Adobe study points to serious gaps in the digital skillet among brand-side marketers across Europe, with those in the UK looking to hire data analysts to help “reinvent” themselves.

Adobe marked its European Summit by publishing “a wake-up call for business leaders” via study revealing that 73% of marketers had to “reinvent themselves”, in a bid to underline the depth of demand for its content marketing cloud services.

The findings in the report – dubbed ‘Digital Roadblock: Marketers Struggle to Reinvent Themselves – quizzed 350 marketing professionals in the UK, Germany and France, and with more than two-thirds of European marketers (68%) state that marketing has changed more in the last two years than in the previous 50.

Skills shortages acknowledged, but change is difficult
But respondents cited organisational challenges over personal obstacles as barriers to becoming the marketers they aspire to be in the digital era. Over half (58%) of European marketers surveyed claimed marketing success is dependent on organisational change.

Other perceived obstacles in Europe include a lack of training in new skills (30%), confusion over roles and responsibilities (30%) and company resistance to trying new programmes (30%).

When asked to identify the most significant driving forces of change, the usual lip service was paid to platforms such as ‘social media and ‘mobile’, with the report itself not specifically mentioning the word ‘programmatic’.

Data-driven changes
But 59% of respondents did mention that looking at new ways of thinking about audience engagement where high on their list of priorities. Meanwhile 54% reported that anew technologies for analysing marketing effectiveness were needed.

The majority (73%) of marketers in the UK, Germany and France agree they need to be more data-focused to succeed; however, the findings revealed differences in attitudes between countries.

In France and Germany, marketers say digital talent - including social marketing and e-commerce management - is the most critical for new hires. However, in a sign that the UK m`rket is slightly more sophisticated in terms of programmatic media trading, UK respondents reported that recruiting data analysts was top of their list of planned appointments.

Data analysts highly sought after in the UK
Respondents in the UK and France generally agree on how data has affected their approach to marketing. Seventy percent of marketers in the UK and 68% in France agree that capturing and applying data to inform and drive marketing activities is the new reality. This was compared to just 56% of respondents in Germany, indicating the tighter levels of data privacy there.

When asked about what they hope to do more of in the next 12 months, 50% of UK marketers said they want to use more consumer data and behaviour to shape marketing strategies, compared to 37% in France and 33% in Germany.

Mark Phibbs, Adobe, VP, marketing for EMEA, said: “This is a wake-up call for business leaders - success in the digital age is not going to happen until marketing teams feel they have the training and organisational support they need. It’s critical to get these investments right. Companies that can’t evolve fast enough are going to get left behind.”

Digital talent viewed as critical, but performance lagging
The research also exposed significant gaps in the way marketers are actually performing.

When asked to rate both the importance and how well they feel their companies are currently doing in key digital marketing functions, the findings revealed a 24% gap in the areas of personalisation and targeting, as well as a 24% gap in customer response management.

Likewise, marketers across Europe are struggling with content management (22% gap), marketing measurement (21% gap) and social marketing (19% gap).

Speaking with ExchangeWire, Jonathan Beeston, Adobe, director of new product innovation, said the survey highlighted how companies “need to take their data our of silos”.

He said: “It’s a horrible phrase but it’s almost as if we have to ‘de-silo’ the data… so the communities manager can understand what the search guy is doing.”

When discussing the aforementioned skills gap, and ‘organisational issues’ identified in the Adobe study, Beeston said: “Basically, when it comes to marketing functions, maybe the answers lie outside of the marketing department?

Arguably it’s down to the CEO, or HR person to look at how they can restructure, or incentivise their teams [to implement effective changes needed for the digital era]”.

Here comes the sales part…
Of course the timing of the release coincided with the launch/summit of updates to various elements of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud services. Perhaps the most relevant of which to ExchangeWire readers was the update to its digital advertising platform Adobe Media Optimiser.

This update includes a renewed user interface, with Adobe claiming the update will increase performance by up to 25% through through new, “predictive modelling algorithms that forecast and optimise campaigns across search, social and display channels”.

The update also includes tools that let marketers evaluate their campaign optimisation models ahead of implementation (this includes dynamic campaign optimisation, including budget allocation), as well as unified campaign analysis, through tighter integration of Adobe Analytics.

Basically, it means that better integration between its media optimiser tool and the rest of its marketing cloud stack improves its efficiency, i.e. ‘spend more money with us, and your campaign metrics will improve’.

Further details only the product specs can be read here.