A report released by cross-platform software platform Signal, shows that just 5% of Australian marketers have a single view of their customer despite 78% highlighting that it's important for their role.
While the vast majority of marketers indicated in the report that understanding their customers across platform was vital, Warren Billington, Signal’s managing director for APAC told AdNews that he wasn't surprised that the numbers were so far apart between identifying the need and putting a strategy into action.
“Customers are using a variety of on and offline channels so understanding that view has become really quite difficult,” he said.
“One of the key reasons is that marketers are still operating in silos in particular channels, so their technologies appear to be aligned to those channels. We have a situation where they're technologies are hard to integrate.
“It's hard to share data and insights across those technologies so there's a lot of fragmentation and complexity around connecting insights.”
Some of the key findings of the report include: 66% of marketers said that fragmented data leads to incomplete marketing measurement while 60% said it hinders the ability to personalise customer experiences. 44% also said they can’t understand the customer journey with incomplete data, and 20% said it causes inefficient media buying.
According to the report one of the main challenges is gathering and matching data, with 60% of marketers saying they are unable to merge customer profile fragments as data becomes available, and 59% can’t collect and connect data across channels.
Billington told AdNews that things can change very quickly and what is needed is a data layer to tie together all of a marketers technology layers.
“We're not suggesting marketers rethink their technology platforms, but rather think about the importance of that central data layer so they make better decisions within the technology platform they already have.
“Certainly the intent is there from marketers, it has been slowed or made difficult by factors such as technology fragmentation, so when you're trying to share insights it gets really hard. a new model around a data infrastructure and that should underpin everything marketers do, you have to get the data foundation right,” Billington continued.
The results of this report come from a survey of nearly 200 Australian marketers conducted in March 2015 by Signal.
Signal also carried out the same survey with nearly 200 marketers in the US, Canada, Latin America, UK and Europe, Asia, and Middle East.
The Australian report can be viewed here and the global report here.
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