While marketing leaders look to evolve their customer journeys to enhance the customer experience, new research from Salesforce shows that data continues to be a struggle for companies to meet their goals. Sixty-seven percent of marketing leaders say creating a connected customer journey across all touchpoints and channels is critical to the success of their entire marketing strategy. But overall, only 23% of marketers are extremely satisfied with their ability to leverage customer data to create more relevant experiences.
The 2017 Salesforce State Of Marketing report surveyed 3,500 marketing leaders to identify how technology and shifting priorities impact the decisions to reshape internal marketing organizations and better their marketing efforts. The report breaks down respondents by performance levels:
- High-performers (12%), those who are extremely satisfied with their current marketing initiatives;
- Moderate performers (76%), those who are either “very or moderately satisfied” in their marketing efforts; and
- Underperformers (12%), those who are “slightly or not at all satisfied” with their marketing efforts.
Sixty-three percent of respondents said that their company has become more focused on expanding marketing efforts across channels and devices. In addition, 64% of marketing leaders said their company has become more focused on providing a consistent experience across every channel because of changing customer expectations.
“Marketers are reorganizing their departments to focus on the customer journey more than just the channel,” said Meghann York, Director of Product Marketing for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “This means they must align their teams to different stages of the customer journey and ultimately focus on customer experience. Marketing departments and CMOs are seeing that if you want to connect the customer experience, you can’t be in silos yourself.”
Other findings from the report include:
- Roughly 89% of marketing leaders agree that a connected customer journey positively impacts revenue growth;
- High performers are 12.8x more likely than underperformers to heavily coordinate their marketing efforts across these channels;
- More than eight out of 10 high performers say their current tech stack is very effective at achieving goals such as internal collaboration and increased productivity; and
- About half (51%) of marketing leaders are already using artificial intelligence (AI), with more than a quarter planning to pilot it in the next two years.
