Poll: What’s Your Top Strategic Marketing Priority For 2016?

CMO.com asked its Twitter followers to weigh in on their strategic priorities for 2016. The results, at first look, seemed a bit bewildering.

Last week CMO.com posted the following question to its Twitter followers:>

VOTE: What’s your top strategic marketing priority for 2016? See what others said: https://t.co/la1MWVxY55 — CMO.com (@CMO_com) February 3, 2016

We consulted with Mark Asher, director of corporate strategy at Adobe (CMO.com’s parent company), to help us better understand the results, which, at first look, seemed a bit bewildering. What follows are Asher’s observations:

• Data intelligence is a core priority for 2016. This is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity–marketers and agencies are increasingly being required to show demonstrable ROI across end-user touchpoints.
• Brands that have fully replatformed their marketing to digital can measure end-user campaign reaction in near real time and, as a result, optimize and redeploy content to maximize the ROI of the campaign.
• Social engagement continues to be important as the space between end user and brand continues to narrow toward true one-to-one relationships. As a recent McKinsey & Co. white paper suggests, “ … consumers [have] unprecedented power to compare prices, complain loudly, and find the best deals.”
• Companies are recognizing that digital touchpoints aren’t just transactional. More brands are incorporating them to tell brand stories, generate brand affinity, and drive more loyalty. This is made possible by advances in digital marketing that enable better audience profiling and targeting, as well as advances in content creation that leverage the richer narrative available through video, mobile interactivity, and social networking.

What are your thoughts about these findings? Tweet @CMO_com using #MarketingPriorityPoll to voice your opinion.