Global Marketers Say Management Keen on Customer Data Insights

May 29, 2012

This article is included in these additional categories:

Analytics, Automated & MarTech | Data-driven | Email | Paid Search | Personalization | Search Engine Optimization | Social Media

cmocouncil-most-appealing-digital-mktg-functions-to-mgmt-may2012.jpgGlobal marketers are getting the green light from management to execute digital marketing campaigns, with 1 in 5 saying they have a mandate and budget, and another 42% saying they have strong interest and active support from line-of-business (LOB) leaders, according to a CMO Council study released in May 2012. And it turns out that most marketers believe management is enthusiastic about customer data integration, analytics, and personalization of market interactions, with 62% saying this has appeal among leadership. Other top functions that marketers believe are of interest to LOB leaders include website performance improvement and richer engagement (61%), and lead acquisition, conversion, and upselling/cross-selling of customers (60%). Roughly 2 in 5 say the same about behavior-based insight gathering for more effective segmentation and messaging (41%) and search marketing an online advertising (39%).

Integration Still Lacking, Especially With IT

Although the majority of marketers believe that senior corporate management is invested in digital marketing, with 63% saying that this interest is driven by the potential for better performance and ROI, most marketers have not yet been able to turn this support into a fully integrated solution. 36% of the respondents said that their digital marketing adoption and integration was simply a collection of point solutions, rather than being integrated across the organization. An additional 44% said their strategies are still at an exploration level. And only 9% said they have a highly evolved digital marketing model. These results come after recent findings from a PulsePoint study released earlier this month, which found that most marketers lack confidence in their ability to executive complex digital marketing programs.

One area in particular in which integration is sparse is with the IT team: only 32% of the marketers surveyed by the CMO Council reported teaming with IT on specific needs. In fact, only roughly one-quarter are engaging in multidisciplinary activities to drive their digital marketing processes. This compares to 59% who said they look internally to their own teams to assess their needs.

Email Said Top-Performing Channel

Data from the CMO Council’s “Integrate to Accelerate Digital Marketing Effectiveness” indicates that even if marketers are still collecting random digital channels rather than pursuing an integrated approach, they have a fairly clear idea which solutions are most effective. Indeed, two-thirds said email marketing was their most successful solution, ahead of website performance and interface solutions (52%), and paid and organic search (45%).

Email and SEO were also tabbed by global company marketers to be the best-performing digital channels in terms of ROI in an Econsultancy survey released in March 2012.

Other Findings:

  • The top digital marketing challenges faced by the CMO Council respondents include a lack of budget and interface solutions (52%), integrating internal and external customer data (43%), and assessing which marketing applications are most valuable (29%).
  • Respondents who self-identify as high-performance, data-driven digital marketers plan to re-invest in social monitoring (48%), email (38%), workflow management tools (32%) and marketing resource management applications (27%) in the next year. This group’s metrics of success include response rates (55%) and conversion and closure rates (35%).
  • Roughly half of the marketers surveyed believe that management’s enthusiasm for digital marketing is a response to the preference of customers for digital media consumption and real-time interaction with brands.

About the Data: The CMO Council data is based on a survey of more than 200 global marketers.

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