As marketing evolves, customer satisfaction and customer engagement have jumped to the top of the list of marketers’ main measures for success. According to the new Salesforce 2016 State of Marketing Report, 65% of high-performing marketers said they’ve adopted a customer journey strategy to measure this success, while 88% said it’s critical to their success.
The report surveyed nearly 4,000 marketing leaders to discover overall trends in marketing, how high-performing marketing teams approach marketing intelligence and customer experience and key insights on primary digital marketing channels.
“In B2B, you can’t just market products anymore,” said Meghann York, Director of Product Marketing for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “It’s important that marketing teams prioritize the customer journey in their marketing efforts and understand that customer satisfaction is the No. 1 metric for identifying marketing success.” She added that “people who are not focused on the customer are going to fall behind.”
The report indicated that digital marketing ROI is on the rise, with marketers spending 70% of their total budget on digital marketing channels. Additionally, 75% of marketers leveraging social report that it is generating ROI.
Some other key findings from the survey include:
- Among high-performing marketing teams, 63% say they collaborate with other business units, such as sales, service and IT;
- Top marketing teams are nearly four times more likely to agree that predictive intelligence and data science are important to their overall strategy; and
- Among all performance levels, 63% of marketers plan to increase spending on marketing tools and technology over the next two years.
