SA marketers upbeat, embracing digital during work-from-anywhere era

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Global CRM company Salesforce released the seventh edition of its State of Marketing report today, which is based on a survey of over 8,200 marketing leaders across 37 countries and six continents, including 300 from South Africa.

According to the research, 42% of South African marketers expect revenue growth at their organisations over the next 12 to 18 months, and 52% say their work provides greater value than it did a year ago.

Challenges are afoot, though, with 66% of South African marketers agreeing that customer expectations are more difficult to meet than they were a year ago. To adapt, marketers are leaning into the digital transformations they had initiated prior to the pandemic. In fact, 93% of South African marketers say the pandemic changed their digital engagement strategy, and 90% say it changed their marketing channel mix.

“Over the course of a little more than a year, marketers in South Africa have navigated changes in customer behaviour that normally occur over years,” said Robbie Kearns, senior regional vice president, Salesforce. "The insights in this year’s State of Marketing report provide a good benchmark for what’s changed, what’s consistent, and where the art and science of marketing goes from here.”

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Key SA insights

Key insights and trends revealed in the report include the following:

• As customers go digital, marketing steps up: Marketers are accelerating their digital transformations. Video is the marketing channel that increased in value the most in South Africa during the pandemic.

• Collaboration drives the market from anywhere era: No longer tied to offices, a distributed workforce is reevaluating how they engage not only customers, but each other. Eighty-four percent of South African marketing organisations are adopting new policies around remote work.

• Marketing is spelled D-A-T-A: Managing data is becoming more complex as sources multiply. South African marketers expect a 33% increase in the number of data sources they use between 2021 and 2022.

• Metrics and KPIs continue to evolve: As their work becomes more strategic and valuable for the business at large, marketers are reevaluating what success looks like. Eighty-five percent of South African CMOs align their KPIs with the CEOs.