CMOs to upgrade content marketing for lead gen boost

More than half of CMOs (51%) in Asia-Pac (ex-Japan) want to improve the quality of their content marketing to boost lead generation in the next 12 months, research has revealed.

In its report, IDC Futurescape: Worldwide Chief Marketing Officer Predictions, research firm IDC considers how the marketing landscape will evolve, using data gathered from the tech C-Suite.

It highlights trends such as Generative AI, marketing content fatigue, phasing out of cookies and a shift towards an open advertising ecosystem, noting timelines and consequences.

“There will be a clear shift towards marketers expanding their skillsets to include capabilities such as storytelling, and data analytics and greater cross-functional collaboration with other teams such as IT, sales, and operations towards the notion of a dream team,” Lavanya Jindal, research analyst, martech and value streams at IDC, said in a statement to accompany the report.

“Generative AI will act as the enabler through greater automation of manual tasks such as SEO, content, and website optimisation.”

By 2027, the report suggests that 30% of marketers will use a blend of data analysis, experience design, storytelling and creativity skillsets to deliver in what it calls “marketing’s experience era”.

With CMOs having to evolve into orchestrators of customer value, the report sees half of them being measured on their ability to deliver it by 2027.

The report predicts the marketing journey becoming a two-way conversation by 2026, with marketers using content to improve leads to purchase conversions by 40%.

The report also predicts that AI will drive greater levels of automation across marketing tasks, with 30% of traditionally routine jobs such as SEO, website optimisation and hyper personalisation being assumed by GenAI.

The report concludes that in the near term (2024-2026), focus will be on content marketing, consumer-controlled AI and intelligent journey orchestration driven by contextualised conversations.

While in the longer term (2027-2029) there will be a shift to automated traditional marketing tasks, quantum sensing, greater collaboration and AI enabling an expansion of marketer’s skillsets.

International Data Corporation (IDC) is a global provider of market intelligence, advisory services and events in IT, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. The full report is available for purchase on its website.