Regional marketers have said that generating actionable insights is one of their top priority areas for improvement.
42 per cent of marketers in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) region ranked it as their top priority, according to GfK’s newly launched CMO Outlook report.
The CMO Outlook report highlights more than 600 senior marketers’ perception of marketing today.
The report also found that regional marketers have the lowest access to real-time insights when compared globally.
The report found that only 19 per cent of META marketers said that they get receive actionable insights in real time from the gathered data.
Other regions including North America, South America, Europe and APAC show better figures ranging from 20 per cent to 33 per cent.
The report also found that they faced several barriers when it came to fully optimising data and insights.
In the META region, 37 per cent of marketers said that lack of resources was a big barrier, followed by insufficient tools (35%) and lack of investment budget (35%).
Other areas that regional marketers look to improve upon are media optimisation, extracting data signals, data integration, pricing optimisation and purchase data.
38 per cent of META marketers said that these important areas for them to improve upon.
The report also dips into the outlook the marketers holds for the future including their sustainability and environmental practices and investment in long-term branding.
It found that 56 per cent of marketers in the Middle East and Africa state that sustainability and environmental protection are important parts of their brand.
This figure is the highest among the five markets that were surveyed.
When it comes to long-term branding, the region prefers to invest a fair amount of their budgets towards it.
Almost half of the marketers in the region said that they spend 60 to 79 per cent of their budget on long-term branding. While 29 per cent said that they spend 80 to 100 per cent of their budget for the same.
While the overall outlook for the industry looks positive, even globally, 52 per cent of marketing decision-makers in the region still said that they feel particularly affected by the economic situation at the moment.
