Lack of a single customer view, an inability to deal with large amounts of data and lack of time for optimisation are among the challenges that cause the biggest headaches for modern marketers, according to new research published today by Econsultancy in partnership with SmartFocus .

The ‘Marketing Pain Points and How to Overcome Them’ report identifies the most significant challenges marketers face in today’s digital age and offers insight and advice from a number of leading marketing experts on how to overcome them.

Among the ‘pain points’ identified in the report are the challenges of making customer data actionable, bottlenecks caused by IT and web development teams and lack of time for campaign testing and optimisation. The report identifies the following key challenges:

• Turning insights into actionable segments to drive effective marketing content (45%)
• Inability to create a single customer view (42%)
• Difficulty keeping track of customers across different channels and on different devices (41%)
• Complexities of using multiple data sources (40%)
• Defining attribution and assessing touchpoints required to convert a customer (40%)

Jess Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer for SmartFocus, explains: “Our research shows the key challenge for marketers lies in gathering their disparate data to create that elusive single customer view and might be wholly unobtainable in the near future for many businesses. When this is the case, we suggest creating a usable model like a single marketing view in the immediate, so that every touchpoint is registered and measured across channels. This foundation will also help to serve contextual marketing in real-time, driving response rates and reducing churn.”

Linus Gregoriadis, Research Director of Econsultancy says: “Digital technology and changing consumer behavior have created a near infinite number of opportunities for marketers to reach and engage customers, while also creating a whole host of new problems for marketing teams to wrestle with.”

SmartFocus’s best-of-breed Message Cloud technology allows marketers to solve these marketing headaches. It gives a holistic view of a brand’s customers and enable them to deliver even more personalised marketing interactions that increase brand engagement and sales. The Message Cloud effortlessly processes big data to automatically personalise and contextualise communication to every brand’s customer. Using a host of factors including location, weather, customer age and gender, favourite brands and products, web browsing history, past buying behaviour and abandoned carts, The Message Cloud listens to and learns from customers.

One large brand using The Message Cloud is the UK’s largest toy retailer, the Entertainer. Phil Geary, Chief Marketing Officer for the Entertainer, comments: “SmartFocus helps to make our customer experience be the best it can be, irrespective of what channel we’re using, and the SmartFocus Message Cloud ensures that my team and I can offer perfect user experience every time. Replicating our in-store experience when each and every one of our customers visits our website or receives one of our marketing messages is critical to us. The SmartFocus solution offered us all of the capabilities we needed in a single, comprehensive platform.”

The report followed a global general survey of over 500 senior marketers, who gave their views on the impact of marketing challenges to their businesses.