The role of the chief marketing officer (CMO) has been increasingly scrutinized in recent years. Dozens of CMO positions have been axed from some of the world’s most recognizable brands, including McDonald’s which replaced the role with a new SVP marketing technology position. CMOs who remain will need to prepare to handle even more pressure to prove their organizational value in 2020, says a new Forrester report.

In 2018 Forrester predicted a decline in Fortune 100 CMOs. Since then, organizations have started to part ways with CMOs, reallocating their responsibilities to leaders such as the CIO. 2020 is predicted to be a critical year for CMOs to deliver seamless customer experiences with their martech investments and, crucially, generate attributable revenue from those martech-enabled experiences. 

Martech spend continues to take a solid chunk out of CMOs’ budgets, and while spending slowed this year, the report warns that CMOs approach martech investments cautiously — and more strategically. “Rather than blindly dumping more money into tech spend, we’ve delivered growth with a strategy built around creative engagement with our customers through existing channels,” Chris Brandt, CMO of Chipotle told Forrester.

1. Asked to identify the top organisational goals for the business, companies expect their marketers to grow revenues (20.75 per cent), acquire new customers (20.6 per cent), and improve the customer experience (17.9 per cent), as their top priorities.

2. Marketers are investing in programs to better demonstrate the value of their work. However, these are often unsophisticated. 

3. As such, marketing is still poorly perceived by its management peers. Barely 15 per cent of respondents said their peers saw marketing as a primary business driver and revenue generator. 

4. Marketing technology has made huge strides improving the lot of CMOs over the past decade, and most companies have made investments across a range of disciplines. The top five functions identified by marketers in the survey were CRM, Social Media Engagement, Email Marketing Platforms, Marketing Automation, and Data Management.

5. As to their own goals, marketers want to build a bigger personal profile (interestingly, in the deep dive this was partly motivated by wanting to demonstrate the value of thought leadership to their peers). They also aspire to taking a larger role in business strategy and see gaining additional skills and capabilities as key to this.

Linear. The simplest Multi-Source Attribution model, linear attribution gives equal weight and revenue credit to all touchpoints.

Time decay. The lengthier the sales cycle (think B2B), the more spread out the touchpoints. The time decay model gives credit to more recent marketing touchpoints as opposed to those earlier in the process, which may not have been as impactful.

U-shaped. The U-shaped MTA model gives credit to two key touchpoints — the first touch and the lead creation — and any in between. Forty percent of the credit goes to the first touch and 40% goes to lead creation, while the remaining 20% is divided between any touches that occurred in the middle.

W-shaped. This model is the same as U-shaped MTA, except it includes an additional touchpoint — the opportunity creation. All three touchpoints receive 30% of the credit, while the remaining middle touches share 10%.

Full path. Full path attribution builds on the W-shaped model, including the final close. Basically, the bulk of the credit is given to the major milestones of the customer journey, but lower weight is also assigned to the touchpoints in between. One of the biggest benefits of this model is that it accounts for the sales team’s post-opportunity follow-up interactions, giving them the same weight as early-stage marketing activities.

Custom. Of course, there is an option to assign your own attribution weights through a custom model. 

Marketing feels they’re not getting recognition for their achievements. Finance sees marketing as an endless cost centre. This is not an easy fix. Forrester research shows 78% of respondents agree that marketing-finance alignment is vitally important, but only 15% feel that the two departments currently work together towards shared goals. At the very core of this rift is an inability to measure the impact of marketing in wider financial terms. That’s where predictive marketing analytics steps in.

Advanced predictive creates a centralised metric that brings marketing and finance onto the same page: Customer lifetime value (CLV) which represents predicted lifetime revenue in quantitative financial terms.

CLV allows marketing to see which accounts are most worth targeting so it can better focus its efforts, and in turn build a better business case for reinvestment; and finance can see exactly where revenue is coming from, through a clear, centralised dashboard.

Finance executives get complete future-based oversight of marketing performance towards tangible financial goals – so they can make better decisions about the wider business.

They’re more likely to improve returns than other technologies

A key part of proving digital marketing ROI is to measure the key metric over time, both before and after your effort, using a regular sample of the data or a time series. The reason you need a time series for proving digital marketing ROI is that it will allow you to illustrate that your actions had a material and lasting impact on a key metric.

Additionally, you should also be able to show that your initiative did not have a negative impact on any other key metrics. That is, to prove ROI you also need to show that while you have increased conversion rates, you did not inadvertently lower the average value of the customer. Doing so would reduce, if not negate, your impact on revenue.

One of the downsides of marketing ROI is that it is easy to only recognize the incremental profits in short-term sales and underestimate the long-term benefits that marketing brings to brand value.

This “can be particularly challenging for executives who might be impatient to see a return. A CFO might just see marketing expenses walking out the door and not a corresponding build-up of cash flows and assets,” Avery explains. As a result, CFOs and CMOs are often at odds. “CFOs are under tremendous pressure to deliver quarterly earnings, and may not be patient for the longer-term effects of marketing to take hold. You’re asking them to believe in forward movement in a progression through a customer’s purchase journey, and that can take a long time,” she says. But marketing does more for a company than generate profits in the short term; it also builds lasting value and drives future profits.

