DMA Insight: Data and Training are Key Challenges Facing the Industry

The insights gleaned from the over 300 industry professionals that helped to judge the DMA Awards 2022 provide an overview of the changes and trends impacting the data and marketing industry in recent years. The latest figures reveal key challenges around data and training that need to be overcome.

Two key metrics that have seen the most significant change over the last 12 months are the lack of data available to marketers and how that data is managed. While there had been a decline in the majority of challenges to improving customer engagement and marketing, there was an increase in respondents finding a lack of data (46%) to be a challenge. The same trend can be seen in those finding a lack of data management (27%) to be a hindrance towards effectiveness measurement.

With the upcoming changes to the UK GDPR, we’re entering a new phase within data management, likely requiring additional learning and training simply to keep up-to-date. With the plans to remove cookie consent altogether and have websites more dependent on their own 1st-party data for online tracking (announced alongside stricter fines for a lack of compliance), it is becoming more integral now that employees working within these areas are well-versed in the full process of data acquisition, storage, and usage.

In-line with this increase in data difficulty was a rise in those finding customer engagement to be too complicated (16%) and those lacking senior support (15%). There was also a rise in those respondents claiming increased difficulties from their available resources and talent (30%).

As with the previous year, a limited budget (47%) has remained the largest contributing challenge to customer engagement. However, it is unlikely to be the sole contributor to these prior difficulties alone as those finding monetary resources to be a challenge had actually fallen considerably from 2021.

A factor that can account for all the above issues, relating to the majority of these trends which have become larger challenges to the previous year, is that of training.

Despite the perceived value in training to be consistent in significance in the previous year (92% claiming it to be important), the amount of ongoing data and marketing-related training has fallen by 10%, highlighting a need for either an increase in the amount of training data and marketing organisations offer their employees or a change in the ways in which they perform this.

With an additional 8% of respondents not knowing whether there’s more or less training from the previous year, it may also indicate a desire for a clearer system or approach to how organisations conduct their training. Infrequent training may be becoming a less effective form in which skills development is executed.

One alternate approach that may tackle both these key issues is micro-upskilling, recently championed and piloted by the DMA. In this instance, training is conducted by employees undergoing one hour of training a week, allowing for a more consistent progression in an employee’s development.

Want to know more about micro-upskilling and other learning resources? Find out more:

Data Driven Marketing IDM Course

Data Analytics for Marketers IDM Course