Marketing leaders indicated that data-driven management is essential to mobilize, motivate and optimize their teams. They also said that when marketing is aligned with other functional units, businesses see faster revenue growth and higher profitability.

Find out more about what marketers said about their views on challenges they face in demonstrating marketing ROI and how they’re compensating their staff:

Marketing Goals of Marketers

• The vast majority of marketers (47.42%) consider themselves data-informed, using data after-the-fact to find out what worked well and what didn’t. While 27.84% consider themselves data-driven.
• 60.94% reported that their top marketing objective is to increase sales, followed by 51.81% for increasing customer engagement, and then 51.56% for increasing brand awareness.
• About the top social media marketing objectives, increasing brand awareness ranked the top with a rate of 79.79%.

Analytics and Reporting

• 66.3% of marketers think it’s easier or much easier to prove marketing impact.
• 71.11% consider attributing social and content to revenue is their top challenges for proving marketing ROI, followed by 48.89% for aligning KPIs with overall business goals.
• 90.64% use engagement metrics to evaluate the impact of their marketing.
• 40.94% have specially trained staff to analyze data trends.

Team Structure and Alignment

• Marketers surveyed spend 24% of their time in analyzing marketing data and 24% in developing content.
• 50.68% of marketers use agencies for PR, 48.63% for video production and 28.77% for social media.
• 29.3% said they compensate members of their marketing team by salary only.
• 48.75% reported that their 2017 marketing budget stayed the same.

Graph Shows the Top Marketing Objectives for Marketing Executives in 2017

Methodology:

Data was driven from 217 marketing executives from 19 different industries. The response rate translates to a 95% confidence level, with a 6.49% margin of error. The survey was conducted between January 31 & February 27, 2017.