Finding out your favorite marketing byword is a lie can be as upsetting as learning there’s no tooth fairy. These 8 marketing myths are the worst offenders.

Web marketing sprint 1: months 1–4

• Persona/KPI interview & questionnaire
• Analytics setup
• Site audits
• Topical keyword research
• Information architecture analysis & implementation
• Navigation optimization
• Social strategy/review
• Benchmark report

Web marketing sprint 2: months 5–8

• Navigation implementation
• Tag optimization
• On-page optimization
• Content messaging
• Editorial calendar & blogging
• Social media implementation
• Information architecture analysis
• Benchmark report

Web marketing sprint 3: months 9–12

• Information architecture analysis
• On-page optimization
• SEO performance reviews
• Social media implementation/blogging
• Conversion optimization
• Benchmark report

The vast majority (84%) of marketers believe that the level of complexity faced by marketing professionals over the next 5 years will be high (55%) or very high (29%), per results from the latest iteration of the SoDA Report conducted with Forrester. While respondents tend to see more complexity on the horizon as they did in last year’s report, they also feel more prepared.

When asked to identify barriers to digital marketing investment, 33% of respondents admitted that 'company culture' was one. In 2015, this figure was only 24%.

Looking more closely at the organisational attitude to digital marketing spend, it seems marketers are a little less bullish than last year as to whether all the battles have been won.  A smaller proportion of respondents think they are working towards cohesive CX, breaking down silos, securing boardroom buy-in (a significant drop from 71% to 57%), reserving budget for innovation, or breaking the distinction between digital and traditional budgets.

On the positive side, 54% of respondents are planning to recruit more people into their digital team in 2016 - this is an increase from 51% in 2015.

"In many ways, modern marketing has more in common with the software profession than it does with classic marketing management. As surprising as that may sound, it's the natural result of the world going digital. Marketing must move faster, adapt more quickly to market feedback, and manage an increasingly complex set of customer experience touchpoints. All of these challenges are shaped by the dynamics of software--from the growing number of technologies in our own organizations to the global forces of the Internet at large.

But you can turn that to your advantage. And you don't need to be technical to do it.

"Hacking Marketing" will show you how to conquer those challenges by adapting successful management frameworks from the software industry to the practice of marketing for "any" business in a digital world. You'll learn about agile and lean management methodologies, innovation techniques used by high-growth technology companies that any organization can apply, pragmatic approaches for scaling up marketing in a fragmented and constantly shifting environment, and strategies to unleash the full potential of talent in a digital age."

The modern CMO must now embrace an extended skillset that often creeps into the realm of IT, exploring new technologies from a marketing perspective. The challenges on marketing and IT agendas are, therefore, joined-up and concerned with technology strategy and consolidation. Marketing and digital strategies are closely aligned. They must take adoption techniques into account to improve business processes, adding yet another string to the modern CMO’s bow – change management. Understanding how the organisation and its employees must adapt and learn new skills is imperative to successful technology implementation.

The modern CMO and his/her team are working with IT to leverage and realise the true value of technology to improve their ROI. Previously, these two distinct disciplines and mindsets consisted of independent, siloed teams that lacked the ability to identify and capture revenue opportunities from a business-aligned perspective. The amount of data accrued by marketing programmes requires a comprehensive analytics platform to make sense of the data and turn it into useful insight. The relationship between marketing and IT seems to be an obvious and natural partnership. However, this newly found marriage is a must in order to utilise technology solutions for improved marketing agendas.

marketingIO: One Source for All Marketing Technology Challenges. See our solutions.  

Finance leaders identified marketing efforts, or expanding relationships with existing customers, as the top strategic factor driving company growth and profitability in 2016, according to the 6th annual CFO Sentiment Study. Nevertheless, marketing budgets are already on the chopping block.

For example, to support Unilever's efficiency expansion drive, its marketers will now have to adopt "zero-based budgeting": They'll have to justify spending on all new activity instead of their budgets' being based on the previous year's spending.

What might be the underlying cause of budget reductions despite CFOs' belief that both top-line and bottom-line growth in 2016 will require sales and marketing? It's likely that despite improvements in technology and processes, as well as an increased focus on measurement, only few marketers can actually prove their value.

marketingIO: One Source for All Marketing Technology Challenges. See our solutions.