Marketing automation tools lead marketers' tech shopping lists

CMOs are forgoing spreadsheets and homegrown solutions and looking instead for technology tools to help with thorny marketing issues like reporting, analytics and attribution.

Business intelligence reporting tools to create custom dashboard and reports are the No. 1 item on CMOs' shopping lists, according to a new eMarketer study, which says 60 percent of marketers are likely to buy services with those tools in 2016.

Close behind are marketing automation and campaign management tools to help marketers manage multi-channel campaigns, with 57 percent of executives in the market for those tools.

Also high on the shopping list are customer-interaction tools for reaching customers in social media, experiential and event marketing, social review and mobile.

What else are marketers fast-tracking? Analytics tools for customer intelligence, attribution software for sales and marketing ROI, and data management and integration tools.

We found this data interesting because those tools are part of UPTRACS, which we built to help marketers generate more and higher-quality leads with efficient and accurate spending across all of their media channels.

ROI is still hard to measure for marketers

This study makes one thing clear: Marketers still find it difficult to measure the ROI of their advertising efforts. Are they getting quality leads for the money they're spending, especially on digital channels like web and mobile search, social media and email? If you can't measure accurately, you won't know for sure.

If you aren't getting those quality leads, then there's likely something off in your media mix. But, if you can't see where your media strategy is faltering, you won't know how to fix it, and those quality leads will continue to go elsewhere.

Relying on manual number-crunching and hunches to make marketing decisions wastes a big chunk of your marketing budget. You miss out on key opportunities to know and reach your customers at the most opportune times and places.

Data-driven marketing and the science of reaching customers and prospects have grown exponentially more complicated just in the last five years, especially with the growth of new marketing and advertising platforms and devices.

We're not surprised to see more and more marketing executives turning to sophisticated tech tools to help them understand their costs and data better and to drive more value for their marketing programs.

All of those needs are built into UPTRACS in order to help marketers made sense of their data across campaigns and channels, down to a granular level. Want to know more? Test-drive UPTRACS for free; just share your contact info and a little bit about your business, and we'll take it from there. Or drop us a line at 855-287-8722.