Top-Performing Marketing Teams Focus on Customer Experience and MarTech

The recently released “2016 State of Marketing” report from Salesforce found high-performing marketing teams are 8.8 times more likely to adopt a customer journey strategy as part of their business strategy than teams that underperformed.

High-performers are also 7.7 times more likely to lead customer experience initiatives than their underperforming counterparts, bridging the gap between marketing sales and service.

In addition, 72 percent of top performing marketing teams are increasing marketing technology spend in the next two years. In general, roughly half (53 percent) of high performers qualify as heavy tech adopters, whereas only 7 percent of underperformers qualify as heavy tech adopters.

Scott McCorcle, Salesforce Marketing Cloud CEO notes that, “If we truly put customers at the center of our thinking — considering how we can make any touchpoint delightful — it changes the way we approach applying all the tools available to us as marketers.”

The types of advanced marketing technology utilized by high performers include marketing analytics, data targeting and segmentation, marketing automation, lean/agile methods and predictive intelligence.

Use of predictive intelligence in particular is making it easier for marketers to track customer behavior and use those insights to create personalized interactions. High-performing teams are 3.6 times more likely to agree that predictive intelligence and data science are important to their marketing strategy compared to underperformers.

Optimizing Customer Experiences in 2016

The “2016 Digital Trends” report from Econsultancy and Adobe determined 22 percent of marketers consider optimizing the customer experience to be the most exciting opportunity for 2016.

Respondents aim to improve customer experiences with personalization (31 percent), content optimization (29 percent) and social media management (25 percent). “The drumbeat of customer experience continues to sound, though it is increasingly accompanied by an emphasis on data,” said Econsultancy’s Vice President of Research Stefan Tornquist.