Give Marketers Back Time With Smart & Efficient Campaign Planning

If your marketing activities these days feel more like a giant game of whack-a-mole than a series of intentional strategic moves, you’re not alone. In an economic climate that’s so up in the air, it’s common for marketers to shift their focus to projects that need more attention in the moment over long-term strategic planning for the future.  

After all, without quick wins to remind leaders of their importance, marketing budgets can easily find themselves on the cutting board. Gaining and maintaining stakeholder support is a concern for 16% of marketers in 2023, demonstrating just how important it is for marketing to prove its worth in the midst of uncertain times. 

However, the frenetic focus on day-to-day activities leaves little room to think about long-term strategy. Without a way to implement smart and efficient campaign planning, building for the future can seem impossible without additional headcount. 

Let’s break down the most common challenges facing marketing campaigns today, as well as Inverta’s new Campaign in a Box solution that can launch demand generation campaigns in as quickly as eight weeks.

Challenges Facing Marketers in 2023

Marketers have their work cut out for them in 2023. With increasingly limited budgets, leaders are being forced to get creative and do more with less. Indeed, 17% of marketers anticipate pivoting on strategy as their biggest challenge this year. Making changes at the drop of a hat and doing them well is especially difficult when it comes to driving traffic and putting data to good use.

Driving Traffic, Pipeline, & ROI Is Becoming More Complex

  • A 2022 CMO survey found 80% of marketers see generating predictable pipelines as their top challenge in 2023. 
  • 19% of marketers say generating traffic and leads are the biggest challenge of 2023.
  • 20% of senior marketers say proving ROI on marketing expenses is one of their top challenges.

Siloed Data & Processes Are Limiting Productivity in 2023

  • 17% of senior marketers say they need more actionable insights from their data.
  • Focusing on retention in addition to upselling and expansion is becoming more important.
  • Too many tech stacks are built in silos, and focusing on meeting business needs rather than features will be the key to success this year.

The challenges facing marketers this year are many and varied. In order to succeed now and in the future, finding a way to address these challenges in a cost-effective and timely manner is essential.

How Inverta’s Campaign in a Box Can Help

Inverta’s team of marketing consultants have been in your shoes. We know what challenges are headed your way in 2023, and that’s why we asked ourselves, what if our clients had a turnkey solution at their disposal for their next demand generation campaign? 

That would be a pretty useful tactic to have in their toolkit.

The result? Inverta’s Campaign in a Box. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a tailored and customized campaign designed to boost your pipeline without exhausting your internal resources. 

What does it include? We’re so glad you asked.

  • Program Design: Account selection, personalized messaging, customized channels, and tactics
  • Technology Augmentation: Buyer intent surge data, keyword optimization, targeted display advertising, and more
  • Program Setup and Launch: Full-service execution of the program design
  • Monitoring and Optimization: Weekly assessment of campaign performance and engagement data
  • Performance Reporting: Visibility into engagement data and content intelligence, rolled up to socialize with stakeholders

Campaign in a Box can help if:

  • You need to generate revenue, quickly
  • Your campaigns aren’t benefiting from technology
  • You don’t have the data you need to optimize your demand strategy
  • You’re under pressure to demonstrate ROI
  • You need to stretch your budget
  • Your teams are feeling overwhelmed
  • You need a new way to inject life into your pipeline 

In short, if you’re feeling the heat of increasing your pipeline without the budget to up your resources, Campaign in a Box is a great solution to work smarter when it comes to campaign planning.

Launch a Demand Gen Campaign in Just 8 Weeks With Inverta

The best part about Campaign in a Box? It’s fast. In just eight weeks, we’ll have your campaign ready to launch. By six months, you’ll start seeing tangible results reflected in your pipeline.

Learn More About Inverta

  • If you’re ready to invest in a player, coach, and trusted advisor who can move the needle for your demand generation campaigns, Inverta’s new Campaign in a Box offering can deliver. Contact us here.
  • Learn more about our new campaign in a box solution – click here to access.

Why Demonstrating Marketing ROI Is So Important for CMOs

When times are tough, costs must be cut and spending must be justified. Yet, outcomes must continue, business as usual. This conundrum puts CMOs between a rock and a hard place. How do you deliver results with a tighter budget? More importantly, how can you tie those results to your budget effectively?

