Page 68 - Adnews Magazine November-December 2021

Forecasts 2022
How are CMOs going to drive business growth?
In 2021-2022 to support this business growth, Australian CMOS are directing more effort to:
• Shifting more of the marketing
spend towards ecommerce with 31% already doing this (up 18 points YOY) and 20% implement- ing this and 28% considering.
• Increasing the pace of digital transformation with 56% imple- menting or already doing this (up 15 points YOY).
• Investing in Customer Experience is also a priority with only 6% of those surveyed not considering or already actioning this. Getting the job done. Over the
last 12 months, Australian CMOs have gained confidence in their ability to achieve ecommerce (83%) and digital transformation (82%) strategies, rating themselves as ‘somewhat’ or ‘highly able’.
Investing in improving Customer Experience is the strategy that most CMOs feel confident about with 88% rating their ability to achieve this as ‘somewhat’ or ‘highly able’.
Customer Experience The key ingredients that CMOs nominate (top 3) for creating differentiated
customers experiences: Personalisation (72%); Innovative use of technol- ogy (64%); Consistency across touchpoints (56%).
Unsurprisingly understanding the consumer (97%) is seen as the most important organisational requirement for CX success, however this is closely followed by data integration and leveraging data (94%) and inno- vating faster than competitors and collaboration, both at (93%).
Emerging tech. Almost a quarter (24%) of CMOs claim they are already using artificial intelligence and chatbots, 20% using augmented reality and 19% using machine learning.
What do CMOs want from agency partners?
When asked about delivering superior CX strategies, what CMOs want most from their agency partners is: Creative thinking (52%); Innovation capabilities (33%); An understanding of Data (31%); Business Transformation services (29%).
Expectations of marketing agency relationships are largely aligned with growth strategies, with CMOs expecting agency partners to be: Able to provide fully-integrated solutions across all elements of the marketing mix — 71%; Driving innovation for clients — 70%; Delivering competency in technology and data — 69%; Business partnering to drive execution and growth over the long-term — 68%; Although “Explicit focus on efficiency and cost reduction” is rated number one at 73%.
CMOs have a different perspective on the impact of COVID-19. In 2020, only 7% rated the impact of COVID on their business as minimal, in 2021 this has increased to 33%.
Those that claimed to be significantly impaired or badly impacted dropped to 30% in 2021 from 43% in 2020. Significantly, 37% of CMOs think the COVID-19 crisis will increase the importance of the marketing function in their organisation.
This most common strategy employed in response to the coronavirus crisis has been 'Understanding changing consumer behaviour/market research’ with 41% of CMOs nominating this, followed by ‘Adapting marketing messaging to the current situation’ and 'Price optimisation’ — both at 32% of CMOs. These three strategies were also nominated as the most effective.