The role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) changed rapidly over the last few years. This has been due to numerous factors including the emergence of new digital marketing channels and the recent focus on data-driven results. The 2013 Future of the CMO Role Survey was conducted to learn more about the current conditions for global executives in the senior marketing function.
 
The responses received from senior marketing executives showed that 68% had a positive view on their companies' overall marketing strategy. Even though the overall view was positive, executives did have concerns about digital transformation’s impact on their company’s marketing department. The top business concerns for marketing executives included changes in technology, campaign ROI and social media/online marketing.  The top career management concerns for marketing executives included the ability to move up into top senior positions, as well as company politics.
 
CMOs Are Concerned about Their Organizations’ Digital Marketing Effectiveness
68% of senior marketing executives believe their marketing team is not equipped to handle the fast-paced changes in digital marketing. These executives rated social media marketing (32% weak) and email marketing (23% weak) as their companies’ weakest digital channels and paid search (23% strong, 23% good) and organic search (36% good) as their companies’ strongest digital channels.
 
Specific comments about the CMO role over the next 3 years included:

“The increasing role of outside partners in different aspects of the marketing function will diversify even more and become a wider and more complex external part of the team that needs to be "orchestrated" and coordinated as a whole. Marketing will increasingly act upon narrower target groups with a wide array of techniques and programs: the marketing plans will become more fragmented and coordination, funding, key metric definition and evaluation will become more complex.”
 
“Keeping up with the changes in marketing, while trying to be innovative, will strongly impact the CMO role. The rate of communication is increasing so fast that data and information flows seamlessly across the globe. The CMO needs to build networks and teams that can keep ahead of this information flow. The role of the marketing team is not to gather data but make effective and quick decisions from data. Because the rate of communication is so fast, something innovative today is quickly status quo tomorrow. The CMO needs to focus on these quick data streams through effective marketing team creation.”
 
Required Skills for CMOs

Priority Social Networks for Marketing Executives’ Marketing Plans

About Our Study
This BlueSteps survey was conducted in July 2013 and received 66 responses, from BlueSteps member marketing executives worldwide.
 
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