IBMconducts a survey of marketing professionals each year and the results are put out in a document called “The State Of Marketing.”
Image via CrunchBase
If you want to see a presentation about it, you can click through here to read 28 very interesting slides. Generally, the document talks about how the role of marketing has expanded to let marketing take a lead role in the entirety of the customer experience but the part that I found most interesting was this:
More must be done to link insight to action for online visitor data…high performing companies leverage their online data in other channels.
Yet we still see the silos in place that are limiting the effectiveness of what activity is out there:
- Only 22% currently run social tactics as part of integrated campaigns
- 79% run social marketing in silos discretely and on an ad hoc basis
- 51% marketers don’t use social media data to inform decision about marketing offers and messages.
The document goes on to talk about the need to integrate systems, budgets, and alignment. Hard to argue with any of that and as companies change their marketing tactics from push to pull, they’re going to encounter another barrier: time. Whether we call it content marketing, inbound marketing, or something else, the purchase cycle is different for these types of messages and this kind of media. The expansion of platforms from one main screen (the TV) to multiple screens (computers, mobile devices) is a huge contributor to the complexity of not just the message but also form factor. As eMarketer stated in their summary of the report:
The continued fracturing of the media landscape has made it increasingly difficult for marketers to reach customers in large numbers. The poll found that the largest percentage of respondents, 41%, named the growth of marketing channels and devices as the top challenge to their company over the next few years.
It’s hard to change perspective, particularly when what we’re trying to hit is a changing and moving target. This report is proof of that. The thing we can all try to do as marketers is to keep an open mind, focus on the customer and not our own internal power bases, and look on this as a huge opportunity, not as a massive pain in the rear. It’s a new perspective – I think those are always exciting. You?
Consult Keith 