Boldspace Insight: Nearly two-thirds of marketing and communications decision-makers cannot access the essential data they need

A majority (60%) of marketing and communications leaders cannot easily access the data they need across the core areas of their remit.

We asked marketing and communications decision-makers in medium-to-large organisations their views and challenges across 14 key areas of their role, from audience, market and strategy to creative, media and reputation.

The findings uncovered clear consensus on the benefits of having the data for all 14 areas in one place. 89% of senior communications professionals and 79% of senior marketers say having data for all 14 areas in one place would allow them to drive growth more effectively. They also showed that c-suite teams have high expectations of their knowledge about the business across each area, but many are feeling left in the dark without the data they need.

Commenting on the findings, Nick Ford-Young, Co-CEO at Boldspace, said: “The fact that a majority of marketing and communications leaders do not have easy access to data in each of these 14 crucial areas demonstrates how far we still have to go across the industry to better capture data and make it accessible, in every sense. Until this becomes a reality there are significant missed opportunities in driving revenue, prioritising budgets and moving faster than competitors to come out on top.

“Excessive data is not necessarily a good thing, in fact it’s a big problem. Data is only useful if we are able to order, distil and extract the key points quickly. Our findings demonstrate that marketing and PR teams alike feel overwhelmed at what they should know, with little time and data benchmarked against the right, relative points to inform their strategies. Democratising data is a core part of solving the challenge of integration.”

The 14 key areas analysed were audience, market, identity, product, people, experience, strategy, creative, content, media, engagement, conversion, loyalty, and reputation. These are the 14 areas – what Boldspace calls the ‘Whole World Brand View’, tracked in their data and analytics platform BoldLens^TM – that enable clients to effectively see gaps, remedy problems, build brands, implement winning strategies, devise bold communications, and protect reputations.

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