Data and Analytics Trends to Drive Future Growth
Data in this report is from a double-blind survey of third-party of over 1,050 decision-making marketers around the world. Let’s see how marketers are pursuing growth and improving marketing ROI. We’ll review:
- The role of cross-channel marketing and its effect on marketing analytics
- Challenges with marketing data integration and analytics
- How companies leverage data to support business objectives and strategies
- How orgs intend to pursue data-driven transformation in the future
As customers shift their expectations and behaviors in response to a “digital first” world, businesses have had to accelerate their digital transformations to keep up. Eighty-eight percent of customers expect companies to accelerate digital initiatives due to COVID-19. More than half (52%) of consumers and business buyers expect offers to always be personalized, and 66% expect companies to understand their personal needs.1 Marketers have taken a prominent role in driving this transformation, and are under increasing pressure to deliver maximum impact with every investment.
In their pursuit of success, marketers are increasingly looking to engage, measure, adapt, and optimize every touchpoint of the customer experience. To do this, marketers seek a strategy for their customer and performance data that moves at unprecedented speed and scale.
Our global research evaluates how marketers are navigating this transformation, with a focus on how they are integrating and analyzing marketing performance data from all of the touchpoints needed to reach today’s digital first customers — all while maximizing marketing-led growth. Here are five of our key findings.
1) Marketers play a key role in business-wide growth, but they’re struggling to meet their targets.
Eighty-seven percent of marketers view their position as critical for driving growth. However, only two in five marketers say they are very successful at reaching their sales targets.
2) Marketing performance data continues to proliferate across multiple channels and platforms.
Marketers are using an average of 21 marketing and advertising platforms, and 79% of marketers say it’s important to have a cross-channel overview of performance and business impact.
3) Time-consuming data integration hinders data confidence and veracity.
Forty-three percent of marketers spend a week or more every month preparing data, and only 31% of marketers are very confident in the accuracy of their data.
4) Marketers lack timely, accessible, and actionable reporting and insights.
Only 32% of marketers have daily visibility into performance, and 74% of marketers cite that key stakeholders face challenges accessing data and insights.
5) Marketers seek to improve on data-driven outcomes in the next year.
Marketers’ top priorities for the next year include optimizing marketing spend, gaining a strategic view of all performance, and having better insights to understand and engage customers.
COVID-19 Heightens Focus on Marketing Spend Optimization
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an immediate impact on marketing organizations and reinforced the need to optimize marketing spend. Nearly one in three marketers report a decrease in their marketing and advertising budgets. Meanwhile, almost half of marketers report that their budgets remain the same.
The pandemic has also forced many marketers to rebalance their priorities. Relating to customers with empathetic and personalized messages became a heightened priority, as did the use of data and collaboration across teams and business units.
Amidst this rapidly changing landscape, businesses have had to adapt their models, services, and communications. Sixty-nine percent of customers believe that companies should offer new ways to get products and services due to COVID-19. Thus, marketers have prioritized testing new marketing strategies and channels to succeed in the new normal. At the same time, they have had to do this while preserving and optimizing their marketing budgets. High performers are nearly twice as likely to significantly increase prioritization across different goals relative to low performers.
Finally, for the majority of marketers, data has only become more important. Eighty percent of marketers report increasing prioritization of the use of data and measurement to navigate the uncertainty of socioeconomic conditions.
Marketers Who Have Significantly Increased Prioritization of the Following Due to the Pandemic
