From cloud adoption to customer journey analytics – the challenges and trends for data-driven marketers in 2022

4 min read

Discover a brief overview of the findings of our Data Trends Report 2022.

Still shadowed by the pandemic, 2021 was unlike many other years. How did this change marketers in terms of their priorities and goals? To gain a clearer view on the biggest trends and challenges impacting customer analytics and campaign management, we surveyed a diverse range of 200 marketing, data and campaign professionals through our annual Apteco Live user group conference in November 2021.

Here is a brief overview of some of our key findings.

What is your greatest success in marketing analytics?

Let’s start with the successes. Through the survey, we wanted to know what respondents considered as their greatest achievements based on applying marketing analytics.

The largest group (38%) indicated that understanding their customer base was the greatest success. Building a better understanding of customers includes gathering insights across a range of attributes and behaviours. For instance, it was important to gather answers to questions such as:

• Who are my top customers and what do they look like?
• Where do customers live and how far are they away from the next local store?
• How much and when do they buy?
  …and much more.

The next two achievements identified by respondents were personalising and targeting campaigns (26%), and understanding where the organisation generates value (14%).

Do you take a cloud first approach to application deployment?

As the use of cloud computing is generally on the rise and brings many economic, technical, and organisational advantages, we were interested in understanding the status of cloud adoption for marketing systems. We found that 61% of respondents already use some form of cloud system. 43% stated that they currently use a mix of cloud, hosted, and on-premise systems. 18% even stated that they always aim to deploy cloud applications.

Despite these positive results, we also saw that a significant share (30%) of the respondents said that they don’t know what their organisation’s approach towards cloud is. This could either be a sign of some scepticism about cloud systems and their providers or an implication that cloud is viewed as more of an IT concern rather than a marketing interest. 

What is the biggest challenge you face in using your current MarTech stack efficiently?

It’s interesting to note that several other, independent studies report that marketers face challenges in using their MarTech stacks efficiently. A recent study by MarTech reported that 67% of respondents had replaced a MarTech solution in the past year. Another study by Gartner found that 68% of respondents were struggling to utilise their stack’s full breadth of capabilities. We were therefore keen to learn more about the factors that make it difficult for marketers to use their MarTech stacks efficiently.

We found that for a majority (41%), data quality is the biggest challenge, followed by data reconciliation across channels, data timeliness, and interoperability with other tools.

Interestingly, our findings also suggest that issues such as a lack of technical skills, ease of use, or technology licensing costs weren’t cited as significant challenges.

What are the most important trends for your organisation in 2022?

When we analysed results from the survey, the top trend wasn't a big surprise. Customer journey analytics had been voted as the top trend in last year’s survey. So, why does this trend persist as the most important?

On the one hand, customer journey analytics provides marketers with the key insights they need to deliver a highly personalised, seamless, secure, on-demand, and omni-channel customer experience. On the other hand, employing customer journey analytics successfully is a complex process.

Customer journey analytics covers several disciplines, including data fusion, journey discovery, automation, and optimisation. Due to the complexity in applying customer journey analytics successfully, we expect this to remain among the top trends for the next couple of years.

Download the full data trends report today

To discover the other top trends and further findings from this year’s survey, download our full Data Trends Report 2022. Inside, you'll gain more insights based on how your peers responded to topics such as these:

• How important is first-party-data in the mix of data sources used? 
• How advanced are the methods that marketers use to bring known customer data and anonymous website data together? 
• Which role do email and direct mail have in today’s campaigning channel mix?  
• When it comes to campaign objectives, do marketers put their focus on customer acquisition or retention?
• When it comes to measuring campaign performance, which metrics are important?