The benefits of a well-executed marketing plan are many, but to realize them CMOs must first ensure their strategies and tactics are right.

In this week's edition of "CMO Wants To Know," seven executives cite areas where their fellow marketers might be missing the mark. Read on to find out some common mistakes—and hopefully avoid them yourself.

Mobile is crucial and it's here to stay. Marketers today understand how important mobile sites are for reaching customers—in fact, according to the PewResearch Internet ProjectOpens in a new window, nearly 60 percent of American adults own smartphones and 40 percent own tablets. Smartphones and tablets together command fully one third of organic search traffic, and that's only projected to grow. According to BrightEdge's newly released "Mobile Share ReportOpens in a new window," smartphone traffic will grow 50 percent within the next year.

“Think like a publisher” is a mantra that most content marketers, even entrepreneurs, repeat as they plan e-books, white papers, blog posts, videos and other collateral. They hire former journalists to write and produce, but when it comes to publication, a lot of them fall short of their goals. The secret, according to BrightEdge CEO and co-founder Jim Yu, is to operate the publishing arm of the marketing department in a B2B organization as an actual revenue-rich business.

If your business depends upon online traffic, you should know. More than half of digital traffic online now comes from mobile devices and through mobile apps.

A comScore report says smartphones and tablets combined now account for 6o percent of all online traffic up from 50 percent a year ago. And 51 percent of that traffic is driven by mobile apps (like those for digital radio such as Pandora or Spotify, digital messaging like WhatsApp or Viber and social apps like Facebook and Twitter.)

A recent report by BrightEdge found that one in four mobile sites are losing traffic due to configuration errors: “Twenty-seven percent of mobile sites are ranked lower than they should be because Google and other search engines do not recognize the mobile site as related to its desktop counterpart.”

The study analyzed billions of queries and determined that “62 percent of organic searches show different results depending on whether the search was performed on a desktop or smartphone.”

BrightEdge considered mobile configuration in terms of separate URLs (dedicated mobile sites), dynamic serving and responsive design. Dedicated mobile sites evidenced a 72 percent error rate and dynamic serving errors amounted to 30 percent; no errors were found with responsive design.

Want to know why the mobile version of your site isn’t reaping the benefit of all that mobile traffic you’ve been hearing about? Well, it could be because poor configuration of your mobile site is causing it to rank poorly with search engines.

That’s right. A new study says up to 27 percent of mobile sites are not configured properly.

And that could be costing you a huge amount of traffic, not to mention loss of revenue, because potential customers never even find the mobile version of your site.

Mobile is commanding more of the organic search market today than ever before. Smartphones account for 23 percent, and combined with tablets' 12 percent share, mobile now equates to fully a third of today's organic search traffic. And in the coming year, smartphone share is poised to balloon by at least another 50 percent. With this explosive growth, mobile will surely be a top priority for companies across industries. But just because you're "doing mobile," doesn't necessarily mean you're doing it right. Not only must marketers fully understand the intent and goals for their mobile experience, but they must also choose the correct mobile solution to fit that desired experience.

After analyzing “billions of pieces” of content, content marketing firm BrightEdge claims organic search is the primary driver of website traffic to business sites, while social barely generates a blip on the traffic radar.

The BrightEdge study found organic search drives 51 percent of all visitors to B2B and B2C websites, trumping all other non-organic search channels, including paid search (10%) and social (5%).

BrightEdge went beyond breaking down traffic sources to examine how traffic is distributed by industry.

According to the study, organic search traffic accounted for 73 percent of all traffic to business services site, more than a 20 percent jump from the 51 percent when evaluating organic search across all sites.