Data-Related Investments Yielding Speedy ROI for Marketers

A survey conducted at the 2014 DMA Annual Conference for data-driven marketing found that 47 percent of brands are already seeing positive ROI from data-related investments made over the past few years, an eight percentage point increase from last year’s results.

Infogroup, a company dedicated to providing B2B data solutions, surveyed approximately 600 DMA conference attendees to compile its findings. The survey has been conducted at the DMA conference for three years in a row. Information shows that marketers have continued to increase their data-driven marketing budgets throughout this time.

“Data investment is quickly reaching an important turning point,” said Gretchen Littlefield, president of Infogroup. “With nearly half of marketers experiencing ROI, data-driven marketing is no longer an emerging field. It’s standard practice.”

About 64 percent of survey respondents said that they expect their data-driven marketing budgets to increase in 2015. Approximately 15 percent of marketers said that they will begin investing in these types of initiatives in the coming year.

“Marketing is equal parts art and science, and positive ROI indicates that the industry has started to master the science portion of data collection and analysis,” Littlefield continued. “We anticipate that data-driven investment and returns will steadily rise in the next few years.”

Continuing Problems with Big Data

Despite the shift in investment, big data integration is still in its infancy, which means that there are hurdles to overcome. A webinar hosted by CMS Wire in September by Amit Varshneya of Demandbase and Holger Schulze of eG Innovations looked at data reflecting poor data integration in the B2B industry.

Schulze and Varshneya reviewed the results of the “Trends and Challenges of B2B Marketing Analytics in 2014” survey, which included responses from 500 marketing professionals. They found that 54 percent of people claim that a lack of systems integration has been a big challenge in 2014.

Additionally, 44 percent of people thought that poor data quality was a marketing hurdle, while 34 percent said that a lack of resources has caused issues as of late. However, 46 percent of respondents said that they still expect their analytics budgets to grow in the future.