Salesforce, a global leader in CRM, has released the State of Marketingreport, sharing insights from over 4,800 marketing leaders across 29 countries – including 99 from the UAE.
The report covers the latest trends on how marketers are evaluating and implementing AI into their operations; approaching data acquisition, maintenance and application strategies and ensuring customer trust and security as vulnerabilities increase.
Key insights from the research include:
- Priorities for a new marketing era. Marketers are evolving their practices in a highly competitive landscape. They’re looking to AI – both generative and predictive – to help personalise at scale and boost efficiency.
- Implementing/ leveraging AI is marketers’ number one priority on a global scale, as well as their biggest challenge
- Locally, improving marketing ROI and attribution is UAE marketers’ number one priority, while outdated tools and technologies is their biggest challenge
- Marketers shore up their data foundations. Businesses have long struggled to connect disparate data points to create consistent, personalised experiences across customer journeys. Yet as third-party cookies are depreciated and AI proliferates, that quest is only becoming more critical and challenging.
- Thirty-two percent of marketers in the UAE are fully satisfied with their ability to unify customer data sources
- Sixty-six percent of marketers in the UAE have access to real-time data to execute a campaign. Seventy-eight percent need the IT department’s help to do so
- Marketers in the UAE use an average of 10 different tactics to collect data, with customer service data being the most common
- Marketers embrace AI with an eye on trust. Marketers are intent on successfully applying AI in their operations with the right data, but are concerned about security.
- Eighty-three percent of marketers in the UAE are already experimenting with or have fully implemented AI into their workflows
- AI implementation is also a point of differentiation: high performing marketing teams are 1.3x more likely than underperformers to have fully implemented AI within their operations
- The three most popular AI use cases among marketers in the UAE are: generate content, personalise the customer journey across channels and drive best offers in real-time
- Full personalisation remains a work in progress. To meet rising customer expectations around personalisation, marketers are graduating beyond broad audience segmentations, like location or age, to more specific identifiers like individual preferences or past interactions. There’s also a difference between how the highest- and lowest-performing marketing teams adapt.
- High performers in the UAE fully personalise across an average of seven channels, compared with underperformers who fully personalised across 4.5
- Marketers seek unified analytics. There is no shortage of data sources but putting that data to work is a challenge – especially when it demands a holistic or long-term view of data.
- Forty-six percent of marketers in the UAE track customer lifetime value (CTV)
- Ninety-one percent of marketers in the UAE say they have a clear view into marketing’s impact on revenue