Marketing efficiencies top of mind for CXOs in 2019
Adults in the U.S. now spend more than six hours per day listening to, watching, reading or interacting with digital media which has huge implications for how brands market to their customers. Now a new white paper details challenges for brands.
Jersey City, NJ-based Forbes Insights has teamed up with Ventura, CA-based real-time ad bidding platform The Trade Desk to ask 226 global CMOs in organizations across sectors with annual revenues of over $500 million about the issues and challenges they are facing.
The findings released in its 'The Modern CMO white paper' reveal that the biggest challenge that is keeping CMO's up at night is how to keep up with the changing consumption habits of today's digital consumer.
Efficiency in marketing and investing in technology are key goals for nearly half of CMOs surveyed.
These factors both have a goal to use technology efficiently for improving marketing ROI.
Respondents reported that their technology budgets are rising and plan to rise further, with almost nine out of ten (86 percent) reported increasing investment in marketing technology over the next year.
Brands see China as a big opportunity for growing their global customer base. With 772 million internet-connected consumers and a growth in the affluent middle class, China is top of mind for many CMOs.
A large percentage of the Chinese population is online and broadband and video has rapidly grown there. Three of five companies currently include China in their global ad campaigns, and half the companies not yet focused on this market expect to invest there over the next one to three years.
Almost all plan to grow their business in China. Four out of five (80 percent) of CMOs say they are increasing marketing investment in China over the next 12 to 18 months.
Additionally marketers plan to use programmatic methods to increase efficiency, and better target individual customers.
Two-thirds of surveyed CMOs spend over a quarter of their advertising budgets on programmatic technologies. One third (38 percent) are choosing programmatic partners to access cross device and emerging channels.
Almost half (46 percent) of CMOs expect to increase their investment in marketing technology by at least a quarter.
CMOs need to have a common data source of data across all channels to create a consistent baseline. Having a unified data model makes it easier and more achievable to create brand goals
Accessing and using this unified data is critical to marketing success. More than three-quarters of the companies surveyed make marketing decisions based on data-driven insights over half the time.
And almost all (95 percent) use data to detail their audience segmentation strategy. Companies with larger ad budgets are using data to inform strategy 52 percent more often than companies with smaller ad budgets.
Marketing represents 11 percent of company annual budget, so CMOs must be able to justify the investment in terms of revenue and enterprise value.
The Trade Desk's CMO, Susan Vobejda said: "CMO's roles are becoming more digital and analytics focused as data-driven insights are increasingly important for successful marketers.
Nearly eight in ten (78 percent) of the CMOs we surveyed use data-driven insights to increase their marketing efficiency.
In 2019, efficiency in marketing and investing in technology are top-of-mind for CMOs. With CMOs increasingly focused on ROI as a metric of success, they point to AI and machine learning as the technologies they think will deliver the biggest ROI."
And those brands that most effectively utilise technology, data and digital media to reach and engage their customers will win - and get the ROI they need.
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