Survey results: 68% of web campaigns don't happen on time

Survey of U.S. senior marketing executives reveals 68% of web campaigns don’t happen on time, risking loss of new business and customers. As U.S. businesses compete for web customers globally, internal forces slow them down.

A new survey of U.S. senior marketing decision-makers reveals that nearly 70 percent of Web marketing campaigns do not get launched on time, leading to a potential loss of new business leads and eroded customer satisfaction. According to the survey, which was conducted by PK Data on behalf of SDL Tridion, 59 percent of marketers acknowledged that the Web is “critical” to their global brand and marketing strategy, yet a combination of lengthy internal approval processes, IT department backlogs, and the type of Web content management system they use makes getting Web content approved and published “painfully slow” or “bumpy” at best.

Not surprisingly, a large majority of the marketers, 76 percent, change their Web site content at least once a week, or even daily. Yet the success rate for meeting Web publishing deadlines is alarmingly low – less than 30 percent of the time.  When asked which departments are most involved in managing their Web site, the responsibility was split nearly evenly across marketing, communications and IT. Overly-complicated internal approval processes and dissatisfaction with the Web content management (WCM) system, whether software or manual, were mentioned as the reasons behind delays by 52 percent of the respondents. Nearly half of the respondents agreed that overloaded IT departments contributed to the delays, confirming opinions expressed by industry experts that IT is bogged down with web content requests that could be more easily handled by marketing and communications departments.

“As the Web picks up speed daily, there are internal forces at work that are slowing it down,” said Erik Aeyelts Averink, president, Products & Solutions for SDL Tridion.  “This can have a huge impact on a company’s ability to compete globally and meet business goals. These days, a customer who can’t find what they need or who has a frustrating experience on your Web site, can easily go elsewhere. Clearly, some companies have realized that it’s time to look at their Web implementation resources and put the control back in the hands of the content owners.”

Newer WCM software technologies, such as SDL Tridion’s R5 software, are now so intuitive that even a non-technical person can easily learn how to use them, enabling marketers to launch multiple campaigns in multiple languages, while still allowing local customization. These systems can also take over the job of streamlining the internal approval process, while maintaining appropriate controls over Web content that affects corporate branding, policies and legal guidelines.

PK Data completed the survey of 120 senior marketing decision makers in the consumer products, electronics/telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, and automotive industries. 70 percent of the respondents work at companies with annual sales ranging from $250 million to more than $1 billion. Annual sales for the remaining 30 percent range from $50 million to $250 million.