REQUIRED READING POST

Disruptive times call for confidence in marketing strategy – but how do marketers achieve this? CMO Council has been benchmarking marketing performance metrics for two decades in our research and reports, which provide marketing leadership with a first-rate framework of measurement and metrics.

A recent CMO Council research survey showed that 2 in 3 marketing leaders lacked confidence in their ability to achieve goals in the face of economic adversity and uncertainty.

In fact, 66% of marketers lack confidence in their ability to achieve revenue goals, according to the CMO Council research in partnership with Sprinklr, the unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform for modern enterprises.

The study, Outsmart Adversity: How CMOs Can Weather Economic Headwinds and Emerge Poised for Growth, highlights the importance of data and analytics for marketers working to protect budgets and prove ROI in 2023. Nearly 8 in 10 express concerns around lack of investment or budget cuts. Challenges with executing data-driven marketing strategies contribute to this lack of confidence.

“Marketers will have to build alliances with finance and IT to protect budgets and MarTech investments, and they’ll need to identify and shore up capabilities to build their confidence,” said Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council. “These capabilities include gathering real-time insights that reveal how audiences really feel about your marketing on multiple channels, and then easily distributing this knowledge throughout the organization.”  

The report surveyed nearly 500 global marketing leaders to reveal key findings about how marketers feel about economic adversity, and how they can achieve revenue goals.

“In uncertain times, marketers face even more pressure to protect budgets and programs by demonstrating clear ROI,” said Arun Pattabhiraman, Chief Marketing Officer, Sprinklr. “As our research with the CMO Council shows, marketers must embrace the opportunity to enhance the way they gather data, identify actionable consumer insights, and strengthen their engagement strategy across channels.” 

DOWNLOAD: “Outsmart Adversity: How CMOs Can Weather Economic Headwinds and Emerge Poised for Growth”

CMO Council has been benchmarking marketing performance for CMOs since its inception, 2 decades ago. In early issues of our influential PeerSphere magazine, we highlighted the most most critical factors that CMOs must address to become successful leaders and create value for their organizations

READ: V1N3 issue of PeerSphere, available online

Of course, the rapid acceleration of ecommerce means that CMOs have had to become data disruptors as “High-Velocity Data Marketers” and digital transformation specialists. Our report, Sparking MarTech Migration + Digital Innovation looked at how companies needed to embrace this digital-first reality without losing sight of what makes their brand resonate with their audience: human connection. The ability to balance digital advancements with authenticity is the holy grail for marketers today. This study sponsored by HCL Software highlights perspectives from a global CMO Council member survey about their experiences in the past few turbulent years.

How to globalize, modernize and optimize enterprise marketing operations, was the subject of our report, Scaling the Value of the CMO: Chief marketers are stretched and challenged like never before. The global pandemic disrupted markets, operations and customer behaviors. Agile recovery and new routes to revenue are the new imperatives; and leaner, more digitally proficient marketing organizations with shared purpose and greater productivity are key deliverables. Better  integrating and leveraging new automation platforms, tools and actionable data insights critical to campaign performance are now an essential CMO mandate.

This study uncovers serious gaps, holes and deficiencies across key functional areas in the office of the CMO. In consequence, 86 percent of senior marketers surveyed believe lack of leadership depth and capabilities has resulted in missed revenue, growth and customer acquisition opportunities. This is contributing to notable marketing perception, performance and capacity problems. 

Marketing Metrics

The CMO Council Market Performance Measurement Report was the first time the CMO Council published a report on the topic of Marketing Performance Measurement (MPM), back in 2004 -- long before MPM became a common part of the marketing lexicon. Selected by our over 1,000 members as the most compelling topic facing CMO's today, this report defined how companies should measure and quantify marketing's performance. It proved to be an invaluable resource to assist marketing executives looking to build an MPM system in their company. The fundamental outline and framework this report  provides still stands the test of time.