According to the recently released State of Marketing Report from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, 57% of marketers plan to increase their marketing budgets this year with a priority on incorporating social media across all channels and taking full advantage of the insights gleaned to grow their respective brands.
For its report the CMO Council – which is made up of 6,000 chief marketers who are responsible for over $200 billion in spending across 110 countries, queried over 750 of its members with 64% of the respondents indicating they reported directly to the CEO, President or COO.
The report highlighted three key areas marketers need to focus on.
The following is taken from a summary of the report provided by the council itself. Tell me if you see a common theme here…
1. Drive top-line growth and market share while better defining the brand and value proposition. Through new automated campaign and lead management tools, marketers can engage in highly interactive (and highly relevant) dialogues across multiple channels, reaching across social, digital, and traditional media channels. Connecting the measurements of these multiple channels is one of the key challenges marketers will seek to address in 2011.
2. Redefine the customer experience, developing web experiences that are highly engaging, personalized and differentiated. This new “experience mix” must include social platforms, but must also integrate the messaging and engagements through traditional channels.
3. Use insights to grow the brand and increase loyalty. As we continue to engage with customers in instant, online social channels, gathering data from every impression, every search, every transaction, status update, or tweet can develop a more complete profile of the customer and must be integrated with off line data sources.
The common theme is Social Media and Integration.
Marketers need to create engaging campaigns that seamlessly integrate the digital/social and traditional worlds, while delivering the same message across all media channels with a constant eye on tracking, monitoring and results to continually define the demographics of each individual customer.
As for those of us on the agency side, it’s our job to provide marketers with all the support and tools they need to achieve their goals while delivering the highest ROI on marketing dollars invested.
Steve Olenski
Originally posted on the Star Group blog
Sources: cmocouncil.org, Media Post , Google Images