Advancements in data and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are prompting marketers to rethink, reconfigure, and revolutionize how companies connect with customers, according to Salesforce's 2024 State of Marketing Report. For the report's ninth edition, Salesforce surveyed nearly 5,000 marketers, generating 4,850 responses from marketing decision-makers across North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe.
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Marketers are evolving their practices in a highly competitive landscape. They're looking to AI -- both generative and predictive -- to help personalize at scale and boost efficiency. Marketers rank AI adoption as both their number one priority and challenge. Here is the executive summary of the report captured in five key findings:
This article will focus on the report's findings related to AI and data-related research.
Taking advantage of AI is the marketer's biggest priority -- and biggest challenge. Maintaining trust, another key area of focus, is a core part of successful AI deployment. In fact, 68% of customers say advances in AI make it more important for companies to be trustworthy.
Marketer's top priorities:
Marketer's top challenges:
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The report found that marketers use an average of eight different marketing tools and technologies. All AI projects start as data projects. Capturing customer data from a large set of marketing tools that are not integrated creates a challenge for marketers to unify, harmonize, and create a 360-degree view of their customer engagement touchpoints. Only 32% of marketers are satisfied with how they use customer data to create relevant experiences.
Marketers use an average of 9 different tactics across the entire customer journey. The most common data sources for marketers are:
The report found that 38% of marketers don't use third-party data.
The modern marketer's challenge isn't a lack of first-party data -- it's fully integrating this data across departments to glean insights, plan campaigns, and suppress messages from reaching the wrong audiences, to name a few examples.
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Only 31% of marketers are satisfied with their ability to unify customer data sources. Data integration across the enterprise app landscape is key to high-performance marketing. About two in five marketers still don't have real-time data at their disposal for crucial tasks, relying instead on potentially outdated insights -- or even intuition. Even teams with live data are slowed down by their ability to activate it. While over half of marketers say data is available in real time to execute a campaign, 59% need the IT department's help to do so. Most customer data is trapped in business, with limited or no access to marketing.
In 2022, 68% of marketers had a defined AI strategy. Today, 75% of marketers are already rolling up their sleeves and experimenting with or implementing AI. Yet a closer look reveals an uneven landscape. High performers are 2.5 times more likely than underperformers to have fully implemented AI within their operations. Already, generative AI use cases rank among marketers' favorites alongside more established predictive AI applications.
Top marketing AI use cases:
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Marketers do have concerns with AI. Eighty-eight percent of marketers worry about missing out on generative AI's benefits, compared to 78% of sales and 73% of service colleagues. And 41% of CMOs cite data exposure as a top concern compared to 29% of VPs and 32% of team leads. Ninety-eight percent of marketing leaders believe trustworthy data is essential. But, just as the data must be trustworthy, so should its integration with AI.
Ranking of marketer's generative AI concerns:
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The State of Marketing report reveals the importance of data and AI in terms of measuring success and meaningful outcomes. Performance metrics continue to focus on revenue. Marketers closely monitor their marketing/sales pipeline (64%) and funnel (63%). And 48% of marketers track customer lifetime value. The most important marketing metrics include the following: customer retention rates, customer acquisition costs, customer satisfaction, customer referral rates and volumes, and customer lifetime value.
To learn more about the 2024 State of Marketing report, you can visit here.