The Marketing Performance Blueprint: Strategies and Technologies to Build and Measure Business Success

Chapter 1 Mind the Gaps

We have entered the age of content, context, and the customer experience.

THE MARKETING TALENT GAP

Digital marketing has revolutionized the industry, and the job market. Corporate marketing departments, small businesses, and marketing agencies struggle to recruit and retain qualified professionals for career paths that did not exist three years ago, while academic institutions are faced with the need to adapt curriculums to the real-time nature of business.

The majority of professionals gain their digital marketing knowledge on the job rather than through full-time school programs. This lack of training and formal education is affecting marketers' confidence in their ability to execute critical digital marketing functions, including ecommerce, personalization and targeting, marketing measurement, social marketing, digital advertising, and content marketing.

In Search of the Unicorns

The job of every marketer, from the copywriter to the chief marketing officer (CMO), is to connect actions to outcomes. However, according to the 2012 Marketing Skills Gap survey conducted by Focus (@Focus) and the Marketing Automation Institute, 75 percent of marketers say their lack of skills is impacting revenue in some way, and 74 percent say it is contributing to marketing and sales misalignment.¹

In the 2013 report “B2B CMOs Must Evolve or Move On,” Forrester (@forrester) and the Business Marketing Association (@BMANational) showed that 96 percent of marketing ...