New metrics offer hope for perennial challenges
The top challenges revealed by our research are nothing new to marketers—they’re perennial difficulties that plague most planning cycles. Demonstrating ROI of marketing activities, generating quality traffic/leads, securing budgets, and getting more value from owned channels have been on top challenge lists in similar forms for decades.
With marketers prioritizing innovation and shifting focus toward newer tactics like content and account-based marketing (ABM), one might expect to see old troubles fall away and new challenges rising to the top. Yet the same problems persist. The perseverance of classic marketing challenges throughout varied economic environments may say less about their enduring nature, instead revealing issues with how we measure success.
As marketing continues to evolve and new metrics gain steam, we believe our understanding of these challenges will grow. Which problems are “real,” and which are more a reflection of outdated measurement? What are the true root causes of these concerns? And how do we solve them—not just for this cycle, but in a programmatic way that allows us to address them over the long term?
With the growth of engagement metrics, customer lifetime value (CLV) measurements, the time-to-innovation metric, and other emerging mechanisms, we’re already seeing the balance tip toward more useful methods of measuring success. As younger generations take a more prominent role in marketing—and as our technology continues to break barriers—we expect this trend to continue. These factors and others will allow us to cast typical marketing challenges in the appropriate light, implement policies to address them in intelligent, automated ways, and shift our focus toward higher value initiatives that deliver differentiating results for our clients.