Spending on Data-Driven Marketing Set to Rise
DDM investment boosts revenues, execs say
January 11, 2017
It’s perhaps no surprise that more executives are using more data to help power their decision-making. In fact, as a recent investigation of spending trends in "data-driven marketing" reveals, marketers are continuing to invest and benefit from this approach.

While data-driven marketing refers to wide range of marketing tactics, many executives mention cross-channel and cross-device marketing and advertising, along with lookalike targeting, as three of the most popular data-fueled marketing tactics. These three techniques were among the most-used by US business-to-business (B2B) marketers polled in September 2016 by Dun & Bradstreet.
Additional quarterly survey data collected by the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) and Winterberry Group adds insight into the spending and revenue associated with data-driven marketing. According to their Q3 2016 survey of DMA-member marketing technology professionals, more marketers intended to increase spending on data-driven marketing through the end of 2016. Over 40% of respondents in the survey said they expected their data-driven marketing outlays to “increase somewhat” or “increase significantly” in Q4 2016.

This investment in data-driven marketing spending is also predicted to have an impact on these firms’ revenue. More than 40% of executives surveyed by the DMA and Winterberry expected their Q4 2016 revenues generated by data-driven marketing efforts to “increase significantly” or “increase somewhat.”
Even though data-driven marketing has won fans among decision-makers, the discipline is not without its flaws. According to one recent eMarketer article on data-driven marketing, gathering high-quality data to use in such efforts continues to be a problem for many organizations worldwide.
—Jeremy Kressmann
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