The "marketer" designation continues to shift towards a new "marketing technologist" title, according to a massive new Salesforce report that crunched responses from 5,000 marketers across the globe.
Top challenges for marketers this year
The report, available here, identifies the top 5 challenges facing markers globally as:
- New business development
- Quality of leads
- Remaining up to date with marketing technology
- Customer acquisition
- Quantifying marketing's ROI
Technology plays a key role in each of these challenges, as the latest technologies can streamline quality lead gen (#1 and #4) while also increasing business opportunities (#1) and measuring impact (#5).
This means that those travel marketers seeking to more cleanly identify the overall success must move into a "marketing technologist" mindset to ensure the correct matching of technology to task.
In order to tackle those challenges, the vast majority of respondents worldwide are planning to increase marketing spend in 2015.
Social and mobile key channels in 2015
The top spend categories for these larger global budgets are focused on the social and mobile channels.
- Social media advertising
- Social media marketing
- Social media engagement
- Location-based mobile tracking
- Mobile applications
Notice how the first three are all related to social media? That's important, insofar as each was identified separately.
It's important to note the differences between each of those categories: advertising is simply targeted display on social, marketing includes staffing and payments for efforts to grow community through strategy, and engagement includes the cost of content and ongoing management to regularly engage the brand's community.
In addition to these social media efforts, 70% also see mobile as critical to achieving business objectives.
The social and mobile areas can be combined, with targeting specific to social media users on mobile devices. This is where mobile applications and location-based tracking come into play, especially for marketers with objectives that include incoming foot traffic to brick-and-mortar businesses or those pursuing in-destination conversion.
Marketers must see the dual-prongs of social and mobile as opportunities not to be missed. Mobile marketing itself is starting to produce ROI for 31% of respondents, with a further 59% saying they will either see ROI soon or currently enjoy indirect ROI.
Other areas of continued strength include email marketing, which is gradually being transitioned to responsive design to account for mobile device consumption.
The report includes useful executive summaries for countries around the world (as seen in the earlier graphic on budget increases), and offers plenty of advice for regional travel marketers.
NB: Marketing eyeball image courtesy Shutterstock.