Tying Activity To Revenue, Integrating Channels Cited As Top Challenges In New CMO Survey

“We are consistently hearing that the linkage from campaigns to results is broken, across both BtoB and BtoC organizations,” said Lisa Arthur, CMO of Aprimo. “Many heads of marketing are still struggling with a lack of channel integration. They are still looking at siloed channels and then having to do a lot of background work to try and correlate that work to results from both online and offline activities.”

The survey found 37% of marketers surveyed feel that the biggest challenge facing CMOs today is integrating and tracking multiple channels. Another challenge cited by 28% of marketers was the need to do more with less. “We are seeing a trend to have fewer people doing more campaigns. We have one of our clients that is now executing over 800 demand gen campaigns with only one dedicated staff member and our software.”

Arthur said the need for greater integration and visibility across channels is underscored by the growing pressure on CMOs to be accountable for how their investments are impacting top and bottom line performance. “The macroeconomic environment businesses are operating in today requires heads of marketing to drive revenue and also return bottom line improvement,” she added. “CMOs have to be more accountable to their CEO and their board. I can use myself as an example, I’ve been the head of marketing at both publicly held and privately held companies and in each case the board consistently wants visibility into the results and the return on investment.”

Less than a year into her tenure as CMO at Aprimo, Arthur said she has first-hand experience in using that visibility to instill confidence in the board that marketing’s contribution to delivering on the revenue goal would reach targets. “When I look at our demand I have visibility all the way from the top of the funnel down to the bottom,” Arthur said. “Because I can track offline channels as well as online, we can marry all of that information together and accurately track marketing’s contribution. “We know down to a science how many touches it takes to move an inquiry to a close deal, and we don’t have to rely only on the last touch. This allows us to build nurturing campaigns that are customer centric and do modeling with sales on the pipeline, our contribution and what that will drive in revenue. The reason we can do this with such confidence and accuracy is because I can link my channels and my results directly to my spend.”

To create an ongoing dialog around these challenges, Aprimo has started a discussion forum with marketers about “The Imperatives of the Marketing Revolution,” which seeks to establish best practices and explore how marketers can navigate the changing role of marketing. To participate in the discussion and download the whitepaper on the first Imperative, “Marketing Must Be Accountable,” please visit www.aprimo.com/revolution.