What’s Missing From the Modern Marketer’s Toolkit?

The modern marketer's toolkit is packed with strategies to connect with people — to encourage engagement, to generate store traffic, and to drive sales. From data analysis to social media activation, marketers have an extensive array of technologies to both understand and to reach their customers.

However, marketers continue to have challenges connecting with their target audiences. Many of the marketing leaders I've interviewed for Vericast’s podcast, Business to Human, have explained that they have significant hurdles to overcome to effectively communicate with customers. This challenge is particularly pronounced in a post-cookie environment, where consumers value personalized marketing but also demand data privacy.

When asked specifically about what's missing from the marketing toolkit, the responses point to common issues for marketers that must be addressed for future marketing success.

The 3 Biggest Marketing Challenges

Marketing in the digital age presents a myriad of challenges, including an overwhelming abundance of data and no consistent framework to collect it, resource constraints within teams, effective measurement tools, and the ability to illustrate the value of marketing efforts to stakeholders.

1. The Data Dilemma

Modern brands often possess vast amounts of customer data, but struggle to effectively manage and extract value from it. Marketers are unable to make meaningful use of data due to it being stored and maintained across multiple systems, leading to incomplete or inaccurate insights.

Additionally, inconsistent and fragmented data can be expensive and difficult to maintain, often resulting in erroneous analysis and an inability to maintain a holistic view of the customer. This can contribute to ineffective marketing strategies and campaigns.

It's critical for retail marketers to be able to utilize the data they collect to directly inform future communication with customers. This will ensure that they're aligned on expectations and preferences and enable marketers to deliver tailored customer experiences.

2. The Team Constraints

Inefficiencies created by multiple systems and complex workflows can burden already small marketing teams. To address resource constraints and meet ever-growing expectations, it's crucial for marketers of all types — acquisition, brand, product, content, etc. — to work together to drive campaigns and the overall business.

By integrating marketing art and science and combining resources, maximum success can be achieved.

3. The Measurement Problem

The inability to find the right signals through the noise makes clean measurement extremely difficult. How can retail marketers connect their efforts or campaigns to successful metrics if they don’t know where the data originated from? And without intuitive measurement, marketing teams cannot effectively improve their marketing outreach and ultimately prove their value to the organization. In the competition for resources, it's more important than ever for marketers to be able to demonstrate that their efforts are yielding financial returns for the retail business.

The Marketing Silver Bullet

In addition to the above challenges, marketers also need to consider how to future-proof their strategies as the marketing and retail landscapes continue to evolve and prioritize consumer privacy. Navigating immediate and long-term needs while determining the best approach to handle customer data assets is essential for achieving growth in a turbulent and privacy-first world.

And while individual technology tools to solve these problems exist, implementing them into a marketing stack can often be too complicated, too expensive and too quickly outdated for most retail businesses.

Taking a holistic view of these challenges, it’s evident that modern marketers require an open architecture approach that allows them to leverage data from all sources and activate on it for outreach opportunities. With a single solution that cleans, enhances and uncovers opportunities from first-party data, marketers can gain a broader perspective, leverage marketing intelligence and learn from marketing performance.

As the marketing landscape and technology tools continue to evolve, it's imperative for retail marketers to stay adaptable in their approach to meet the ever-changing demands of the industry.

Matthew Tilley is executive director of content marketing at Vericast, a company reimagining marketing solutions one business-to-human connection at a time.