Almost Half of Marketers Do Not Trust the Reliability of Their Data Due to Fragmented Tools and Poor Integration

Zeta Global announced a Forrester Consulting Opportunity Snapshot, “Elevate Your Integration Strategy for Maximum Business Impact.” This study was commissioned by Zeta Global to examine the current state of marketing technology and the biggest challenges that brands face in their quest to improve customer experiences and accelerate growth.

The Forrester study discovered most companies (85%) have over 10 technologies within their stack, yet over 50% believe they are lacking the capability or processes to manage fragmented tools and problems that may arise from poor integration. Problems increase as more solutions are added. Marketers can achieve a better return on their technology investment by developing a comprehensive integration strategy that has the flexibility to optimize existing technology and connect multiple solutions, disparate data sets, and fragmented processes.

The analysis was based on surveying hundreds of US marketers responsible for customer experience tools. The Forrester study shares how companies can understand and utilize the long-term benefits of an optimally integrated data/tech environment. To better define the core components of a successful vendor selection process that creates better experiences for consumers and better results for the brand. Click here for the full Forrester Opportunity study results.

Key findings of marketers’ challenges found in the study:

Point Solutions Make Marketing More Complex Than Ever: “The best of breed” trend driven by CIOs and System Integrators has increased complexity. Companies today typically use 11 or more solutions that impact CX (84%), with over one third storing and processing at least nine diverse types of customer data within these tools. This fragmented approach hinders marketers’ abilities to create personalized experiences while increasing operating expenses.

Flexibility To Customize Technology Helps Master CX: While ‘out of the box’ integrations are a good start; smart marketers recognize the importance of customizing existing integrations (67%) and the flexibility to create new ones (71%).

Data Without Intelligence Slows Speed-To-Market and Impairs the Bottom Line: Only half surveyed of marketers are confident in their data, including quality, security, reliability, and activation. Marketers who rely on a poorly integrated environment experience delays in launch campaigns (59%), resulting in lost revenue (55%) for the business.

Analytics is a Top Expectation, But Still Unrealized: Providing insights is the top technology buying requirement (74%), yet delivering insights is marketers’ top challenge. Respondents cite that lack of integration creates data activation problems.

A Single Platform Delivers Positive Business Outcomes: Respondents with a well-integrated technology environment reported improved reputation (68%), speed to market revenue advantage (67%), improved internal collaboration (61%), and ability to analyze data in the application (59%).

“As marketing becomes more complex, many companies are failing to keep up with modern expectations of customer experience and losing revenue as a result. The Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP) has been designed for marketers’ needs with the unique flexibility to wrap around and augment the brand’s tech stack, providing speed to intelligence, deeper analytics, and activation to deliver greater return on investment. We developed a single solution that consolidates multiple separate point solutions to resolve these issues and create practical and proven integration,” said Christian Monberg, Zeta’s Chief Technology Officer and Head of Product.