1 in 4 Marketers Say They Always Use Data As Part of Their Decision-Making Process

June 3, 2020

This article is included in these additional categories:

Analytics, Automated & MarTech | Customer-Centric | Data-driven | Personalization

Ascend2 Critical Data Driven Marketing Trends Jun2020Data factors into the strategic decisions made by a majority of today’s marketers. A new survey [download page] from Ascend2 found that one-quarter of marketers are using marketing data as part of every strategic decision, while another 44% report that data plays a part in their decision-making most of the time.

However, a moderate share said that data is used in their strategic decision making only some of the time (26%) or never (5%), indicating that data-driven approaches aren’t universal.

That caveat aside, what data-driven trends are marketers pinpointing as most critical to their decision-making process in the year ahead? For many of the marketers surveyed, data-driven personalization (47%) and improving the customer journey (46%) were trends that they considered to be some of the most critical to the decision-making process. Others also cited predictive analytics (38%) and the alignment of online and offline data (33%), with fewer pointing to omni-channel marketing (21%), AI/machine learning (21%) and programmatic advertising (20%) as critical trends.

Optimizing the Customer Journey A Key Objective

Some 45% of respondents report having a strategy in place to have unified marketing data, while about one-third (32%) say they have a strategy in the works. Only one-quarter (23%) say they don’t have a strategy, nor do they plan on having one.

One of the objectives that two-fifths (42%) of those surveyed hope to achieve with a data-driven strategy for decision-making is to optimize the customer journey.

Although more than half (54%) of the respondents to Ascend2’s survey represented small companies (fewer than 50 employees), recent research shows that the majority (81%) of enterprise companies also see the importance of a cohesive customer journey as a way to improve customer experience. Added to that, a data-driven customer journey-based approach has been found to be the preferred approach for high-performing customer experience professionals.

What’s more, while many respondents consider improving the customer journey to be a primary objective for their unified marketing data strategy, only 3 in 10 (29%) consider it to be a critical challenge.

The same cannot be said for other key objectives such as increasing customer loyalty (46%) and increasing conversion rates (43%), which a similar percentage of respondents also found to be challenging.

Other Highlights

  • Marketers consider engagement (47%), customer retention rate (46%), conversion rates (45%) and customer lifetime value (40%) to be some of the most useful data for making better marketing decisions;
  • On the other end of the spectrum, far fewer marketers find multi-touch attribution (17%) and funnel/pipeline (16%) data to be helpful in their decision-making.
  • Although a majority of marketers expect to see their budgets decrease due to the COVID-19 outbreak, almost half of the respondents to this recent survey (fielded in early April) say their data management budget is increasing moderately (34%) or significantly (13%).

The full report can be found here.

About the Data: Results are based on an online survey of 277 marketers from a mix of B2B (38%), B2C (39%) and B2B and B2C equally (23%) companies fielded in the first week of April 2020.

Chart-Library-Ad-1

Explore More Articles.

Which Skills Are Important in RevOps?

Which Skills Are Important in RevOps?

9 in 10 RevOps professionals view data analysis skills as being important, a high percentage also don’t believe they need this skill for their job.

Marketing Charts Logo

Stay on the cutting edge of marketing.

Sign up for our free newsletter.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This