Survey Shows Marketers Want Analytics

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, over 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 most difficult positions in a corporation now,” said Todd Forsythe, vice president for global marketing at 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 of over $500 million said that 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,” says Scott Gillum, vice president with MarketBridge, a survey sponsor. “They want to know how to evaluate the return on our investment.”

But that doesn’t sit well with everyone. One MarketBridge client feared that the dashboard would “drive marketing to be too performance- and process-driven, and that they would lose an element of creativity,” Gillum adds.

At the same time, the survey showed that CMOs have “very little control over performance, or the ability to impact it,” he continues.

What are the best measurements of marketing group performance? Almost half of those surveyed said revenue growth. Others cited market share gains (39.4%); customer value loyalty and affinity (35.1%); and company profitability (29.5%).

And companies do see the need for analytics. When hiring, they’re looking for people with “analytical and database skills,” said survey author Scott Van Camp.

On the downside, marketing departments at large companies have had trouble staying focused. Almost 30% said they faced “constant disruption” in workflow, and 62.2% said they felt distracted at times.

Just how credible are marketing groups within their firms? Nearly two-thirds said that marketing was more responsible for creating top-line company growth than the marketplace. But of the 414 marketing officers surveyed, over a third said their units need more clout within their companies, and that percentage jumps to half at larger firms.

Maybe this is due to disconnects within the companies. Most of the marketers feel their groups are in sync with corporate strategy. But almost 40% said their alignment was average, not well aligned or not aligned at all.