Dive Brief:
- Salesforce announced two new initiatives with a focus on the customer experience, and in a blog post, it cited its recent 2016 State of Marketing as motive. The report that found 58% of high-performing marketing teams are driving customer experience initiatives across the business as compared to 8% of under-performers.
- The software company introduced Marketing Cloud Lightning, which is designed to allow digital marketers to create more intelligent and personalized customer experiences.
- Ad Exchanger reported that Salesforce has also teamed up with Google on the Marketing Cloud for Google's Customer Match tool that will allow marketers to create audience segments that can then be targeted in Google search, Gmail and YouTube.
Dive Insight:
Customer-centric marketing is now the norm across both B2C and B2B marketing programs, exemplified by the Salesforce report, which illustrated that high-performing marketing teams are focused on consumer experience.
Earlier this year, Ed O'Boyle, global practice leader at Gallup, told Marketing Dive, "Customer-centricity should run through all marketing activities – it is not a tactic, but an operating model that companies can use to build better relationships."
As consumers become more informed and better equipped to make purchase choices from among the plethora of options they now have, customer experience should be top of mind for all brands. Customer centricity should run through every company's marketing and messaging -- in order to reach target consumers in tailored and timely ways.
In Salesforce’s blog post, the firm provided some context for its focus on the customer.
"Today, customers have more information, choices and power than ever before, making the customer experience extremely important to businesses," the Salesforce blog post reads. "Creating seamless, personalized customer experiences requires collaboration across the company, but, as the lines between sales, service and marketing continue to blur, marketers are leading the charge in this effort."