The State of Marketing 2012

Takeaways from IBM's global survey of marketers

Each year IBM interviews several hundred marketers to get a flavour of what the collective challenges, successes, fears and opportunities are.

It's interesting reading and always somehow comforting and inspiring to know you're not alone 🙂

In this post I've picked out 7 of the key takeaways. You can view the presentation on SlideShare here and see the background on the study here, though I've summarised the salient points in this post and added the key charts below.

Here are our 7 key take-aways

1. The more successful companies expand the role of marketing in order to lead the customer experience - the success factors here are born around having influence across the 4P's and so being able to optimise their company's purchase cycle more effectively.

2. As integration and channel complexity grows there's real need to be able to measure performance and ROI across multiple channels through effective attribution.

3. Email integration remains a significant and surprising challenge, with 66% of marketers saying email is either manually integrated or not at all. There are huge wins in this area for marketers to understand and then design around the customer conversion and purchase cycle.

4. The biggest perceived challenge for marketers (practitioners and senior managers) is the proliferation of new devices and channel choices (I referenced this in my post last week so interesting to see this in the IBM report) followed by the mechanics of managing customer collaboration and influence. Mapping customer engagement is key to help ensure rigour in existing against new channel investment.

5. Mobile (like email) remains a siloed tactic with only 21% integrating mobile into their campaigns in a meaningful way, probably not so surprising at the moment. Expect this to quickly change as marketers will increasingly have to follow their consumer into the mobile web.

6. An integrated view on data is critical. Not surprisingly, the ever increasing number of channels and proliferation of data sources are making life difficult - finding a way to manage and analyse data from more multiple sources is agreed as important by 85% of marketers.

7. IT alignment is key. It's no surprise at all that, given the importance of effective data collection and reporting, high performing marketing teams work closely with their IT counter-parts. We can only expect the value of this relationship within an organisation to get more important!

Do you recognise these or maybe other challenges? Share your thoughts below…