How well do digital marketers understand the journey their customers take from awareness to conversion and beyond? Based on research, the answer may be ‘not very.’

In fact, an eMarketer report found that only a minority of agency professionals and client-side marketers from around the world were using key sources of data about the customer journey.

However, the potential for gleaning insight from data cannot be denied. Check out this infographic for more details.

The three keys to boosting your customer journey insight mentioned in the infographic are worth exploring further. Here is more about the type of data marketers are collecting, plus the tools and tactics used to gain actionable insights.

Cross-channel view of results

As B2Bs spread efforts across a wide range of marketing channels, a cross-channel view becomes critical. What do marketers look for when determining which tools to spend on?

1. Cross-channel view of results, with demands at 82%
2. Predictive and prescriptive analytics
3. Dashboards

A look at the types of marketing tactics provides more insight into why a cross-channel view is so important. All marketers used and analyzed email marketing, while 86% leveraged content marketing. Eight in 10 implemented and leveraged social media and search engine optimization, while 75% tapped into paid search. That is a lot going on!

Integrated technologies for a single customer view

Just 6% of marketers worldwide have a single view of all customers and prospects across devices and touch points. For the most part, marketers use fragmented, incomplete and complex approaches to building a single view:

– One-third use a combination of in-house solutions

– One-third leverages a mix of in-house and outside resources

– 16% built proprietary technology

61% said a better integration of existing tools would enable them to make better use of data technology and the large majority had at least started to integrate data, but admitted they had a long way to go.

Mastering the customer experience

Marketers worldwide consider the customer experience to be the single most exciting opportunity. Almost half of the respondents (46%) rank customized messaging and a personalized customer experience as the #1 priority. In fact, personalized customer experience is a top marketing area predicted to see more dollars coming in, and a single customer view is crucial to providing a personalized and thus better customer experience.

However, very few leverage these marketing activities. Less than one-fifth (18%) used a single customer profile for all marketing efforts. And though requiring data integration – just 10% of marketers tie together customer data across channels, tools and databases.

Marketers are planning a customer experience makeover and those who are able to do so stand to reap plenty of benefits.

When an emphasis is placed on data-driven decision-making, marketers take another step closer to better understanding the customer journey. The result? Digital marketing campaigns become easier to optimize and programs can deliver significantly better results.

Download a free copy of the entire eMarketer report here.