Our C-Suite Outlook 2024 survey shows that CEOs are expecting the marketing and communications function to be strong drivers of growth in 2024 and beyond. As we enter a year with economic and geopolitical uncertainties, marketing and communications leaders are prioritizing improving their performance measurement and attracting and managing talent, and optimizing productivity with remote/hybrid work. The following are insights on these topics from our roundtable for members of the Marketing & Communications Center held in December 2023.

1. Current business needs and external events might influence the CEO’s perceived impact and relevance of these functions. For example, the visibility of communications teams may be higher during periods of volatility or emerging issues, while all eyes are on the marketing teams during periods of lower sales/revenue. Regardless of whether their team is currently in the limelight, leaders need to continue to show their team’s performance and communicate impact through appropriate metrics.
    
2. The lack of KPIs that effectively indicate revenue growth or profit is a key challenge. Good results on a specific marketing campaign or a metric like social media impressions do not necessarily mean a good overall financial impact on the business.
    
3. Inflated numbers about performance can lead to broken trust. Presenting a more favorable number for a KPI that does not seem to reflect the impact on business goals can backfire and undermine trust. Therefore, it is worthwhile investing the time and effort to establish metrics and KPIs that the CEO agrees on as suitable and relevant to build trust.
    
4. Brand reputation is often important to the C-Suite and can be a useful metric for showing impact, but attribution is tricky. Examples of reputation indicators include aided and unaided brand awareness by potential customers, net promoter score, and tools such as RepTrak. However, while tracking and measuring brand reputation have become more common, building an effective attribution model continues to be a challenge for many companies.
    
5. Soft metrics and anecdotal evidence such as consideration and stories from individual clients can be powerful indicators of impact for CEOs. Another tool that leaders have found useful is exploring and comparing their performance with case studies from other companies. Ultimately, being able to build a cohesive story from the metrics and granular feedback and connecting it to business objectives are crucial to proving impact.
    
6. Challenges of remote/hybrid work include productivity, teams brainstorming together, relationship building, and collaboration both within and between teams. Many companies are focusing on creating purposeful in-person interactions and team-building activities to build and strengthen company culture. To this end, some leaders are finding success with introducing fun engagement activities like a quirky sales contest with an awards ceremony that can build camaraderie and culture if done right.
    
7. Some leaders would like data to support remote/in-office work policy decisions. Large-scale remote work is still relatively newand there is not enough data on performance and productivity when comparing remote, hybrid, and in-office work policies. Often, these decisions have been based on highly biased or anecdotal evidence. Despite challenges, a lot of professionals are finding that remote work can be efficient for them, especially when supported by the right technology.
    
8. Looking ahead to 2024, leaders are expecting the focus to shift to communications teams as the election year looms for countries around the world, including the United States, which combined represent about half the world’s population while geopolitical tensions remain high. Change management and improving the employee experience to compete for talent are also expected to be areas of focus for the year.