– CMOs struggling to simplify operational data into meaningful insights for decision-making

– Marketing ops spending to deliver financial and budgeting efficiency

– Marketing ops viewed as the engine to power all other marketing activities

BrandMaker, the leading innovator in Marketing Operations and Marketing Resource Management solutions, today announced the final in a series of findings of its independent research study on experiences and attitudes of top marketing executives around marketing operations. The research revealed that marketing executives who plan to increase their spending in marketing operations the most this year want to improve financial management and budgeting.

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Real-time visibility and control of data is a top challenge
The research explored the challenges surrounding financial management for marketing plans and initiatives, including the ease of integrating information from across the organization into meaningful insights to aid decision making.  Almost all (91%) marketing leaders say they encounter challenges presenting data to their executive team, with nearly two-thirds (65%) of CMOs reporting that they struggle to simplify operational data into meaningful insights. Other data-related challenges cited include:

–  Struggling to aggregate large amounts of data into ROI proof points (47%) 
–  Too many data sources to easily make sense of it (41%)
–  Only a few (11%) reports that they don’t trust their data

BrandMaker research found that CMOs frequently faced issues bringing together budget and campaign performance data, making it challenging to react to market opportunities quickly. 94% of marketing organizations face barriers including:

–  Inadequate technology to support marketing ops and new workflows (39%)
–  Lack of access to real-time budgets (34%)
–  The inability to integrate and correlate information into meaningful insights (33%)

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Plans to increase marketing ops spending to improve financial management
According to the research study, 99% of marketing executives want to see their marketing operations improve. Even after surviving a long year where customer spending was uneven, and marketing budgets were frequently constrained, marketing executives are eager to invest in marketing ops solutions this year. Most (89%) have plans to spend more in 2021. This number includes more than a third (34%) of CMOs who characterize their increased investment as “substantial.”

The greater the marketing investment, the more critical it is to get the most value possible. Marketing executives who are increasing their spending the most in 2021 are to invest in financial management (63%), integration of existing martech (55%), and content (47%).

Said Mirko Holzer, CEO of BrandMaker: “Analyzing financial and performance data to understand if the team is delivering on their goals becomes a time-consuming manual process. It is almost impossible to analyze information manually to deliver real-time optimization for reacting to different market situations. By providing a single, integrated SaaS platform to manage, simplify, optimize, and automate the entire marketing value chain, BrandMaker brings financial rigor to help marketing unlock its true value within the company.”

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