Key Insights: Real marketing automation scares and CMOs distrust the data “silver bullet”

We’re past Halloween but there are still many factors that give CMOs, their fellow senior, and other mid-level marketers the creepy crawlies. This week, we’re addressing them to help you move forward more effectively into the holiday season.

Questions that give marketers the chills

Our recent Marketing Automation Summit on October 22, 2020, saw hundreds of marketers convene over the future scope of marketing automation, the challenges, and possibilities. They were quick to share their fears and concerns with our expert panelists Brian Solis, Dave Dewey, Jon Miller, Rob Towne, and, Oliver Gedeihn. Here’s a list of some questions that give marketers the chills:

1. How do we know where to draw the line between automating things and letting us humans get the job done instead?
2. Which according to you is the most versatile marketing automation tool? 
3. How can you help upper management recognize the importance of allowing the marketer to have more leeway in what marketing is done? Any tips though? 
4. Any tips for designing/building scalable processes? 
5. Is the cost and energy of marketing for the future feasible for an SMB?
6. What are the top handful of Customer Journeys marketers should focus on? – Ex. Welcome journey, abandoned cart journey, re-engagement journey. 
7. How do you make Sales see the value e.g. of lead scoring and nurturing and why they should embrace this rather than sticking with their old cold calling? 
8. do you have a template for evaluating and identifying multi-touch sales attribution, only part of which might include an automated series of email touchpoints? 
9. Has the panel noticed any differences in how women/men and people from different backgrounds engage digitally with marketing? Do any of the panel have any useful insights into how the charity and not for profit sector are using automation well?
10. How do empathy (a very personal thing) and automation (a very tech / impersonal thing) merge? Can they? 

There’s more! Our panel of futurists and marketing automation experts were gracious to help out with answers.

Sign up cost-free to access all these answers and more insights.

CMO’s distrust in the data “silver bullet”: A horror story

According to Gartner’s recent study, by 2023, 60% of CMOs will slash the size of their marketing analytics departments in half. Why? Because CMOs didn’t see the promised improvements come to fruition. Even though there has been a stable three-year trend of CMOs prioritizing marketing analytics as a key enabler in supporting marketing strategy, what brings this disappointment? Gartner surveyed 400 respondents and these were some key findings:

• A large proportion of senior marketers (CMOs and VPs of marketing) are unimpressed by the results they receive from their marketing data and analytics investments. 
• 54% of senior marketing respondents in the Marketing Data and Analytics Survey 2020 indicated that marketing analytics has not had the influence within their organizations that they expected. 
• Only 54% of marketing decisions are being influenced by marketing analytics. 

Senior marketers deprioritize data science and campaign analysis

CMOs and VPs of marketing don’t think data is delivering vs the importance that mid-level marketer groups have been placing on it. Since they are the influencers for many drivers of change across multiple functions, here’s a graph to help you visualize the same.

Hence, the deprioritization. There is a black hole, a perceived gap in the effectiveness of data science, and campaign analysis. 

The board room divide: Silos between senior and mid-level management

The experience of senior and mid-level marketers are two sides of the veil. Turns out, there aren’t just “data silos” but also “perception silos” between the senior and mid-level. As data and analytics technologies have continued to prove essential and budgets assigned to these continually grow, what creates this contradiction? Midlevel marketers (Directors and Managers) are more likely to report that analytics, in fact, deliver the desired influence.

Why this difference?

A closer examination of this daunting disconnect between senior and midlevel marketers shows that the cause of it is mostly due to different priorities at different marketing leadership levels.

Here are some more key findings: 

• 44% of respondents expect that their analytics team size will grow over the next two years in an effort to make a bigger impact on business outcomes and support more advanced analytics capabilities
• Only 23% of respondents cite skill development as a top priority for their analytics team
• Teams devote more time to manual data management and preparation tasks
• 44% of respondents said they’re unable to measure marketing ROI

Top three reasons for lack of trust in data analytics for decision making

Even though 73% of marketers intend to use more data analytics in their decision making, the current state of trust in their data is very poor. These were the top reported reasons for the lack of trust in data:

1. Poor data quality
2. Inactionable results
3. Unclear recommendations

Here’s a complete look at all the factors involved.

ClickZ readers’ choice for the week

This week our readers have been most inclined towards the key takeaways of our Marketing Automation Summit, industry key insights, and why second-party data deserves a second look.

1. 8 key takeaways from ClickZ’s Marketing Automation Summit
2. Key Insights: Holiday shopping November spotlight, age profiles, preferences, and more
3. Why marketers are giving second-party data a second look