Digital-Marketing-Performance-DashboardAdobe’s annual APAC Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard reveals a region in which digital transformation is reaching maturity levels in most countries, while businesses face a fresh challenge to integrate customer experience strategically across the organization’s touchpoints, under the guidance of a strong, visionary leader.

The CMO Council, in partnership with Adobe, has been tracking adoption, traction and success of digital marketing in key Asia Pacific countries since 2012.

This year’s Adobe APAC Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard was compiled through quantitative surveys with over 900 marketers across the region. Marketers from Australia, New Zealand, Korea, China, India, Hong Kong, Singapore and other countries responded and completed the surveys.  And for the first time, the Adobe APAC Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard examined creative empowerment and content velocity indicators, both critical to delivering an integrated and compelling customer experience across digital and real-world touchpoints. The inclusion of these two new categories revealed that companies have not yet managed to extend this integrated approach to cover creativity and the development of content.

Only 4% of APAC marketers feel that they have a highly evolved creative engine fueled by an organization-wide, unified vision. In getting to this nirvana, the challenge lies in breaking down functional silos: 31% of Singapore marketers report they struggle to connect functional silos across their organization.

Another challenge lies in the area of organizational culture. Across APAC, all countries report very low levels (9%) when it comes to organizational culture that is dedicated to a unified, dynamic customer experience powered by creative content and digital experiences. This is even lower in Singapore at 7%.

Commenting on this, Stephen Hamill, Managing Director, Adobe South East Asia, said, “While marketers rightly see digital marketing as a channel to engage audiences, they need to begin looking at incorporating unified digital customer experiences across all touchpoints. The lack of a unified creative vision, and an unaligned organizational culture, are both huge obstacles which marketers need to overcome. Hence, the role of marketers moving forward is to lead a paradigm shift in their organizations to enable the delivery of a unified customer experience. In essence, we’re saying that marketers need to helm business transformation to digital.”

Other key findings from the research include:

• Customers are driving adoption and optimization of digital marketing for their markets. In Singapore, customer preference and digital dependency is driving adoption of digital marketing at 73%, above the APAC average, indicating a digitally discerning and demanding audience. Other drivers include cost efficiency and effectiveness at 67% and ability to better engage and activate audiences at 62%, which has increased from 52% in 2014.

• Digital marketing enjoys strong business leadership support. 43% of Singapore marketers report a strong digital champion on the leadership team, slightly above 2014 levels of 41%

• Business leaders in Singapore are not yet fully convinced of the ROI of digital. 21% of Singapore marketers report that their APAC leadership teams have doubts. This is higher than the APAC and average of 17%.

• Data is where marketers have made the least progress across the digital marketing journey. There are signs that marketers might be going back to viewing data merely for reporting, rather than as a tool to improve campaign performance.17% of Singapore marketers report they archive data but do nothing with it. This is an increase of 2% since 2014 and above the APAC average of 11%.

Liz Miller, Vice President of Marketing at the CMO Council said that marketers have come full circle. “In a pre-digital era, we relied on instinct and experience to tell us what customers wanted from our brand. The emergence of powerful marketing technology platforms enabled us to move away from guesswork, and gave us unprecedented access to a single, organizational view of the customer along with actionable insights and information. Yet in our haste to embrace that power, we may have lost sight of the power of creativity in delivering an exceptional, aligned and consistent customer experience. The second wave of rapid adoption is about to hit marketers and business across Asia Pacific, with creativity and content playing a pivotal role in delivering a personalized customer experience.” Hence, she offers three areas of focus for marketers in the year ahead:

• Content and creativity are key, and together with strong organizational data mindset and execution, will be the fuel that catapults customer experience forward.

• Keep reporting against business KPIs and define digital success in terms of business goals – this is what resonates with the leadership team.

• Re-define what data means and see it as the embodiment of the customer, not just a reporting metric.

For more information, please download the full report.

 

By MediaBUZZ