CXOs – Get Marketing On Track! Part III

“CXOs – Get Marketing On Track! Part I” and Part II have attracted new readers that The Marketing Consigliere has been happy to become acquainted with.  The timeliness of this blog apparently has hit a nerve and now another report underscores the need to “get marketing on track.”

The CMO Council recently commissioned a study to determine current marketing operations in light of “economic uncertainty and decreasing budgetary resources.”

“Calibrate How You Operate” documents that Marketing executives face their organization’s lack of will to establish better aligned and integrated operations.  This echoes results from an IDC report mentioned in the “Marketing Still Stuck in a Silo” blog from this past December in that siloed data is a tremendous obstacle for most Marketing operations.

Although last year the Marketing Consigliere scolded CMOs because a majority were not interested in social networking for business, he does concede that there are fundamental infrastructure transformations that need to take place within an organization before you can best leverage new tools like social media, and this report is encouraging because it reveals that Marketers are realizing more and more that they need to increase operational efficiences to become a Net-Centric Marketing organization.

Among the findings:

• 43% of companies have marketing budgets that are only up to 5% of sales; 26% are in the “sweet spot” of 6% to 10% of sales, while 21% surprisingly report budgets between 11% and 35% of sales.
• Over 27% of respondents have four or less people in their Marketing department
• 42% of respondents claim that corporate culture and politics undermine efforts to improve Marketing operational efficiency, while 60% believe that operational transformation is critical to the organization and only 4.5% are satisfied with the condition and performance of their Marketing operations.
• Only 55% are using web analytics and the same percentage are using email campaign management tools.
• Only 53% are using a CRM system.
• Over 26% percent are uncertain as to the amount of budget that will be authorized to invest in transformational efforts, with only 25% spending only $100,000 (or less) this year.

The entire report is available from the CMO Council for $299; it is a good read for the serious Marketer who needs to lobby for his or her turf.  Ultimately, more and more companies will be adopting Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) platforms that make Marketing operations more efficient, but it is still a difficult challenge for Marketers who understand this to navigate through all the organizational landmines to make this real.

The Marketing Consigliere wants to advise you through this process and will keep blogging about the need to use Internet based technologies to better gather, store, analyze, share, and act upon data.