Learn priorities and challenges facing CMO’s

Good research can truly impact our ability to adjust our roles, and our strategies to effectively reach and impact our audience/consumers.   To many business conduct their business with blinders on.  They follow the gilded path presented in the media with no understanding how it relates to their consumer and audience.  They continue to market and connect with their traditional markets in their traditional ways until the markets move past them and they soon are no longer relevant.   They see trends but don’t investigate how those trends might affect their own business, or whether they are even relevant.   Understand the differences between your business and your competitors before you follow blindly in their path.  Lastly, many companies see all the great press about the new marketing trends Big Companies are able to fund and drive so successfully, without any understanding of how that translates to their small business.   So good research, and an understanding of how your consumer interacts with your brand is critical for success today.   

 

3 Priorities and 25 Challenges for CMO’s

By 2018, digital marketing is expected to overtake TV as the largest advertising segment. It’s elevating the importance of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) as strategist, innovator, and buyer of advisory services and technology. Greater measurability with digital marketing is making the CMO more accountable.

No question about it, a CMO has more responsibilities these days. It’s giving CMO’s a much bigger “to do” list.

Here are the top 3 priorities and 25 challenges a CMO faces with digital marketing.

GREATER TOP-LINE GROWTH

Recommended for YouWebcast: How to Build Great Products the Lean Startup Way

• 73% of CMO’s say they would increasingly contract directly with media owners and technology companies (MediaSense)
• 65% of CMO’s say digital marketing is the best way to deliver higher response and engagement rates to their companies (CMO Council)
• 60% say they anticipated content development functions would increasingly move in-house or to alternative agencies within the next five years (MediaSense)
• 58% of respondents say the number of agencies they worked with would likely fall over the next five years (MediaSense)
• 53% of CMO’s say with the growth of digital marketing, their team’s responsibilities include a greater focus on enabling revenue growth (Deloitte and ExactTarget)
• 38% of CMO’s say they have a larger technology budget to keep pace with the growth of digital marketing (Deloitte and ExactTarget)
• Number of direct reports to a CMO has decreased from 31 to 11 in the past 3 years (CMO Survey)

CUSTOMER FOCUS

• 90% say that customer individualization is a priority (Adobe)
• 71% believe mobile marketing is core to their business (SalesForce)
• 63% place a priority on the ability to spot opportunities and adapt strategies quickly (Econsultancy)
• 38% of CMO’s perceive an increased role in customer service, yet 23% don’t feel adequately prepared to address that greater role (SalesForce)
• CMO’s narrowly give the edge to excellent service (23%) over product quality (22%) and a trusting relationship (21%) (Duke University)
• Only 20% have set up social networks for the purpose of engaging with customers (Forbes)
• Only 16% use web personalization frequently today, while 50% plan to do so (Deloitte and ExactTarget)

ANALYTICS THAT ENABLE BETTER DECISION MAKING

• 82% feel under-prepared to deal with the explosion of data (Forbes)
• 70% have suboptimal, or no ability to integrate customer data between online and offline sources (Adobe)
• 68% of organizations have a separate digital marketing budget — it averages a quarter of the total marketing budget (Forbes)
• 66% are funding digital marketing via reinvestment of existing marketing budgets (Forbes)
• 65% say the use of outcome-based KPI’s, in order to match media investment decisions more closely to business results, was their number one priority (MediaSense)
• 61% say data acquisition is their top internal marketing priority (Deloitte and ExactTarget)
• 61% of CMO’s admit they have a long way to go still in using big data properly (Adobe)
• 59% of CMO’s name flexible and agile marketing processes as a top internal marketing priority (Deloitte and ExactTarget)
• 53% of CMO’s say ROI is their most important metric used to measure success (Deloitte and ExactTarget)
• 52% say the growth of digital marketing has led to the need for more qualified data and analytics personnel. What are the “right” metrics for CMO’s? The numbers proving marketing ROI to fellow C-suite members (SalesForce)
• Only 31% of projects use available or request marketing analytics (CMO Survey)

If you are a CMO, or work with one, do these statistics reflect your priorities and challenges? Are you looking for an alternative agency to help you solve them?

 

 

Read actual article on Business to community online.