There is a gap between marketing technology, data, strategy and results. For marketers who are in the trenches marketing brands every day, this statement isn’t surprising. It’s simply a statement of fact. Yes, there are tons of tools available to integrate technology into marketing strategy, leverage massive amounts of data, and drive big results. However, actually using those tools to attain those big results is a hurdle that most marketers are still far from surmounting.
A new report from CMO Council and Tealium, Quantify How Well You Unify, shares input from 150 senior marketers in North America who were surveyed during the third quarter of 2014, and the results are very disappointing. While 67% of senior marketers believe that technology is critical to their businesses, only 44% have formal marketing technology (martech) strategies in place and only 16% reported that their martech strategies are well aligned with their business strategies.
What’s holding marketers back and keeping the gap from closing? There are three challenges that approximately one out of two respondents cited as obstacles to fully leveraging martech: selecting the right technologies, a lack of talent to manage, and centralizing fragmented data. You can see these statistics and more in the infographic below.
Source: CMO Council
The data shows that these problems can be sourced back to strategy. More than one in two respondents indicated that they didn’t know if their martech investments created business value! There is so much data and there are so many tools that marketing executives are in data paralysis mode. Until a clear strategic focus related to martech is identified and marketers actually stick to that strategy rather than chasing the latest shiny martech toy, the gap between marketing, technology, data, strategy, and results will not close.
It’s particularly interesting to note the importance of marketing leadership in effectively leveraging martech to drive improved results. In a press release, CMO Council explained, “CMOs who own the marketing strategy have greater business impact than CMOs who delegate the responsibility.”
You can follow the link at the beginning of the page to learn how to purchase and download the full reports from CMO Council. Based on the data presented in the infographic, what do you think? Does your marketing leadership team own the martech strategy? Are you overwhelmed with data and not sure what tools you should be using and why? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts on the martech gap.
Image: Svilen Milev
Susan Gunelius is the author of 10 marketing, social media, branding, copywriting, and technology books, and she is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She also owns Women on Business, an award-wining blog for business women. She is a featured columnist for Entrepreneur.com and Forbes.com, and her marketing-related articles have appeared on websites such as MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, TodayShow.com, and more.
She has over 20 years of experience in the marketing field having spent the first decade of her career directing marketing programs for some of the largest companies in the world, including divisions of AT&T and HSBC. Today, her clients include large and small companies around the world and household brands like Citigroup, Cox Communications, Intuit, and more. Susan is frequently interviewed about marketing and branding by television, radio, print, and online media organizations, and she speaks about these topics at events around the world. You can connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+.
