The 6 Most Common Concerns of Marketing Leaders
Business and marketing leaders share common concerns about how to manage the growing complexity of their discipline. Communication channels increase exponentially, the volume of content their buyers are inundated with grows continuously, and there is greater pressure to impact top line revenue than ever before. Here is a closer look at the common concerns of business and marketing leaders today.
[Related: The 6 Common Concerns of Marketing Services Agencies]
“We want an aggressive and tightly integrated content strategy”
The ‘content is king’ marketing industry mantra is beginning to lose meaning. The narrative of the value that the business provides to its marketplace is an agreed upon necessity for most top business and marketing leaders. The problem is that they want their story well produced and orchestrated across every communication outlet that is pertinent to their strategy. Even selecting the right communication mix is challenging for these businesses and marketing leaders, let alone developing an operational approach to executing a well-integrated content marketing strategy.
“There is more pressure to improve upon the impact to topline revenue”
Companies that take an aggressive approach to business development demand that their marketing dollars and efforts return measurable results. The pressure to see the impact on top line revenue against defined strategic go to market plans has dramatically risen for marketing leaders over the past five years.
“We need to improve our MQL TO SQL ratio”
The top line revenue pressures have most leaders constantly scrutinizing their marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead conversion ratios. This demands marketing leadership to be both collaborative and prescriptive with the sales team they support, and constantly refine the approach in order to ensure pipeline metrics are consistently healthy. As more investments are made in creating more content and distributing it across more channels, the pressure to show results grows.
“We are constantly in an insource vs outsource decision loop”
Talent is always an issue for marketing leaders. Not only is creative talent with the appropriate analytic and business acumen difficult to find, but also the speed with which the go to market strategy must be adjusted, sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly, constantly identifies new resource requirements. The mix of hard to find talent with unexpected resource requirements places the marketing leader in a constant insource vs. outsource decision loop.
“There is so much to manage, and we’re overwhelmed”
All of these concerns add up to one fact; Marketing leaders are overwhelmed with the growing complexity of technology, communication outlets, revenue pressure, and a constant need to find the right talent. There is a growing demand from these top business and marketing leaders to seek help that will contribute to the entire effort as well as deliver the resources necessary for execution.
“Services available to help are inefficient and only cover discrete tactical areas”
This growing need for help is met with frustration when marketing leaders turn to the services marketplace. The majority of agencies poised to assist them are generally focused on small discrete and tactical capabilities. This leaves the leader with no other choice then to piece together yet another strategy, how to identify, acquire and manage outside vendors.
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