UK marketers waste £2.5bn a year by relying on guesswork
UK marketers are wasting £2.5bn a year by relying on guesswork and not data and rational decision-making, research from marketingQED has found.
It was discovered that respondents were more likely to simply follow what their firm has tended to do in the past (39.4 per cent), while 34.9 per cent follow what seems to be the commonly accepted practice in the industry rather than seek advice, with just 6.8 per cent seeking advice from colleagues and 6.1 per cent from outside agencies.
The research from the marketing software firm found that 75.6 per cent had never employed a data professional, such as a statistician, economist ordata analyst, while 37.2 per cent of those with marketing budgets of over £1m do not use any analytics.
Glenn Granger, CEO of marketingQED, said: “Most marketers make decisions based on instinct, convention, or their experience of what tended to work well in the past. The problem is that this seldom works, and there is massive wastage as a result.
“Marketing is fiendishly complicated: most single purchases are the result of many messages received through many channels, in many places, over a period of time, and this is too much data for our brains to process. Marketers can guess what works and what doesn’t, but their guesses are often wrong. At worst, they are playing darts blindfold.
“Marketers are missing tricks left, right and centre. They often use the wrong channels, allocate too much or too little money, on their campaigns, and have little accurate idea of what impact each choice has on the bottom line. This needn’t happen. In my experience, marketers who have used data intelligently have raised their profits by as much as twenty per cent.
“However, these are the exceptions. Unfortunately, most marketers remain raindancers when they could and should have evolved into meteorologists.”
It was estimated by 28.6 per cent of marketers that at least one in five pounds they spend is wasted; while 22.4 per cent of firms do no evaluation on whether their choice of marketing channels had been effective after a campaign has ended.