MARKETING STRATEGY

Marketers lack confidence in their ability to achieve goals in hard times

By our News Team | 2023

As they deal with a struggling economy, most marketing leaders are worried about the impact of budget cuts and lack of investment. 

The US-based CMO Council, in partnership with customer experience platform Sprinklr, recently released a new research report entitled ‘Outsmart Adversity: How CMOs Can Weather Economic Headwinds and Emerge Poised for Growth’.

It finds that two in three marketing leaders lack confidence in their ability to achieve goals in the face of economic adversity and uncertainty, while nearly eight in 10 express concerns around lack of investment or budget cuts.

Marketing strategy

Photo by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free

Challenges with executing data-driven marketing strategies contribute to this lack of confidence.

“Marketers will have to build alliances with finance and IT to protect budgets and MarTech investments, and they’ll need to identify and shore up capabilities to build their confidence,” said Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council. 

“These capabilities include gathering real-time insights that reveal how audiences really feel about your marketing on multiple channels, and then easily distributing this knowledge throughout the organisation.”

The report surveyed nearly 500 global marketing leaders to reveal key findings about how marketers feel about economic adversity and how they can achieve revenue goals.

Key findings include:

  • 78% of marketers don’t strongly feel that they can convince the CFO to invest in marketing and not cut the budget.
  • Facing budget challenges, a majority (68%) strongly agree that it’s imperative for CMOs and CIOs to collaborate this year to develop a competitive advantage with customer experience.
  • However, even among highly confident marketers surveyed, only 32% are very satisfied in their ability to leverage data/analytics. Among less confident marketers, this falls to 10%.
  • Internal collaboration and maximising ROI across marketing channels will be key to success. In the next 12 months, most marketers plan to create omnichannel customer experiences to help them emerge from economic uncertainty.

“In uncertain times, marketers face even more pressure to protect budgets and programmes by demonstrating clear ROI,” said Arun Pattabhiraman, Chief Marketing Officer at Sprinklr. 

“As our research with the CMO Council shows, marketers must embrace the opportunity to enhance the way they gather data, identify actionable consumer insights, and strengthen their engagement strategy across channels.”

You can download the full report here.

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