The abundance of challenges that brands and businesses are facing so far in 2023 is taking its toll on marketing leaders and teams, and new CMO Council research reveals that 2 in 3 marketing leaders lack confidence in their ability to achieve goals in the face of this economic adversity and uncertainty. Challenges with executing data-driven marketing strategies contribute to this lack of confidence.
The Council’s new report, Outsmart Adversity: How CMOs Can Weather Economic Headwinds and Emerge Poised for Growth, in partnership with unified customer experience management firm Sprinklr, also found that nearly 8 in 10 are concerned about lack of investment and budget cuts.
“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, in a news release. “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 organization.”
Key findings include:
- 78 percent 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 percent) 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 percent are very satisfied in their ability to leverage data/analytics. Among less confident marketers, this falls to 10 percent.
- Internal collaboration and maximizing 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 programs by demonstrating clear ROI,” said Arun Pattabhiraman, CMO at Sprinklr, in the release. “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.”
Download the full report here.
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.
