Four in ten marketers report that they feel unprepared for a digital first future, according to a survey from Accenture.

According to Marketing Week, four in ten marketers report that they feel unprepared for that future, according to a survey from Accenture.

This is interesting as surely since the digital age is already upon us (isn’t it all mobile now already) B2B marketers need to ensure their organizations are ready for this fundamental shift in marketing.

“Marketing executives are growing increasingly concerned that tight budgets and the lack of a clear strategy for implementing digital technologies are hurting their company’s ability to compete in the digital age,” said Brian Whipple, global managing director of Accenture Interactive, in a statement. “There is a clear performance gap between the demands of the marketplace and the ability of marketing organizations to apply the digital technology talent required to be more effective.”

Accenture Interactive’s online survey,  “Turbulence for the CMO,” conducted last August and September, polled 405 senior marketing executives in 10 countries. Sixty-three percent of respondents were B2B and 72 percent were CMO-level and above.

The report found that inefficient business practices (19 percent) and lack of funding (17 percent) are the main reasons marketers don’t feel well prepared to meet their objectives. In addition, 70 percent of executives believe that corporate marketing will undergo a dramatic change within the next five years and that their organizations must create a digital plan that will help them achieve higher revenue and increase market share.

But my favourite one – as a digital marketing trainer who specialises in B2B – is that they fear not knowing enough about becoming a digital-first organization.

Many of them are now thinking about how to maximize ROI across multiple channels.

Nearly one in five CMOs score themselves as below average in multichannel attribution, correlating advertising to sales, and measuring media buying effectiveness.

“How can CMOs succeed with customers if they can’t measure the most effective strategies to use with customers who are changing their behaviors and interacting with brands differently?” the report asks.

However, marketing executives are not sitting idly by, twiddling their thumbs.

To prepare for the digital shift, two-thirds (66 percent) of marketing executives will spend at least one quarter of their budget on digital marketing next year, and almost one-quarter (23 percent) said that more than half will be spent on digital marketing.

Also, senior execs plan to invest more in their analytics capabilities. To help retain and grow their customer base, almost half (48 percent) said they will spend more on managing customer data. Forty percent said they will boost spending on web analytics and 39 percent will spend more on marketing analytics.

But will they spend more on actually training their staff on how to use tools like Google Analytics properly? The tool is amazing – and free – so really budget should go on analytical training rather than fancy new platforms 😉

Finally, CMOs realize they need new talent and digital innovators to help them reach their goals. Half of the executives said they would begin an internal reorganization to become more digitally focused, and more than half said they would be hiring more people with the necessary digital skills (52 percent) or providing their existing staff with digital training (55 percent).

Which is great for a digital training company like Great Marketing Works, isn;t it 🙂

Online budgets increasing – and right so :) – according to new report from Nielsen’s Vizu

Despite marketers’ continued struggle with measurement of brand advertising, more than half (63 percent) will increase their online brand advertising budgets, according to a report from Nielsen’s Vizu. In addition, 20 percent of respondents said that those budgets would grow by 20 percent or more.

Looks like we were right to start advising our clients last year to be doing the same.

Thanks to Visu and FierceCMO’s Tequia Burt for the report below.

7 Marketing Metrics Worth Obsessing Over

If you work in marketing or you do the marketing for your own business, you know alot of time is (or should be) spent on reports and analysis.

In fact today, most of my time was spent looking at different channels and the conversion rates for websites and landing pages and having ideas on how these could all be improved. So I read with interest in Duct Tape Marketing on the 7 key marketing metrics worth obsessing over. We do this for our clients everyday at http://www.greatmarketingworks.co.uk.

Twitter better than your own website at converting b2b leads….surprising?

We all knew that twitter would be better than Facebook for business to business but a surprising fact supported by research is that twitter might even beat your website!

What’s the real value of a following…. isn’t it who they are friends with?

