Much rides on marketing’s relationship with information security to acquire, maintain and secure customer data for competitive advantage. Together, marketing and security can navigate perilous waters, such as Generative AI, trust and privacy concerns, en route to preserving and building the brand...
MarTech procurement intentions have made a massive swing to embracing new GenAI tools, applications and analytics. Almost 60% of marketing leaders view this area of investment as offering the most value and ROI. This is good news and comes at a critical time: 1 in 3 CMOs say their campaign performance needs improvement or has underperformed. Our newest report, “CMO Intentions 2024,” ...
We have spent months understanding the overwhelming challenges the CMOs are faced with and the years and decades of first-hand experience addressing those leveraging data and insight into development to define these critical priorities going forward. These are not just challenges; they're opportunities for us to shape marketing's future and the impact we can deliver...
Most B2B marketers say they should be driving the customer-acquisition machine, yet 62% say their lead gen and engagement strategy underperforms! Millions of dollars are being wasted on misguided “spray and pray” campaigns. ...
When it’s done right, sponsorship provides one of the most powerful, flexible, and accountable of all marketing media. The problem is that in 99% of the cases, sponsorship fails because of a lack of strategic direction, a lack of skills, and a lack of accountability – all areas where small changes precipitated by marketing leadership can invoke huge changes in company fortunes. Even if...
Here’s a handy primer from the CMO Council and WM America on how to Boost Yield in the Account Marketing Field. No more “spray and pray.” Apply new ABM methodologies using precision prospecting, timely and relevant engagement, and AI-driven data enrichment for intention-based buyer targeting...
Economic headwinds have arrived, and chances are, you’re not prepared. Only 10% of marketing leaders strongly believe their marketing investments, whose reins are often held by finance, position them to emerge from economic turmoil ahead of the competition, according to our new report produced in collaboration with KPMG LLP...
CMOs are facing growing budget pressures and increased expectations to drive positive ROAS from their media investments. Optimizing media spend based on always-on attribution has proven to drive increased incremental sales and revenue in a new study conducted by InMarket, in cooperation with the CMO Council...
With looming economic headwinds, this year will test marketing’s mettle to survive them and even emerge in a growth position. Yet only 34% of marketing leaders are highly confident in their ability to handle economic adversity and uncertainty against their revenue growth mandate. ...
Most sales and marketing organizations haven’t been able to pivot fast enough to the new digital buyer. More than 70% of marketers don’t feel very confident in their current sales and marketing model to sell effectively in the digitalized customer journey. This means they risk falling short of their revenue mandate...
It’s no secret that the last few years have upended the way customers want to interact with companies. Digital engagement has led to higher customer expectations, bigger demands and about a million more choices if one brand doesn’t deliver. Privacy laws and changes by tech companies have marketers scrambling to get the data they need to meet customer expectations...
Marketers are turning increasingly to data as a source of wisdom and foresight; and to get ahead of sudden disruptions and heightened consumer expectations. The CMO is at the epicenter of this data movement at a time when companies need strategic, intelligence-based direction more than ever...
When local businesses stumble, a national brand’s revenue tumbles. A third of national marketers say 40% or more of their company’s revenue comes from local business partners, yet less than 30% of small businesses have fully recovered from the pandemic. Do the math, and you’ll see a lot of lost revenue...
CMOs have entered a new era of high-velocity data marketing to spot sudden disruptions in market and customer behavior. We’re talking about the speed of acquiring real-time, relevant data signals. Speed of generating data insights. Speed of closing the gap between data and insights, insights and action...
Given today’s marketing pressures, such as tighter budgets, leaner staff, higher stakes with MarTech, and expectations of increased and tangible return on marketing investments, smart and fast marketing sourcing has become a team sport.This has led to a grassroots refresh of marketing’s relationship with procurement. Why? CMOs who more actively involve procurement in marketing sourcing...
