The value of marketing is essential — this much is clear to business leaders. And yet, CMOs and marketing heads find themselves at odds with proving their department’s financial impact. Why?

(Here’s a deep dive into why CMOs are having trouble demonstrating the value of marketing and solutions for how to fix it.)

New expectations have fallen into the lap of marketers — expectations that are the result of the sheer power of the marketing organization. Business decision-makers are seeing what marketing is capable of and have thus turned the spotlight on CMOs and marketing heads.

Here are a few reasons why marketing is under so much pressure today:

Marketing is expected to guide the entire customer experience

In a recent survey, Salesforce discovered that 80 percent of business decision-makers put improving their company’s customer experience among the top priorities for the coming year. Customer experience is no longer a marketing buzzword; it’s well known throughout the organization as a revenue driver. Marketing is expected to drive revenue on top of guiding the customer experience. There’s a lot that goes into creating a seamless every-touch experience and connecting marketing efforts with the bottom line, but marketers need to have the skills to do that now.

Marketing owns more functions than ever

Customer service and sales are just a couple of the functions that often fall under the purview of marketing in this new era. Because of the expectation to guide the customer experience, marketing must own all the touchpoints. This requires a highly communicative marketing department and understanding that allows team members to speak the same language.

There are too many tech options

Of course, today’s tech landscape makes marketing more powerful than ever before. However, when there are so many tech options to choose from, it can be tough to understand which are necessary to one business’s bottom line and which are just noise.

There is too much data

In this new era of marketing, collecting user data is not only desired but is considered best practice. The problem is that there’s so much of it, and marketing departments don’t always have the capacity to understand the data they have. Marketing teams need to understand the data and what it means, but many lack these skills.

There is always something new to incorporate into the marketing mix

Change is a given today. Even when CMOs and marketing heads may think they’ve gotten the formula right, new and different ways of doing things — oftentimes doing things better — crop up. Keeping up month to month with new marketing efficiencies is a full-time job, and teams can’t spare the human power to do it all.

Generating value in the new era of marketing is no easy feat. Read our hot-off-the-press insights report to learn more about the challenges CMOs and marketing leaders face today and, more importantly, how they can overcome them.