The majority of CMOs are turning to a little metric called return on investment (ROI). As macroeconomic uncertainty results in tighter budgets, marketing spend is under more scrutiny than usual. Every dollar spent needs to be correlated with a healthy return, and fast — 77% of CMOs say they’re under pressure to prove increased short-term ROI on marketing campaigns.  

In this blog, we’ll break down why ROI matters right now, what a focus on ROI changes about marketing activity, and how to start delivering ROI despite the current economic climate. 

CMOs Must Track & Prove ROI Faster Than Ever

In the face of a looming recession following several years of pandemic-related upheaval, a laser focus on ROI is a pretty natural response for company leadership. After all, when so much is uncertain, doubling down on the things that are working is a no-brainer. 

This certainly seems to be the case. Nearly 37% of marketers report that tracking ROI is becoming increasingly front-and-center, especially for larger organizations. Indeed, ROI has risen to the top of company leaders’ priority list. 

Marketers report the top metrics for their CEO, CFO, and board members are:

  • ROI: 48.4%
  • Delivering business outcomes: 39.9%
  • New customer acquisition: 35.8%

Couple this with shifting customer behavior due to inflation, and it’s never been trickier for CMOs to deliver on leaderships’ expectations. As recent Gartner research has identified, the burden to deliver ROI falls heavily on the CMO’s shoulders. 

“In order to meet the enterprise mandate of driving growth amid continued disruption, CMOs must act decisively to prioritize their investments and their strategy for the year ahead [2023],” said Ewan McIntyre, Gartner Marketing’s Chief of Research.

The Impact of an ROI Focus on Marketing Objectives & Outcomes

Prioritizing ROI impacts CMOs’ decisions around marketing activity and outcomes in a variety of ways. Beyond the pressure to deliver ROI in the short term, the current environment has led marketing leaders to worry about their strategy as a whole. 31% of marketing leaders are concerned they’ll have to curb creative campaigns, with an additional 30% worrying they’ll have to operate more reactively instead of proactively. 

This new focus on tying marketing activity to clear-cut returns can be new territory for many marketing activities, presenting challenges for marketers and CMOs alike. For example, when analyzing marketing campaign effectiveness, only 28.4% of marketers report measuring ROI to do so. In fact, 45.7% of marketers say their brand is “too focused” on ROI. 

Clearly, there is a large disconnect between the metrics the CEO and CFO want to see and what marketers believe is important. In bridging that gap, CMOs have their jobs cut out for them. 

In today’s climate, an ROI focus means CMOs have to more or less accomplish all of the following:

  • Work smarter with a tighter budget in order to deliver the same outcomes as before.
  • Help the CEO and CFO understand what ROI means for marketing, and help marketers understand what ROI means according to the CEO and CFO.
  • Ensure a focus on ROI doesn’t distract from impactful marketing activities where ROI is difficult to measure, in both the short and long term.

In short, doing all this with fewer resources is a tall order for CMOs and the organizations they lead.

How To Retain Budget, Maximize Marketing Activity, & Prove ROI

One of the most important things CMOs can do to successfully lead their marketing organizations through uncertain times is learning how to strengthen value calculations that prove marketing’s importance. Although it may seem counterintuitive, this often means moving beyond ROI as an end-all metric and making the case to evaluate budgets on various other inputs instead. 

For example, the ROI of your marketing tech stack can be difficult to tie directly to pipeline numbers, yet it’s essential to marketing activities that do influence revenue. Likewise, long-term strategies may not have an immediate ROI, but they do pay off with time. Striking the right balance between what’s essential for both now and later can be difficult on your own.

Learn More About Inverta

Inverta acts as a player, coach, and trusted advisor when it comes to helping CMOs measure and deliver ROI. Our new campaign-in-a-box solution can build short-term wins while we set up your organization for future success. 

  • Interested in how Inverta can help coach you through a campaign planning strategy? Contact us here.
  • Learn more about our new campaign in a box solution – click here to access.