As high-tech companies emerge from the pandemic, marketing and MarTech lie at the heart of the recovery. To optimize MarTech investments, marketing needs to have a very effective relationship with IT that spans strategy, selection and management. Such a working relationship drives MarTech innovation, capability maturity and higher performance. ...
As consumer products companies emerge from the pandemic, marketing and MarTech lie at the heart of the recovery. To optimize MarTech investments, marketing needs to have a very effective relationship with IT that spans strategy, selection and management. Such a working relationship drives MarTech innovation, capability maturity and higher performance. ...
For far too long, customer service had a comfortable place on marketing’s back burner. But what happens when the pot starts to boil over?The customer journey is no longer a linear funnel. With so much noise and endless distractions, marketers need to foster real, human connections. New research from Acquire finds that customer service is the new key to effective marketing, loyalty, ...
As companies emerge from the pandemic, marketing and MarTech lie at the heart of the recovery. To optimize MarTech investments, marketing needs to have a very effective relationship with IT that spans strategy, selection and management. Such a working relationship drives MarTech innovation, capability maturity and higher performance. ...
Don’t fall prey to one-dimensional data analysis for determining your brands multidimensional impact. This Partner Content report explores how marketing leaders need to see farther and deeper than ever before into their brand’s analytics, impact and performance. Learn how to achieve a 360-degree view of your brand strategy metrics to see how you stack up against competitors...
Are you measuring yourself in a silo? This Partner Content report focuses on the health insurance industry and provides unique strategies for your organization to see into your brand’s competitive landscape. Learn how to outsmart your competition and win market share with more visibility and context than ever before...
Customers are people, too. So many emotions are behind each click, purchase and interaction customers have with your brand. This Partner Content report explores how marketing leaders can measure their brand analytics, impact and campaigns beyond the narrow lens of one-dimensional data. Treat customers as more than just a number...
BrandTotal’s Top Performers charts presents brands that dominated social media that month. Learn what worked and why, how leading brands are generated social media success and more! This Partner Content report covers three main categories: Top 10 Most Engaging Ads, Top 10 Most Loved Ads, and Top 10 Spenders. Did your organization make the cut...
Are marketers missing the mark with their content? For 42% of marketers, content is the most vital tool for lead acquisition, yet it’s consistently underutilized. Omnichannel communication in today's digital climate requires cohesive, accessible and impactful content narratives in order to resonate with rapidly evolving audiences' needs. For many brands, gaps in communication, inconsistent ...
The world is opening up! The industry that was initially the hardest hit – travel – is set to lead the recovery. This industry report highlights who is dominating the Share-of-Voice (SOV), which creatives are catching fire, what the consumer sentiment is around brands and even specific posts, what each brand’s messaging and positioning strategy is, and who’s getting it ...
Leading Food and Beverage brands are household names and key drivers of the economy. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, fundamentally changed the way we relate to these brands. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past year, it is the importance of brand messaging, particularly when it comes to paid social media messaging and creative. What messages are brands attempting to connect...
An ecosystem is rapidly unfolding in financial services, blurring boundaries between stalwart finance institutions, giant tech companies and emerging FinTechs. Financial services — banking, payments, wealth management and more — need to devise a strategy on how to align to this new paradigm and come up with defensible competitive positions...
Retailers are at crossroads as the world emerges from the pandemic, which tore a particularly destructive path in the retail and consumer packaged goods industries...
There’s some good news and optimism from global marketing leaders looking for growth recovery in 2021. Nearly two-thirds of 200 members surveyed by the CMO Council worldwide say they will boost marketing spend in the coming year and most don’t expect to downsize or re-structure their organizations...
B2B marketers today must introduce strategic themes and advocacy platforms that resonate with customer decision makers sweating business issues, problems and challenges. By assuming a trusted authority leader role and evidencing intimacy with market needs and requirements, vendors become credible sources of relevant information and conversation...
