New research from the Customer Data Platform Institute finds that business marketers are catching up with consumer marketers in Customer Data Platform deployments. The firm’s new survey found that 41 percent of companies selling to consumers are in the process of deploying a CDP, compared with just 19 percent of companies selling to business—but 34 percent of the B2B companies plan to start deployment within the next twelve months, compared to only 19 percent of consumer brands.
Other survey finding suggest the change is coming just in time:
- Business marketers are more likely than consumer marketers to rely on CRM or marketing automation systems to unify their customer data (22 percent vs 8 percent).
- Business marketers using CRM or marketing automation in this way have below-average satisfaction with their martech investments.
- CDP users have higher satisfaction than non-users among both business and consumer marketers.
Additional survey findings include:
- consumer marketers have more fragmented data than B2B marketers, with 62 percent reporting many disconnected systems compared with 48 percent of B2B marketers.
- inability to assemble unified customer data is the most-cited obstacle to using customer data well, listed by 63 percent of respondents compared with incapable delivery systems (54 percent) or inaccessible source data (47 percent).
- a unified customer view is the most important CDP benefit, listed by 86 percent of respondents. Many fewer cited applications such as predictive modeling (59 percent), message selection (49 percent) or cross-channel orchestration (49 percent).
- companies with a specialized martech manager or staff are more satisfied with their marketing technology results than firms where marketing technology is run by a central IT department or left to individual groups within marketing.
Download the full report here.
