75% of Brands Will Implement Big Data Analytics, Data-Driven Marketing Within Two Years

400 senior mar­keters give their view on cur­rent and future pri­or­i­ties.

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

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:

teradata-tech

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

teradata-budgets

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.

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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