Organizations are finding digital channels highly important when it comes to communicating with their customers. Indeed, a report [download page] from Crownpeak found that 1 in 5 organizations cite digital advertising as the most important communication channel today.
Research from WARC shows that marketers have made customer experience their primary priority for digital transformation. However, even with their confidence in digital communication channels, the 400 IT and marketing decision-makers surveyed by Crownpeak are running into factors that are hindering their organization’s current method of managing digital experiences. Some of these include struggling to keep content consistent with brand messaging, keeping software up-to-date with the latest features available, and the need for specialists to operate or develop on digital experience management.
Reliance on IT
Another limitation to their organization’s current method of managing digital experience was too much reliance on the IT department. Interestingly, how heavily marketing relies on the IT department may be in the eye of the beholder.
While CMOs now list IT as one of their top supporters, they appear to not know how much they ask IT to do in regards to digital experience management. For instance, half of the IT decision-makers surveyed said that marketing asks them to update software to a new version, however, only one-third of marketing decision-makers say they ask IT to perform this task.
Similarly, one-third of marketers say they ask IT to customize software to meet the needs of the organization, but some 47% of IT decision-maker report that marketing asks this of them. Fewer marketers also think they ask IT to provide technical or software support (39%), update content (28%), integrate with other marketing technology (29%) and deal with performance issues (26%) than IT says they do (44%, 40%, 39% and 35%, respectively).
Resources for Digital Experience Management
Crownpeak found that it took an average of 11 months for the organizations surveyed to implement their current web content management system (CMS) or digital experience platform (DXP), with about three-quarters (76%) saying it took their organization at least 6 months to do so.
The report also found that more resources are being expended on infrastructure than on digital experiences. On average, respondents report that 55% of their development team’s time each week is spent maintaining current CMS or DXP systems, leaving the remaining 45% of the time for teams to work on creating new digital experiences.
When asked where they would redirect money currently invested in infrastructure, two-thirds (65%) of respondents would prioritize new digital experiences, while others also prioritized additional technology (58%), more demand gen activities (49%) and more branding activities (49%).
The full report can be downloaded here.
About the Data: Findings are based on a survey of 400 US IT and marketing decision-makers from organizations with at least 1,000 employees, fielded in November and December 2020.
