Data analytics is growing, but marketers still struggle with data management, since the available tools are insufficient to integrate data and activate insights.
Measurement of digital advertising impact on offline sales is difficult. From social media to paid search channels, the biggest challenge is about measuring the impact of marketing tactics in these channels against offline sales. According to Forrester research, two in three marketers find it difficult to measure impact.
The unpredictable customer journeys also cause havoc in marketing measurement. According to the report, one of the top measurement challenges that firms face is managing the complexity of the customer journey. Currently, only 30% of firms use journey analytics.
The report ‘Leader of The Pack: How Holistic Marketing Measurement Drives Business Success,’ by Forrester is based on a survey of 300 organizations in the US to evaluate the maturity of their marketing in terms of measurement insights.
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Marketers are quite realistic about the state of their marketing measurement, where only 16% believe they are currently optimized.
Marketers believe that the ability to integrate data across multiple channels and to link it to insights to specific customers is also a significant challenge. There are a number of unconnected data sources along with the unmanageable volume of data. Experts believe that it is the lack of measurement solutions as foundation capabilities that cause the challenges. For 40% of firms, current marketing strategy can’t push recommendations into media-buying systems, while 38% can’t currently optimize marketing spend or forecasting against multiple objectives at the same time.
Enterprises also believe that they have matured over the last two years, and 73% of respondents hope to have optimized their marketing measurement by 2020.
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Out of respondents that Forester has surveyed, only 17% of companies have leveraged the marketing technologies quite well and integrated the services for better measurement. Experts believe that the leaders who have mastered the measurement use it for actions and make both tactical and strategic marketing decisions.
Experts believe that to measure marketing efforts and impact; it is crucial to measure both digital and offline touch points. Marketing maturity is not dependent on company size but planning, organizing, and implementation of measurement insights differently.
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Rather than depending on finance, operations, and sales data for measuring insights, marketing departments must own insights and data to calculate marketing performance. The Forrester report also states that among the leading companies, 98% of marketing strategy teams are responsible for their impact calculations.
This means, it is essential to integrate the data into digital channels and offline channels completely. Out of the companies who measure well, 83% of companies have entirely integrated data compared to 48% of the companies who lack in measurement.
Experts believe marketing teams can only improve measurement if they leverage technology for tactical solutions that look into future planning rather than just for reporting, data visualizations, and the ability to integrate insights.
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