Teradata has released the results of its 2013 Data Driven Marketing Survey, compiling responses from over 2200 marketers throughout the globe.  Companies surveyed all have at least $100M in revenue, with some at over $10B.  Some of the companies surveyed have marketing-focused big data scientists on staff; other have no such specialists and have difficulty getting the data they need from their IT departments.

Some of the survey results and trends are predictable.  For example, companies with higher revenue are more likely to have on-staff data scientists; and 58% of survey respondents see making more accurate decisions as a benefit of basing those decisions on data.

But other results are less obvious, and probably more interesting too. For example:

• 50% of marketers say that marketing and IT are not strategic partners in their company
• 40% of marketers gave their department a grade of C or lower for using data to drive marketing
• 71% of marketers plan to implement a Big Data analytics solution in the next two years
• Less than 10% of companies use the data they have in a systematic way

Some of the results were downright counter-intuitive:

• Of the types of data companies collect and currently use to drive marketing, transactional data came in last at 38% (demographic data came in first with 73%)
• In a list of obstacles to implementing data-driven marketing, lack of funding priority came in very high, at #3, with 35%
• The industry vertical with the lowest number of marketers giving themselves a grade of A was Financial Services (at 16%), worse even than telecom/utilities and healthcare
• 30% of companies at the low end of the revenue scale (between $100M and $500M in revenue) plan to evaluate/add marketing data scientists in the next 2 years.  That’s a significantly higher percentage than companies in any of the other (higher) three revenue categories

One very interesting factoid from the report is that a full 75% of respondents report that they have difficulty in calculating return on investment (ROI) on their data-driven market spend.  The irony here is striking: marketers are having difficulty measuring and evaluating data driven marketing, the very underpinning of which is measurement and evaluation.

The survey shows that we’re in a bit of a split reality right now, when it comes to big data.  Marketers are probably the most advanced adopters of the technology, and 71% of them plan to have Big Data solutions in place in the next two years.  Meanwhile 75% of marketers can’t calculate their ROI and 50% of them say that IT is not a strategic partner.

Well, at least they’re honest, and that’s probably quite valuable.  Download the full report and see if you can’t benefit from the candor of 2200+ marketers’ shared experiences on using data in their craft.