Digital marketing has helped marketers get through extraordinarily challenging business conditions by interacting with customers who were stranded at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, digitizing goods and services, and boosting sales.
It’s time to build on those accomplishments by strengthening their dedication to developing their data and digital competence, creating a culture of continuous learning and experimentation, and utilizing insights to provide customers with tailored services for a greater Return on Investment (ROI).
Marketers are aware that digital marketing is what will drive their industry forward.
Because of this, they are content to devote 57% of their budgets to digital marketing operations. They want to raise spending by another 16% in 2023, according to the February 2022 edition of The CMO Survey.
However, the poll discovered that this contribution had declined during the previous 12 months. More than 30% of marketers who took part in the survey claimed to be seeing mediocre to no returns on their efforts, which might lead to future financial issues if they are not able to shut this void.
What can marketers do about the declining returns and why are they happening? Here are the three causes of the performance difference in digital marketing.
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There isn’t a completely integrated digital marketing organization in place for businesses
In the August 2021 edition of The CMO Survey, more than 60% of marketing executives stated that their organizations were either in the beginning stages (i.e., conceptualizing and designing their digital transformation) or the later stages (i.e., developing non-integrated digital elements) of this journey.
Simply having a digital marketing division is insufficient. To realize its full potential, digital marketing has to be wholly integrated throughout the business and utilized to inform and assess marketing choices. Unfortunately, the majority of companies do not now operate that way.
Data belonging to third parties will be lost if privacy laws change
The way third-party data is used is evolving in response to rising consumer privacy concerns and the gradual removal of third-party cookie support. Marketers are aware of the difficulty and say that they are increasing their investments in managing consumer privacy issues as well as their efforts to better understand customers outside of their company’s own websites and applications. In order to create value and transform digital investments into profits, it is crucial to have this insight in order to learn about consumers, recognize new possibilities, and segment and target them efficiently.
Many businesses contract out their digital marketing activities
Due to the scarcity of qualified candidates and the associated expenditures; businesses have typically not established internal digital teams.
But perhaps it’s time to reconsider this. When an external agency is in charge of the majority, if not all, of a company’s digital activities, maintaining brand consistency and developing a fully integrated brand strategy becomes more and more difficult as digital plays a growing part in a company’s marketing initiatives.
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Like other corporate activities, marketers are also under pressure to provide results faster. Staff that works in-house and don’t have as many clients as agency partners can usually move more quickly. Therefore, if marketers are not in charge of creating strategy and maintaining customer data, they may be leaving out a critical aspect of the Customer Experience (CX) and bringing delayed returns to the company.
Data analytics presents a challenging learning curve for marketing teams
In the past; marketing executives have prioritized website optimization when discussing expenditures in digital marketing. With a surge in the number of businesses spending on data analytics, however, those investments changed substantially in 2022, making this the highest investment recorded by marketing leaders.
The difficulty is that marketing tech stacks are getting more complicated. Although enterprises invest in the technology required to compete with their technologically advanced competitors, there is a learning curve correlated with better data analytics, so it will probably take some time before marketers see significant returns for their businesses.