Research from Marketo reveals senior marketers are customer-centric but majority aren’t aligned with CEOs
The majority of marketers are focusing on customers to drive revenue but failing to engage with CEOs in their organisations along the journey, a new report has found.
The Morar HPI’s Marketing Decision Makers Report, commissioned by Marketo, revealed while 53 per cent of marketers are engaging in customers to drive revenue, 40 per cent feel their c-suite does not listen to them or understand the nuances of marketing.
Out of the 200 A/NZ senior marketing decision-makers surveyed, 55 per cent said the biggest challenge they faced was driving business growth and 30 per cent said it was building their brand. Thirteen per cent cited "proving their impact to their CEO" as a key challenge.
Despite the advances in digital marketing, the report found a quarter of of B2C A/NZ marketers and a third of local B2B marketers still focus on email and single-channel marketing, saying if email wasn’t available to them tomorrow, it would be ‘devastating’ to their marketing execution.
In addition, 35 per cent of marketers said they don’t have the technology they need to drive customer engagement and insights, and 75 per cent want better technology than they currently have. Organisations that are getting it right and ‘admired the most’ were cited as Apple, Amazon and Facebook respectively.
“When the priorities of marketers and CEOs are different, marketing departments will continue to struggle to get the budget, technology, and tools they need. Internally, marketers need to sell the benefits of engaging customers,” Marketo’s senior marketing director, Chris Connell, said. “It is clear that marketers are switching tactics, from ‘disruption-based’ marketing, to meaningful customer engagement, but they haven’t yet explained to their internal stakeholders why this is important.
“Having the attention of your customers is useful, but it’s meaningless if you don’t engage them in a highly personal way, at scale. It’s positive to see engagement as such an overwhelming priority for marketers, but the next step is to get c-suite buy in.”
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