Many marketers have a vision of where they want to take their brands, of engaging customers in innovative ways across channels and devices. But they find themselves stuck on square one. Their technology stacks are holding them back. Their cross-channel marketing strategies don’t align with the reality of their marketing stacks.
That’s why Signal surveyed 281 brand and agency marketers, spanning 16 industry verticals, from around the world to explore the challenges faced by marketers in achieving their cross-channel marketing goals.
And when we tallied the results, a clear picture emerged of where marketers are with their technology stacks, and where they need to be.
Our Cross-Channel Marketing and Technology Survey, the first of its kind on this topic, shows three important findings:
- Technology fragmentation is a major problem. Fully half of marketers say that lack of coordination between their technologies impedes their cross-channel success.
- Marketers overwhelmingly say that connecting their tools would improve their capabilities, harness data, improve customer engagement, and drive sales.
- Yet more than half of marketers have yet to link their technologies beyond the most basic level.
Hollis Thomases, principal analyst at Digital Clarity Group, says Signal’s research rings true with what she has found. “My own research with CMOs corroborates Signal’s findings that the opportunities and challenges surrounding first-party data is a top-of-mind concern,” Thomases said. “Data also represents one of the biggest challenges to marketers today because they want to do all of these things but have multiple issues, technically and conceptually in connecting the dots.”
All this creates a real opportunity for marketers. Brands and agencies that focus on optimizing the existing technologies in their stacks will have a significant competitive advantage in the race for cross-channel success.
Marketers can’t succeed in a cross-channel world if their technologies are operating in mono-channel. The research shows that the next frontier in cross-channel marketing is the ability to connect technologies across the marketing stack so they can work better, together.
To read the special report, click here.
Originally published September 24, 2014