After a few years of radical shifts and rocky economics, the future is looking bright for the marketing world, according to senior marketers surveyed in the eighth annual State of Marketing report by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council. If you glean nothing else from the massive survey, here’s the big takeaway:
Over 80 percent of marketers are confident that they’ll meet their goals in terms of top-line revenue growth and market share in the next year.
As for how they’ll do it, they’re not exactly sure, but with bigger budgets and better analytics, there’s a positive vibe running through the marketing world. Take a look at some of the key predictions in the report, and see if you agree with 525 of your fellow marketers who were chosen from a wide range of industries to take part in the survey.
Hiring freezes will thaw. Staff shortages, layoffs, and one-person marketing teams have been the norm for some time, but this coming year, 55 percent of respondents say they expect to hire additional help. Add to that the fact that only 10 percent of marketing leaders are worried about their own job security, and that signifies a confidence in future growth that hasn’t been felt in some time.
The purse strings will loosen. If you’re a marketer, you know that fighting for a bigger budget is all in a day’s work. More than half (54 percent) of survey respondents said, however, that they expect bigger budgets in the coming months; 27 percent said they will likely remain the same (which is still positive, considering how easy it is take an ax to existing budgets). For the marketers themselves, three quarters happily reported that they received a salary increase or bonus in the past year, with 83 percent expecting that to be the case in the next year as well if they do a great job.
Marketers will have a captive audience. With C-suite employees at the center of every major corporate decision (think CEO, CFO, CIO, COO), the CMO is not always in the loop. However, because of an increased reliance on marketing to improve customer engagement and service, 69 percent of marketers say their stature and credibility among key business decision makers has increased, and will continue to do so.
The digital revolution will continue. Chief marketers say they will be consumed with lots of digital-focused initiatives over the next 12 months, with 60 percent saying a full-fledged “digital marketing makeover” will be their number one transformational project. Among the top areas of digital marketing investments expected in the next year include email marketing, website performance optimization, mobile applications, lead management, site design, and search marketing. New digital solutions and cloud-based services will help drive these initiatives. As for why so much focus will be put onto digital improvements, 50 percent of marketers ranked search-optimized website marketing as one of the most effective ways to generate demand in their market; 42 percent listed social media interaction. What’s remarkable is those responses came out ahead of traditional print and broadcast methods.
Marketers want more numbers. Improving measurement tools and analytics were cited throughout the report as essential for making improvements to digital marketing performance. But with only six percent of marketers giving their own digital marketing efforts an A+, they know there is still a lot to learn, and they will be looking toward technologies and solutions to help them.
Whether or not your own experience mirrors the findings above, the fact that things are looking up for the profession in general will hopefully trickle down. As more corporations look to their CMOs for input into key business decisions, budgets will increase, and marketing will have a greater impact on business growth.
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