Reach the Right Audience — Sherburne

A KEY element to successfully marketing your business is your ability to craft the right messages to reach the intended audience. These days, that intended audience is more likely to be marketing professionals rather than the purchasing professionals. They own the budgets that purchase our products and they are increasingly likely to be the ones who are making the decisions to purchase those products and services.

If you are not calling on them, you certainly should be. And what are they really looking for?

I recently came across an interesting survey of Chief Marketing Officers. While the title Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) can be a little intimidating and sounds like a title only found in very large companies, 51 percent of respondents to this research reported a total number of employees in their companies of 500 or less. This means that understanding what these CMOs are looking for can be relevant to businesses of almost any size. That’s why it’s worth sharing the highlights of this research with you.

The research was conducted by Targetbase (www.targetbase.com), a direct marketing agency in Omnicom Group’s Diversified Agency Services division. They surveyed CMOs from 40 leading companies—including Disney, General Mills, Sunkist and Whole Foods, as well as smaller companies—on the relationship between marketing and corporate growth.

The 19-question survey explores how these CMOs measure growth, the challenges they face in meeting financial goals, and marketing efforts and budget. In other words, it reflects how they measure their personal success as they strive to deliver success for their companies.

While companies use a number of metrics to measure their growth—growth that can be attributed to the success of their sales and marketing efforts—28 percent of the respondents reported that revenue was the most important metric, followed by profits (18 percent) and sales (15 percent). That being said, growth goals are relatively modest, with 38 percent of respondents indicating they expected less than 10 percent growth in their most important metric.