Marketers Frustrated By Data, Stress Real-Time, Quantifiable Results
- by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, November 14, 2013
Brand marketers have begun to realize there is a chasm between the access to data they need and what's actually available to them -- especially since many receive financial compensation connected to the use of data and results of company campaigns.
Marketers realize that good data isn't just critical to the business, it's vital to their personal success. Some 54%
of Domo survey respondents said they are compensated by marketing return on investments, yet most of them cannot quantify the effectiveness of their various marketing campaigns.
Only 37%
know the ROI of their social media initiatives, while just 51% can measure the ROI of their search engine optimization campaigns. Some 87% of brand marketers rely on data to do their job well, but
only 45% believe they have sufficient access to the data they need to carry out the task effectively, according to the survey.
About 83% of survey respondents stress the importance of real-time marketing data -- up from 70% in the prior survey -- but only 37% have access to the data they need in real-time.
Many marketers remain overwhelmed with the amount of raw data available to them, but don't know how to sort through the numbers to find the important trends. About 66% of marketers still feel overwhelmed by the volume of data, 59% are frustrated by how long it takes to receive reports, and 50% of marketers said the marketing reports lack important information.
The majority of marketers use some form of analytics to help them make sense of their data, but for the most part, these analytics tools fall short. Some 68% of marketers use Web analytics, but 39% evaluate the numbers collected by their Web analytics platform monthly or less often.
Some 80% see the importance of combining the marketing data from all disparate media sources, yet only 19% report they have the ability to do that today.
The study also calls out the growing importance of real-time email data. About 83% of marketers have email marketing tools, but only 9% evaluate email marketing data daily.
Interesting results, but not surprising. The marketers that we speak to often cite their frustration with traditional data platforms, because they do a great job accumulating and managing data, but what marketers really want are insights and action.
I believe we are heading toward the "next gen" of data platforms in which analysis and action will be key. Tools that empower decision makers, and that are easy to use -- democratizing data access -- will be the future.
The Starkist Tuna folks tried to tell us this 50 ago when they said: Starkist doesn't want tunas with good taste. Starkist wants tunas that taste good.
We hear very similar comments as well, but I do think many advertisers and agencies are getting smarter in their ability to act on insights provided by centralized marketing platforms that go beyond just managing data. The ability to plan, target, engage and measure across all channels and devices to truly optimize media planning and buying efforts is here...and its very exciting!
Here's the fascinating chasm: Online marketing guys say "there's unlimited potential for great data" (which there is - I was a tech guy). Except, as a marketer, it's never available. In reality, the data that's able to be regularly used from online situations is miserable - except for highly targeted direct response style platforms where there can be good data. So I'm not so sure it's "real time" as much as "actually there". On very large client with a multi-million dollar site was able to only get counter data for visits and unique visitors. So to get daily visits/unique visitors - you had to get the counters each day at the same time and subtract yesterday's. THEN, they cleared the counters at the end of the month. Far too often there's a huge gap between the IDEA of smart data online and the reality it's rarely delivered.