Survey: Organizations Continue to Boost Investments in Digital Marketing

As companies continue to reap the benefits of digital marketing, new research suggests that they are investing more in this area to improve their overall performance.

The 27th edition of The CMO Survey was recently published by Deloitte, the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, and the American Marketing Association. Statistics showed that over the last year, most companies (77.4%) invested in the optimization of their website to improve the performance of their digital marketing activities. This was followed by digital media and search (69%), data analytics (65.7%) and direct digital marketing (63.6%).

Interestingly, many intend on automating some of their efforts in the near future. The majority of respondents (37.7%) said that they will be increasing their use of artificial intelligence or machine learning by upwards of 40% over the next three years, specifically for marketing initiatives.

Optimizing Marketing Automation for Success

Some organizations are turning to automation to continue benefiting from digital marketing, but previous research indicates that it will not come without obstacles.

Ascend2 conducted its “Optimizing Marketing Automation” survey, and data showed that only 46% of best-in-class marketers claimed they are “very successful” at achieving their top priorities through marketing automation optimization. Some of the most common barriers to marketing automation success are achieving data unification (38%), improving the user experience (37%) and streamlining marketing processes (30%).

Marketers are also still struggling with delivering personalized content (44%), integrating all of their marketing systems (43%), and creating a successful strategy (41%).