The CMO Survey Reveals the Social Media Integration Gap
A few recent studies opened the CMO kimono, offering a glimpse into the top concerns on lead marketers’ minds. Not surprisingly, two primary issues are integrating social in a meaningful way into the larger marketing suite of tools (less than 10% in two studies think they’ve done it), and finding better analytics for measurement.
The CMO Survey
The twice a year CMO Survey revealed lead marketers actively grappling with both social media adoption and general marketing analytics and measurement (hat tip: Marketing Pilgrim). An astounding 62.8% of CMOs admit to not actively using their measurement tools!
This means a) the tools suck b) they are measuring the wrong things, making the data irrelevant, or c) time management or laziness issues are abound. One of the more interesting data points showed that organizations that evaluate the effectiveness of their tools use the data much more frequently.
It’s disheartening to see almost 2/3 of CMOs don’t analyze the effectiveness of their programs. They fly blind and leave food on the table.
Even more disappointing: Only 7% of CMOs believe that social media is very well integrated into the larger marketing enterprise. On a scale of 7, the average integration score was 3.8.
Wow! With the marketing spend on social expected to reach 20% of overall marketing budgets in the next 5 years, CMOs better get on it!!!
The CMO Council Survey
Triangulating trends always helps determine an independent survey’s accuracy. A recent CMO Council study verifies the CMO Survey’s integration issues. Only 9% of CMO Council respondents say they’ve reached a highly evolved and proven digital marketing strategy, according to the MarketingProfs write up.
The top digital marketing tactics for CMOS are email (67%), Web site interactions (52%) and social (48%). Seems like most CMOs understand what actually drives revenue. As Christopher S. Penn noted the other day, you live or die on your database (even if it is social media driven).
Countering the CMO Survey findings, the Council survey says that 62% of its respondents are very interested in customer analytics from their marketing. May be it’s not so bad after all… Or maybe this just validates the need for more useful analytics (sorry, Klout).
MIT Sloane Social Business Study
The 2012 MIT Sloane Social Business Global Executive Study didn’t interact with CMOs specifically, rather it asks a wide range of managers what they thought of the social business trend. Here’s the surprise, it has more legs than one would think.
But as Rich Becker pointed out there are many barriers. Two of these reinforce the above surveys: siloization of business departments — or lack of social integration — and the need for stronger analytics.
These two overarching CMOs issues are primary reasons why Gini Dietrich and I wrote Marketing in the Round. We know marketers need to fold social into the mix and measure more effectively, and will be discussing this issue at the closing keynote tomorrow at the Vocus Users Conference, our DC Launch Party on June 21, and at SocialMix 2012 in Toronto on July 26 (20% discount registration code: MITR20). Please join us.
What do you think about CMOs wanting to integrate social and find better analytics?