For a long time now I have been teaching clients that Facebook is all very well but it only fits into marketing after someone has got awareness of you, has an interest in you and has a desire to buy from you. AIDA… anyone 😉 … But it’s only now after a much bigger blog writes about it do people start to listen…

MakerBot Introduces 3D Photo Booth In Its New York Store, Print Your Face In 3D

Data isn’t just the new oil, it’s the new money. Ask Zoë Keating

Gigaom

People love to call data the new oil, but that might be selling it short. It’s only oil when we’re talking about pools of unrefined data like the stuff web companies collect, which has to be processed and transformed into something useful. There are certain types of data, though — especially data about consumers — that are as good as money in the bank without any work at all. And if you don’t believe me, ask popular cellist Zoë Keating.

As a bill attempting to lower the royalty rates paid to artists by streaming music services such as Pandora (s P) works its way through Congress, Keating took to her Tumblr blog last week and offered a solution that both sides should listen to, but won’t. You might have read about her stance in Billboard or ITworld already, or perhaps on Slashdot. If you haven’t, here it is in…

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Crafting and delivering a fantastic elevator pitch is something every marketer should know how to do

A great point about Elevator Pitches – which I think ties into something I was chatting about at the #02marktgmatters event last week – that everyone in your organisation SHOULD know your brand values off by heart.

I was wondering why my job was getting more complex…

The 2012 CMO Survey by the American Marketing Association and Duke University. In terms of both department size and budget, Marketing is on the rise. They report that the size of business’ marketing departments has more than doubled — in fact, almost tripled — since August 2011 …

Which is why perhaps I know have three times the amount of work to do… as it’s just me 😉

The Yutt dem, Youths…. come on then… what do they really want?

A great key question that needs answering is this: what do young people actually want from us as marketers?

The Youth Insight Report this year began to address the question. For instance, we’ve heard a lot about social media marketing of late. Brands have learned the importance of transparency, relevance and shared conversation versus traditional push approaches. We know young people are big users of social media – 97% in our recent survey use Facebook and 45% are on Twitter. However less is known about what they really want and expect from brands through these platforms.

‘Engagement’ is the current marketing mantra, but in our research almost half said explicitly that they do not want to talk to brands using social media. A third said they do not follow a single brand, and the response to all our questions around the value of brands using social media for the consumer – such as the chance for one-to-one dialogue or the convenience of getting a quick answer – were met with a shrug and silence.

Those that do follow brands have clear expectations. They want either material gain – some free products, a good discount or perhaps a winnable competition – or they want to be entertained. That’s pretty much it. Having a conversation does not feature.

This is not to dismiss social media marketing; as a channel for traffic to our own website and for increasing brand awareness, the likes of Facebook and Twitter are very important. It’s more about remembering context. At Youth Marketing Strategy, student-popular travel publisher Lonely Planet explained an epiphany moment they had when, months after sharing content and encouraging discussion, a Facebook user piped up and asked why they didn’t announce they had a new book for sale. TBG Digital’s Jeremy Waite summarised Red Bull’s successful social strategy as: “50% of people go online to waste time. So let’s give them some really cool shit to do when they get there.”

The young people in our research like brands that make life easier for them, not those that want a conversation. Convenience is highly valued and is what the majority like most about buying online. While a worrying 52% admit they will buy things whether they can afford to or not, price remains the top priority when deciding. Young people want things that work with the technology they own. Most now have smartphones (74% and rising quickly), watch TV on their laptops (75%) and many will be using Kindles and tablets for their studies this year (around half will own one of either in 2012/13). These are the insights marketers should look to when planning for success.

Further research we are now doing aims to deconstruct the most successful youth brands and work out why they are popular. We’ve got dozens of students coming into our offices over the coming weeks to help analyse the results of our Youth 100 survey. The full results will be published in October, but early indications are that the majority of top youth brands are not using a secret sauce. Most of them succeed because ultimately they understand what 16-24s want from them.