If you’re a marketing executive reading this, we don’t need to tell you what a crazy (and exciting) 2015 has been. The marketing world has seen so many shifts and advancements, and the responsibilities and focus of marketing leaders has already changed dramatically from even just a year ago.
As we look back on the past year to consider what we’ve learned, one thing of particular interest we’ve found as marketing headhunters is what blog topics and article gained the most attention. This not only helps us at MarketPro determine how to better serve you; it also gives some indications of what trends and challenges were most important to marketing’s top minds in 2015. For full transparency and personal interest, here are the five posts you have found most compelling and valuable this year as measured by page views and web chatter:
How to Tell if a Marketing VP is Ready to Take the Step to CMO
Our most popular post of the year discussed the ultimate marketing career move: taking the final step from VP Marketing to Chief Marketing Officer. When it’s time to hire a new CMO, organizations can choose to promote from within or bring in external talent.
Both routes have their advantages and risks, and determining the right path isn’t easy. But it’s a critical decision to make, and one that could determine the growth or failure of an entire company.
At a time when marketing budgets are growing and marketing executives are earning more clout in corporate executive teams, it’s little wonder people are interested in topics like this. And who better to be able to provide a knowledgeable perspective than marketing headhunters?So you’re looking for a new CMO. When marketing is moving fast, you can’t afford long delays in filling key leadership positions. What do you do?
What Unicorns, Leprechauns, and Your VP of Sales and Marketing Have in Common
This post proved to be our most controversial yet, which we found to be both interesting and exciting. In it, we posit that in today’s business environment, it’s essentially impossible to be an effective executive of both Sales and Marketing at the same time.
If your business’s Marketing is operating under the direction of a Sales executive, then you’re missing an opportunity for better revenue and profits.
We had a lot of executives weigh in on this one, including some with the same “VP of Sales and Marketing” we were critiquing. Their thoughts and input were well received and added a lot of valuable points, but ultimately we stick to our original sentiment. Today’s Marketing and Sales are simply far too complex for anyone to reasonably be able to competently manage both at the same time. If your organization is structured this way, you should seriously consider reading this and changing course.
4 Things That Could Kill Your CMO Career
Once a marketer has painstakingly climbed the ranks up to the prestigious C-Suite, they’re not secure on their throne. CMO tenures have risen, but remain among the shortest of any senior executive roles. It doesn’t take much for decades of hard work to suddenly disappear.
Competition is at an all-time high, cutthroat and driven by the innumerable opportunities presented by digital marketing.
We see this all too often as CMO executive recruiters. Talented marketing leaders that were on top of their game just a year or two ago can suddenly fall to the middle of the pack, or make a critical mistake and compromise everything.
It’s always heartbreaking to see this happen, and we do our best to keep the executives we meet on the right path. You can avoid those CMO career kills yourself by checking out the post, if you haven’t already.
6 ROI and Performance Measurement Challenges Great CMOs Must Conquer this Year
Posts like this are interesting to look back on to see how your vision of the future matches up with reality. Published early in this year, this one warned marketing leaders that 2015 was the year that they would finally have to nail down their KPI measurement and ROI evaluation or face the consequences.
How much progress did your marketing make on performance measurement this year? If it failed to overcome any of the challenges we listed, you’re likely at immediate risk of falling behind. Time to get your marketing analytics talent working in high gear to prep for 2016!Some marketing problems are unique to an organization or industry, but a few in particular, usually related to marketing ROI and performance measurement, come up time and again as serious problems.
Why Trying to Fix Your “Lazy” Millennial Marketers is a Waste of Time
It wasn’t long ago that the only thought marketing leaders gave to Millennials was how to best market to them. That remains an unsolved hot topic, but it seems that many organizations were seemingly unprepared when this generation suddenly joined the workforce and started making up substantial parts of their marketing teams, especially in critical new digital and marketing technology staffing roles.
Instead of blaming your woes on the latest generation of professionals and wasting valuable time trying to fix a lost cause, update your perspective and try a more productive route.
Many marketing executives consider their Millennial marketing talent to be out of touch with their company culture, disrespectful, or just plain lazy. But what we’ve found (and backed up by some excellent research) is that Millennials in general are no less competent or hard working than previous generations. So if you’re struggling to get productivity out of your newer hires, that probably has more to do with your hiring and management strategy than the year they were born.
