Chief marketing officer top 10 predictions for 2013

USA: International Data Corp. (IDC) hosted a Web conference, IDC - 2013 Chief Marketing Officer Predictions: Today's CMO Becomes Master of Data, highlighting the top 10 predictions for the year ahead.
Featuring analysts Rich Vancil and Kathleen Schaub, the session provided organizations with insight and perspective on long-term industry trends along with new themes that may be on the horizon.

The top 10 predictions are:

Prediction 1 - The C-suite (CEO, CFO, and COO) will demand that the CMO produce both a strategy and a plan for how market-driven data will significantly contribute to corporate objectives.

Prediction 2 - The CMO and the CIO will begin the year as functional peers and end the year as either friends or frenemies, and per the CEO, the CIO will become more actively involved with the CMO in all marketing automation decisions that have cross-functional implications.

Prediction 3 - The automation outlay could approach 10 percent of marketing's discretionary budget in 2013, with two-thirds of the total outlay coming from marketing and one-third coming from IT; for "best practice" organizations, this will shift to 50:50 by 2014.

Prediction 4 - Even with their new partnership with the CIO, many CMOs will find that their positions are in jeopardy as they failed to produce a robust data analytics function — or even a game plan to get there.

Prediction 5 - Starting in 2013, after the CMO realizes that he/she does not have the skill sets in place for data analytics proficiency, 50 percent of new marketing hires will have technical backgrounds.

Prediction 6 - Eight out of ten companies will report that most social media initiative growth is taking place outside of marketing.

Prediction 7 - By the end of 2013, 5 percent of CMOs will shift to a "mobile first" strategy.

Prediction 8 - Content isn't king — it's a wild beast; In 2013, CMOs will be pragmatic, shifting focus less on big platform projects and more on linking access to audience needs.

Prediction 9 - The demand for greater insight into the revenue impact of marketing and sales will require that older CRM systems be replaced, creating infrastructure disruption.

Prediction 10 - High-tech pipeline conversion metrics will continue to improve; expect a 20 percent improvement in target-to-deal ratios and a 10 percent reduction in time to create a customer, with both due to better automation and analytics-driven process improvement.

"The challenge for the CMO is dealing with self-educated buyers. These are the smart, resourceful, and socially connected consumers who do their own research before ever entering the formal channels of a vendor's marketing and selling apparatus," said Rich Vancil, IDC Group VP. "In the wake of all of their self-education is a stream of data that the CMO will have to understand."