Today’s Marketing: Shift Your Focus, Shift Your Budget

“It is the best of times in marketing ... borne of challenges and big opportunities.” -- Sachin Gadhvi, Vice President, Marketing, Ticketmaster

Titled Marketing is a (Buyer) Journey, Not a Destination, the guide gives an informative look into how top marketing executives -- from companies such as Wells Fargo, Bally, Ticketmaster, Valspar, CNO Financial, medCPU and Goddard Schools -- are shifting their increasing budgets to be less about the sales funnel and more about the buyer journey across all channels.

As the CMO Solution Guide explains, 57% of CMOs reported that they expect their marketing budgets to increase over the next 2-3 years. As a result, CMOs are planning to increase spending across every stage of the buyer journey by an average of 50% in the next 2 years.

With marketing budgets up, so are expectations, and budget allocations have changed.

Leading the charge in the shift? Content and digital marketing.

The research shows that these are now not only a part of marketing budgets, but increasingly becoming the guiding beacons. Content marketing is the top budgeted item, claiming 13% of budgets, with digital advertising a close second at 11%.

This spending shift comes at a time when consumers have begun engaging businesses from multiple channels, researching products on their mobile devices, purchasing from their tablets and then picking them up in the stores. CMOs want to engage where their customers are, and social has emerged as the gold-medal multitasker for the job.

Social marketing allows marketers to invest and be present as their customers discover, learn, try, buy and become brand advocates in their own right.

According to the study, marketers have taken note, and are prioritizing loyalty and customer advocacy.

“People now see marketing as a great fusion opportunity that reaches beyond awareness and into training or advocacy. The increased scope is leading to increased resources.” - Mirjana Prokic, Marketing Director, Valspar

Reallocating Spending Across Multiple Channels

According to the CMO Club Solution Guide, the best way to leverage all the options in this new marketing playbook is to put an initial bet on each horse in the game. Marketers are getting increasingly more agile as they then leverage data to reallocate budgets to the winning “horse” and set themselves up for content marketing success.

And, as CMOs are testing, failing and improving tactics across buyer stages, they are enjoying the positive effects of a digital-centric marketing plan:

In our data-obsessed era, every action results in quantifiable, actionable analytics. The ability to create measurably successful marketing initiatives built on customer insight has increased CMOs’ credibility in the C-suite.

So, what’s the drive behind all of this experimental marketing?

For most, it comes down to the bottom line: 53% of CMOs said the main reason to experiment is due to the imperative to generate higher revenue for their company. And 20% say that they are experimenting with different allocations because “better data and technology allow them to measure the success (and failure) of each experimentation, so they can quickly identify winning approaches and pivot away from less-than-effective ones.”

“I’m currently allocating 5 - 10% of my budget to innovation -- new ideas and approaches where it’s okay to fail, but it allows us to test new concepts.” -- Paul Koulogeorge, CMO, Goddard Schools

Focus on the Customer

For top marketers, it all boils down to getting a better dialogue with customers across the entire journey.

During the research process, CMOs clearly indicated that they are most interested in using strong content in the digital realm as a means to facilitate and drive these interactions.

They consistently ranked social, website, email, digital, mobile and apps as their preferred vehicles. A digital approach spread evenly across these platforms provides a more conclusive overview of the customer journey and easily allows for experimental tactics within each stage. ROI attribution is a secondary benefit.

This is the future of marketing. Today’s CMOs are digital multi-taskers; they are more nimble and agile than ever before and are ready to shift on a moment’s notice.

You can download the complete CMO Club Solution Guide here or read the IBM feature piece.

The opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage/MyersBizNet management or associated bloggers.