In a review on Adweek Magazine, digital training company Grovo reveals that 91% of digital marketing budget is spent without knowing if it’s effective.

$910 billion out of $1 trillion.

$1 trillion spent on digital marketing each year.  $910 billion is spent in essentially a guess.

Staggering.

At least when you have few expectation about what’s going to happen you won’t be disappointed.

The problem?  A skills gap.  There are too few professionals out there who have the breadth of knowledge necessary to plan, execute, analyze, and modify campaigns that maximize results.

Two major issues are data gathering/analysis and cross-channel marketing.

Data

The problem with data is not a lack of it.  Quite the opposite.

Digital marketing provides so much data with so many analytics platforms that the problem is managing it while identifying KPIs.

Marketers have to understand the tools, then they have to understand what the tools are telling them.  You have to be technical, a numbers cruncher, and at the same time understand marketing strategy and sales psychology.

It’s a science and an art. Unfortunately, there are too few Da Vinci’s out there.

Cross-Channel Marketing

Digital cross-channel marketing delves into content marketing, which is online editorial content created for advertising, marketing, and lead-generation purposes.

This happens on company blogs, social media, forums, PR materials, whitepapers, website articles…anywhere you can get your message to prospective customers online.

Content marketing is notoriously difficult to track for ROI – even the best content marketers acknowledge this.

And social media continues to be the pot of gold at the end of the marketing rainbow…everybody feels there is a goldmine to be had with social media marketing, but because so much of it targets the awareness level in the purchase cycle, few correctly track results (see data).

Consider this:

This study involves major brands and even marketing agencies themselves.  Consider what’s going in with SMBs, where marketing efforts are less sophisticated.

At Marketing 360®, we created our digital marketing software program for the express purpose of moving more businesses into that 9% that actually know what their investment is delivering.