Has martech failed marketers?

384 marketers told us their problems. 75% of the time, there’s a single cause.

Join our webinar with Scott Brinker on November 13 and get the full report when you register.

the Report
The Pain Points
The Hidden Cause
The Path Forward

Don’t blame the tools

The best martech stack is invisible. You just get to go and do your job. But marketers constantly feel the pain of their tools and stack, and we found there’s a single reason: the data isn’t where it needs to be.


Join our webinar on November 13 with Scott Brinker, Analyst and Advisor at chiefmartec, to dig into the findings and paths forward, and get the full report when you register.

Scott Brinker
The marketing landscape has never evolved faster, especially with surge of AI— and yet the work of marketers is fundamentally broken. Tools reveal the symptoms, but data is the cause. This report is a must-read for leaders who want to build marketing organizations that are truly connected, intelligent, and ready for what's next.”

Scott Brinker, Analyst and Advisor at chiefmartec

Sign up for our November 13 webinar, and get the report delivered straight to your inbox now.

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Marketers say tooling is their #1 pain point

Enterprise marketers have about 90 tools, but don’t use 70% of them.* Our conversations back this up: tooling was the most common issue raised, regardless of use case or number of tools in the stack.

*From Scott Brinker, chiefmartec via NetSkope and Gartner

The most common marketing pain points

74%

Tooling

20.1%

Audience
targeting

1.0%

Other

1.3%

Personalization

3.6%

AI

Every time we want to connect something, it doesn’t fit nicely like Lego pieces — it’s a huge challenge with the tools we have.

Marketing Technology Specialist, Financial Services
AI only continues the trend

Nearly every marketer is talking about AI, but success is rare: just 10% say they’re using AI effectively, and fewer than 2% when it comes to personalization — the use case they care about most. The promise of AI is real, but like another tool in the stack, marketers aren’t using it the way they want.

Marketers' top priorities for AI

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Personalization

95%

Ad optimization

82%

Customer predictions (LTV, churn, etc.)

55%

Winback/retention

38%

Content generation

26%

% of marketer conversations

We currently have very basic personalization, and that's why our customers don't always feel like the content resonates.

Assistant GM, Growth, Retail
Meanwhile, audiences can't be found.

Marketers face another near-universal issue. No one can find their audience with their tools. That's a staggering (bad and sad) find: If you can't even locate your audience, it's pretty hard to do anything else in marketing.

0

20

40

60

80

100

95%

of B2C marketers struggle to reach, target, or find their audience

Actually finding the audience that responds is the hard part.

Director, Marketing, AdTech & Operations, QSR

It’s not you (or your tools). It’s your data.

We found that 75% of the time, there’s a single reason people struggle with tools: their data. Which makes sense. Data is the baseline for all marketers’ tooling and activities — from building audiences, to creating journeys, to personalizing experiences at scale. When the data isn’t there, you feel it across nearly everything.
How is data broken? Let us count the ways. 

Marketers struggle the most with siloed data in each tool, and since we know that teams juggle a lot of tools (you may remember, it’s 90+), you can imagine how painful this is. But there are tons of reasons for the struggle.

The biggest data challenges

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Data doesn’t flow between tools

96%

Inaccessible without engineering

83%

No single source of truth

63%

Hard to activate

61%

Not timely

49%

% of marketer conversations

Our main issue is integrating data across platforms without things breaking.

Director of Marketing, Retail
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Marketing doesn’t work without data

Better marketing doesn’t mean shopping for another tool, discarding all of them, or investing in a re-architecting project. The best teams focus on context and solve their data problems in three ways.

1

Access

This is your competitive differentiator. When you can fully access your data to understand your audience, everything else opens up.

2

Completeness

With fragmented data, you can't piece together what happened before, what's going on now, and what's ahead. You need the complete picture.

3

Action

Layering AI on top of your data to reach your audiences, in a way that's actually personalized at scale, is the future of marketing.

See what we uncovered

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