The report found that 77% of marketers believe their work is more valuable than it was a year ago. Therefore, together with technology, digital marketing has also grown in reputation in the emergency to the point of obtaining the utmost attention in investment choices. During the pandemic, even if only to avoid being left behind, companies have implemented, or rediscovered, tools for digital interaction with customers and consumers. Tools that today can be refined with more serenity.
The 4 trends of the State of Marketing report to (re) start from
Referring to Italy, during the presentation of the report, Andrea Buffoni, Regional Vice President Salesforce Cloud, pointed out that 94% of the interviewees changed their digital engagement strategy and 90% reviewed the mix of channels to be used for own marketing activities.
18% of the marketing budget is reserved for the development of specific technological tools.
(fonte: Salesforce State of Marketing 2021)
The trends highlighted by Salesforce’s State of Marketing report are summarized by Buffoni in four main points:
- The acceleration of digital transformation paths also affects corporate marketing and, if 78% of final consumers expect a company to meet their “digital expectations”, it becomes necessary to make the most of the new tools available.
- Like all departments, marketing has also had to adapt its operational processes. The revolution of hybrid mode work involves a total overhaul of operations and the interaction between employees and with all corporate stakeholders.
- The data definitively assumes a priority value for the business, the challenge is knowing how to manage it correctly. Italian marketers expect a 40% increase in the number of data sources to refer to: to avoid being overwhelmed, it is necessary to have application services capable of distinguishing sources in qualitative terms.
- Thanks to the level of information depth that data analysis tools can achieve, metrics and KPIs continue to evolve: marketers are required to redefine them by considering new and alternatives as adequate business values.
In light of the trends, among the challenges that await Italian marketers according to the Salesforce report, the need to have a single vision of the customer / consumer transversal to the individual business units, the reorganization of structures and processes according to this approach, the availability for its customers of a uniform journey across the different channels and devices and, finally, the redefinition of metrics for measuring and attributing marketing ROI.
A cascade of data to manage
In particular, the channels that recorded the greatest increase in the last year are Videos, Social Media and Digital Ads. Each of these has a specific ROI, which does not necessarily have to refer to a generated sale. The Return of the Investment, in fact, has never before assumed different facets that involve different objectives, such as brand awareness, which, if they lead to a sale, follow more complex paths but no less interesting to analyze.
If the value of the metrics doubles – 78% of the sample claim to have changed their priority – this is also due to the enormous increase in data sources. In two years, the average number of data sources used by marketers around the world has gone from 8 to 14 and, according to Buffoni, the value can also be confirmed for Italy. If, then, we imagine that by 2025 this value could reach 45, marketers are faced with a further challenge, to be addressed immediately.
There is a need to put the data sources in order, to take care of their quality and completeness, to favor their accessibility and integration. In addition to dealing with their governance and with technical limitations such as the unification of the identities of consumers who access digital assets.
In Italy, only 34% of marketers are completely satisfied with their ability to use data for business purposes.
(fonte: Salesforce State of Marketing 2021)
It is the centrality of the person – the employee as well as the customer – that Salesforce places as the fulcrum of its entire offer of solutions. The completion of the integration of Slack, a collaboration platform recently acquired, configures an offer model that places it at the center of a shortlist of twelve components aimed at all divisions and company interlocutors. A model that adapts perfectly to the paradigms of the new company operations.
The individual components in turn place the data, their management, their processing and the real-time dialogue between the sources as the objective of their algorithms. Processing supported more and more by automation tools, with the aim of providing quality business information that is easily understandable and allows immediate action.