• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 12, 2023

It’s clear that confidence among marketers continues to wane as the number of consumer choices for brands and expectations for personalization make it difficult to manage campaigns and achieve desired outcomes -- not to mention the need to optimize based on data in real-time.

Deirdre McFarland, senior vice president of marketing, NCSolutions, believes the survey results show that marketers do not feel confident in their ability to drive direct outcomes through marketing and advertising.

Only 49% of marketers who describe themselves as confident say they perform on-the-go campaign optimization well, compared with 20% of not-so-confident marketers. And 42% of confident marketers say they perform well in driving consistent campaign results, compared with 28% of not-so-confident marketers.

Research from the CMO Council released this week, Optimizing Outcomes in Media Marketing, found 2 in 3 marketing leaders are not very confident in their current media marketing and advertising strategy to win and retain customers, increase brand loyalty, and enhance customer experiences.

Still, marketers have high hopes for improvement. Many plan to work on better understanding why a campaign is successful or not. Most marketers struggle in this area regardless of confidence level, per the report.

Only 39% of confident marketers and 23% of not-so-confident marketers say they perform this capability well. The findings underscore the difficulty in understanding what makes a campaign successful, and which elements worked or didn’t.

In the next 12 months, marketers said they will work to improve measurement of campaign performance and becoming more accurate and efficient at customer targeting in hopes it will lead to a better understanding of campaigns and, ultimately, more consistent results.

For example, 67% said they will work on optimizing campaigns on the fly, and 67% said they will work on accurate and efficient customer targeting.

Some 56% will work on doing a better job of measuring campaign performance, and 53% will work on third-party data evaluation and analysis. About 41% will work on Driving consistent campaign results, and 40% on understanding why a campaign is successful or not.