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.

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.).