Marketing Governance

Adobe 2013 Digital Marketing Survey. The survey was published April 26th. Some 53 percent of the digital marketers surveyed from around the world say they devote less than 5 percent of their budget to optimization activities. Last year 48 percent of the marketers said this. Only 6 percent of respondents are allocating more than one-quarter of their budgets to these activities, relatively unchanged from last year’s 7 percent. And that is strange, because through optimization companies can reduce the costs of their marketing operations. By calculating the ROI for the optimization projects it can become apparent that the reason not to, is actually the reason to do it; saving budget.

Eye-openers

Adobe conducted this survey amongst 1800 marketers from around the World. “Some of the findings are eye-opening”, says John Cristofano, PR-Manager at  Adobe, “like data showing a majority of the companies surveyed spend 5 percent or less of their marketing budget on optimization activities. Five percent or less, even though it’s also clear from the data that companies investing more get more in return. For example, companies allocating more than 25 percent of marketing budgets to optimization are twice as likely to see high conversion rates.”

With these kinds of results, it’s only logical to ask why there are not more companies are investing in optimization. According to the survey there are two major challenges. Budget and resources are the two most important things, that hold marketers back says almost half of the respondents.

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Distributed Marketing

In a recent survey by the Aberdeen Group, 67% of respondents said their marketing operates in a distributed marketing environment. By the traditional definition, distributed marketing refers to a marketing model in which both a central corporate marketing department and “local” organizations or business units share authority and responsibility for making marketing decisions and performing marketing activities. The stereotypical example of a distributed marketing organization is a franchise network, but distributed marketing models exist in many kinds of organizations.

The reality is, most large companies, particularly global enterprises, use some form of a distributed marketing model. For example, marketing operations is many multinational companies are highly fragmented. Most global enterprises have regional or national marketing organizations in addition to a central corporate marketing department. These regional and/or local marketing organizations often play a significant role in the creation of marketing content and the execution of marketing programs. They usually hire their own language service providers for translation services, and they may also contract with marketing agencies to create original content or adapt “corporate” content for the local market.

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Ross Graber serves as Research Director for the Marketing Operations Strategies service at SiriusDecisions. He brings over 15 years of marketing experience with focus spanning marketing measurement, demonstrating ROI, data management, process development, marketing technology, customer marketing and sales enablement. He sheds his light on measurement tools. The web is littered with people who know best for you and your organisation. They think they know what your marketing measurement needs to be like and look like.

Outside looking in: the CMO struggles to get in sync with the C-suite is based on a global survey of marketing and non-marketing executives from 19 industries in 42 countries, and on in-depth interviews with senior executives from major companies.

The EIU report shows that a significant gap exists between CMOs and the rest of the C-suite regarding marketing’s strategic priorities. EIU asked survey participants to identify marketing’s top priority. The filelink:file0 below shows how both CMOs and non-marketing executives responded

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If you are going to deliver Operational Marketing Excellence in your business you need to get your technology implementation right.

Here are the top 10 critical moves you should make.

Operational Marketing Excellence doesn’t come easily; it takes time and demands that you change stubborn habits, overcome emotional barriers, and mend broken processes. Software-vendor Aprimo has some top tips.

Do you rely on hearsay when it comes to your marketingcampaigns? No you say? Feedback on your marketingcampaigns, showing results and measuring effectiveness. It sounds like every marketer would own one or more processes to do so, but do they?

Most senior marketers say they either have a formalized process or are using one when the situation calls for it. “But when it comes to the types of local market data used to impact campaign performance, those same marketers appear to be too reliant on ‘hearsay data’,” the CMO Council states in a new study.

Marketers are twice as likely to gather insights from field and business development teams as they are to examine online voice of customer listening and analysis (57% vs. 29%).

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Efficient marketing supply chain management will deliver significant financial results, as well improving collaboration amongst the marketing department, its internal customers and the suppliers of marketing services.

If you want to know more, watch this video.