Mediaboss Marketing

Unified's report, 'The New Age of Transparency', surveyed 100s of digital marketers from Fortune 500 brands and their agencies. It reveals that this year is "the tipping point" and will be the year where "marketers intend to leverage business intelligence to give them the transparency and context they need to confidently unleash the power of their social advertising investments".

But first, it seems, those marketers need to overcome some challenges. The report reveals that half of social marketers refer to their data as "a kludge" - a term attributed to Jackson W. Granholm, who defined the word in a 1962 issue of the magazine Datamation as "an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole".

Nearly 1 in 4 (38%) of social marketers say they have no capability to "normalize and enrich" social media data to make it usable and 56% have little to no transparency into social advertising performance and ROI.

Furthermore, fragmentation causes challenges and limits social advertisers in reaching their full potential, found the report, with 1 in 3 marketers leveraging 4-10 different buying and/or activation tools for their brand.

Additional findings from the report include:

- 60% have little to no ability to easily share performance analytics with other teams;

- 51% have little to no transparency into which solution is working best;

- 67% of marketers state that "the ability to understand creative and targeting performance at a granular level" is somewhat to extremely important;

- Only 8% of marketers call themselves advanced trailblazers when it comes to business intelligence for social ads - meaning there is a huge opportunity for growth in 2017.

Tags: fragmentation, research, social marketing, transparency

Go here to read the rest:
Social marketers refer to their data as 'kludge' - BizReport