success means together with other executive leaders. Too often marketing metrics are disconnected—impressions, clicks, bounce rates—without linking to patient acquisition, readmissions avoided, or cost savings. So, we’ve co-defined measurement frameworks with the CEO and CFO. For example: how many new patients are in key service lines, what is referral conversion, what’s the margin on those patients, what’s the lifetime of their relationship with us.
• Second, invest in full-funnel measurement. Track awareness, first inquiries, then referral, then care utilization. Use attribution where possible and accept proxy metrics where you must—but always tie back to outcomes the health system cares about.
• Third, manage innovation with guardrails. Use pilots and A/B tests. Try new channels or messages in controlled settings. Learn fast, invest more only when you see early signals of impact. This kind of experimentation builds confidence up the chain and helps avoid over-investing in unproven ideas.

Paula: The alignment with CFO/CEO you mentioned is crucial. What advice do you have for CMOs who want to elevate their role but haven’t yet broken into that strategic level of influence?

Kevin: If I were advising any marketer in that position, here are a few steps I’d recommend:

1. Speak financial metrics from day one. Understand revenue, margin, costs. When you pitch a campaign, don’t just show creative; show financial impact.
2. Find early wins in high-visibility, high-leverage areas—e.g., patient leakage, referral improvement, or digital access improvements. Deliver them well.
3. Build cross-functional credibility. Spend time with operations, finance, clinicians. Ask what keeps them up at night. Frame your marketing initiatives as solutions to their pain points, not just marketing wins.
4. Invest in your team’s capability. Hire or upskill people who can bridge brand and data—analytics, attribution, customer insight. A strong data translator or insight lead is as critical as creative.
5. Be proactive in C-suite conversations. Don’t wait to be invited to the table. Request to be part of enterprise strategy sessions. Show willingness to share risk, not just reports.

Takeaways for CMOs & Marketing Leaders

• Position yourself not as campaign manager, but as growth architect. Speak the language of outcomes, not outputs.
  Earn trust by aligning early with CEO & CFO: shared goals, shared metrics.
• Build measurement systems that connect marketing activity to financial outcomes.
• Prioritize agility: test, learn, scale. Balance innovation with accountability.
• Lead your team toward multi-disciplinary fluency—brand + data + digital + customer experience.

Where to Start?

A strong financial story is the best starting place.