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Survey finds marketers struggle to deliver personalized content

Written by Guest contributor

MarketingCharts staff

Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of articles from MarketingCharts, which provides up-to-the-minute data and research to marketers.

Delivering personalized content is the most challenging barrier to marketing automation success, although the integration of all marketing systems is a close second, according to a new report from Ascend2. Despite the difficulties marketers are having delivering personalized content, the vast majority say that content personalization driven by marketing automation is improving.

The survey was fielded among 250 marketers worldwide, who were fairly evenly split between a B2B (40 percent) and B2C (33 percent) focus, with the remaining 27 percent targeting B2B and B2C equally.

The delivery of personalized content is one of the top priorities for marketing automation optimization, per the report, though it falls behind more general goals such as creating a successful strategy and improving the user experience.

The survey presented respondents with a list of seven tactics used to optimize marketing automation, asking which were among the most effective and the most difficult to execute.

The tactic identified as effective by the largest share of respondents was customer experience mapping (53 percent). Customer journey mapping has been seen as a top practice in boosting conversion rates for enterprise B2B marketers and is a distinctive trait of top-performing marketers.

Close behind customer experience mapping is personalized/dynamic content, noted as effective by 51 percent of respondents. These two tactics are considered effective by a wider swathe of respondents than others, such as landing page and form CTAs (35 percent), AI and predictive modeling (34 percent) and A/B or multivariate testing (28 percent).

The relatively low level of perceived effectiveness for AI and predictive modeling is curious given other research indicating strong enthusiasm surrounding its use. It may be that marketers simply don’t have much experience in this area.

AI and predictive modeling emerged as one of the most difficult tactics used to optimize marketing automation. Cited by 45 percent as a difficult tactic, it was narrowly behind only one other: personalized/dynamic content (46 percent).

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