Marketing technology can be useful for marketers looking to strengthen their digital personalization efforts. According to June research, well over half of senior business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers globally rely on web analytics software, customer relationship management (CRM) and content management systems to ramp up their digital personalization efforts.
From March to June 2016, CEB polled 228 B2C senior marketers worldwide from more than 17 industries about personalized communications, defined as using a customer’s behavioral data to customize marketing based on their likely needs.
According to the data, 68% of respondents said they deploy web analytics software, followed by CRM (61%) and content management systems (55%) to support digital personalization efforts. In contrast, 5% said they had not yet invested in a technology to facilitate this type of work.
Also noteworthy from the research, was that only 18% of marketers polled said they use predictive analytics for personalization, a discipline that many marketers, both client- and agency-side, have been buzzing about.
Personalization is, in fact, becoming a crucial piece to content marketing strategy, in order for marketers to produce contextually relevant material. In a separate July 2016 study from Forrester Consulting and Persado, most marketers in the US and Western Europe said they use and behavior-based data develop content based on insights and emotions (67%).
What’s critical to gaining these relevant insights though is by having access to the right technologies. And most marketers agree that these types of tools can help their teams personalize at scale. In fact, many have said can’t personalize because they don’t have the tools, according to March 2016 research by Demand Metric and Seismic.