Check out Conquering Barriers to Activation: The Strategic Chief Marketing Technologist

 

 

A CMO’s Guide to Growing Revenue With Fewer Resources

Unfortunately, many CMOs are finding themselves on the frontlines of the much-discussed (and uneasily anticipated) economic headwinds of this year. Between employee layoffs and budget cuts in the face of increasing revenue targets, a perfect storm has landed right on the CMO’s doorstep.

If you’re a CMO, the question now remains: What marketing strategies will pave the way for success now and in the future?

To make your existing resources go further, find new growth opportunities amid shifting consumer expectations, and hit revenue targets, something needs to change. In this blog, we’ll break down the challenges CMOs are facing, what top CMOs are doing differently, and how you can think about growth in 2023’s unique market.

Challenges CMOs Are Facing in 2023

While budget inevitably does play a factor in marketing outcomes, strategic planning and execution become even more important during times of uncertainty. Indeed, the problem for many CMOs lies in their organizational processes, core skills, and implementation rather than their wallets.

Underused Tech

What good is adding a new martech tool to your belt if you don’t even use your old tools to their full capacity? (Asking for a friend…well, asking for a lot of friends, actually.) Accordingly to Gartner, marketers used just 42% of their martech stack overall in 2022—a decrease from 58% in 2020.

As more and more tools are emerging, it’s important to remember that your biggest source of untapped potential might be sitting right there in your URL bar. If you’re unsure where to start to get more bang for your buck, try auditing your existing tech stack.

Underdeveloped Skills & Support 

There’s a simple reason a greater portion of marketers might be underutilizing their tech stack: they don’t know how. A majority of martech leaders (64%) agree that their teams lack both the technical skills or support required to operate and increase the usage of their martech stack. Plus, as more marketing organizations are taking on the ownership of their tools, this presents a real challenge for internal teams. 

Couple this with the talent acquisition and retention issues of late (28% of martech leaders have difficulty identifying and recruiting martech talent), and CMOs have a real problem on their hands.

Where’s the ROI?

Finally, a pervasive problem facing CMOs this year is proving the ROI of their tools and processes. Gartner estimates that, despite marketing budgets allocating 31% of resources to marketing operations (MarOps), 72% of MarOps pursuits aren’t resulting in success.

If CMOs are going to be serious about growth during an era of budget squeeze, ironing out the challenges of ROI for the martech stack AND operations is key for success. 

The Solution: A Shifting CMO Role, New Focus, & Smart Growth

If anything, 2023 has demonstrated just how far the CMO role has changed in the last few years. Whereas success used to be more nebulous and targeted to a few small marketing areas of focus, today’s success is much more narrowly defined.

Jim D’Arcangleo, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer of AWeber, says the CMO role of today encompasses much more, including:

  • Utilizing dozens of channel options with dozens of media players
  • Owning GTM plans from end to end, including client engagement and upsell campaigns
  • Purchasing the right tech to enable the strategy
  • Ensuring the efficiency and effectiveness of all marketing activity with the data to prove it.

Where CMOs Should Focus Now

So, with all the changes, where is the best place to focus? Bryan Law, CMO at ZoomInfo, believes that it’s in creating a shift in focus from driving volume to driving value instead. That means aligning with sales across metrics, target accounts, campaigns, and outreach. 

How can CMOs do this?

  • Be consistent and distinctive in your marketing approach to capture mindshare.
  • Invest and leverage the right technologies that enable alignment and eliminate silos.

Short-Term Wins, Long-Term Focus

Ultimately, Lisa Ames, CMO at Norwest Venture Partners, gives a word of caution to CMOs making adjustments in 2023 to not get near-sighted. While a focus on ROI-driven performance with short-term demand gen is important, it should be balanced with a long-game effort to improve brand building and market trust. 

Between inflation and a recession, customers will be holding on to their wallets a bit more tightly, and brands who can build long-term value during this time of uncertainty will come out better for it in the end.

Final Takeaways: How Inverta Helps CMOs

At the end of the day, CMOs can jumpstart growth in 2023 if they make a few key adjustments to their strategy and teams today. That might look like jumpstarting your existing team by investing in skill development so your martech has additional use cases, doubling down on proving ROI in the areas where you know it works, or bringing on a marketing consultancy to fill in the gaps.

At Inverta, our team of seasoned marketers can help with everything from martech evaluation and implementation to resource augmentation

Learn More About Inverta