NEW YORK: Marketers and their agencies need to transform their roles and responsibilities to improve collaboration and business results, a new industry report has stated.

Research firm Forbes Insights joined forces with Oracle Marketing Cloud to question 255 brand and agency executives around the world and found 60% said their roles and responsibilities had changed significantly over the past two years.

These evolving brand and agency roles are throwing up a number of challenges and creating issues in their relationship, the report said, which is leading to a negative impact on the customer experience and business results.

This was highlighted with the finding that almost half (48%) of respondents said that evolving brand and agency roles are making successful collaboration more difficult.

In addition, more than a third (36%) said their organisations are not highly effective when it comes to collaborating with their stakeholders to translate a marketing vision into a targeted cross-channel program.

Another hurdle uncovered in the survey centred on the 38% of respondents who said they are not able to effectively create and deliver timely content tailored to specific customer personas.

Effective use of data and technology also presents challenges for marketers and their agencies as just 19% reported that they are very satisfied with current marketing technology.

And four-in-five (81%) said they are unable to maximise customer data to create new and impactful marketing programs.

Turning to their priorities for the year ahead, increasing sales and attracting new customers emerged as the most important (80%), closely followed by enhancing customer loyalty (79%) and expanding brand awareness (78%).

Significantly, 60% said that to achieve these goals closer brand and agency collaboration would become even more important over the next 12 months.

"As the nature of marketing continues to change, closer collaboration between brands and agencies is becoming more important than ever," said Bruce Rogers, chief insights officer and head of the CMO Practice at Forbes Media.

"Progressive marketing leaders within brands across the world have identified this change and are embracing new and closer working relationships. At the heart of these efforts is a drive to effectively gather and mine rich sources of customer data.

Data sourced from Forbes Insights; additional content from Warc staff