Covid19 continues to impact almost every marketing department worldwide, inviting more scrutiny on budget and resource than ever before. However, for Marketers, this has only shone further light on an issue that has always been front of mind, that of demonstrating Marketing value back into the business, in a way that all internal stakeholders understand.
In response to this we’ve surveyed 200 senior UK Marketers, asking questions surrounding campaign strategy, execution, reporting, and marketing capability and status.
Read our Marketing Return on Investment Report here
Digital Transformation
Only 22% of Marketers are still executing campaigns through single touch email blasts.
By now as marketers we’ve all heard that our core tenets are segmentation, targeting and positioning, but the strategy that we as modern marketers need to adopt is evolving. This is because new technology, processes and innovations are forcing marketing departments worldwide to undertake digital transformations, and the forefront of this is the world of marketing technology.
The fact that only 22% of marketers still adopt the batch and blast approach is a drastic improvement on previous years and demonstrates clearly that this digital transformation is happening. Marketers are beginning to understand that holistic nurture frameworks, ABM and hyper personalisation are the best ways through which to communicate with clients, prospects and everything in between, and a blanket approach to mar-comms is ultimately a fruitless avenue.
“Marketers now need to be sending campaigns aligned to specific customer journeys, and create a buyer experience that customers now expect, similar to that of best in class brands such as Amazon, Apple and Netflix.”
Marketing Return on Investment Report 2021
Marketers need to demonstrate value, not just MROI
35% of Marketers understand Marketing Performance Management but don’t currently practice it as part of their marketing plan.
According to Gartner, “Marketing performance management (MPM) encompasses the technologies and services for solutions that support marketing's ability to gain access to insights, analyse data, make predictions, and optimize marketing programs, campaigns and resources.”
Here at Clevertouch, we like to simplify this and take it one step further, and so we define MPM as a holistic measurement of whether an initiative makes money, saves money or provides a degree of insight and intelligence that wasn’t available before, but is now a competitive advantage.
Customers are now self-serving around 60% of the buying process on average, and so it is no longer just about how marketing can be tied into the rest of the business financially, but how the marketing function made that customer journey easier, informing prospective clients with the requisite information for Sales to effectively pick up the remaining 40%.
“35% of Marketers understand Marketing Performance but don’t currently practice it as part of their marketing plan. This is likely because of the gulf that exists between ability and ambition for many marketing departments, one that should diminish as technology continues to make the lives of Marketers everywhere easier.”
Marketing Return on Investment Report 2021
Read our Marketing Return on Investment Report here
Stakeholder buy in has never been more important
Just 36% of Marketers are sharing their reports with executive leadership.
The modern marketer can no longer just be satisfied that they are simply doing a good job, they need to prove their value back into the business, and in particular to their executive stakeholders. Now, according to our MROI Report 2021, 64% of marketers aren’t even sharing reports with their executive leadership. This could be for a number of reasons, from a lack of ability to summarise marketing success in a way executive stakeholders would engage with, to an all-out disconnect between the marketing department and the rest of the business.
Whatever the reason for this lack of communication from Marketing to their shareholders, what is undeniable is that the procurement, deployment and integration processes around adding or migrating to a new marketing technology requires Stakeholder buy in. Without the right internal sponsor right at the start, digital transformation projects are set up to fail.
“Executive reporting will increase buy in from senior members, and in doing so create a better picture of marketing internally, as well increase justification for increased marketing spend in the future.”
Marketing Return on Investment Report 2021
Read our Marketing Return on Investment Report here
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Statistics taken from Clevertouch's Marketing Return on Investment Report 2021, unless otherwise specified.