CMOs in the age of digital transformation and accelerating competitive intensity are being challenged to set forth new routes to revenue. With the expectation that the mandate of today's CMO is to achieve consistent and substantial growth, there is increasing pressure to identify strategies that will achieve increased customer value, scale global operations and improve product success...
Warren Buffet famously said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” This has never been more true when it comes to the sacred trust between customers and brands. Today’s customers are ready to flee brands that can’t keep personal data secure. Yet, too many brands risk losing customer trust in the face of massive data proliferation and rising ...
Too often, marketers provision leads from agencies, offshore list sources, internal departments or media channels that are not the result of an opt-in, permission-based, relevant content-consumption process. In other words, they’re garbage. And it gets worse: These leads may be coming from bad actors, such as overseas lead farms cutting corners and outright illicit name scrapers. All of ...
CMOs are expected to drive growth. Yet while research released in Q2 earlier this year (2018) highlighted that CMOs are increasingly activating on growth-driving activities, many are still stuck in the traditional role of brand storyteller rather than strategic revenue creator. Indeed, many are far less comfortable with key aspects of driving growth such as architecting the customer experience and...
GDPR, the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation, has forced marketers to rethink their operations to ensure they are compliant. Yet new research highlights that far too many marketers are unaware that GDPR even applies to them, and have taken no steps to modify their policies...
Recent CMO Council research highlights the need for executives across marketing, commerce and supply chain to do more with the data at their fingertips, especially given the need to provide a superior customer experience in an omni-channel environment...
In the first part of this investigative growth-driving series, “CMO Action to Spark a Growth Reaction,” we highlighted results of a survey of nearly 200 senior marketing leaders. That research demonstrated that on the road to driving growth, CMOs have evolved beyond their traditional role as brand growth leader, and today are getting comfortable in taking on the role of sales and ...
CMOs are increasingly expected to drive growth. In our first investigation into marketers as growth-drivers in 2016, 68 percent of the marketing leaders surveyed saw themselves as growth leaders. They also revealed that senior management and the board held them accountable for growth, believing it was their chief or primary mandate. Yet that investigation also revealed that far too many marketers ...
Nearly 80 percent of marketers surveyed for this study by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council reveal they are still unable to fully realize the revenue potential of their customers. Developed in partnership with SendWithUs, this strategic brief reveals that collaboration around the channels of choice for the customer is critical to turning an automated touchpoint into a revenue-producing ...
This strategic brief explores how the massive scale, data quality and customization capability of online marketplaces are bringing new levels of customer insight, enriched experiences and added value to brands...
While as much as a third of most marketing budgets are dedicated to content origination, few companies formally assess the effectiveness of their content strategies and the relevance and value of content offerings. Even fewer are examining the performance, influence and impact of content in the pre-sales, conversion and customer relationship development areas...
While marketers made great strides in taking ownership of customer experience (CX) strategies in 2016, recent research from the CMO Council reveals that 49 percent of marketers believe they are only able to deliver connected, personalized, data-led experiences some of the time—and primarily only across digital engagements. Furthermore, when asked about the ROI of these experiences, only 7 ...
The role of the CMO has evolved far beyond anyone could have predicted 10 years ago. Gone is the traditional role of mere brand ambassador, replaced with the critical role of business driver, change agent and customer experience champion. As was revealed in the report "The CMO Shift to Gaining Business Lift," CMOs have a clear desire, and business-supported mandate to serve as the primary growth ...
Believe it or not, just 8 percent of 200 chief marketers surveyed by the CMO Council in Q3 admit to auditing, assessing and continually improving the customer experience. Given the critical need to convert, grow and retain relationships in an omni-channel world, this is a pretty pitiful statistic...
The CMO of today has denounced the traditional role of mere brand ambassador, instead opting to actively assert their role as business driver, change agent and customer experience champion. But while the CMO of today knows they will need to take the driver's seat in steering the development of next generation products, services, business models and customer experiences, many may still be falling ...
