How are Marketers Accelerating their Digital Transformation with Less

In a post-pandemic world where marketers are expected to accelerate their digital initiatives, some with less of a budget, and fewer resources to meet targets, marketers are wondering how they are going to be successful with these new resource constraints. In a recent study from Salesforce, they asked over 1,050 marketing decision-makers from around the globe this very question. You can read the full survey, the Second Annual Marketing Intelligence Report, to see how these marketers are achieving growth on a global scale. We’re going to walk through some of their initiatives and how marketers are tackling them with the Salesforce platform.

How are businesses accelerating their digital transformation?

According to the Second Annual Marketing Intelligence Report, marketers are spearheading their digital transformation by leading growth activities. Their top choices for growth areas are as follows:

1. Sales/Revenue
2. Customer Satisfaction/Net Promoter Score
3. Lifetime Value of a Customer/Brand Loyalty
4. Return on Marketing Investment

And with a data-driven transformation on the horizon, their top improvements for the next year are as follows:

1. Optimizing Marketing Spend
2. Strategic View of Overall Marketing Performance
3. Better Ability to Understand/Engage Customers
4. Revenue Growth and Campaign KPI Performance

How are marketers actually conquering these changes? Let’s take a look at what some marketers are doing to pivot and conquer the data-driven transformation.

Optimizing Marketing Spend

The pandemic has forced many marketers to reprioritize their marketing initiatives in order to optimize their marketing spend. Some of the most popular ways marketers plan to optimize marketing spend are as follows:

1. Advertisement Optimization: Instead of continuously running paid ads, marketers are starting to optimize their campaigns with targeted campaigns based on their buyer audiences. They’re using demographics to send targeted ads to targeted audiences based on role, title, location, and etc. Rather than spending money on generic advertising, marketers are able to optimize their Ad spend by prioritizing Ad spend on targeted audiences. Marketers are able to tackle these challenges with salesforce. They can:
   1. Understand customer signals and behavior and segment with Audience Studio.
   2. Use Social Studio to gather customer and market feedback.
   3. Create and activate content with Email, Mobile, Advertising, and Social Studios.
2. Reporting Consolidation: With so many marketing tools at your disposal, it’s no wonder you have so many different reports, data points, and metrics to evaluate. Marketers are trimming down their tech stacks and combining important data points to create reports that are accurate and matter. They’re spending less time navigating from platform to platform, and instead, finding ways to bring the data together for meaningful metrics. Marketers are using Salesforce to help them:
   1. Connecting all of their marketing initiatives with other departments with Salesforce Customer 360.
   2. Build campaign ROI reports with B2BMA.
3. Consuming More Meaningful Data: Once marketers have these meaningful metrics data at their disposal, they’re not able to make data-driven decisions. Marketers are now prioritizing the data, evaluating the data, and using that information to determine where to spend their marketing dollars, ultimately optimizing how they’re. spending their marketing budget. Marketers are optimizing budgets and programs with Salesforce, they’re:
   1. Using Datorama connect & analyze all marketing performance data to optimize every investment.
   2. Improving engagement, conversion & ROI with Einstein AI

Strategic View of Overall Marketing Performance/Revenue Growth and Campaign KPI Performance

Many marketers are finding that their challenges to successfully achieving a holistic view of their overall marketing performance are due to misalignment in reporting, lack of resources/talent, and a lack of governance and real-time data. The challenge is understandable considering the diverse marketing mix of channels marketers are using to represent their brand. This includes anything from their website, email marketing/automation tool, social media, and other channels depending on their business and industry. The Salesforce State of Marketing report states the following:

On average, marketers use eight different channels for their marketing strategies, and on average 21 platforms.

Imagine trying to pull data from 21 platforms just to understand your campaign performance? So how are marketers getting a strategic view of their overall marketing performance? If you’re using Salesforce CRM, and Marketing Cloud, and/or Pardot you’ll have a number of reporting tools at your disposal, as well as the ability to integrate into other platforms to pull in data and create your own Marketing dashboards. If you’re new to Salesforce here’s an overview of Pardot, B2BMA Marketing Analytics, and Salesforce Engage.

