Top priorities and common challenges for market leaders 2018
As you already know, most marketing managers have bought into the need for speed when it comes to change and are actively working to meet their customers digitally. But what are market leaders’ top priorities 2018 when it comes to marketing technology investments? And their biggest challenges?
We know.
Wiraya and Odyssey, suppliers in Martech, have interviewed market leaders in a variety of industries to investigate this. The insights from the interviews have been compiled in the report Martech 2018.
Priorities 2018
1. Cooperation across the organisation
Working together across business functions is the only way forward since the development of an efficient customer journey relies on several departments across the organisation.
Marketing leaders are collaborative and they list broad cooperation across organisational boundaries as one of the top success factors to create the best customer experience. Focussing on the customer is today an absolute necessity.
2. Customer journeys – translated into data
Marketing departments have come a long way in defining customer journeys. However, few have succeeded in translating the process into an automated and data-driven process based on customer data. The challenge is effectively implementing this approach into existing systems and processes.
Many businesses are looking to moving several phases in the customer journey to digital interactions. Customers demand simplicity and want to complete their tasks fast and efficient. Marketing managers say they will continue to invest in technology in the upcoming years to automate customer interactions and improve data management.
3. They want to educate and be educated
According to the study marketing departments are responsible for the majority of customer insights for the business. This means that understanding customer needs and feedback is higher amongst marketing staff in the organisation. As a result, they often market themselves as the customer’s voice in the organisation.
Now, customer knowledge and understanding need to be shared across the rest of the organisation. It’s important marketing leaders focus on transferring these customer insights to others within the organisation, and increase their own knowledge on suitable technology platforms that can transform the knowledge of the customer into an even better digital customer experience.
Common challenges 2018
1. Process changes
Many marketing departments are currently undergoing a transformation towards a more customer-focused approach, but there are only a few internal processes in place. You want to be able to digitalise the customer journey as much as possible and to make it easier for the customer, while also streamlining the marketing organisation.
2. Competence
Develop the competence of the existing staff to transform to a more digital approach is a challenging mission. Many of the interviewed said they need to build competence internally in order to be able to work in a more agile and flexible way. But they also realise that they may need to buy consultancy services short-term in order to quickly adapt and change.
3. Demand for analytics
Lack of analysts is a major problem for most of the companies in the survey. The analysts are needed to process, analyze and recommend how to act on the customer data collected. Furthermore, they find it difficult to get a complete picture of the data, especially when the larger organisations are stuck in old legacy systems that aren’t integrated.
Read more about the four key areas in Marketing Technology that will help your organisation to become more profitable and take your digitalisation to the next level here.