According to the findings from this CMO Council study, conducted in partnership with digital marketing intelligence company Netsertive, the strength of the entire omnichannel experience may lie in the last mile of the journey, where customers are choosing to transact, as well as in local retail partnerships and touchpoints. Marketers almost unanimously agree that delivering an omnichannel ...
Marketers in today’s connected world are aiming to deliver personalized communications to consumers, but are they really getting it right? According to a study by the CMO Council, in partnership with Bazaarvoice, while consumers are increasingly comfortable with marketers using their personal data for targeted advertising that is relevant to them, marketers are still struggling to deliver ...
Despite the understanding that the desire to create customer-centric experiences is driving marketing, marketers are still struggling to achieve true customer experience success. In fact, 73 percent of marketers surveyed by the CMO Council stated that customer centricity was critical to the success of the business, but 41 percent indicated that their lack of customer-centric experiences had ...
Clicks, views, posts, shares and visits have taken a back seat to acquisition, retention and revenue growth as core measures of customer experience and engagement success, reports the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council. According to a new study conducted with Microsoft Corp., marketers are de-prioritizing digital campaign metrics in favor of business-focused measurements that more directly tie ...
While there is an over-abundance of consumer data and analytics, marketers have yet to master what meteorologists and economists do best: funnel this multiplicity of data into actionable insights to reliably anticipate and predict what’s ahead and then prepare for it...
This presentation explores background research sourced by the CMO Council, Deloitte, and third parties to provides additional context to our latest initiative, "The CMO Shift to Gaining Business Lift" in three main exploratory research areas...
The CMO Council recently partnered with Vindicia, the leaders in payment and billing solutions, to host a series of executive roundtables to discuss new paths to revenue and the challenges to monetization optimization. The number one issue that marketers found most challenging to overcome: FEAR...
This study—entitled “Activating the New American Mainstream”—addresses the necessity of reaching these critical customer segments that are quickly becoming the new mainstream consumers in America. According to a 10-question survey of 150 North America-based senior marketing executives, 67 percent reveal that their CMO has a high level of buy-in and support for multicultural...
For a previous study by the CMO Council (titled “Better Traction From Smarter SMB Interaction”), some 70 percent of the 184 total respondents revealed that the SMB market is an extremely important market for their businesses, with only 5 percent of marketers feeling that the market was not important at all. Looking toward the future, 66 percent anticipated an increase in SMB focus, ...
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but marketers have not turned a strategic lens on optimizing the return from their visual media content investments. While 65 percent of senior marketing executives believe visual assets are core to how their brand story is communicated, a scant 27 percent have the ability to aggregate, organize and manage these assets across marketing and non-marketing ...
This strategic report from the CMO Council and Ebiquity suggests that as budgets increase to fund digital marketing campaigns and more personalized customer engagement, marketers now need additional expertise in data analytics, content creation and channel proliferation to improve ROI...
Conducted in partnership with Adobe, this report highlights that while improvements are clearly being made when it comes to digital, APAC marketers are still largely focused on single-vector metrics that measure past success or single points of campaign performance, and they are typically not measuring impact on harder business metrics, such as sales pipeline measurement or customer lifetime value...
For three years, the CMO Council partnered with Nielsen to survey brands, agencies and media publishers to learn more about how—and where—they’re spending advertising dollars. The latest resulting white paper—titled “The State of Digital Brand Advertising”—takes a detailed look at the steps marketers are taking as they strive to maximize the impact of ...
As part of a recent study by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and SAS—titled “Getting in Sync With Mobile Customers”—leading marketers shared their insights around mobile as a critical component within the marketing toolkit through a quantitative survey. This research found that mobile can be a real game-changer for marketers who create a full strategy around it ...
