Digest...

Chief marketers are fast becoming expert urban planners fighting enterprise data sprawl in their digital marketing technology portfolios. They are being challenged to bring disciplined development and cross-functional harmonization to what is an ever more crowded, data-producing landscape.

A new study published today by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Tealium, the leader in real-time unified marketing solutions, finds strong links to suggest that improved business and marketing performance are directly related to having a formal roadmap for digital marketing technology acquisition, integration and data unification. 

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 The study revealed:

• Forty-two (42) percent of CMOs who own their marketing technology strategy see greater business impact than those who do not.

• Those with a formal strategy contribute more to overall revenue and value creation. Half (50 percent) are able to achieve more targeted, efficient and relevant customer engagements, and 39 percent achieve greater return and accountability of marketing spend.

• CMOs who manage and integrate technology are achieving measurable business and operational gains. Nearly one-third (30 percent) of CMOs who say they manage and integrate technology extremely well or pretty well are seeing tangible business value, with 51 percent of those achieving greater revenue contributions.

• Those who integrate a technology strategy within their overall marketing strategy are able to achieve more personalized customer interactions across channels. Fifty-nine (59) percent of those who have integrated this strategy report achieving more targeted, efficient and relevant customer engagements.

• Less than half (44 percent) of senior marketers surveyed say they have a formal marketing technology strategy and program to further business goals.

• Just 16 percent of marketers report their marketing technology strategy is tightly aligned to the business strategy.

• Only 3 percent of marketers say they are doing extremely well at integrating marketing technologies across functions.

• A surprising 54 percent of marketers are not sure whether their marketing technology investments are producing tangible business value. 

Intermediate/ Condensed...

Automation presents important opportunities for marketers. But people still have a critical place in our increasingly automated world—and organizations that ignore the role that living, breathing human beings play in the marketing automation process risk leaving both money and market share on the table.

1. Question outcomes

Technology can explain what occurred, but it can't tell you why it occurred. The ability to ask the questions that drive effective marketing is uniquely human. And in many cases, the lack of a human presence causes organizations to repeat the same mistakes, severely limiting the performance of campaigns.

2. Eliminate divisions

Machines can facilitate collaboration, but they can't initiate it. The integration of humans and technology in marketing automation creates new opportunities to break down organizational silos and streamlines the achievement of critical business goals—outcomes that can't be produced by a technology-only system designed to focus on isolated metrics and siloed marketing functions.

3. Encourage cross-channel sharing

In the same way that organizational silos limit collaboration, strict channel divisions reduce the overall impact of marketing initiatives. SEO campaigns and PPC campaigns are natural bedfellows. But too often, the insights gleaned from SEO aren't shared with and implemented for PPC (and vice versa). Additionally, insights from both PPC and SEO can benefit social, email, and other marketing channels.

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Intermediate/ Digest...

Nearly two thirds of the respondents (63%) say they have too many marketing technology vendors to manage. More than half of the study’s respondents (53%) use five or more discrete marketing technology solutions, including marketing automation software, CRM, email marketing and social media tools.

Additional key findings include:

• The top three marketing priorities for mid-sized companies in 2014 are to acquire new customers (87%), increase customer retention (86%), and increase brand awareness (80%);

• 79% of marketing executives say it’s a challenge to get (and hold) the attention of target customers, and 72% say it’s difficult to find their target audiences online;

• 70% agree that marketing has become more challenging, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the wide range of technology solutions available to them;

• 53% of mid-sized companies use five or more marketing technology solutions. 15% use 10 or more; and

• 79% of respondents somewhat or strongly agree that online communities are a “critical channel” for their marketing efforts. By the end of the year, 77% of respondents say their companies plan to have online communities in place, 90% of them including customers, 77% including employees. 

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