Dive Brief:

• About 55% of marketers report working on technology systems that extend marketing’s view of the customer to include insights from all impact and interaction points in the customer journey, according to a new study from the CMO Council and SAP.
• The study, called “Context, Commerce and Customer: Best Practices to Exceed Expectations," details the importance of integrating customer data with marketing technology like marketing automation and CRM systems. The study is based on a survey of 170 global marketing leaders.
• However, the study also found that 17% of respondents were not convinced that achieving this integrated view of data via dashboards was possible at their organizations.

Dive Insight:

Data is a key chess piece for effective digital marketing, but it remains a challenge and requires effort to fully integrate data with different martech offerings. 

The report highlighted the top points of martech impact are increased measurability and tracking of campaigns and programs (42%), increased engagement across the customer journey (41%), and automated processes and campaigns, connected engagement dots, and accelerated rate of engagement at a lower cost (all at 25%). The top sources for marketing data cited by the research include: contact-level data (81%), campaign data (69%), CRM system data (68%), billing/payment data (50%), and sales data (49%).

“With the advancement of marketing technologies and tools in recent years, marketers have benefitted from greater transparency into the measurement of traditional marketing practices. And while this has helped marketers somewhat, it still falls short of providing a holistic, real-time view of the customer and their interactions at every step of the journey,” Liz Miller, senior vice president of marketing for the CMO Council, said in a statement.

More effective sharing and use of data and intelligence is needed to create a more seamless user experience, the CMO Council said in a press release. The survey results reveal that important internal data can often become "trapped in organizational silos and harder to aggregate and reach."

“The new challenge will be to extend the processes and platforms that power the customer experience beyond the comfortable walls of marketing," Miller said.

"This demands that the entire organization—from HR to operations and the supply chain—be connected and aligned around a live view of the customer as an individual … a view that takes the past, present and future state of that individual into context in real-time,” Jamie Anderson, senior vice president and Chief Marketing Officer at SAP Hybris, said about the research.