64% of B2B marketers feel underinvested in technology

Any doubt that marketing is becoming a technology-powered discipline?

The ITSMA (Information Technology Services Marketing Association) shared results from their latest survey on marketing technology at a briefing outside of Boston earlier this week. The slide above shows the big picture result: today, 21% of B2B marketers believe that marketing technology is critical to deliver on marketing’s business objectives. But in 2 years, 60% expect marketing technology will be critical to that mission.

This survey was conducted with 87 marketing technology users, mostly ITSMA members. 86% were B2B only companies, 62% of the participants were director-level or above, and 53% of the participants were firms with over $1 billion revenues.

While acknowledging the increasing criticality of marketing technology, the survey also revealed many of the challenges that marketers are facing in adapting to this new tech-heavy environment: budget and skills, planning and process, and organizational barriers. Some of the key stats that participants reported on these difficulties:

• 64% feel underinvested in marketing technology
• 45% are unable to access marketing technology skills
• 35% lack resources for training and technology adoption
• 58% have cobbled their technology together without a strategy or plan
• 35% have inefficient processes, even with technology
• 66% have no documented IT policies or governance over marketing technology integration and interoperability
• 45% report poor data quality and/or organizational data silos
• 46% have a less than satisfactory relationship with IT

So clearly we have our work cut out for us.

But an encouraging result from the survey was the recognition marketing technology frontrunners — the subset of participants who rated their organizations as approaching “industry best practices” with their marketing technology initiatives — reported that they are outperforming their peers who were marketing technology followers on many dimensions:

In reviewing the practices that were associated with those marketing technology frontrunners, the ITSMA made the following recommendations to those who want to catch up with them:

1. Foster a culture that values data and analytics as much as, if not more than, marketing’s creative legacy.
2. Create a marketing technology strategy and plan.
3. Up the ante and invest in technology, training, and adoption.
4. Don’t skimp on process design and documentation.
5. Reach out and collaborate with IT to define a marketing infrastructure roadmap.

Granted, those recommendations are easier said than done. But as five goals for marketing management to target, I agree that’s right on track.