Some 53% of surveyed CMOs from around the world believe that digital marketing’s growth has changed their team’s responsibilities by ratcheting up the pressure to enable revenue growth, according to a report [download page] from Deloitte and Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud. Interestingly, though, as CMOs place a premium on ROI as a success metric, few feel ill-prepared for these new revenue responsibilities. Instead, a new foe proves most troubling: finding the right data and analytics talent. Slightly more than half reported that digital marketing’s growth had resulted in a greater need for data/analytics personnel – and roughly one-third indicated that this need was the aspect of their responsibilities they feel least prepared for. (By comparison, just 4% feel least prepared for their added revenue responsibilities.)
With marketers struggling with the explosion of data, difficulty finding the right talent has become a familiar refrain. So while many recognize the need for data analysis skills, few rate their current teams highly in this regard.
Beyond staffing, CMOs responding to the Deloitte and Salesforce study identify their greater customer service role (23%) and ownership of internal functions alignment (18%) as aspects they feel ill-prepared for. Many also point to a greater ownership of customer-facing teams and channels as a significant change in their responsibilities.
These changes and challenges are reflected in CMOs’ priorities this year. Internally, CMOs count the following as their top 3 priorities:
- Data acquisition (61%);
- Testing and optimization (60%); and
- Flexible and agile marketing processes (59%).
Externally, top priorities are:
- Customer acquisition (52%);
- Personalized experiences (51%); and
- Customer engagement (51%).
Despite the focus on customer experience, just 42% of respondents are personalizing the web experience to some degree, the lowest rate of use out of 10 areas identified. However, respondents plan to make up that gap, as half plan to personalize the web.
Currently, the most commonly used digital areas of organizational focus are traditional stalwarts email marketing (85% using to some degree) and SEO and SEM (77%). Although these aren’t new, they’re consistently highly-rated channels for ROI, and the few CMOs not currently making use of them plan to do so.
About the Data: In their study, the CMO Club and Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud partnered to conduct an online survey of 228 global marketing leaders. Survey respondents were limited to CMO or Head of Marketing positions reporting to a CEO, president, or country/line of business head. Forty-two percent of respondents belonged to a company with more than $1 billion in revenue, with 24% between $500 million and $1 billion. The survey was conducted from October to December 2013.
A plurality 45% indicated that their digital marketing spend was 5-20% of their budgets last year, while a plurality 43% see it taking up 20-40% of their budgets this year.
