In an effort to understand just how much data influences mobile marketing, YouAppi, a growth marketing platform for mobile brands, surveyed 543 in-house and agency marketers on the current need for critical data. According to the report, 98 per cent of respondents – consisting of both brand and performance marketers – said they’ve increased their organizational investment in data. 97 per cent of all respondents have seen improvement, and more than half of those would go so far as to call the improvements significant.

Respondents listed the specific areas they had invested more funds into, which included reporting and dashboard technology (81 per cent), their in-house data analytics teams (64 per cent), purchasing 3rd party performance data (47 per cent), adding more data-centric roles on internal teams (46 per cent) and hiring outside agencies for data analysis (24 per cent).

Marketers even admitted their roles were changing with the increasing importance of data, as 96 per cent of respondents said their job duties have become more data-focused, and 57 per cent consider the change in their duties significant. Of all job roles, marketing executives (62 per cent) were found to have the most drastic change in duties in relation to focus on data and metrics.

With the increasing importance of data, marketers believe job roles and function may need to be remolded. 96 per cent of all respondents agreed that brand marketers would benefit from developing the data skill set a performance marketer may possess, and 91 per cent said performance marketers should adopt the positioning and creative expertise of brand marketers.

Over half of all marketers revealed they are confident their job isn’t going anywhere, with 64 per cent saying they have zero concerns regarding job security. YouAppi discovered that over the last two years, 46 per cent of hiring has happened at the performance marketer level, and an additional 32 per cent of respondents said their companies are hiring both brand and performance marketers equally.

In the coming year, respondents are predicting a continued increase in marketing investments, with 91 per cent of performance marketers and 54 per cent of brand marketers anticipating more budget and expenditure changes in their respective departments.

“It’s fantastic to see more organizations take advantage of the skills and expertise that performance and brand marketers bring to the table, and create an environment where these two disciplines can better complement one another” said Moshe Vaknin, founder and CEO of YouAppi. “As marketers continue to invest in more sophisticated data analytics, and find creative ways to make that data actionable, they will see measurable results that connect them in powerful ways to their end customers.”