15 Mind-Blowing Stats About Data-Driven Marketing

Despite marketers’ commitment to collecting and mining data to inform strategy, there’s still a ton of room for improvement in turning intelligence into actionable insights.

by Giselle Abramovich

Posted on 05-05-2016

The practice of collecting and mining data to inform marketing strategy has become commonplace for many marketers. However, despite this commitment to data-driven marketing, there’s still a ton of room for improvement in turning intelligence into actionable insights. 

For the latest stats, read the Adobe Digital Economy Index for 2020.

Here are the stats from 2016:

1. Today data-driven marketing is either embedded or strategic for 78% of marketers.

2. Speed is the second most-cited benefit of data-driven marketing, after accuracy, cited by 67%.

3. Sixty-three percent of marketers reported that their spending on data-driven marketing and advertising grew over the last year.

4. Fifty-three percent of marketers said “a demand to deliver more relevant communications/be more ‘customer-centric’” is among the most important factors driving their investment in data-driven marketing.

5. Sixty-four percent of marketing executives “strongly agree” that data-driven marketing is crucial to success in a hypercompetitive global economy.

6. Fifty-three percent of organizations have instituted an enterprisewide vision for data analytics.

7. Eighty-seven percent of marketers consider data their organizations’ most underutilized asset.

8. Almost half (49%) of brand executives feel “significant pressure” to increase data’s role in their current strategy.

9. More than half (54%) of companies say their biggest challenge to data-driven marketing success is the lack of data quality and completeness.

10. Marketers want recognition for their data-driven marketing performance. Therefore, increasing revenue that can be attributed to marketing is their top objective (44%) for the year ahead.

11. Only 19% of marketers track all of their marketing efforts in order to drive improvement via reporting. Best-in-class marketers are 56% more likely to use data and analytics platforms.

12. Marketing data and analytics users are 57% more effective at increasing their productivity with integrated marketing technologies.

13. A whopping 92.3% of organizations maintain databases to host information on customers or prospects, at least to some extent.

14. Additionally, 90.7% of U.S. ad and marketing professionals said they segment data to better target and engage addressable customer, or B2B, audiences. Some 50.5% said they were more advanced in that area.

15. Spending on data-driven marketing is about 20% of all marketing spend ($1.3 trillion a year spent on marketing in the U.S.).

Topics: CMO by Adobe, Experience Cloud, Insights Inspiration, Digital Transformation, Digital Foundation, Analytics

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