Taking Too Long to Market to Online Audiences

By Marisa Peacock | Published Apr 24, 2009

A new survey by SDL Tridion (news, site), which surveyed 113 marketing, communications and branding decision makers across Europe, revealed business is slow.

Seventy percent of businesses take two weeks or longer to roll out new marketing campaigns. Back in 2007, SDL Tridion conducted a similar survey of U.S. senior marketing executives with similar results.

Back then, 68% of web campaigns didn’t happen on time.

A Delayed Connection

Companies that aren't receptive to adapting popular web trends and technologies are not only hindering their marketing strategies, but also the relationships they could be building by using them.

According to the survey, respondents indicated that personalization is the problem and the solution. Only 23% say they are communicating with target audiences in a "highly personalized manner", whereas half of the respondents personalized content with basic information. 26 percent didn't personalize anything at all.

Failing to build relationships doesn't help businesses better understand customers' needs and interests. As a result, businesses are missing key connections that could increase revenue.

Planning to Fail

Most companies don't plan to fail. And yet, even those that say their objective is to enhance and capitalize on customer databases, don't always follow through. Also hindering their efforts to complete campaigns on schedule is a lack of cohesiveness and consistency about how best to measure campaign success.

More than half of the respondents said they always measure the return on investment (ROI) of their campaigns and 13 percent admit to never analysing the results of their investment.

However, 62 percent list web analytics solutions as critical to the roll out of their campaigns, leaving a disconnect between those which always measure ROI and those which sporadically do so.

A Time to Innovate

Companies are struggling to stay afloat, both economically and creatively. So it's strange that companies aren't doing all that they can to capitalize on social media, networking and other related web technologies to build networks.

Not only does employing new web technologies work, it's affordable and innovative and can extend the life of a marketing campaign.

Consumers are savvy. It's time for companies to follow suit.