Report: 44% of Marketers are at a ‘Basic’ Level of Audience Management Maturity

Marketers have more data than ever before on their target audiences, but new research suggests that many of them are still basic in terms of audience management maturity.

Merkle and MarTech Advisor recently published the “State of Audience Management Maturity” report, and statistics found that 44% of marketers only consider themselves to be at a “basic” level of audience management maturity. This is despite the fact that they have multiple tools deployed for both audience definition and management.

“Basic” is defined as being at the start of the journey toward determining effective audience management for cross-channel campaign orchestration.

The top audience management tools, according to the report, are the marketing cloud (12.3%), CRM (12.3%) and other (20.4%), which may be defined as manual or home-grown methods.

Marketers Still Struggling to Harness Customer Data

The key to better audience management may be harnessing customer data, but previous research suggests that this is still a struggle for many marketers.

Fospha conducted “The State of Marketing Measurement, Attribution and Data Management” report and found that 34% of all marketers believe their company only analyzes less than 20% of all customer data available to them. Comparatively, less than 15% of marketers believe that they process and analyze between 81% and 100% of data for marketing purposes.

“Brands need access to and understanding of their own data across all platforms,” wrote the authors of the report. “This will allow them to have a transparent view of their audience’s behavior, creating a mutually beneficial relationship between brand and consumer.”