The nation’s top marketers believe in analytics. But many of them aren’t sure their teams have the right skills to fully leverage their marketing data.
According to the latest CMO Survey — released in August by the American Marketing Association, Deloitte and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business — the typical marketing team spends 5.5 percent of its budget on analytics.
In the next three years, that’s expected to grow to 18.1 percent. It’s a projected increase of 229 percent.
Some plan to budget even more. For consumer services, analytics spending could expand by 56 percent. And at companies worth $10 billion or more, analytics spend may grow from 9.5 percent to 23.1 percent over the next three years.
At the same time, the surveyed marketers question whether their teams have the right skills and experience to put analytics to work.
The CMO Survey asked respondents to rank, on a scale of 1 to 7, their team’s ability to get the most from their marketing analytics.
Only 1.9 percent gave their teams the highest score of 7. At the other end of the scale, 14.5 percent gave their teams a 1, saying they didn’t have the right skills.
The mean score of all respondents was 3.7.
One possible solution: Outsourcing part of your analytics operation and hiring an outside firm (like Alight’s Insight Analytics Group) to supplement and train your team. The CMO Survey found that, overall, marketers plan to increase outsourcing by 5.1 percent over the next 12 months.
Among the other findings from the latest CMO Survey:
- The CMO Survey found that, on average, marketing data is consulted 37.5 percent of the time a business decision is made.
- Respondents were also asked to judge analytics’ impact on their company’s performance, using a 1 to 7 scale. The mean score was 3.9.
You can find the complete results from the latest CMO Survey at this link.