Survey: CMOs Struggle to Connect Marketing Efforts with Company Success

Although marketers are constantly evolving their strategies, CMOs are still struggling to tie marketing efforts to improvements in their overall bottom line.

Korn Ferry recently conducted the “2018 CMO Pulse Survey” to determine how many marketing initiatives can be tied back to company success. About half of CMOs (52 percent) claimed that they could not make a direct correlation between their marketing team’s results to company performance.

“Today’s marketers have more data and analytics than ever before, so it would seem they should be able to tie their efforts directly to the success of the company,” said Caren Fleit, managing director, Korn Ferry Global Marketing Officers Practice. “Unfortunately, many measure the effectiveness of initiatives only in terms of marketing metrics and miss the opportunity to connect it to overall business performance as measured in terms of sales and profit, among other factors.”

About 39 percent said that data and analytics are the marketing function in greatest need of advancement. This was followed by personalization (30 percent) and branding (12 percent).

Data, Analytics, and Marketing Content Personalization

Both analytics and personalization are in need of improvement, according to the survey, and previous research suggests that they go hand-in-hand.

According to the “2nd Annual Personalization Development Study” from Monetate, 47 percent of marketers consider data quality to be a top three challenge in terms of personalization development.

In 2017, about 60 percent of marketers claimed that they had a documented personalization strategy. This was an increase from the 55 percent that said the same the year before.