If you have Patdot (Pardot Plus and Advanced editions) you’ll have B2BMA included. It was designed for the data-driven marketer who is really looking to dive into their data to see what’s performing and what the impact is on the ROI. You’ll have the ability to connect to other sources of data so you can really see the entire picture and state of marketing. Of course, you’ll want to check with your partner or Account Executive as some of this may not be out of the box. But what is out of the box are four really great dashboards for you to understand how marketing is performing.

1. Pipeline Dashboard: Check out what’s going on in your marketing lifecycle, a breakdown of the sales pipeline, and campaign performance.
2. Engagement Dashboard: Analyze engagement to see what’s performing. See the image below.
3. Marketing Manager Dashboard: An overview of everything happening in your pipeline, and how customers are engaging with top content.
4. Multi-Touch Attribution Dashboard: Discover what’s most effective at different points in the funnel, see what attracts leads, and what closes deals.

Let’s dive into the Marketing Manager dashboard. This dashboard is a combination of the engagement and pipeline dashboard and allows you to get a quick look at the health of your business and your campaign performance. It includes the following metrics: pipeline deals, revenue by the campaign, and marketing asset engagement. As you can see by the example below, this type of dashboard will help marketers tackle the data-driven transformation point number 4, driving revenue growth and campaign KPI performance. These dashboards are also editable, so you can add on different data points and combine external data points so you can have a holistic view of your campaign performance.

Let’s review the Multi-Touch Attribution dashboard. This one shows you which marketing efforts are most influential during each stage of the buying lifecycle. This dashboard allows you to view the data by 3 attribution types: first touch, even distribution, and last touch.

Better Ability to Understand/Engage Customers

This is a huge undertaking for some marketers during the next coming year. They want to understand and engage with their customers with connected experiences, rather than one-off transactions that are inconsistent and leave the customer with a disconnected feeling. This means all of the departments need to be connected, sales needs to be communicating back to marketing, and service needs to be communicating to sales. The only way to really achieve something. like this is being on one connected CRM, where you’ll have a single 360-degree view of each customer. You want to deliver insights to each department that will help them help the customer, and keep your company on pace with the ever-rising bar being set for customer experience expectations. According to Salesforce:

80% of customers say the experiences provided by a company are as important to them as its products and services.

This is huge, the customer experience has the potential to directly impact your bottom line. So, how are organizations tackling this challenge? They’ll need to start by connecting their teams to achieve a 360-degree view of their customer, and with what platform can they achieve this on, you guessed it, let’s look at Salesforce.

Salesforce Customer 360

With more ways for customers to engage with your business, Salesforce puts the customer at the center of everything. So you can connect to data from anywhere this way you get a complete view of your customer in every department, from sales, service, marketing, and commerce.

Salesforce brings your teams together on one platform to create seamless customer experiences. Here’s an example of how it would work with a retailer.

• Marketing: Marketing can use tableau, B2BMA, and Salesforce reports to understand demand, and pinpoint areas of improvement, then run social and digital ads to optimize their advertising spend. Once they’ve captured their attention they can bring them into a personalized email journey.

• Commerce: The commerce team can leverage this information to create dynamic shopping experiences, in-store and online.
• Sales: Once a customer makes an order, sales can be alerted so they can send over deals and special offers based on what the customer likes. they can have a conversation over the phone and record customer preferences and update information on their customer record in real-time so it’s accessible to the other departments.
• Service: If your customer needs to update/change their order, the service agent will update the order in real-time, so this information is accessible to the other departments.
• Behind the Scenes: When orders are placed purchasing data is connected to an inventory system with Mulesoft which integrates data from anywhere to help keep everyone up to date.

By uniting everyone on one platform, you’ll be able to better understand and engage with your customers, tackling data-driven transformation goal number 3. Let us know if you need help with your data-driven transformation.

About Roycon
We’re an Austin-based Salesforce Consulting Partner, with a passion and belief that the Salesforce platform’s capabilities can help businesses run more efficiently and effectively. Whether you are just getting started with Salesforce or looking to realize its full potential, Roycon specializes in Salesforce Implementations, Salesforce Ongoing Support, and Salesforce Integrations, and Development. We’re the certified partner to guide the way to increase Salesforce Adoption, make strategic decisions, and build your Salesforce Roadmap for success.