Advanced/ Digest...

This year’s Digital Marketing Spending Survey yields some interesting insights:

-- >  Marketing budgets on the rise  This year’s survey shows marketing spend at 10.7% of revenue, up 8% over last year.

-- >  Budgets march toward digital parity  This year, 3.1% of revenue was earmarked for digital, up an impressive 20% from last year.

-- >  Customer experience comes forward—the belief that customer is king has graduated from platitude to practice as 77% of respondents report a chief customer officer in name or role among its top executives. Nearly half report into marketing.

-- >  Marketing technologists redouble—last year, the rise of the chief marketing technologist equivalent was top news. This year, it’s clear that this is no passing fad. The CMT is now found, in role or title, in 81% of organizations—up from 70% last year. It’s a clear indication that technical chops are crucial to digital marketing magic.

-- >  Content and search marketing spend falls off Why? These disciplines are increasingly intertwined as search algorithm changes point to truer measures of audience engagement. Call it the sophomore slump for what are likely to be two solid matriculators on the longer horizon. The rebound will likely depend on a more deliberate focus on proving ROI.

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IDC released yesterday its top 2014 predictions for Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs).

Advanced/ Condensed...

Indeed, IDC’s predictions for 2014 sounded like a call to arms, to the shedding of “traditional sales mentality,” and to “facing the digital shakeup” by taking risks and experimenting. Here’s my edited version of IDC’s predictions:

-- >  The CMO role will burst traditional boundaries and will become “open for definition.”

-- >  CMO and CIO pairs (only a few notable successes?) will throw out the rule book, set aside process-heavy tradition, and experiment to deliver marketing’s successful use of information technology.

-- >  By 2020, the marketing function in leading companies will be re-organized along three key components: content, channels, and consumption (data and analysis), getting rid of traditional silos.

-- >  Marketing will move towards a shared services model for content creation, distribution and management

-- >  Customers want a seamless experience so CMOs will integrate media silos to provide data-driven multi-channel coverage.

-- >  80% of customer data will be wasted due to immature enterprise data “value chains”

-- >  By the end of 2014, 60% of CMOs will have a formal recruiting process for marketers with data skills.

-- >  Almost all marketers will need some analytics skills, but only 20% of marketers will receive formal training on analytics and customer data management.

-- >  Fragmented marketing IT point products and low adoption rate will inhibit companies’ ability to win customers, as gaps in the marketing IT infrastructure slow down the flow of data.

-- >  Digital marketing investment will exceed 50% of total program budget by 2016, up from 39% in 2013.

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