Digital Marketing: Are we reinventing fast enough?

To say that new tech­nolo­gies con­tin­ue to change the world would be a huge under­state­ment, and any­one who saw the round-the-block queues for the iPhone 6 last month could see that con­sumers have an over­whelm­ing desire to keep up-to-date with the lat­est trends. How­ev­er, it is some­times unclear if mar­keters are tak­ing advan­tage of new tech­nolo­gies or sim­ply play­ing catch up.

At the UK stop in a series of Euro­pean Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Sym­posia, Adobe unveiled new research which looked at the chang­ing roles of UK mar­keters. The research showed that a typ­i­cal mar­ket­ing role has an increas­ing­ly dig­i­tal focus, with 43% of the mar­keters sur­veyed say­ing that more than half of their mar­ket­ing activ­i­ty is now dig­i­tal – a sub­stan­tial 60% increase over the 2013 fig­ure. In addi­tion, dig­i­tal skills are now seen as cen­tral to almost all mar­ket­ing posi­tions with 92% stat­ing that they are impor­tant, includ­ing 99% of C‑level executives.

The surge in demand for dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing has been unprece­dent­ed, and mar­keters are doing very well in meet­ing this demand by devel­op­ing the required skills. 84% already have some lev­el of con­fi­dence in their dig­i­tal skills – a very high fig­ure which is up from 80% in 2013. A quar­ter now describe them­selves as ‘very con­fi­dent’ – this is up from only 8% in 2013, a huge increase of over 300%. How­ev­er, 18% still lack con­fi­dence and there is cer­tain­ly more work to be done if all dig­i­tal pri­or­i­ties are to be met.

Mar­keters are also still far from con­fi­dent across the whole dig­i­tal skills range. Ana­lyt­i­cal abil­i­ty is the area where mar­keters felt that they had the least con­fi­dence, with social ana­lyt­ics (25%), web ana­lyt­ics (27%) and mobile ana­lyt­ics (30%) com­ing out as the worst, even though over half of them have access to the right tools to do their day-to-day work.

Despite the huge growth in smart­phones, mobile was still not seen as high­ly impor­tant to most, with few list­ing mobile dig­i­tal skills as a pri­or­i­ty. This will almost cer­tain­ly have to change once the mar­ket­ing poten­tial of mobile devices is ful­ly harnessed.

The main rea­son mar­keters lacked con­fi­dence in cer­tain skills was a lack of train­ing – almost dou­ble all oth­er fac­tors at 30%. In addi­tion, train­ing was rarely a source for find­ing out about new tools and tech­niques: com­pa­ny train­ing (21%); online train­ing cours­es (21%); and in-per­son train­ing cours­es (17%) were the bot­tom three categories.

Mar­ket­ing is rapid­ly chang­ing and mar­keters need to con­tin­ue to invest in their skills through a mix of train­ing, direct expe­ri­ence and a hands-on approach to tech­nol­o­gy. Mar­keters have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to lead the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion with­in their company.

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