Survey: Time is the biggest barrier to personalizing marketing messages
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.
More than half of marketers (59 percent), advertisers (52 percent) and brand creatives (53 percent) find it difficult to personalize content at scale. And while agency creatives are a little more confident, a new survey from Adobe indicates that fewer than half of respondents overall believe that their company’s content personalization is very extensive.
What’s holding them back? Time is easily the biggest impediment. Presented with nine barriers to content and digital ad creative personalization and asked to rank their top three, fully one-third pointed to the time to create and iterate as their number one barrier. One-fifth of respondents indicated that time was their second- or third-ranked barrier, such that a majority overall put it in their top three.
It’s easy to understand why time would be a key barrier to personalization at scale when considering other results from the survey. On average, respondents estimated that it takes 17 hours to create a single piece of short-form content or ad format, with brand creatives on the low end of that spectrum (14 hours) and agency creatives on the high end (22 hours).
Personalizing the content requires creating variations, which nine in 10 respondents are doing. Most commonly, they’re creating variations to target different segments of the market (59 percent), but many also create variations for different digital channels (49 percent) and for different campaigns (42 percent).
All told, respondents reported that it takes them 12 days, on average, to get a single piece of content to market.
The analysts note that creatives, marketers and advertisers feel that content quality is more important than both personalization and cost, such that they’re “not willing to sacrifice quality for speed and volume.” But while those priorities seem laudable, cost is a hindrance: half of the respondents ranked the cost of creation and iteration as a top three barrier to personalizing content and digital ad creative.
Access to artificial intelligence, often touted as the tool to bring personalized content at scale, came in as the least significant barrier.