Digital Marketers Anticipate More Complexity While Struggling to Innovate

New research indicates that digital marketers anticipate more complexity in the future, yet their organizations are falling short when it comes to innovation.

The “2016 Digital Marketing Outlook” report conducted by SoDA and Forrester discovered that the large majority of marketers (84 percent) believe they will face a high or very high level of complexity over the next five years. However, more than one-third of respondents (38 percent) say that their organization is only somewhat innovative in terms of digital initiatives.

Additionally, nearly half of marketers (46 percent) stated that their company is only making minor innovations to product and service offerings, as well as customer engagement.

Despite these potential setbacks, digital marketers are confident in their own skills to handle the bump in complexity.

“Fifty-six percent, over half of marketers polled, feel ‘quite’ or ‘very prepared,’ a jump of 26 percentage points over 2015,” the researchers noted. “This increase further supports the notion that marketers are entering a new mental state in terms of handling digital and will seek different types of digital support compared to the past.”

A Look at B2B Digital Marketing Challenges

In terms of B2B digital marketing, budgets are the largest challenge for many organizations. The “2016 State of B2B Digital Marketing” survey from Ascend2 revealed that 43 percent of B2B marketers claimed an inadequate marketing budget was their most significant barrier to success.

A lack of internal skills/training (39 percent), a lack of effective strategy (36 percent) and inadequate analytics (29 percent) were also named top challenges. However, 84 percent of B2B marketers still claimed that their strategies have been relatively successful thus far.