Many marketers went into their jobs with the preconceived notion that it would entail flexing their creative muscles. But reality paints a completely different picture of what consumes the average marketer’s day-to-day. Wrangling tech issues, putting out fires, neverending syncs, or even stepping into a marketing/data-science hybrid role. Not exactly the brainstorming, brand-focused paradise that was promised. These issues are no fault of marketers or data scientists — tech stacks are letting teams down and keeping them from bringing their strategies to life.
Foundational issues sabotage progress and productivity
As with most issues that arise within business processes, there isn’t a surface level fix that will make things run smoothly. It’s often a foundational inaccuracy that’s elicited all the problems you can clearly identify. Much like a toothache might be a direct result of a cavity, but the real solution isn’t just to have it filled — you have to reexamine how you could be brushing your teeth incorrectly.
For marketers, most issues boil down to difficulties managing, storing, and effectively using customer data. This is caused by a lack of proper or effective technology and how their business has organized teams — so it’s no wonder that these foundational issues are resulting in up to a month of additional campaign ramp times.
Marketers aren’t able to create a cohesive customer journey because they’ve been placed in siloed, channel-centric roles with siloed data. 67% of marketers say these organizational disconnects have slowed down their teams from enhancing the customer experience. Email marketers are working off of different goals and data from mobile marketers, but they’re messaging the exact same customers. Additionally, leadership may emphasize certain metrics for each channel marketer and these channels rapidly evolve away from each other.
Adding in sub-par customer data sources, the entire situation is a CX nightmare waiting to happen. Over three in five businesses that store data in multiple systems, rather than a unified ecosystem, believe their organization does not have the tools/technology needed to best execute campaigns using their collected customer data. And of those folks who use multiple, disparate systems 69% feel that friction within their martech stack hinders campaign execution.
Band-aid solutions are often applied to these core issues — such as buying a new marketing automation tool or purchasing third-party data. Ultimately, these might give a temporary boost to growth, but the same issues will still keep marketers from being as successful as they can be. Your organization needs to build teams and customer data profiles from the ground up to ensure that you can be successful in making your best ideas come to life.
Data activation can bring your brightest ideas to life
Luckily, the answer to the customer data problem isn’t rocket science (it’s data science). A unified source of truth that guides further automation and decisioning can reduce campaign start-up times, and improve accuracy and conversions.
The key to building the strongest data foundation possible is about finding the right tech partner — because everything else that’s done within marketing functions will reflect the health of your data. Take for example Blueshift’s Customer Data Activation Platform, which solves for foundational fragmentation and activates customer data through the power of AI. The end result? Nimble, cross-functional marketing teams that spend more time dreaming than they do cleaning lists and crunching numbers, and happy customers who get messaging that’s meaningful on a 1:1 level.
Want to learn more about what’s holding you back — and how top businesses are fixing their customer data faux pas? Download the complete Marketer vs. Martech report. Or, if you’re ready to see the platform in action, book a demo with our data activation experts today.
