Marketing Efforts Are Still Uncoordinated at Many Mid-Market Firms

That’s according to a survey-based study from market research firm The Relevancy Group, which shows that a sizable chunk of marketers are having trouble coordinating efforts between divisions, and well over half think their marketing departments don’t even share common goals.

The study, commissioned for marketing solutions firm Yes Lifestyle Marketing, finds that for two-thirds of marketing executives at large companies say their organizations are failing to coordinate campaigns across all channels. Only 22% of mid-market marketing executives are confident in their ability to align campaigns across channels. Generally, oversight under one group seems to be lacking at a lot of companies with 68% of respondents saying enterprise marketing executives lack central ownership of programs across channels.

Only 33% of enterprise marketers said their multichannel programs are tightly coordinated. At mid-market companies, only 22% said so. Said Michael Fisher, president of Yes Lifecycle Marketing in a statement, “Customer records are in shambles, and marketers are in denial. It’s admirable that marketers have set their sights on multichannel marketing strategies, but they need to start at the foundation.” The survey responses suggest that marketing channel failure is at least partly due to poor data practices, with only 37% of enterprise organizations and 29% of mid-market companies saying they have a central repository for customer data.

And email marketing is still the dominant channel with 73% of enterprise marketers saying they use it. But 61% of those surveyed said they only one or two data sources to inform their email campaigns. Fifty-four percent use demographic data, and about 50% use geographic data. What gets left behind are data on customer profitability (35%), transaction history (31%), and email open rates (28%). And that’s not likely to change as only 40% of marketers said they need to improve segmentation and targeting, and list it as a goal for the coming year.