Growth is a key mandate for today’s marketer: Download Salesforce Datorama’s free report today
In decades past, a marketer’s role was centred around protecting and strengthening a brand’s identity, capturing leads to pass on to the sales team, and acting as a steward of the brand. However, in today’s world, marketers are moving from their traditional roles towards a broader mandate focused on driving overall business growth.
While marketers have always been accountable to both their customers and their business, with budgets under increased scrutiny – especially since the COVID-19 pandemic – marketers are facing increased responsibility to show return on investment (ROI) for every single marketing dollar spent. In this new role, driving business growth is critical.
The new marketing mandate
With this in mind, Salesforce has released a free downloadable report to help understand the new growth marketing mandate, titled: “Marketing Intelligence Report Asia-Pacific: Data, Growth, and the New Marketing Mandate.”
The report examines how marketers across Asia-Pacific are responding to these ongoing shifts, including how they’re integrating their marketing data to measure impact and bottom-line growth.
The report, conducted in partnership with The Leading Edge, was conducted via an online survey of 1,002 marketers, along with 12 one-on-one qualitative interviews. Survey respondents included key decision-making marketers from Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and India.
Barriers to growth marketing
According to the report, ninety-one per cent of marketers agree that marketing has a major role to play in driving growth, and two in five have shifted their priorities to focus on marketing-led growth.
At times, growth marketing can appear to create a tension between short-term gains and long-term results. As one marketing director explains: “The ultimate challenge is demonstrating results in the short-term and setting up at the same time for those longer-term results… let’s call it equity vs performance.”
The report found that marketers differ quite significantly when it comes to the timing of their growth marketing strategies. While 11 per cent are focused on the short term, 54 per cent are more focused on the long term, which is about building brand equity, loyalty, and values. The remaining 35 per cent of APAC marketers are focused on a mix of the two.
But despite this almost universal recognition that marketing is key for growth, there are several barriers that still exist between marketers and the results they need to achieve. The most pressing barriers include misalignment on measurement, inefficient use of budget, and a lack of a unified view of performance.
On average, APAC marketers use 7.4 marketing platforms, each containing a multitude of data that varies in format, delivery mechanisms, and other aspects that make comparing performance across channels a serious challenge.
Data integration can require considerable time and effort, especially with 71% of marketers in APAC still doing this manually to some degree. As one senior marketing director explained: “A lot of systems are sitting around doing nothing, or to serve one person and one task. ‘All in one place’ creates technical efficiencies as well as knowledge efficiencies.”
The report provides an in-depth insight into how marketers across the APAC region are responding to this new mandate and integrating their marketing data in order to measure performance and drive bottom-line growth.