With mobile device dependency central to today’s digital lifestyles, enlightened brands are creating new mobile relationship marketing strategies that go well beyond simple app and mobile advertising delivery. In this study from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, conducted in partnership with SAS, we found that 61 percent of marketers surveyed reveal they have deployed some form of ...
The 2014 digital dashboard has found that countries such as Australia, India and Singapore are pulling away with strong executive support and digital champions while South Korea, China and Hong Kong struggle with executive support and skill shortages. It also found that marketers are not moving beyond more basic measurements. Asked whether they are measuring throughout the life of campaigns, only ...
In this age of the customer-defined experience, language and how we present content to our customers can mean the difference between rejection and transaction. While much focus has been placed on the channels through which content can be delivered, less attention has been paid to the complex challenges associated with adapting, packaging and translating content for different audiences, cultures ...
Two CMO Council Dinner Dialogue events were held in early 2014 in New York and Los Angeles to discuss the intersection of social, content and business performance. With marketers from brands like Sirius XM, Harper Collins, Johnson & Johnson, Macy’s, NBA, Live Nation, Paramount, Honda and many more in attendance, it was clear that the organizations were all at different stages in their ...
While global consumers have been quick to adopt an immersive mobile lifestyle, marketers have been a bit more cautious about fully committing to mobile relationship marketing (MRM). More brands are launching apps or are establishing mobile-enabled content, but few are looking at the totality of the mobile relationship and fully integrating it into the overarching marketing strategy...
This strategic brief includes findings from a survey of 352 senior-level B2B buyers, influencers and decision makers and features insights into the effectiveness of marketing content in generating value for customers. It also includes qualitative findings of interviews conducted with marketing executives at IBM, Allegro Development, AppNexus, CA Technologies and more. It provides an in-depth, well...
“Turning Social Feeds Into Business Leads,” developed in partnership with hoojook, Inc., argues that the auto industry ecosystem should do more to leverage social media as a platform for driving business leads into sales pipelines. Based on interviews with senior marketers and executives from auto manufacturers, dealer networks, aftermarket service providers and B2B automotive ...
This white paper is the first in a four-part series, which looks at how leading brands are turning big data into actionable customer insights and engagements. Featured are two best-practice studies in which both brands are truly innovating and activating big data analytics to create some of the most relevant and profitable experiences with their customers...
Building a fully connected customer experience requires marketers to have a complete, 360-degree view of the customer. In addition, customers expect transparency and value from the brands with whom they choose to do business, and this requires marketers to have customer intelligence and data that enable them to meet customers' expectations of seamless and highly personalized engagements. And as ...
The demand for a marketing intelligence engine that can aggregate data and deliver the facts marketers need to create more engaging customer experiences has never been greater. Marketers must reach their customers with real-time, relevant messages through the customers’ preferred channels to meet their ever-evolving needs and be able to sort through the wealth of data without having it ...
Vendor content frequently lacks value and trustworthiness in the eyes of BtoB buyers, who are increasingly turning to more trusted, peer-driven sources of content along their path to purchase, according to the CMO Council's Content ROI Center. This white paper includes the results of a survey of more than 400 BtoB buyers and content seekers around the world who were reached through NetLine ...
According to the McKinsey Quarterly, “the rapid growth of online advertising hides a serious challenge: the digital world has developed faster than the tools needed to measure it. This problem has made it difficult for marketers to fully exploit the web’s promise as the most targeted and measurable medium in the history of marketing…Hobbled by nascent ...
The CMO Council, along with partner SAS, set out to better understand the key challenges, opportunities and requirements that both CMOs and CIOs were facing in their journey to develop a more customer-centric enterprise. Through the research, what has emerged is a picture of alignment around platform and technology, as well as the opportunity for even deeper connections around data and ...
As marketers look to understand, test, leverage, exploit and measure mobile advertising, there is also a call for best practices in how this integrates with both online and offline customer acquisition and relationship-building initiatives. To answer this call, the CMO Council identified a collection of brand leaders for this whitepaper, which also includes media consumption insights gathered by ...
