Leading marketing automation software firm Marketo released its first marketing survey on the maturity of contemporary marketers. The report titled, “2017 Marketing Benchmark Report: North America” carries survey results seeking insights from 1300+ Marketo customers on adoption of marketing technologies and integration.

Marketing Benchmark Report: North America measures the maturity of marketers based on their marketing strategies and how they execute campaigns using technologies. According to the report, 60% modern marketers deploy six or more MarTech stacks in their campaigns. However, the underlining fact is that there is a huge scope for growth in the industry.

Top insights from 2017 Marketing Benchmark Report: North America

• 65% marketers running global campaigns use a centralized marketing automation strategy. Centralized strategy, compared to regional stacks, enable marketers to scale marketing activities into newer regions more effectively.
• Content, centralized alignment with the parent base and skill mapping of people using marketing technologies remain the top challenges in deploying marketing automation strategy. Other challenges are budget allocation and autonomy.
• Only 3% companies use 20 or more marketing technologies to run their businesses. 40% respondents consider 6-10 MarTech solutions enough to suffice their requirements.
• 68% respondents have a full-fledged long-term plan to build their MarTech stack. While 37% marketers have a mix-and-match strategy of short and long-term plan with MarTech in contrast to 32% respondents who have no plans.
• A whopping 96% of the respondents agree that siloed data and MarTech solutions can derail the purpose of bringing technology on board. Marketers want a single MarTech vendor to offer solutions that allow them to seamlessly integrate all existing technologies at an enterprise level.
• 34% marketers are practicing ABM to target and engage high-value accounts at scale. Most marketers, as many as 22%, consider content development as a major challenge in ABM adoption. Other challenges involve understanding the ABM basics and navigating through the ABM landscape using reporting and analytics.
• 39% of marketers devote less than a quarter of their budget to customer engagement programs, and more than two-thirds of marketers do not have customer referral programs. While the emphasis is on customer acquisition, marketers are beginning to understand the significance of engagement marketing and how this approach will become critical to all marketing strategies.
• Marketers must embrace a multi-channel approach towards engaging with today’s empowered buyers and ultimately drive revenue for their organizations. Only 42% have a mobile-optimized website, and 26% are incorporating mobile advertising into their mobile marketing strategy, even though many marketers do not identify as mobile marketers.

Based on these findings, Marketo has identified the challenges and opportunities addressing marketers based on their technology adoption and maturity. Marketo insists on creating Centers of Excellence (CoEs) to enable marketers in shifting away from siloed inefficiencies.

Overall, bringing MarTech on board helps drive higher ROI from marketing campaigns by fostering enterprise collaboration, improving brand identity and improving customer experience across channels and mediums. 2017 is projected as the year when mobile and social advertising becomes more advanced, forcing marketers to allocate budget allocations towards omnichannel digital platforms. Providing best customer experience and gaining highest audience engagement remain the top priorities for marketers, achievable through a scalable centralized marketing automation platform.