The 2020 State of Digital Marketing

Identifying Trends, Best Practices and Key Capabilities for Digital Marketing Excellence

Altimeter’s 2020 State of Digital Marketing report gives marketers the latest data on how companies are using digital marketing to drive business results. It identifies and quantifies the key practices being used by companies to achieve digital marketing excellence.

Based on a survey of 476 senior digital marketers across North America, Europe, and China, the report provides key insights into what strategies, channels, and practices perform best, including how these vary across industries and regions. It also identifies trends in innovation, current technology adoption, and key metrics for measuring digital marketing success.

Key Findings From the Report

1. The top objectives for digital marketers include acquiring new customers (40%) and increasing revenue from current customers (39%).
2. Digital marketers’ top priorities for improvement include more effective personalization (52%), better segmentation (42%) and optimized owned channel performance (37%).
3. Fifty-two percent of companies rated technology integration as their top digital marketing challenge. Hiring the right talent (51%) and scaling innovation across the organization (49%) were top challenges, too.
4. Despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, most marketers (56%) are continuing transformation plans, with 22% even accelerating them in response to the crisis.
5. Ninety-five percent of companies are able to personalize messaging and experiences in some form based on customer data. Nearly a fifth are using AI-driven predictive analytics.
6. The most desired skills for new hires include data analysis (42%) and marketing automation expertise (39%).
7. Microsoft (26%) narrowly beat Salesforce (25%), Oracle (13%) and Adobe (10%) as the leading primary martech platform for most marketing teams.

Download the report to learn more.