Marketers are ‘clueless about data’

A new IBM study has confirmed what direct marketers have been saying for years: the future is bright; the future is data. And, with the vast majority of client marketers clueless about how to embrace it, the future could be even brighter for agencies and data experts.
According to IBM’s 2011 global CMO, the majority of marketers across the world still feel underprepared to meet a predicted “data explosion” – sparked by the rise of social media – that will allow them to better measure campaign ROI.
The study found that 87% of marketing chiefs in the UK and Ireland and 71% globally feel ill-equipped to deal with the increasing need for analysis and the overwhelming “volume, velocity and variety” of data.
And even though nearly two-thirds now think ROI will be the primary measure of the effectiveness by 2015, even among the most successful enterprises, half of all marketing bosses feel insufficiently prepared to provide hard numbers.
And most of these executives – responsible for the integrated marketing of their organisation’s products, services and brand reputations – say they lack significant influence in key areas such as product development, pricing and selection of sales channels.
The IBM study found that while 82% of marketers say they plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years, only 26% are currently tracking blogs, 42% tracking third party reviews and 48% are tracking consumer reviews to help shape their marketing strategies.
“The inflection point created by social media represents a permanent change in the nature of customer relationships,” said Carolyn Heller Baird, CRM research lead for the IBM Institute for Business Value and the global director of the study. “Some 90% of all the real-time information being created today is unstructured data. Marketers who successfully harness this new source of insight will be in a strong position to increase revenues, reinvent their customer relationships and build new brand value.”
Baird likened marketers who underestimate the impact of social media to those who were slow to view the Internet as a new and powerful platform for commerce. Like the rise of e-business more than a decade ago, the radical embrace of social media by all customer demographic categories represents an opportunity for marketers to drive increased revenue, brand value and to reinvent the nature of the relationship between enterprises and the buyers of their offering, the study claims.
Marketers who establish a culture receptive to deriving insight from social media will be far better prepared to anticipate future shifts in markets and technology, it concludes.

1 Trackbacks & Pingbacks

  1. 2011 review: year of hack attack

Comments are closed.