Martin Kihn, SVP Strategy, Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

What are marketers' hopes and dreams? What keeps them up at night?

Even though it's a people-oriented discipline, marketing can sometimes feel lonely. Faced with ever-greater pressures and ever-shorter tenures, the CMO may sometimes believe they're the only person in the world with their particular punch list of goals and constraints.

However, they're not. Each year, my company launches a double-blind global survey across 29 countries to uncover the priorities, goals and fears of 4,850 marketing professionals. Given longitudinal data, we can dial into trends over time—and this year, the trends are eye-popping.

It's Aye-Aye To AI—With Some Uh-Ohs

Let's start with the obvious: Marketers are definitely looking to AI—both generative and predictive—to help them personalize at a greater scale and make their operations more efficient. A surprising 75% said they had already implemented or were seriously testing AI in their workflows.

AI is a broad term with many applications. Popular marketing uses include automating customer interactions, generating content (starting with emails), analyzing performance, automating data integration and driving offers in real time. Interestingly, only one of these involves the buzziest type of AI—content generation—while the nuts and bolts of data management prevail.

Marketers still have mixed feelings about AI; they rank it as both their No. 1 priority and their No. 1 challenge. A sense among marketers I talk to is that they are hopeful about AI, but they're also being very careful about how they use it. Top concerns about AI include data leakage, lack of necessary data, a lack of strategy or use cases, and inaccurate outputs.

These aren't the only risks. Others have written about the challenges of the new generation of large language models such as OpenAI and Claude providing "facts" that aren't actually true, outputs that reflect the biases of the original data (such as assuming any "CEO" is a man), and copyright and intellectual property infringement.

None of these challenges mean that marketers should give up on AI, which can improve efficiency and effectiveness. They just mean the path to progress should be carefully managed.

Data Is A Problem For Many

Accurate data is the foundation of good marketing, personalization and AI—and marketers know this. A full 98% of the respondents said they believe trustworthy data was essential to their operations, which makes me wonder what the other 2% are doing.

Most important of all is first-party data, which the marketers' organization gathers from its customers and prospects. This data can often be tied directly to a known individual (generally, with their consent) and used to build a unified profile for better personalization and measurement.

Google announced the eventual demise of third-party cookies back in 2020, and since then, marketers have been all-in on first-party data. Consulting firm Deloitte reiterated that "first-party data, customer trust and user control will be vital to your future strategy."

Where does this first-party data come from? A dozen sources were cited by more than 40% of survey respondents. Most commonly used were customer service data, transaction data, mobile apps, web accounts and loyalty programs.

The glamorization of first-party data requires an organizational shift. Many departments realize they don't have the internal resources needed to manage customer data, which can be complex and short-lived. Knowing that I'm shopping for a credit card today doesn't mean I'm still in the market in a week, and regulations require consent flags, curation and the ability for customers to self-delete—all capabilities that the team must implement.

Pressures related to customer data cause a sense of frustration with internal capabilities. Only 31% of marketers surveyed say they are fully satisfied with their ability to bring different sources of customer data together for purposes like performance analysis, audience suppression and campaign building.

Personalization Is A Frustrating Quest

There is ample evidence that customers expect personalization and a coherent experience across channels. We don't like to repeat ourselves or sift through irrelevant information. However, the ability to deliver a more personalized—let alone a truly one-to-one—experience remains out of reach for almost all but the biggest and best organizations like Amazon and Netflix.

That doesn't stop us from trying. In fact, the ability to personalize across channels was the biggest differentiator in the survey between high- and low-performing marketers. The former group says it can "fully personalize" across an average of six channels, while low performers can handle three.

Customer data is required for true personalization; you can't engage someone with relevant content if you don't know their interests. It also requires that data about the same customer coming from different sources somehow be harmonized into a unified profile. It's for the purpose of building this "unified profile" that the customer data platform (CDP) category emerged a decade ago and is poised to grow to almost $10 billion by 2030.

In addition to harmonizing trapped customer data, marketers increasingly focus their personalization efforts more on retention than acquisition or upselling. Examples here include how-to guides, loyalty program information, personalized newsletters, emails and webpages, and content-rich apps.

It can cost up to five times more to acquire a customer than to keep one. Every customer lost to a bad or irrelevant experience with your brand is expensive to replace. Investing in collecting, organizing, analyzing and activating data about existing customers is just good business.

In summary, this is definitely the year that AI entered the mainstream, gaining rapid adoption across all markets and industries. A healthy touch of trepidation may ensure guardrails are used. Marketers are committed to AI and first-party data but continue to struggle with unifying data sources and realizing truly cross-channel personalization.

There are more tools and talent than ever, and marketers can take solace in the fact that the survey says: You're not alone.

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