Marketers have been challenged by recent data privacy changes, and 90% have fundamentally altered how they measure marketing performance according to Marketing Intelligence Report, a study released
Wednesday by Salesforce.
For instance, brands have made the following investments in technology in an effort to cope with privacy changes:
- Marketing analytics and measurement technology — 52%
- Customer-data platform technology — 50%
- Real-time interaction and personalization technology — 45%
- Content management technology — 44%
- Identity
enrichment and resolution technology — 41%
But fewer than half are very confident in their ability to do the following in the face of the recent
changes:
- Hit sales or business targets — 42%
- Create personalized customer experiences — 40%
- Identify and target relevant audiences — 39%
- Compare marketing performance across channels — 38%
- Measure marketing ROI —
37%
Among other privacy shifts, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection has reduced the relevance of email opens, and Google’s third-party cookie deprecation has pushed
businesses to “a consumer-first, content-based approach to data collection,” the study states.
As a result of all this, brands have invested in these marketing tactics in
response to the changes, with email marketing falling far down the list:
- Paid social —54%
- Mobile marketing — 52%
- Web experiences — 51%
- Content marketing — 49%
- Paid search —
48%
- Email marketing — 43%
- Event marketing — 41%
- Programmatic/display advertising — 40%
- Affiliate marketing — 39%
- Out-of-home marketing —
38%
- Connected TV/OTT marketing — 36%
- Traditional TV/radio advertising — 32%
Email
investments remained the same for 42%. And 13% reported a decrease.
But companies face serious challenges: 80% say their ability to track ROI for each investment needs
improvement. And 33% aver that their insights are too slow for marketing decision-making.
The study separates companies into high performers (17%), moderate performers (69%) and
underperformers (!5%).
It shows that 48% of the high performers are completely satisfied with their ability to drive email opt-ins, as are 42% of moderate performers and 36% of the
underperformers.
But 59% of the high performers are satisfied with their ability to generate sales, while 51% are satisfied with audience/follower growth. In addition,
51% are able to fuel form fills and sign-ups, 51% to achieve product adoption, 51% to create content downloads and 52% to pull website visits.
Brands also say these disciplines are key
to driving marketing-led growth:
- Data quality — 79%
- Shared marketing and sales business objectives —
74%
- Cross-channel analytics — 73%
- Collaboration across distributed teams — 73%
- Real-time
personalization — 73%
- Testing new marketing channels/platforms — 71%
- Artificial intelligence performance insights —
69%
- Unified customer profiles — 67%
Similarly, they see these skills also fuel customer experience:
- Data quality —
77%
- Shared marketing and sales business objectives — 75%
- Cross-channel analytics — 72%
- Collaboration across distributed
teams — 75%
- Real-time personalization — 74%
- Testing new marketing channels/platforms —
72%
- Artificial intelligence performance insights —71%
- Unified customer profiles — 71%
In another finding, the study shows that 40% say their cross-channel data integration is mostly or entirely automatic. But 42% have an even mix of manual and automatic, and 17% are entirely
manual.
Salesforce surveyed 2,583 marketing decision makers worldwide.