Where Marketers Do Well – And Not So Well – in Chasing Growth Opportunities

October 11, 2021

This article is included in these additional categories:

Analytics, Automated & MarTech | Business of Marketing | Customer-Centric | Data-driven | Internal Collaboration | Staffing

CMOSurvey Behaviors When Pursuing Growth Opps Oct2021Some 4 in 10 (39% of) US CMOs say that they are primarily responsible for revenue growth in their company. The latest report from The CMO Survey looks at some of the most frequent behaviors marketers exhibit when pursuing growth opportunities.

Marketers continue to put a lot of stock in organic growth. The senior marketers surveyed were asked to allocate 100 points across corporate strategies their firm will use to grow during the next 12 months. Some 72% of those points went towards organic growth, up slightly from 69% in February. Fewer are prioritizing growth from partnerships (12%), growth from acquisitions (12%) and growth from licensing (4%).

Spending Remains Focused on Market Penetration

As with a similar survey in 2019, respondents are primarily looking to market penetration strategies to drive growth. Based on the 100 point scale, market penetration garnered 55% on average of spending allocation.

It does appear that more companies are making market development a priority (16%). This is particularly true in the B2C Product and B2C Services sectors which saw increases in spending prioritization since February.

Behaviors for Pursuing Growth

After examining the strategies companies are prioritizing in their pursuit of growth, it’s worth looking at what behaviors marketers are showing that pushes that along, as well as some areas that are ripe for improvement.

Per the report, among the key behaviors for pursuing growth that marketers are doing a majority of the time, 8 in 10 (80.3%) are articulating how the growth of opportunities connects to the company position and strategy.

Meanwhile, when pursuing growth, about three-quarters (76.9%) say that the majority of the time they use an integrated marketing team in which digital and non-digital work together. This goes along with another important finding from the survey in which the largest share (42%) of respondents identified having the right talent as the most important factor for driving future organic revenue growth. Indeed, this is an even larger share than those who said the same in February 2020.

And, while a lot has been said about capturing data and martech claiming the largest share of marketing budgets, a comparatively smaller share of respondents consider having the right data (11.2%) or having the right technology (11.7%) to be the most important factor for driving organic revenue growth.

Among the areas where marketers could do better when pursuing growth opportunities are using data insights across channels (61.4% doing so a majority of the time) and identifying how to move the business from core strengths into adjacent digital opportunities (44.4%). These two areas could prove to be critical considering the growing emphasis on and investment in digital.

The full report can be found here.

About the Data: Findings are based on an August survey of 282 top marketers at for-profit US companies, 94% of whom are VP-level or above.

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