Data enables marketing to achieve its potential as a growth driver Over time, the role of the CMO has evolved beyond the traditional remit of brand-building to become more holistic.

CMOs are now responsible for a wide range of activities, including data and technology, business strategy, business growth, and customer experience. Marketing has never been more integral to the business. Over half (57%) of marketers agree that their C-suite executives now see marketing not as a cost center but as a strategic partner in driving business growth. Given the growing importance of ecommerce and the need for marketers to understand how customers interact with brands and companies (and to know when and where to engage with them), real-time marketing can be a key enabler for CMOs to deliver on this broadened mandate. Real-time marketing allows marketers to collect relevant customer data, make quick decisions along the customer journey, be more proactive in engaging customers, support customized content, and enhance the ecommerce experience.

The marketing function falls short of being data-driven Challenges in capabilities, access, and talent are hindering marketers from using data to drive business decisions and strategy. For example, only 43% of marketers say their teams use data to decide on a go-to-market strategy for a new product or service and just 45% say they have a customerdata platform that provides a unified single view of the customer. Availability of and access to data is also a problem for marketing teams. Forty-nine percent of marketers say they use technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) to automate customer segmentation and grouping; however, only 38% say that customer segment and persona data is available to them. In addition, only 44% say they have an adequate supply of skills in areas such as AI and machine learning, or data analytics and data science. And less than half (45%) say they have social digital-marketing skills.

What data-driven marketers do differently and the benefits of a data-rich approach From our research, we identified a cohort of “data-driven marketers” by assessing all respondents against two broad dimensions: data-related factors and technology-related factors. We found that only 11% qualify as data-driven marketers and they outperform the rest of the organizations in four key areas:• They can drive effective real-time marketing initiatives and extract high value from their use • They realize better business outcomes from real-time • They have well-rounded skills and expertise, including better category and customer understanding, datadriven skills, and soft skills such as agility and emotional intelligence • They foster creativity more effectively across a broad range of areas, including customer engagement, personalization, and content.