Find out how to evolve your organization’s marketing plan based on the most important marketing trends today in order to grow your business and strengthen your brand tomorrow.
Latest CMO Insights Report Shows What Tomorrow’s Marketing Trends Will Be
Experts agree that marketing professionals can expect major changes in the next 5 years. Marketers must constantly monitor marketing trends and evolve in order to ensure that they will have the skills and tools they will need to reach tomorrow’s customers, as well as the ones the sales they need to register today. Keep these marketing trends in mind during long range planning as they pertain to your organization’s overall marketing plan.
More than three-quarters of the CMOs that responded to Accenture’s most recent marketing insights research predicted that marketing will undergo major and fundamental change over the next five years. Marketers say that these ten marketing trends should influence your marketing strategy and be used to evolve your organization’s long range plan.
10 Marketing Trends Should Influence Your Long Range Marketing Strategy
1. Analytics skills become core competencies for the CMO
Marketing pioneer John Wana maker (1838 – 1922) was a US merchant, civic and political influencer credited with having made the observation that, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Were the good merchant of Philadelphia alive today, he would have access to all the analytics he could wish for!
Marketers will increasingly be expected to be able to identify the most important benchmarks and show progress over time against specific, measurable goals. Now is the time to identify which metrics matter most to your organization and create a dashboard that demonstrates results and a return on investment for time and resources expended for marketing efforts.
2. Digital budgets will make up 75% of the overall marketing budget (and)
3. Mobile alone will account for 50% of the marketing budget
We are living in a digital world and for shoppers, it’s a multi-device buying journey. We recently shared data from comScore’s 3rd Annual UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper® Study that demonstrates that consumers overwhelmingly research and purchase using desktops and PCs; however, that doesn’t mean that the need for a mobile marketing strategy is overblown.
Mobile may be the channel where “first contact” is made; from social media ads to email to showrooming, webrooming and other consumer behaviors, mobile devices play an increasingly important part in the buyer’s digital journey. This is true for purchases made in-store as well as online.
4. Marketing will be less canned and evolve into more of an on-demand information provider
Organizations can’t rely solely on marketing tactics planned and scheduled out weeks – and sometimes months – in advance. Tomorrow’s most successful CMOs will be listening across media and have the ability to provide information to buyers or automatically serve up relevant content to shoppers in order to provide information needed at pivotal decision points during the buying cycle.
5. Marketing, sales and customer service will (finally!) become one unit
It’s time for the internal silos to be demolished. There was never a time where marketing, sales and customer service were not supposed to be working toward the same goals and serving the same constituencies. As more and more CEOs realize how much more effective each of these functions becomes when integrated, look for blurred – if not completely erased – lines between these departments.
The organizations that may have the toughest time adapting will be those historically dominated internally by the sales team. CMOs in these types of organizations must be able to put quality leads on the table if they want a seat at the decision-making table.
6. Marketing campaigns will unfold responsively in real time, and be diversified for the needs and intents of individuals across multiple devices and channels
One size does not fit all. The most successful CMOs are going to be able to detail buyer profiles to the point that they understand the different drivers common to segments of their target audiences as well as which digital platforms to use to engage them – and it won’t stop there. Marketers will use data in order to better discover the pivotal moments in a buyer’s decision-making process and have the ability to reach out to individuals at key moments in the buying cycle.
7. Earned media will become more important than paid/owned media and – consequently – will receive more attention, support and resources
According to Wikipedia.com, Earned media refers to publicity gained through promotional efforts other than advertising, as opposed to paid media, which refers to publicity gained through advertising. Examples of earned media include traditional publicity media mentions, social mentions and shares, and online and offline word of mouth referrals, reviews and ratings. Online recommendations in particular are playing an increasingly influential role with buyers, with 8 of 10 consumers saying that positive and negative reviews are now just as impactful to their buying decisions as personal recommendations (marketingcharts.com).
8. Marketing and IT will merge
In many organizations, the CMO already outspends IT when it comes to technology. In fact, a 2012 Forbes post shared Gartner analyst Laura McLellan’s prediction that CMOs would spend more than their ITcounterparts by 2017.
9. CMOs will become more influential; in many organizations, the CMO relationship will be more important to the CEO than the CFO and other C-Suite execs
The most successful organizations have one thing in common: Results. CMOs that make themselves valuable to an organization can expect to enjoy more influence and importance within that organization. With increasing importance comes increasing responsibility, however; CMOs will need to continue to evolve rather than rest on their laurels after one or two major successes.
10. We will be “known” as a digital company
From recruiting to sourcing suppliers to customer care and – yes – marketing, it’s a digital world. No organization can afford not to have a digital marketing strategy; for many, being known as a digital company will be intrinsic to industry leadership, profitability, sustainability and long term success.
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