Less Than One-Quarter of Organizations Employ Optimal Digital Marketing Strategies, TEKsystems Survey Finds

Mar 14, 2017 | HANOVER, MD | For media inquiries, please contact us at media@TEKsystems.com.

Advanced Social Media, Digital Advertising and Mobile Marketing Initiatives Characteristics of Fully Mature Organizations 

TEKsystems^®, a leading provider of IT staffing solutions and IT services, today highlighted study findings that explore the current state of digital marketing initiatives within organizations. More than 250 senior marketing executives were polled in January 2017 on their expectations for spending, skill needs and organizational challenges in 2017. Data was examined on five subsets based on how organizations self-identified the maturity of their digital marketing efforts.

Key highlights from the survey include:

Less than One-Quarter of Marketing Organizations Realize Full Digital Maturity; Optimized Organizations Enjoy Greater Budget Growth and Autonomy

• TEKsystems’ Take: Less than one-quarter of organizations (23 percent) are experiencing the benefits of fully optimized digital marketing programs. When comparing respondents who identify their digital marketing programs as optimized to other groups, they tend to experience higher levels of overall budget growth without any decline, devote a higher percentage of their overall marketing budget to digital efforts and maintain greater control of their marketing technology investments.

Social Media, Digital Advertising and Mobile Marketing Stand Out as Hallmarks of Organizations With Optimized Digital Marketing Programs

• TEKsystems’ Take: While there are commonalities across all marketing organizations—such as social media being the most time/resource intensive area and website being the top investment area—differences do emerge as organizations grow in their digital marketing maturity. As organizations mature towards optimization, they tend to expand attention and investment beyond rich, site-based, non-invasive aspects (i.e., content development, video development) to also focus on more outwardly focused and trackable efforts (i.e., digital advertising, social media, mobility). This “tailored” mindset also helps explain why customer experience emerges as one of the top investment areas for optimized organizations—as they seek greater understanding on personalization and customer journey elements during interaction with their customers. Optimized organizations are also able to invest in more cutting-edge areas, such as programmatic advertising and emerging technologies (e.g., VR, augmented reality, predictive analytics).

Budget Overruns and ROI Less of a Challenge for Digitally Optimized Marketing Organizations; Digitally Mature Organizations Shift Focus to More Advanced Concepts

• TEKsystems’ Take: While still a source of concern, those who report that their digital marketing programs are optimized are the only group where less than 50 percent cite budget overruns as a concern, perhaps due to their ability to provide verifiable ROI and the resulting ability to dedicate resources appropriately. Additionally, this is the only group where more than 40 percent indicate scope and architecture as a significant challenge, reinforcing their role as an independent purchaser of technology. Optimized respondents also seem to be more focused on operationalizing their digital marketing efforts with a focus on the more advanced concepts of user experience, omnichannel marketing, conversion rates and analytics.

“What we’re seeing here are clear differences between organizations at different points along the digital maturation curve. Those with optimized digital marketing strategies also show much greater ownership of technology and spend within the marketing function and a more advanced approach to digital marketing” says Steve Aleckson, director of TEKsystems Digital. “Less digitally mature organizations are clearly most challenged with untangling responsibility for customer engagement between marketing, core IT and other stakeholders regarding budget, technology and talent. This makes it harder for less mature organizations to connect with customers effectively, and the gap between them and leading-edge marketers will only get bigger.”  Said Aleckson, "The competition for talent remains a top struggle, and organizations with a clearer strategy and digital roadmap have the advantage in workforce planning—but marketing leaders have to make a strong business case in order to move the needle towards an optimized strategy.”

TEKsystems will be exhibiting at Adobe Summit 2017 (booth No. 848), March 21–23, at the Venetian and Palazzo resorts in Las Vegas.

TEKsystems’ Steve Aleckson is available for additional commentary. For more information about the survey, or to schedule an interview, please contact Nathan Bowen at nabowen@TEKsystems.com.

About TEKsystems

People are at the heart of every successful business initiative. At TEKsystems, an Allegis Group company, we understand people. Every year we deploy more than 80,000 IT professionals at 6,000 client sites across North America, Europe and Asia. Our deep insights into IT human capital management enable us to help our clients achieve their business goals–while optimizing their IT workforce strategies. We provide IT staffing solutions and IT services to help our clients plan, build and run their critical business initiatives. Through our range of quality-focused delivery models, we meet our clients where they are, and take them where they want to go, the way they want to get there.