Marketing teams generate insights constantly, but most of those insights never travel beyond the channel where they were discovered. A survey of 600 marketers asked what typically happens to an insight once it’s found, and the largest response by far is that it stays used only within that channel. A smaller share gets shared informally with another team, and only a small fraction gets automatically incorporated into other workflows or applied consistently across multiple channels.

Essential Statistics

• 37% of marketers say insights are used only within the channel that found them, the largest single response.
• 21% say insights are shared informally with another team.
• 17% say insights are added to centralized reporting.
• Only 6% say insights are applied across multiple channels, and only 5% say insights are automatically incorporated into other workflows.
• 14% say they are unsure what happens to insights after they’re found.

Key Takeaways

• The dominant response of insights staying within their originating channel suggests most organizations lack a structured process for cross-channel knowledge sharing, even when the insight itself could be broadly useful.
• Informal sharing outranking centralized reporting suggests that when insights do travel, they tend to move through personal relationships between team members rather than formal systems.
• The combined 11% for automatic incorporation and cross-channel application suggests true systemic knowledge sharing remains rare, even at organizations that have invested in centralized reporting.
• The 14% who are unsure what happens to insights suggests a meaningful share of marketers may not have visibility into their own organization’s knowledge management process at all.
• This pattern suggests the bigger growth lever for many marketing teams isn’t finding more insights. It’s building the infrastructure to let existing insights travel further than the channel where they started.

Actionable Insights

• Build a simple, mandatory step for logging significant insights into a shared, centralized location rather than letting them stay siloed in the channel where they were found, since this data shows that’s the default outcome for over a third of insights.
• Formalize the informal sharing that’s already happening between teams into an actual documented process, since informal sharing already outranks centralized reporting in this data and could scale further with structure behind it.
• If your team is unsure what happens to insights after discovery, as 14% of respondents report, start by mapping your current process, even a rough version, before trying to improve it.
• Identify a small number of high-value insights already sitting in individual channels and manually test applying them elsewhere. This is a low-lift way to validate whether cross-channel application delivers results before building automated systems.
• Treat insight portability as its own measurable goal, tracking what percentage of discovered insights make it into centralized reporting or get applied across channels, rather than only measuring how many insights get discovered in the first place.

‘Finding the insight was never the hard part. Getting it out of the channel where you found it and into the rest of the business, that’s where almost every team gets stuck.’ – Neil Patel