Marketing Technology & Data Integration, September 2014 [CHART]

Marketers are constantly striving to understand consumers, increasing data collection efforts as a result. However, professionals need to up marketing technology investments if they hope to make sense of this data, according to September 2014 research by Signal, and the majority have taken note: 53% of US marketers polled said they had increased marketing technology investments in the past three years.

Simply adding separate technologies isn’t enough. Thanks to consumer use of multiple devices each day, marketers must also focus on integrating technologies and data across channels. One-quarter of respondents said most or all of their tools were integrated, and a close percentage had at least combined their core ones. An additional 41% of respondents were making some moves, albeit slowly.

In all, 96% of marketers said that fully integrated marketing technology would have a positive, strong or very strong effect on their marketing goals, and 88% said the same about innovation. Fully 86% also believed that integrated marketing technology would improve their customer relationships and create more loyalty. Read the rest at eMarketer.