The Modern Marketer Is Closer Than You Think

Marketing teams are tasked with brainstorming some of the most creative ideas, which in turn build company momentum – yet many still lack the systems to accurately capture the metrics behind those campaigns. With an abundance of new and improved technologies on the horizon for historically low-tech organizations – why has marketing been left in the dust?

While there is ample new martech available, marketers are still playing catch-up. Teams are looking for new ways to spruce up their martech stacks – but many are missing the point. Despite lacking the capabilities to capture data across campaign channels, 61% of marketers plan on implementing predictive analytics. This is surprising, given the complexity and data required to do so.

But it isn’t all doom and gloom for marketers. My team at Adverity surveyed an array of marketers and analysts across the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany to try and understand the future of their marketing efforts. Our Marketing Analytics State of Play report identified marketers’ aspirations for the future and data capabilities and highlights that marketers are on the cusp of truly maximizing data to get better results, make better choices, and ultimately lead to vastly improved marketing ROI. Let’s take a look at some of the key findings.

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Marketers’ 2022 Checklist

Building off of our first Marketing Analytics State of Play 2022 survey, we wanted to look ahead at how marketers were planning to tackle their marketing data in the new year. Marketers believe they have plenty of data, but note that they lack the ability to see that data in one unified place. In fact, only slightly over half of marketers and analysts say their marketing data is accessible from a centralized data lake. Thankfully, we’re hopeful this concerning stat won’t last long.  We found that implementing a single view of data was the top data priority for marketers in 2022 – with 58% expecting to do so in the next 12 months.

Another capability that was portrayed as crucial in 2021 remains a key priority in 2022 for marketers – personalization. We found that 2 out of 5 respondents believe that their current personalization efforts are ‘OK’, with another 12% noting it needs significant improvement. Beyond that, only 40% of respondents believe their audience building and targeting capabilities are strong, with 16% noting it needs significant improvement. Personalization is mission-critical to authentically engage with your audience and create pleasant customer experiences. Personalization is done right when marketers have access to data that is easy to access, analyze and visualize.

What’s on marketers’ bucket lists?

Creating a centralized data lake and improving personalization are all within marketers’ grasp. Yes, there are data capabilities and investment in data infrastructure that needs to be addressed first but getting the right people and data tools in place can make this happen overnight. But where are marketers aiming for the moon? The answer: predictive analytics.

We found that 69% of marketers noted that implementing predictive analytics is their top priority this year. While looking ahead is a great way to future-proof your campaigns, it’s important that we don’t run before we walk.

Truthfully, predictive analytics are only as sound as the data behind them. Before marketers can fully realize the power of predictive analytics they need to have a solid data culture and system in place.  Marketers need to prioritize collecting and analyzing campaign metrics. Thinking back to our previous survey, 54% of C-suite executives responded that manual data wrangling is a problem, with 38% of Chief Marketing Officers lacking trust in their data. Rebuilding this trust is a key step in the right direction for marketing professionals.

Taking this a step further, 41% of analysts stated that low trust in marketing reporting because of data inaccuracies or errors is a significant challenge – but only 30% of marketers saw that same problem. Similarly to our first survey, we see a clear disconnect between the two roles. This continues to be a challenge as two vastly different groups and their C-suite work to implement even more complex technologies like predictive analytics.

Implementing the correct tools to automate complex processes like manual data wrangling is crucial for marketers to regain valuable time in their day-to-day work. Having this time back alongside the critical insights that these tools make readily available will allow adtech and martech professionals to focus on new horizons like predictive analytics.

While it sounds daunting to hear so many reasons why marketers are behind the times – it isn’t too late to bring marketers up to speed. The doom and gloom can be quickly resolved with the right tools and processes put into place. What marketers, analytics professionals, and the C-suite really need is to start with their methods of data wrangling. From there, it becomes much easier to use the additional time and resources they gain back to continue putting one foot in front of the other down the path to modernization.

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