MARKETERS HAVE MANY needs these days. But one tops them all, according to a new survey from the CMO Council.
When asked their most urgent developmental priority, more than half said it was to improve their marketing analytics capability. Second? To identify and promote best practices. Adding more Internet and Web resources was a distant third.
The priorities were different for CEOs. Their No. 1 goal was to increase the efficiency of their marketing organizations, and second to add better technology. The third was to improve the product line.
But 29.4% of the CEOs hoped to reorganize their marketing departments. And 14.5% said they wanted to change their chief marketing officers.
“The CMO has arguably one of the most difficult positions in a corporation now,” said Todd Forsythe, vice president for global marketing at B-to-B software maker Oracle. “They're under tremendous pressure to produce results and produce then immediately. They need to be fairly certain of their return on every marketing dollar spent.”
In line with that, marketers are hoping to invest in performance systems. Almost 45% of those at firms with sales above $500 million said their most important future investment was to create a dashboard, or performance measuring system. And 41.8% planned to spend money on their customer relationship management systems. (Those two priorities were reversed among smaller firms.)
“We're getting a lot of requests from clients trying to create marketing dashboards,” said Scott Gillum, vice president at MarketBridge, a survey sponsor. “They want to know how to evaluate the return on our investment.”
At the same time, the survey showed CMOs have “very little control over performance, or the ability to impact it,” he continued.
What are the best measurements of marketing group performance? Almost half those surveyed said revenue growth. Others pointed up market share gains (39.4%); customer value, loyalty and affinity (35.1%); and company profitability (29.5%).
On the downside, marketing departments at large companies have had trouble staying focused. Almost 30% said they faced “constant disruption” in work flow, while 62.2% noted they felt distracted at times. And 40% said their alignment with corporate goals was average, not well aligned or not aligned at all.