This report explores how companies, specifically those with a presence in Asia-Pacific, can engage with customers in a more valuable way by being more adept at big data analytics. Not surprisingly, marketers report being overwhelmed by growing volumes of customer data and are still playing catch-up in the social media-driven, mobile device-dependent Asia- Pacific market. Download the full report ...
Say goodbye to “Random Acts of Marketing” as integration, alignment, visibility and return on investment (ROI) all top the list of requirements for marketing performance improvement through 2011. Among the priorities, marketers intend to add a one-two-punch of marketing analytics talent coupled with strategic planning and business development experience to better target, segment and ...
As the most pervasive channel of communications and targeted engagement on the planet, the mobile phone reaches more than 5 billion users globally. The mobile channel is an unprecedented opportunity to reach both developed consumer markets in new an intrusive way, and developing regions that cater to a previously untapped, unreachable, and unbanked mass of humanity. The Big Brands Embrace the Move...
A crucial concern for many users is security, a CMO Council survey (in process) of online social network users and trusted business group participants, shows that social networks worry about their personal data being stolen, spam, phishing, accepting third-party application invites, etc. Protecting personal, professional, and corporate reputations is a growing concern as well as the attraction to ...
Customer anxiety and cutbacks are the biggest factors influencing marketing budget allocation in 2009, reports the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council in its annual Marketing Outlook study. Despite a restrained economy, however, marketers see budgets holding up fairly well with dollars being stringently controlled and directed against growing and retaining market share...
On January 22, 2008, 30 sales and marketing executives gathered at Columbia University to convene the first in a series of six global workshops focused on the alignment of sales and marketing as a vehicle to optimize sales effectiveness and, ultimately, drive business growth. Attendees spanned industries as diverse as financial services (represented by American Express and HSBC) to high tech (...
Paris in the springtime. Picturesque. Romantic. Collaborative? CLOSE selected Paris as the sixth and final venue of its six-month global think tank junket. Over the course of six months, the CLOSE workshops gathered some of the most open, honest, eager and seasoned sales and marketing executives the world has to offer. The Paris contingent proved yet again that while the divide between sales and ...
The needs, challenges and expectations of America’s high tech companies is not brought into clearer (and harsher) focus than in the Silicon Valley. Through its history of bubbles that burst and companies whose future hinged on sales in an era of giant marketing and media spend simply can not be hidden. And through it all, the region continued to remain relatively small and insulated. Sales ...
In late 2007, the CMO Council set up a membership organization, CLOSE: The Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness, to convene sales and marketing to discuss the importance and best practices of aligning the two functions. A major part of the effort is a dedicated website – closebiz.org – that features the latest academic and field research, real-time news and ...
The CLOSE workshop world tour found it’s way to Sydney, Australia to learn about the challenges, successes and aspirations of sales and marketing executives. This stop of the global tour was intended to tap into the insights of the Asia Pacific. However, it is important to note that Australia is essentially a market in and of itself. It is a mature market, with distinct needs and ...
The CMO Council released the findings of its annual Marketing Outlook survey with an upbeat report on spend levels mostly holding steady or trending upward in 2008. Many marketers say they are frustrated and stymied by organization cultures, senior management mindset, and insufficient budgets. More than 800 senior marketers across all global regions responded to the CMO Council audit, which looked...
In late 2007 the CMO Council set up a membership organization, CLOSE: The Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness, to bring both sales and marketing to the table to discuss the importance and best practices of aligning sales and marketing efforts. A major part of the effort is a dedicated website – closebiz.org – that features the latest academic and field research in ...
The new study by Deloitte and BPM Forum finds that companies are having difficulty anticipating market change and are limited in their capacity to make effective course-correcting action, in large part due to insufficient investment in strategic planning, getting the right information and having the required talent that can look beyond today's sales, profitability, current products, customers and ...