Adobe says most traditional marketers don’t know how to go digital

Only 14 percent of marketers who want to reinvent themselves for the new digital world actually know how to, according to an Adobe study released today.

In an era of social media, marketing automation, and mobile advertising, that’s clearly a problem.

“Marketers have to adapt to change,” Adobe VP Suresh Vittal told me. “But while marketers recognize that they need to reinvent themselves, they often don’t know how.”

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In the company’s study of over 1,000 marketing professionals, 40 percent said that they wanted to reinvent themselves for the digital age. But only 14 percent of that 40 percent said they knew how to become digital marketers.

Part of the problem, Adobe says, is that marketers are not getting the help they need. 30 percent of the thousand respondents said there was no training available for the new marketing skills they need, and another 30 percent said their organizations are not adapting to new technology.

The stakes are getting higher and higher, Vittal told me.

“It really pays to be the best of the best,” he said, citing data from the survey. “Marketers who are best in their category get 70 percent higher smartphone traffic to their websites, see visitors spend 30 percent more time, and get 100 percent higher conversion rates.”

The challenging reality is that the marketing technology landscape is growing so fast that marketers are being bombarded with new advertising, marketing, analytics, and automation technologies almost daily. Huge new technology solutions from enterprise vendors are vying with cheaper software from upstart startups, and there’s a lot of noise in the space.

Adobe didn’t offer a solution for the problem — although of course the implication in releasing the survey is that the company’s own marketing cloud is at least one answer. Universities and colleges are responding to the need however, with institutions such as NYU and Georgetown offering new digital marketing degrees and certificates.

That makes a lot of sense, given that Marketo CMO Sanjay Dholakia recently told me that marketing has changed more in the last five years than in the previous 500.

Adobe’s study was conducted online by research firm Edelman Berland in February of this year.