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Survey shows marketers' investment priorities

Edited by the Marketingservicestalk editorial team Feb 7, 2008

The road to customer centricity sees analytics keeping pace with digital marketing spend as seven out of ten cite investment in this area as key priority for 2008.

Alterian, the global enterprise marketing platform provider, has released the results of its fifth Annual Marketing Survey, which revealed that marketers' priorities for 2008 are firmly rooted in database and analytics with 67 per cent allocating additional resources to this area.

With responses from almost 900 marketers, agencies, marketing services providers and systems integrators, the survey provides a comprehensive analysis of spending and investment priorities for the industry.

As marketers continue to grow their online marketing programmes, investments in databases and analytics are correspondingly on the rise in support of these efforts.

Alterian found that 45 per cent of marketers are now spending over $500,000 on online marketing, compared with only 37 per cent in 2006.

These marketers are not approaching their online programmes unprepared; 67 per cent of marketers responded that database and analytics are the most sought after skill set and warrant the heaviest investments.

When it comes to effective online marketing, these results reflect that marketers are now marching down the path to become analytically led.

A single view of the customer? Depends on which application you open.

Despite heightened discussion over the past ten years about maintaining a single view of the customer, the industry is still spending huge amounts of time updating different applications with seven out of ten (69 per cent) respondents using more than three marketing applications everyday to do their job.

A staggering one in five (20 per cent) marketers use more than seven separate applications to store and analyse marketing and campaign data, pointing towards a core requirement for an analytical marketing platform that can pull this data together and make sense of it.

A recent Forrester Research report released in January 2008 titled "The Forrester Wave TM: Enterprise Marketing Platform, Q1 2008", states "83 per cent of marketers, a significant majority, tell us that they need a comprehensive marketing suite to improve their effectiveness".

Commenting on the survey results, David Eldridge, CEO, Alterian, said: "Despite the current economic situation receiving much coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, investment in marketing, specifically online marketing, be it outsourced to agencies or in-house, continues to grow with only seven per cent of our respondents citing no planned resource increase".

Eldridge continued: "The focus of this year's survey is clearly on making that first step on the journey to customer centricity, whatever that starting point might be for your company.

"Marketing that is led by an integrated database and analytical foundation will continue to drive online programmes, and increased spending in this area will continue to improve the customer experience.".