CMO's Still Struggling To Piece Together Marketing Systems And Data

In this special report from Which-50, The Lumery’s Co-Founder and Head of Sales & Partnerships, Simon O’Day, reveals his insights into how marketers are unhappy with the level of integration between the different technology tools they use to do their jobs.

He highlighted how the challenges of integration are a natural next step to a modern marketer’s move into more and more data-driven work.
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“Today, marketers are more than used to being data-driven, and so getting much more across the need for data to build their programs. And vendors have exploded in this area to help assist and make this more normalised,” he told Which-50.

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When asked about the disappointment Which-50 has observed in the market, O’Day said it is likely the marketer buying the technology hasn’t understood what data is actually needed to ‘fuel’ their program and where and how to get that data for use in the marketing technology.
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“The easy answer is to blame salespeople but this is not a new challenge,” he said. “If someone has done a proper internal capability audit before embarking on using a martech stack in a modern way, then they will find the gaps in people, process, tech and the data needed — and factor them in.”

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A bigger problem, O’Day said, is the ability for marketers to access data from the other systems in the business that paint a holistic picture of a customer’s profile.
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“The largest problem that we see, day in and day out, is the inability for a marketer to access, structure and ingest data from the business core systems that house raw files, that enable a marketer to utilise it in a customer-friendly manner. Second to this is the lack of people who know how to address all of this.”

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O’Day recommended that marketers do the work upfront — before speaking to vendors — to clearly identify the problems they are trying to solve and how those align with the business goals. They should have a clear view of the data, skills and budget required before seeking out a technical solution.
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“From this most, if not all, integration and use case challenges will emerge and can either be solved or drive the outcome.”

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Read the full story here.