CMOs Increasing Marketing Ops Spend to Improve Financial Management [REPORT]

BrandMaker announced the final in a series of findings of its independent research study on experiences and attitudes of top marketing executives around marketing operations. The research revealed that marketing executives who plan to increase their spending in marketing operations the most this year want to improve financial management and budgeting.

Real-time visibility and control of data is a top challenge

The research explored the challenges surrounding financial management for marketing plans and initiatives, including the ease of integrating information from across the organization into meaningful insights to aid decision making.  Almost all (91%) marketing leaders say they encounter challenges presenting data to their executive team, with nearly two-thirds (65%) of CMOs reporting that they struggle to simplify operational data into meaningful insights. Other data-related challenges cited include:

• Struggling to aggregate large amounts of data into ROI proof points (47%)
• Too many data sources to easily make sense of it (41%)
• Only a few (11%) reports that they don’t trust their data

BrandMaker research found that CMOs frequently faced issues bringing together budget and campaign performance data, making it challenging to react to market opportunities quickly. 94% of marketing organizations face barriers including:

• Inadequate technology to support marketing ops and new workflows (39%)
• Lack of access to real-time budgets (34%)
• The inability to integrate and correlate information into meaningful insights (33%)

Plans to increase marketing ops spending to improve financial management

According to the research study, 99% of marketing executives want to see their marketing operations improve. Even after surviving a long year where customer spending was uneven, and marketing budgets were frequently constrained, marketing executives are eager to invest in marketing ops solutions this year. Most (89%) have plans to spend more in 2021. This number includes more than a third (34%) of CMOs who characterize their increased investment as “substantial.”

The greater the marketing investment, the more critical it is to get the most value possible. Marketing executives who are increasing their spending the most in 2021 are to invest in financial management (63%), integration of existing martech (55%), and content (47%).

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