The growth mandate: How marketers are facing up to the pressures of marketing-led growth
Salesforce’s latest Marketing Intelligence Report reveals a world where in order to face customers’ ever-increasing demands, marketers must learn to engage, measure, adapt and optimise every touchpoint of the customer experience.
Today’s digital-first customer wants personalised offers from companies who understand their needs. They want online experiences that can keep up with their every whim, especially since the pandemic changed the way they live, work, and shop. In fact, according to Salesforce’s latest Marketing Intelligence Report, 88% of customers expect companies to accelerate digital initiatives as a result of COVID-19.
In order to get there, marketers must learn to navigate a complex landscape of channels, data, and tools. A cross-channel overview of marketing activity is vital for achieving clear, measurable business impact, but with Australian marketers using an average of 18 marketing and advertising platforms, it can often be difficult to see the wood for the trees.
So how can marketers begin to better utilise their marketing performance data to engage customers and drive growth? To answer those questions and more, Salesforce has surveyed 1,050 decision-making marketers across Australia, the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan and Singapore. Their responses provide some clear insights for businesses in Australia and beyond looking to navigate the choppy waters of digital disruption.
What is growth, anyway?
It goes without saying that the biggest goal for any marketer is driving growth. But with growth meaning different things to different people, it’s important to first define exactly what the term means to marketers.
When assessing the most important growth-defining metrics in Australia, the Salesforce report found that sales/revenue ranked the highest globally, followed by customers/ client volume and customer satisfaction/ net promoter scores. When planning for growth, more than half of marketers see driving growth as a long-term pursuit, and one in four views it as a mix of long- and short-term goals.
A growing responsibility
Today’s marketers are increasingly accountable not just for their organisation’s brand, but for overall business outcomes, with nine out of ten marketers in Australia and globally making marketing-led growth one of their core priorities.
With this responsibility resting heavily on their shoulders, marketers continue to experience a wide range of obstacles, including misalignment on measurement and reporting, lack of data management, and a lack of real-time insights.
According to the report, marketers globally assess their company’s performance against these key growth metrics as at least ‘somewhat successful.’ Despite this, less than half are considering their organisations ‘very successful’ on any metric. Less than 50% were very successful in achieving the very growth metrics that they deemed most important.
In Australia, just 36% of marketers were fully confident in the accuracy of their data, and 62% were not fully automating their data integrations. Clearly, there is still a lot of room for improvement across the board – both in Australia and globally.
Data, data everywhere
Marketing and data insights are the keys to achieving that all-important growth, but as the platforms and channels pile ever higher, achieving a single unified view is a real challenge. In fact, the biggest barrier for today’s marketer is a lack of unified performance data.
Over half (56%) of Australian marketers are not yet using a business intelligence tool, meaning they are continuing to measure performance within each tool independently or combining them using manual processes such as spreadsheets.
Manual processes such as these are a barrier to analysing and increasing growth. Marketers are unable to achieve the timely, accurate, and actionable data insights they require to make the right decisions and plan for the future.
If marketers want to deliver better growth to their business, they need to let their data lead them. In Australia, the most common growth-related business initiative for the next 24 months is ensuring a recurring revenue model; connecting customer experience across marketing, sales and service; and the diversification of products/offerings.
Looking towards the top improvements, Australian marketers are keen to align data ownership across marketing and IT departments, increase efficiencies in data management and preparation, and seek deeper insights into audiences, content, and offers.
The good news is that marketers are already beginning to respond to the growth mandate by better utilising their marketing performance data. By integrating data from various platforms into a cross-channel view, high performance marketers are able to better evaluate and improve their results over the long term.
In fact, high performers are nearly two times more likely to use an automated approach than a manual one. They’re also more likely to use marketing intelligence or general business intelligence platforms and less likely to use spreadsheets than low performers.
Those in high-performance organisations are also nearly seven times as likely to claim very easy access to data and insights relative to lower-performance organisations.
In order to keep up with these high-performing players, marketers of all stripes must move on from the old days of spreadsheets and manual inputs. Clearly, the time for automation is now. To read Salesforce’s latest Marketing Intelligence Report in full, click here.