COVID-19 Update
Subscribe

Study: Marketers Seeking In-Department Technology Officers

DNN LogoMarketers are looking to bring a chief technology officer (CTO) into the marketing department to help them sort out the array of marketing technology being used.

This is according to a study, titled: Marketing Got Complicated: Challenges (and Opportunities) for Marketers at Mid-Size Companies. The research was commissioned by marketing software company DNN to better understand the challenges facing marketers at companies in the mid-sized segment, defined as those with 50 to 5,000 employees.

The study, conducted in conjunction with Lawless Research, analyzed input from more than 300 marketing executives at U.S. companies during February 2014.

Nearly two thirds of the respondents (63%) say they have too many marketing technology vendors to manage. More than half of the study’s respondents (53%) use five or more discrete marketing technology solutions, including marketing automation software, CRM, email marketing and social media tools.

“The majority say they need a mini chief information officer (CIO) to help them manage the flood of technology options,” said Dennis Shiao, Director of Product Marketing, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “They need help dealing with and integrating the myriad apps, platforms

Additional key findings include:

  • The top three marketing priorities for mid-sized companies in 2014 are to acquire new customers (87%), increase customer retention (86%), and increase brand awareness (80%);
  • 79% of marketing executives say it’s a challenge to get (and hold) the attention of target customers, and 72% say it’s difficult to find their target audiences online;
  • 70% agree that marketing has become more challenging, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the wide range of technology solutions available to them;
  • 53% of mid-sized companies use five or more marketing technology solutions. 15% use 10 or more; and
  • 79% of respondents somewhat or strongly agree that online communities are a “critical channel” for their marketing efforts. By the end of the year, 77% of respondents say their companies plan to have online communities in place, 90% of them including customers, 77% including employees. 

 

A full copy of the report is available at the DNN site.