Marketers’ key roles are customer relationships and fuelling growth

Concurrently, data has risen in importance strategically. Marketers rely on data to inform and create personalised, trusted customer experiences and to optimise campaigns and programmes for maximum ROI.

But gathering, untangling and harnessing the power of data is easier said than done. Only 33% of marketers strongly agree they gain insights fast enough for impactful decision-making, says Salesforce. Here are the top four key findings from the report.

1. Proving marketing impact is crucial

Today’s marketer has a dual mandate: nurturing customer relationships and growing revenue. This is reflected in how marketers define success.

Nearly half say customer satisfaction is their most important metric, followed by return on marketing investment. However, fewer than two in five marketers report that they feel completely successful in evaluating any of these metrics definitively.

When assessing their analytics strategies, marketers emphasise the need to solve this challenge — listing proving impact on growth and customer experience as their top priorities. To get there, marketers are also prioritising the effective use of data in the form of accurate, timely and consumable insights.

2. Privacy changes have led to shifts in marketing strategies and investments

Over the past few years, data privacy regulations — such as GDPR, Apple Mail Privacy Protection and Google’s deprecation of the third-party cookie — have encouraged marketers to adopt a consumer-first, consent-based approach to data collection.

At the same time, marketers are feeling downstream effects in their analytics as popular performance metrics like email opens are now less relevant as privacy policies preventing tracking are implemented.

In fact, 90% of marketers agree that recent data privacy changes have fundamentally changed how they measure marketing performance.

3. Data quality is paramount — but not universally accounted for

Regardless of their objectives, marketers need dependable data to demonstrate the value of their programs and drive outcomes. Nearly four in five marketers say data quality is key to driving marketing-led growth and customer experiences.

But not everyone has access to a reliable data foundation, nor the ability to unlock it. Marketers say employee resources and manual data integration are top challenges in efficiently evaluating performance.

Though marketers are investing in analytics technology, only 51% of marketing teams currently have employees dedicated to analytics, according to the report.

4. Data-driven marketing cultures require a centralised view

Without a clear, holistic view of data, it’s hard to give meaning to data-driven marketing efforts. The report found 98% of marketers emphasise the importance of having a complete, centralised view of all cross-channel marketing.

Yet, 71% still evaluate the performance of their cross-channel marketing in silos, leaving plenty of room for improvement and integration.

Not only do marketers need to integrate data across business units and sources, they also need to share it to generate value, foster team-wide collaboration and connect marketing to business outcomes. With data unified in one place, marketers are positioned to lead growth in their organisations and engage their customers.