Content marketing should engage, educate, or entertain, but more importantly, should elicit action. This is what separates content marketing from content publishing.

The goal is not to be good at content, but to be good at business using content. If your content marketing works, it should affect your audience enough to prompt a business-specific behavior. These behavioral actions are the conversions that we need to track in order to see that our content has moved a reader beyond just engagement.

Many desired conversions can be as high-value as lead generation, product purchases, or requests for information. But they can also come in the form of engagement micro-conversions – sharing content, engaging with additional content, exploring your site deeper. What matters is that there are always things you want your reader to do, even if only to continue reading. 

There should be no clutter involved whatsoever. At the end of the day, clear-cut messaging and compelling CTAs are what drives your ROI.

1. Simplicity of your messaging

2. Granular view of spending and income

3. Creating a unique community

4. Content aligned with buyer’s journey

The biggest challenge in proving digital marketing ROI is tying social and content efforts to revenue, marketers say. See what they say about KPIs, leads, data & more in this study.

While multi-touch attribution is the most accurate approach to demonstrating content marketing ROI, there’s a simpler metric that can get you started: leads influenced.

Leads influenced: The number of people who engaged with a piece of content and converted into a lead within the next 90 days.

Let’s look at an example. Say that I publish this post and 5,000 people read it. And amongst those 5,000 people, 65 become a lead for Contently in the next 90 days—they fill out a demo request form, request to talk to a sales person, download an e-book, or some other conversion event. Then, that piece of content would have 65 leads influenced.

This metric is an easy way to show the impact that content has on the top of your funnel and can be tracked with a simple conversion pixel placed on various conversion event points, like the aforementioned demo request form or e-book download. It’s one of the metrics that we bake right into our analytics platform, and helps us optimize our distribution strategy to ensure that content pieces that generate a lot of leads get prioritized in both our paid and organic campaigns.

Data-driven management is essential for marketing leaders. Equip yourself with actionable strategies, technology recommendations, and budgeting trends.

Lead Source Metrics
% Marketing Sourced Leads
% Sales Sourced Leads

Conversion Rate Metrics

Marketing Lead to Customer Rate 
Sales Lead to Customer Rate

Revenue Contribution Metrics
% Revenue From Marketing Sourced Leads
% Revenue From Sales Sourced Leads 
Product/Service Adoption

Nobody loves them. Everybody hates them. Pity the poor CMO. 

• Marketers say 47% of the c-suite outside of their department use some marketing technology in their roles.
• 52% of global marketers feel that other C-level execs do not understand marketing. 
• 35% think that their CEO strongly realises the potential revenue uplift and saving of martech investment. 
• Marketers think that just a third (33 per cent) of CIOs understand the value of martech at a financial level.
• 27%  say that their marketing team is working closely with the CEO. 
• 97% say that marketing technology has made the marketing department more strategic in its approach
• Last year there was increased investment in platforms such as CMS (83 per cent) and CRM (62 per cent)
• 97% have invested in some form of marketing technology in the past 12 months. 60% were adding to their existing stack

According to software company Squiz’s latest State of Marketing Technology report, 78 per cent of marketers feel confident in explaining the value of technology investments, but there is a disconnect with the rest of the boardroom.

The report, which surveyed 600 senior marketing professionals across Australia, the UK and the US, found 97 per cent of global marketers believe that marketing technology has allowed the marketing department to become more strategic in its approach and 43 per cent say they’ve been able to develop more data-driven KPIs since investing in it.

Yet despite these benefits, the report revealed more than half of marketers think c-level execs don’t understand marketing and only 35 per cent think their CEO strongly realises the potential revenue uplift and saving of martech investment.

• Linear attribution: This is the simplest of the multi-touch attribution models. It evenly applies credit to all touchpoints in the buyer’s journey. 
• Time decay attribution: This model assigns more credit to touchpoints closest to the point of sale. Its weakness is that it will never give proper credit to top-of-funnel touches because they will always be furthest from the conversion.
• Position-based attribution: This model focuses on lead generation. It emphasizes two particular touchpoints: the first touch and the lead conversion touch. The rest of the credit is distributed evenly among the remaining touchpoints. 
• W-shaped attribution: This model is a variant of position-based attribution, but prioritizes an additional third touchpoint for when a prospect becomes an opportunity. 
• Z-shaped attribution: Z-shaped attribution takes the w-model further by adding a final touchpoint: customer close. This attribution works best if your organization continues to market to existing sales prospects, and there is close cooperation between our sales and marketing teams.
• Social and content attribution: This social-focused attribution model connects top-of-funnel interactions to bottom-funnel conversions on your website and landing pages. 

• The American Marketing Association’s 2017 Marketers Confidence Index gained 6 points overall for a total of 69 out of 100 points, a record high, the organization said in a press release. 
• Confidence has eroded in several key areas in the past year. For example, only 25% felt their team had the right tools and processes in place, down 8 points. 
• The problem of unsure marketers extends to the ability to understand the return-on-investment (ROI) for marketing efforts, with 32% saying they have lost confidence in their teams' abilities to do so.