Companies that have committed to the customer experience—factoring in the people, processes, technology, and organizational structure required to facilitate it—are outperforming their peers, according to new research from Adobe, CMO.com’s parent company.

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A focus on customer experience across the organisation.
Organisations with a cross-team approach—with the
customer at the heart of all initiatives—are nearly twice
as likely to have exceeded their business goals by a
significant margin.
Cross-team approach20%
Traditional11%
Artificial intelligence is an exciting newcomer.
Top-performing organisations are
more than 2x as likely to be using
AI for marketing.
2x Percentage of respondents planning to
invest in AI in the next 12 months.
31%
You can’t have a great customer experience
without great tech.
Top-performing companies are almost
3x as likely to have invested in a
highly-integrated, cloud-based
technology stack.
Organisations that combine digital
marketing skills with technology
are nearly 2x as likely to surpass
business goals by a significant margin.
3x 2x
Brands that are design-driven are more
likely to have exceeded their business
goals by a significant margin.
Differentiate your brand by design.
Design-driven22%
Traditional13%
of companies are investing in
design to differentiate their brands.
73%
Organisations rank the following digital-related
priorities among their top three.
Content and experience
management45% Analytics
32% Audience and data
management31%
Nearly 13,000 marketing, creative and IT professionals worldwide
told us what’s trending in digital marketing.
2018 Digital Trends
In association with
What respondents say is the most exciting
opportunity in 2018.
Optimising the customer
experience
Applying data-driven marketing
that focuses on the individual
Creating compelling content
for digital experiences
19% 16% 14%
And the primary focus is…
of organisations state that content and
experience management is number one.
20%