B2C marketers are overwhelmed by growing challenges

Priorities like demonstrating ROI, implementing AI and meeting data challenges are proving too much for many marketers.

Many B2C marketers are finding it difficult to meet priorities this year, a study from Forrester reports. These range from increasing ROI and meeting data challenges to implementing AI technology.

Priorities. The top priorities for B2C marketers were:

• Increase focus on customer experience (28%);
  
• Increase customer engagement across the lifecycle (27%);
  
• Improve how our brand is perceived by customers and prospects (26%);
  
• Improve the ROI/effectiveness of marketing (25%);
  
• Increase our brand’s ability to energize customer relationships and create passionate advocates (24%).

(The 906 marketing decision-makers provided multiple answers to the question.)

Challenges. The challenges getting in the way of marketers’ priorities:

• Changing economic conditions (26%);
  
• Quality of customer data (25%);
  
• Brand perception doesn’t reflect our desired brand identity (25%);
  
• Lack of cross-functional alignment on business objectives (23%);
  
• Process inconsistency due to poor integration or redundancy in technology solutions (22%).

Difficulties. Marketers are also having a hard time with the priorities they were given by their organizations. Among the most difficult:

• Update our data strategy to adapt to data deprecation (47%);
  
• Introduce or enhance AI capabilities (47%);
  
• Implement an omnichannel marketing strategy (45%);
  
• Improve the ROI/effectiveness of marketing (44%);
  
• Implement agile frameworks, methodologies or principles (44%).

Marketing execution. B2C marketers are also having a hard time with marketing execution. Specifically:

• Personalizing, communications, experiences and interactions (41%);
  
• Coordinating different marketing service providers (including agencies) (40%);
  
• Creating a single view of the customer across channels and interactions (37%);
  
• Driving decision-making and customer insights (34%);
  
• Managing data quality (31%).

Why we care. Data privacy regulations and compliance issues continue to impact marketing goals. To meet the moment, organizations should control what they can — namely the internal processes and tech solutions. Only then can customer experience, brand perception and other customer-facing difficulties be improved. With less access to customer data and more regulated data practices, more B2C orgs also will be compelled to look hard at the ROI from retail media networks and other data collaborations via data clean rooms.

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About the author

Chris Wood

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.

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