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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.
Half of the marketing, information and marketing tech professionals surveyed in the UK and U.S. for a report from Merkle state that their organization’s data is not organized for easy consumption, making it the most common technical barrier to deriving meaningful insights.
Other barriers include limited storage, cited by 39 percent; slow data analytics processes, 38 percent; the inability to understand what data is most important to decision-makers, 38 percent; data integration hurdles, 38 percent; and data being stored in disparate systems, 35 percent.
Forty-one percent of respondents say they do not have a single customer profile, even though 89 percent agree that creating a consolidated customer profile is very or extremely important. The inability to capture a single customer view also comes despite 81 percent of U.S. respondents reporting they have a CRM and two-thirds having a customer data platform.
What’s standing in the way? For one thing, technology spend doesn’t seem to be a limiting factor. Some 38 percent of U.S. respondents report allocating 21-25 percent of their marketing technology spend to identity-based solutions, while 27 percent allocate 16-20 percent.
Instead, it’s more likely to be a lack of expertise and skills. Data and analytics is not only currently a valued skillset but is expected to remain so in the future. Nonetheless, close to half (46 percent) of U.S. respondents have run into a lack of data and analytics expertise within their organization when trying to implement a data and analytics solution.
Additionally, many have encountered limitations in gaining consensus among stakeholders (46 percent) or a lack of an agile implementation partner to support changing business and time to market requirements (44 percent).
Finally, although IT is said to no longer be a detractor to marketing, the Merkle report suggests it is still more likely to be in control — finding that IT (56 percent) is more likely than marketing (34 percent) to allocate more than 20 percent on martech spend to identity-based solutions.
Forty-one percent of respondents say they do not have a single customer profile, even though 89 percent agree that creating a consolidated customer profile is very or extremely important. The inability to capture a single customer view also comes despite 81 percent of U.S. respondents reporting they have a CRM and two-thirds having a customer data platform.
What’s standing in the way? For one thing, technology spend doesn’t seem to be a limiting factor. Some 38 percent of U.S. respondents report allocating 21-25 percent of their marketing technology spend to identity-based solutions, while 27 percent allocate 16-20 percent.
Instead, it’s more likely to be a lack of expertise and skills. Data and analytics is not only currently a valued skillset but is expected to remain so in the future. Nonetheless, close to half (46 percent) of U.S. respondents have run into a lack of data and analytics expertise within their organization when trying to implement a data and analytics solution.
Additionally, many have encountered limitations in gaining consensus among stakeholders (46 percent) or a lack of an agile implementation partner to support changing business and time to market requirements (44 percent).
Finally, although IT is said to no longer be a detractor to marketing, the Merkle report suggests it is still more likely to be in control — finding that IT (56 percent) is more likely than marketing (34 percent) to allocate more than 20 percent on martech spend to identity-based solutions.