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The CMO Council’s report Outsmart Adversity tackles pressing problems as marketing faces  economic headwinds. Can you balance investments across brand and demand? Can you clearly and persuasively articulate marketing’s value? Most importantly, when the weather clears, will you be ready for growth? Here’s an excerpt of the report:

Do you know what capabilities matter most to counter external pressures and emerge in a position for growth? How do you think you’re performing against those capabilities? Our study found that the top three “extremely important” capabilities in overcoming economic adversity and uncertainty are:

1. Leveraging data and analytics to become more predictive
2. Articulating marketing’s value to impact revenue
3. Growing loyalty, retention, customer lifetime value (LTV) through social care and personalization

Now for the kicker. There’s a pretty big performance gap between highly confident and less confident marketers in each of these critical capabilities.

Leveraging Data

Why It Matters: The goal of data analytics is to understand what’s happening with customers (e.g., changes in their buying behavior) now and in the future. Marketers need to break data silos and unify data with the right MarTech in order to get ahead of disruption. Existing data silos and analytics systems that rely solely on historical trends are no longer good enough.

Performance Gap: More than a third (34%) of highly confident marketers say they’re very satisfied in their ability to leverage data and analytics to become more predictive, while only 10% of less confident marketers say the same thing.

The big picture is that the vast majority of marketers have an opportunity to improve this capability. But they’ll need to navigate a series of hurdles, such as overcoming manual error, speeding up the data collection process, reconciling and synthesizing data from across multiple channels and sources, creating a comprehensive view of data, etc.

Articulating Value

Why It Matters: One of the recurring themes in our study is the need to overcome, or at least mitigate, marketing’s attribution problem — that is, connecting marketing actions to revenue growth. (For more, see “CMOs & CFOs Align on Spend,” pg. 6.)

Performance Gap: More than half (54%) of highly confident marketers say they’re very satisfied in their ability to articulate marketing’s value to impact revenue, while only 14% of less confident marketers say the same thing. This is a massive gap, and many marketers need to close it. One way is to show marketing attribution, which has become easier to do after the pandemic sent practically every customer to digital channels where engagements could be tracked, measured and optimized.

Growing Loyalty

Why It Matters: Cash-strapped customers will open their wallets for brands they trust — and they’ll do so over and over again. The CMO Council found that CEOs (53%), heads of sales (49%) and line-of-business leaders (44%) pay close attention to LTV when making strategic decisions.

Performance Gap: Marketers can grow loyalty, retention and LTV through social care and personalization — but it’s not easy. Only 16% of highly confident marketers say they’re very satisfied in the performance of this capability, and a mere 5% of less confident marketers say the same thing. Delivering customer service over social channels — the preferred channel today — is a challenge because it requires customer service and marketing to work together. Social channels have been the province of marketing, yet marketing as a function hasn’t been interested in providing customer service support. Marketing needs to pivot to a shared social care strategy.

Outsmart Adversity is a based on a survey of nearly 500 global marketing leaders across industries and geographies. Among job titles, 32% are SVP/EVP of marketing, 31% CMOs, and 20% VP of marketing (or digital). Nearly 30% of respondents come from companies with $1B to $5B in estimated annual 2023 revenue, and 28% from companies with more than $5B. Download the full report.

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