Maybe ROI Isn’t Our Biggest Problem?
According to AdAge, a whopping 93% of CMOs are under pressure to deliver measurable ROI (Return On Investment). Shocking? Not really, but what is shocking is that most marketers can’t or don’t measure ROI so what’s a CMO to do?
In working on the second annual B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Study by ANNUITAS (almost ready for release), I find I am looking at data and statistics about marketers all day long. Most of the statistics aren’t surprising like the AdAge stat on CMOs, but a few are pretty outrageous. The one that really gives me pause is from our study this year that only 7.3% of organizations rate the skill set of their marketing personnel as very effective in executing Demand Generation Strategy. How does the rest of the team perform if less than ten percent are very effective? Not well enough to make up that kind of difference you can assume.
Here’s a look at ion interactive’s newest infographic, 75 Essential Content Marketing Stats with some statistics on content marketing that may make you stop and think back to the AdAge stat and the challenge for CMOs. For example, if 55% of marketers expect to increase content marketing spending in the next 12 months but only 38% of content marketers say their content is effective (data from the 2015 Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends from CMI and MarketingProfs)…isn’t something wrong here?
No wonder almost every single CMO is under pressure to deliver measureable ROI. Marketers need to stop producing more content just because we think we should produce more. More isn’t better. Until we can understand what our buyers want, know when and how they want to consume it, aren’t we wasting our time and resources? Invest in understanding your buyer first, then and only then can you build out a Demand Generation or Content Marketing Strategy that will deliver results. Maybe that is one of the reasons why ROI is so tough to measure?
Author: Erika Goldwater CIPP/US @erikawg is VP, Marketing for ANNUITAS
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