Data-Driven Marketing: A Survey of Marketing Automation Maturity in Global High-Tech Companies

Marketing has become technology, process, and data driven. On average, marketing operations teams at the large high-tech companies in this survey manage over a dozen major systems in an ecosystem that is rapidly evolving. The purpose of this survey was to assess the technology load on marketing organizations in terms of number, scope, and scale of systems as well as adoption, effectiveness, resources, and overall satisfaction levels. There are many interesting results from the data:

• Companies that take an enterprise approach to managing the customer creation process make the most effective use of their marketing infrastructures.
• Data-driven marketing requires many types of systems working together. They must be managed, matured, and optimized together to be most effective.
• Business intelligence (BI) competency is critical — it's one thing to have the data, it's another to use it.
• Penetration into the intended user base for each marketing system is the key:
• Leaders have achieved 90% or higher user adoption for the four pillars of any digital marketing infrastructure: campaign management, Web content management, CRM/SFA, and customer database. By comparison, laggards average only one over 90%.
• Leaders have achieved 75% or higher user adoption for 9 out of the 13 key digital marketing technologies categories we included in our survey. Laggards average only five systems at or above 75% adoption.
• Most respondents (even leaders) believe they have not realized much of the potential they see in their marketing systems.
• Organizational, process, content, and data readiness are seen as the major impediments to reaching the full potential of digital marketing infrastructures.

Clients of IDC's CMO Advisory can access the full document here.