A FORRESTER CONSULTING THOUGHT LEADERSHIP PAPER COMMISSIONED BY SITEIMPROVE, April 2025
The Costs of Complexity: Unify Marketing Performance to Enhance CX And ROI
This Forrester study surveyed 609 global marketing leaders on marketing performance processes. Participants were decision-makers in CMO, digital marketing, content marketing, and demand generation leadership roles.
Marketers are adapting to a shifting landscape
Marketers have their hands full. From dealing with GenAI’s impact on paid and earned media to navigating brand safety and monitoring antitrust lawsuits, marketers are not just doing marketing. They face mounting pressures to plan, buy and optimize paid and earned media more effectively. Most marketers surveyed say they expect their organizations to increase their investment in marketing performance solutions to address marketing challenges, and, on average, firms expect to increase these investments by 17% over the next year while grappling with consumers’ fractured attention and organizational silos. Once marketers do capture consumers’ attention, they are challenged with engaging and converting the audiences they worked so hard to acquire.
Siloed and disjointed systems hamper CX and growth
Marketers deal with unintegrated systems, siloed and disconnected data, constrained resources, and incomplete visibility into buyers’ nonlinear journeys. Sixty-two percent report their marketing technology stack is overly complex, leading to increased costs, greater risks, and limited scalability. Eighty-six percent struggle significantly with technology costs, AI deployment, and siloed channels. A striking 82 percent find data unification and improving organic search results extremely challenging.
While GenAI empowers marketers to play more active roles in deploying AI throughout marketing processes, without the necessary guardrails, it can have disastrous results. Marketers need digital governance and marketing performance technologies to leverage AI effectively. In the best case, such technologies are easy to use and allow AI novices to quickly scale their work.
"A lack of data integration across platforms makes it hard to track campaign performance and refine strategies in real time." – CMO, TRANSPORTATION AND LOGISTICS SERVICES, UK
The cost of inaction is higher than the investments required to solve these problems
Many marketers do not consider websites holistically and lose sight of the bigger picture by focusing on campaign level tactics. Siloed marketing teams means digital governance, content, paid media, and earned media together perform more poorly than the sum of their parts.
Marketers frequently struggle to justify budgets due to challenges in accurately measuring campaign effectiveness and outcomes; increased operational costs and reduced organizational efficiency are direct consequences of fragmented systems and poor integration.
"Integration of data between different channels is difficult, resulting in poor marketing results and wasted marketing resources." - CONTENT MARKETING LEADER
If organizations want to effectively compete, they must take immediate steps to adapt
Most marketers surveyed say they expect their organizations to increase their investment in marketing performance solutions to address these marketing challenges. On average, firms expect to increase these investments by 17 percent over the next year.
Marketing performance platforms help augment workflows with AI, upskill subject matter experts (SMEs), unify data, prove marketing efficacy, and better manage budgets. Most marketers surveyed say they expect their organizations to increase their investment in marketing performance solutions to address marketing challenges, and, on average, firms expect to increase these investments by 17% over the next year.
Top solutions include:
- SEO solutions. Nearly three in four marketers surveyed (73 percent) say their organization plans to implement or expand use of SEO solutions. The newest generation of tools accelerate and simplify SEO as part of a holistic content lifecycle approach, while helping marketers adapt to genAI.
- Digital experience solutions. Seven in ten marketers surveyed (69 percent) note plans to add digital experience solutions, including tools that optimize the user journey across channels and devices.
- Digital governance solutions. Two in three marketers surveyed (65 percent) say their organization plans to invest in accessibility solutions. Tools enabling improved site performance, quality assurance, and brand consistency are key.
"Increasing search engine and optimization — while maintaining compliance and conversion rates for our customers — is going to be the biggest change that we expect to see in our business and throughout the industry as a whole." – DIGITAL MARKETING LEADER, MANUFACTURING AND CONSTRUCTION, CANADA
Full-funnel marketing is the secret to greater performance
Marketers need more robust tools, but they also need a comprehensive marketing performance approach that unifies functions and enables full-funnel experiences.
This approach entails mapping and sequencing paid and earned media to buyers’ nonlinear journeys. By unifying people, processes, and technologies, marketers can achieve more effective full-funnel marketing and healthier brands.
Surveyed marketers expect significant benefits from investing in unified marketing functions; 63% of respondents anticipate systems that unify paid and earned media to have a critical impact on their organization’s marketing success. By investing in unified marketing, respondents ultimately expect to compete more effectively and differentiate their businesses as well as reap greater profitability. By enhancing marketing ROI and consumer experiences, organizations can deepen their moats and scale.
Read more in Forrester’s study
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