Survey: Marketers Still Struggling with Automation and Content Personalization

Although marketers are focused on marketing automation to achieve their top priorities, research shows that they are still facing numerous barriers when it comes to executing this tactic.

Ascend2 recently conducted the “Optimizing Marketing Automation” survey to determine how marketers are faring in terms of marketing automation. Forty-six percent of best-in-class marketers said that they are “very successful” at achieving their top priorities through marketing automation optimization. However, respondents are still struggling with delivering personalized content (44 percent), integrating all marketing systems (43 percent) and creating a successful strategy (41 percent).

Other barriers to marketing automation success include achieving data unification (38 percent), improving the user experience (37 percent), streamlining marketing processes (30 percent) and enhancing measurement and reporting (30 percent).

To overcome these barriers and optimize marketing automation, most marketers (53 percent) are having the most success with customer experience mapping. Fifty-one percent are offering personalized/dynamic content, while 40 percent are focused on prospect/customer re-engagement.

Marketing Priorities and Content Personalization

While 44 percent of marketers may have stated that they are still struggling to deliver personalized content, this is not prohibiting them from making it a top priority in 2018.

Widen recently published the “2018 Connectivity Report” to take a closer look at how customer relationships are changing through personalization. Statistics showed that one-quarter of respondents (28 percent) claimed that personalizing the customer experience is what their organization is most focused on this year.

To achieve their personalization goals, most marketers (72.72 percent) said that the use of data and analytics for smarter targeting is helping their efforts.