A sur­vey con­duct­ed by Econ­sul­tan­cy and Ter­a­da­ta of 400 senior mar­keters has revealed that data dri­ven ana­lyt­ics and mar­ket­ing will be a top pri­or­i­ty for brands in the com­ing months and years. Data dri­ven prac­tice will dri­ve greater cus­tomer-cen­tric­i­ty and per­son­al­iza­tion, not only to cre­ate excep­tion­al con­sumer expe­ri­ences, but also as a strat­e­gy for dri­ving over­all rev­enues.

Data-dri­ven mar­ket­ing can be a tremen­dous­ly pow­er­ful con­cept for brands. By far its great­est val­ue comes from the fact that it’s no longer nec­es­sary to guess or make assump­tions about how con­sumers are behav­ing and what they are inter­est­ed in. Data can tell mar­keters exact­ly what con­sumers are recep­tive to and what kind of adver­tis­ing they want to see.

Today, the abil­i­ty to con­nect large amounts of online data with tra­di­tion­al offline data and know-how, is dri­ving cross-chan­nel insights and per­son­al­ized mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. With inte­grat­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools, mar­keters can reach and engage con­sumers at mul­ti­ple touch-points in pur­chase jour­neys, adapt­ing to their moments of need in real time.

Teradata/Econsultancy’s report sur­veyed 400 senior mar­keters from mul­ti­ple indus­tries in July, pos­ing ques­tions such as: “How have cus­tomer-empow­ered chan­nels reshaped mar­ket­ing bud­gets?”, “How has the use of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing chan­nels caused the mar­ket­ing land­scape to evolve?”, and “How are CMOs and CIOs align­ing dif­fer­ent­ly to ensure all cus­tomer data is acces­si­ble?”

The report high­light­ed an huge demand for mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy from a major­i­ty of brands, with more than 75 per­cent of busi­ness­es already imple­ment­ing mar­ket­ing attri­bu­tion sys­tems, cloud mar­ket­ing man­age­ment sys­tems, and audi­ence man­age­ment sys­tems. Oth­er mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy sys­tems also have high lev­els of usage:

The fig­ures cor­re­spond to an over­all rise in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing bud­gets, with dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing bud­gets due to expe­ri­ence an aver­age increase of 14 per­cent.

Here are some key sta­tis­tics from the report:

• Becom­ing cus­tomer-cen­tric is con­sid­ered a top pri­or­i­ty for 49 per­cent of orga­ni­za­tions.
• Actions and strate­gies to achieve this include imple­ment­ing holis­tic attri­bu­tion, with 45 per­cent of mar­keters look­ing to put this in place in the near future.
• Restruc­tur­ing KPIs to reflect the com­plex­i­ty of the cus­tomer jour­ney will be a pri­or­i­ty for 41 per­cent of mar­keters.
• Big data ana­lyt­ics is expect­ed to be imple­ment­ed by 75 per­cent of brands with­in two years.
• Encour­ag­ing cross-team coop­er­a­tion is a pri­or­i­ty for 54 per­cent of mar­keters, and hir­ing staff devot­ed to cus­tomer-cen­tric activ­i­ties was iden­ti­fied as a pri­or­i­ty for 32 per­cent of mar­keters.
• Many com­pa­nies expect their dig­i­tal invest­ment to reach 50 per­cent by 2019, but the aver­age fig­ure is expect­ed to be rough­ly 40 per­cent.
• Dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing is the largest sin­gle chan­nel bud­get at 17 per­cent, fol­lowed close­ly by search, at 16 per­cent, and con­tent at 15 per­cent. Dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing also has the largest vari­a­tion in spend­ing across media such as web­site spend­ing, social, email, and mobile.
• 34 per­cent of mar­ket­ing lead­ers say­ing they plan on sig­nif­i­cant increase in mobile bud­gets.
• Paid search bud­gets will con­tin­ue grow­ing, with 37 per­cent plan­ning some increase, but only 14 per­cent pre­dict­ing a sig­nif­i­cant one.

Customer-Centricity And Personalization

The report con­firms the grow­ing sen­ti­ment in the indus­try that cus­tomer-cen­tric­i­ty and per­son­al­iza­tion are amongst the high­est pri­or­i­ties for con­sumer fac­ing busi­ness­es. Up to 86% of enter­prise com­pa­nies are already prac­tic­ing some form of per­son­al­iza­tion (although few­er than 20% are doing so in real-time) and this is expect­ed to increase.

Mar­keters how­ev­er, appear opti­mistic as to the con­tin­ued pos­i­tive impact of tech­nol­o­gy on advanc­ing mar­ket­ing per­for­mance through­out con­sumer expe­ri­ences. As the report sum­ma­rizes:

“What’s clear through­out the report is the goal of build­ing a cus­tomer-first approach. Cur­rent and near-term plans for the tech­nolo­gies of cus­tomer analy­sis and expe­ri­ence are a val­i­da­tion that com­pa­nies are mov­ing away from sim­ple plat­i­tudes towards opti­miz­ing the invest­ment of their hard-won bud­gets. They also con­firm that there’s a long way to go.”

You can down­load the full Teradata/Econsultancy report here.