Marketers struggle to keep up with content creation demand for their personalization efforts

As advertising and other brand communications get increasingly personalized, the demand for multiple iterations of content is growing at a rate that marketers are struggling to keep up with. And personalization without, well, personalized content just doesn’t work.

This week, Adobe released State of Creative and Marketing Collaborations which looks at this issue with a survey of more than 1,000 North American marketers, creatives, advertising and IT professionals.

The report says that creative teams working on personalized campaigns are producing an average of 28 pieces of content a week and can take up to 12 days to get a single piece to market. But even with all that output, most marketers and advertisers feel like they could be doing better.

Why you should care

Content has always been king. But in this age of hyper-personalization, the demand has gone into overdrive — providing more of a need that many companies can afford — both financially and operationally.

To catch up with the demand, businesses may need to invest more resources into their content creation efforts: 33 percent of those surveyed said their biggest barrier to personalization is the time investment and 20 percent said cost. This is reinforced by data from the survey that says that half of companies that simply had more money to spend with revenues of more than $50 million reported higher satisfaction with their content strategy and creation and felt they were very well coordinated, as opposed to the average across all businesses at 34 percent.

There is good news. Advertisers and marketers have added considerable staff in content creation (a 63 percent increase for advertisers, 60 percent for marketers) and the vast majority still prize content quality over quantity.

And there’s good news operationally with a majority of marketers, advertisers, creatives and IT pros communicating with each other at least once a week, and 71 percent wanting to get creatives involved in the pre-planning process earlier.

More about the numbers

• Companies need to step up. Only 26 percent of brand creatives, 21 percent marketers, and 24 percent advertising professionals believe their companies do enough to personalize digital advertising.
• Scale continues to be an issue. Fifty-nine percent of marketers, 52 percent advertisers, 41 percent agency creatives and 53 percent brand creatives find it difficult to personalize content at scale.
• More “digitally advanced” businesses (59 percent) say they are outperforming the competition, their content creation and delivery is very well coordinated, and their personalization is extensive than other companies (35 percent).