THE 2020 STATE OF
DIGITAL MARKETING
Identifying Trends,
Best Practices
and Key Capabilities for
Digital Marketing Excellence
BY OMAR AKHTAR, RESEARCH DIRECTOR AND SENIOR ANALYST
Altimeter’s 2020 State of Digital Marketing report gives marketers
the latest data on how companies are using digital marketing to
drive business results. It identiies and quantiies the key practices
being used by companies to achieve digital marketing excellence.
Based on a survey of 476 senior digital marketers across North
America, Europe, and China, the report provides key insights into
what strategies, channels, and practices perform best, including
how these vary across industries and regions. It also identiies
trends in innovation, current technology adoption, and key metrics
for measuring digital marketing success. Major insights include:
• Practices once considered innovative are now mainstream,
such as personalization, testing and optimizing, and multi-
factor segmentation. The next phase will be to enhance these
practices with the use of artiicial intelligence.
• Digital marketing continues to shift towards becoming a
revenue generator, in addition to being a brand builder. Top
priorities for marketers include acquiring new customers and
increasing share-of-spend from existing customers.
• Digital marketers are willing to invest in capability improvements,
especially in areas such as personalization and data analysis.
However, they are less likely to work on structural changes such
as reorganizing the marketing team or creating processes for
knowledge sharing. This directly contributes to the challenge
of scaling digital practices to other parts of the marketing
function or lines of business. If the right organization structure
and platforms for knowledge sharing are not in place, scaling
innovation can stall, despite the improvements in capabilities.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
• Purchasing and integrating the right software continues to be
a top challenge for marketers. This directly aects their ability
to collaborate with other functions eectively, as well as the
rate at which they can implement and master innovative
digital practices.
• Marketing transformation plans are continuing and even
accelerating in the wake of the COVID19 pandemic. However
spending on digital has become polarized in 2020, with some
companies sharply reducing spend and other increasing
budgets in response to the pandemic.
• Marketing collaboration with sales has steadily improved
and is expected to increase even more in the next few years.
Other areas of increased collaboration are with the product
and comms teams. This means collaborating on designing
campaigns, sharing customer data and creating uniied goals
for the customer-facing part of the organization.
1. Acquiring new customers (40%) and increasing revenue from current
customers (39%) are the top objectives for digital marketers.
2. Top improvement priorities for digital marketers are more eective
personalization (52%), better segmentation (42%) and optimized
owned channel performance (37%).
3. Fifty-two percent of companies rated technology integration as their
top digital marketing challenge, followed by hiring the right talent
(51%) and scaling innovation to other parts of the organization (49%).
4. Despite the impact of the COVID19 pandemic, most marketers (56%)
are continuing transformation plans, with 22% even accelerating
them in response to the pandemic.
5. Ninety-ive percent of companies are able to personalize messaging
and experiences in some form based on customer data, with almost
a ifth utilizing AI-driven predictive analytics to do so.
6. Data analysis (42%) and marketing automation expertise (39%) are the
most desired skills for new hires.
7. Microsoft (26%) narrowly beat Salesforce (25%), Oracle (13%) and
Adobe (10%) as the leading primary martech platform for most
marketing teams.
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KEY FINDINGS
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Digital marketers are now tasked with an ever increasing
number of goals that span the entire length of the
marketing funnel. Thankfully, as the demands on digital
marketers have grown, so have their resources, with
companies increasingly diverting their budgets towards
digital skills, technologies and processes. The key
challenge then becomes determining how to use those
resources, and apply them to the digital marketing
priorities that will have the biggest impact on the
chosen goals.
GOALS, RESOURCES
AND CHALLENGES
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As we look at the range of digital marketing
objectives, it’s no surprise that the ones
positively impacting revenue are the top
priorities. Acquiring new customers (40%),
and increasing revenue from existing
customers (39%) have a direct, measurable
impact on a company’s bottom line, and
marketers are increasingly being measured
on their ability to deliver on both.
A third of respondents still include
traditional objectives such as brand and
product awareness, showing that these
priorities are still relevant and haven’t been
replaced. Instead, marketers are simply
being tasked with more.
Interestingly, only 14% prioritized
customer experience as a top objective.
This suggests that ownership of CX may
lie elsewhere in the organization, and
marketing is a contributor, rather than a
leader in this space.
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ACQUIRING NEW CUSTOMERS AND
INCREASING REVENUE FROM CURRENT CUSTOMERS
ARE THE TOP OBJECTIVES
Acquiring new customers
Increasing share-of-spend and revenues
from key customers/accounts
FIG 1: Which of the following business impact objectives are the top priorities
for your irm’s digital marketing eorts in the next 12 months? (Choose 3)
SOURCE: Altimeter “The 2020 State of Digital Marketing” n= 476
40%
Successfully launching new products or services
Developing brand reputation/
raising targeted attributes
Increasing brand awareness
Increasing size of order at or post purchase
(cross-sell, services, consumables)
Helping customers successfully onboard
and use product or service
Converting more marketing qualiied leads
to sales qualiied leads
Creating more sales qualiied leads to buyers
Creating a memorable digital customer experience
Growing e-commerce revenue
Providing digital marketing support
and coordination to channel partners
Enabling the sales team to achieve higher revenue
productivity
39%
34%
31%
31%
25%
24%
20%
14%
14%
11%
9%
6%
