SEA marketers re-evaluate success as role becomes more strategic: report

Marketers in Asean, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, remain optimistic about their organisations’ futures despite unprecedented change and challenges recently, according to Salesforce’s seventh edition of its State of Marketing report, which also reveals significant investment in the tools, technologies and channels that have become indispensable in the market-from-anywhere era.

Why it matters

Creating a cohesive customer journey across channels and devices is Asean marketers’ No 1 priority, while engaging with customers in real time is its No 1 challenge.

Six insights 

• 67% of Asean marketers expect revenue growth over the next 12–18 months, with 77% saying their work provides greater value than it did a year ago.
• 89% of Asean marketers say the pandemic changed their digital engagement strategy, and 90% say it changed their marketing channel mix.
• Marketers are accelerating their digital transformations, with social media and digital ads being the marketing channels that increased the most in value in Asean during the pandemic.
• A distributed workforce is re-evaluating how it engages not only customers but each other, with 63% of Asean marketing organisations adopting new policies around remote work.
• Managing data is becoming more complex as sources multiply, and Asean marketers expect a 40% increase in the number of data sources they use between 2021 and 2022.
• Marketers are re-evaluating what success looks like as their work becomes more strategic and valuable, with 66% of Asean CMOs aligning their KPIs with the CEO’s.

Quote

“This year’s State of Marketing report reveals the continued need for marketers to embody both the art and science of marketing – using technology and data to forge deeper human connections with our customers. At the same time, marketers mustn’t lose sight of the simplest yet most critical truth of all: prioritising the customer’s perspective, now and well into the future” – Wendy Walker, senior director of marketing, Asia Pacific, Salesforce.

Background 

The trends revealed in the report were collected from a survey of over 8,200 marketing leaders – from CMOs to marketing managers – across 37 countries and six continents, including 1,749 from Asean (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam).