Forrester Study Concludes Poor Integration Is the Biggest Barrier to Effective Use of Data

Companies today strive to make business decisions based on strong, data-driven conclusions. It’s therefore critical to ensure that all of a business's data is correct and properly presented so it can be a help, instead of a hindrance.

This is easier said than done.

A recent Forrester Consulting Opportunity Snapshot, “Elevate Your Integration Strategy for Maximum Business Impact,” was commissioned by AI-powered marketing cloud company Zeta Global to examine the current state of marketing technology and the biggest challenges that brands face on their quests to improve customer experiences (CXs) and accelerate growth.

The study found that most companies (85%) have 10+ technologies within their stack, yet more than 50% believe they are lacking the capability or processes to manage fragmented tools and problems that may arise from poor integration.

Moreover, problems increase as more solutions are added. Marketers can achieve a better return on their technology investment by developing a comprehensive integration strategy that has the flexibility to optimize existing technology and connect multiple solutions, disparate data sets and fragmented processes, the study’s authors concluded.

The analysis was based on a survey of hundreds of U.S. marketers responsible for CX tools. The Forrester study shares conclusions to help companies better understand and utilize the long-term benefits of an optimally integrated data/tech environment, and the successful vendor selection that underpins it.

“As marketing becomes more complex, many companies are failing to keep up with modern expectations of customer experience and losing revenue as a result. The Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP) has been designed for marketers’ needs with the unique flexibility to wrap around and augment the brand’s tech stack, providing speed to intelligence, deeper analytics, and activation to deliver greater return on investment. We developed a single solution that consolidates multiple separate point solutions to resolve these issues and create practical and proven integration,” said Christian Monberg, Zeta’s Chief Technology Officer and Head of Product.