• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, May 4, 2017

According to TrackMaven’s 2017 Marketing Leadership Survey, presented by Kara Burney, data-driven management is essential to mobilize and motivate your team. This latest research report provides insights from over 200 marketing leaders, in 19 different industries, on challenges they face when proving Return on Investment.

While the survey report addresses a variety of important marketing topics, a few unsettling trends emerged around misalignment as one common theme, says the report: Other studies show that when marketing is aligned with other functional units, businesses see faster revenue growth and higher profitability. The TrackMaven research says otherwise. In fact, there are three major ways that misalignment undercuts the efficacy of today’s marketing leaders, says the report.

Marketing leaders are not aligning incentives with goals around driving sales, finds the study. Though marketers say their top objective is to increase sales, when it comes to compensating their marketing teams, only about 23% of marketing leaders compensate based on revenue, says the report.

The study discovered even further misalignment views and practices when metrics and sales goals are analyzed. While 61% of marketers say their focus is on increasing sales, many fall back on easy-to-measure vanity metrics, such as consumption, instead of more relevant leads and sales metrics.

While 66% of marketers view analytics as strategically important and believe that it’s easier to prove marketing impact today than in the past, only about 28% are satisfied with their ability to measure performance. Most say they’re only somewhat effective at demonstrating value.

Though marketers say that analytics are strategically important, and are optimistic about the ability to prove ROI, few marketers are happy with their ability to measure performance.

This finding points to a misalignment between marketing objectives and the tools they rely on to accomplish those objectives. When asked, marketers tell us what their biggest challenges are when endeavoring to prove marketing ROI. 71.11% of marketing leaders say difficulties attributing social and content to revenue is their top challenge for proving ROI.

To find out more about the practices and views of today’s marketing leaders, download a free copy of the 2017 Marketing Leadership Survey, to include additional material on:

• The top marketing goals and objectives of today’s marketing leaders, including priorities for social media, demand generation, brand awareness, and more
• How leaders prove marketing ROI, including the biggest challenges and discrepancies in ROI data and the metrics they rely on to demonstrate marketing value
• A leadership perspective on which tools and technologies marketing leaders find most important for measuring marketing performance