Data is the future. The emergence of combined business intelligence and analytics platforms has fueled what Gartner calls “the democratization of analytics,” under which “every business process becomes an analytics process and every user is an analytics user.” Nowhere is this change more evident than in marketing organizations where analytical expertise is a skill that all marketers must increasingly embrace. As companies invest in the IT infrastructure to share data across their organizations with secure, scalable platforms, organizations are empowering even non-analysts to explore data and share their findings.[1]

The future will be one where marketers will no longer use Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint charts to highlight marketing campaign results—instead, they will share live, Web-enabled results from ongoing campaigns that are enhanced and optimized based on real-time results. Organizations will not silo business intelligence data so colleagues will no longer need to ask, “Can I get that deck on campaign performance?” With always-on access to live data, people will explore information to answer business questions and improve outcomes.

The future is very exciting indeed, but where are marketers in this journey? InfoTrends recently completed a study entitled Lead with Data; Follow with Print that examined the state of the industry in terms of data adoption. Today’s smaller print service providers might be asking themselves, are our large customers way ahead of us when it comes to leveraging data? The answer is yes and no. Many organizations are heavily investing in data—accessing it, obtaining intelligence from it, visualizing it—and often enable a layman or non-analyst to derive value from it. However, InfoTrends’ research shows that although the focus on digital and the use of data are rapidly increasing, most marketers are not deploying advanced data-driven techniques. The fact is that most marketers still lack sophistication, so they rely heavily on their business partners for innovation, creativity, management, and execution.