Thank you to our partners at Salesforce for developing this insightful 2021 Marketing Intelligence Report.

How are marketers operationalizing growth mandates, improving visibility into marketing ROI, and using data to support business objectives? What are the top challenges integrating marketing data? And what is the role of cross-channel marketing?

These are some of the most pressing questions Salesforce answers in the newly released Marketing Intelligence Report: Data and Analytics Trends to Drive Future Growth. Based on data collected from over 1,050 marketing decision-makers worldwide, the report drills down into the top five improvements marketers are making right now.

After digging deeper into the trends highlighted in this latest report, I sat down for a Q&A with my team to share my top takeaways and offer some tips to the community at large.

What are the most important takeaways from Salesforce’s new Marketing Intelligence Report?

This report is chock-full of important insights for marketing teams, but three areas, in particular, stand out to me based on what they mean for organizations going forward:

1. Evaluate where your data lives and how well it’s used. Salesforce finds that marketers who are completely satisfied with their investments and outcomes are 4.8 times more likely to be satisfied with their data integration. Of course, this planning piece has always been critical, but it’s even more so now given the accelerated digital transformations most organizations have gone through over the past 12–18 months.

2. Always tie your marketing activities to business outcomes. To measure anything, teams first need to have the right data, in the right place, connected in a way that allows for an accurate picture of all marketing activities and their outcomes. This point really speaks to the importance of gaining that 360-degree view of the customer, which typically happens through a customer data platform (CDP).

3. Break down data silos through better cross functional alignment. According to Salesforce, some of marketers’ top challenges include sharing and collaborating on data analysis, connecting marketing activities to business outcomes (which goes well beyond system integrations), and applying learnings to strategies. All of these come back to collaboration across departments. Most of the data organizations now collect is owned by multiple departments and used for various purposes, but customers don’t care about those distinctions — they expect consistency no matter where, when, or why they interact with an organization.

Let’s break those down a bit further. Starting with the first point, what do organizations need to think through when it comes to planning? And where should they start?

Proper planning, integrations, and maintenance can make or break a program. This is something I’m seeing organizations realize now more than ever after so many businesses, especially those on the consumer goods side, took on digital transformations in a matter of months that previously would have spanned years. So what happens now?

In a world where most, if not all, operations are digital, the next step is to optimize how systems are integrated. Just because systems are digitally connected doesn’t mean they’re efficient. Teams should document both efficiencies and inefficiencies so they can prioritize improving the areas that are most important to delivering the best possible outcomes for their customers.

As part of this effort, teams should evaluate where data lives (all over or centralized) and if it’s connected. If it’s all over, that needs to change. Fortunately, this is an area where teams can start with a few simple steps:

• Take an inventory of your systems and determine whether they are connected and if they should be connected (remember: there may be some cases where this doesn’t make sense).

• Review if they are automated or not and if they should be automated (once again, this doesn’t always make sense).

• Prioritize and balance the impact of any needed initiatives with the level of effort involved to complete them. For example, you’ll need to weigh the impact of taking on one big improvement that will span 12 months versus three or more small-or-medium sized improvements that will take six months.

As you put that structure in place, it’s critical to connect marketing activities to business outcomes. Why is this so important and how can organizations accomplish this?

Tying marketing activities to business outcomes is essential to gaining sight into ROI on those activities. It also empowers teams to make more informed decisions about what to do next.

Getting to this end state starts by mapping data points and their respective systems to understand how they relate. From there, it’s about determining how to best connect data to create that complete view of the customer profile while removing any blind spots. Overall, a CDP is generally the best way for organizations to accurately relate data to marketing activities and individual customers.

Some of the most common questions teams ask center around data cleanliness. For example, how can they keep data clean after they get it in the right place? The answer to this is that data cleanliness starts by designing and implementing processes that minimize manual, time-consuming activities. But that alone isn’t enough. You also need to regularly review current practices so you can identify inefficiencies and determine if they can be updated or replaced by newer, better practices. This should be an ongoing effort, as practices that were once efficient may quickly become inefficient in today’s fast-moving environment.

And what about collaboration? It seems like that’s an important thread that can impact all of these efforts.

Absolutely. With the way data sits across an organization today, collaboration from multiple departments is essential to everything. This is especially apparent in B2B organizations.

One way to achieve excellence in this area is through the introduction of account based marketing (ABM), which requires true collaboration across stakeholders and departments. This collaboration should lead to alignment on definitions, processes, and key data points that enable better coordination of customer-facing activities. It’s essential to remember that being in the same room doesn’t necessarily lead to improvements; rather, that comes from an ongoing, concerted effort to get and keep everyone on the same page.

An area that can get tricky is aligning teams when they use data differently. The best place to start in these instances is to map how each team uses the data. You can then pinpoint any common denominators and decide if and how they should be connected to create a unified profile. Throughout these efforts, remember that gaining alignment is an ongoing initiative.

Of course, knowing what to do is only half the battle: then you have to execute.

Prepare Your Marketing Operations for the Next Wave of Change

The pandemic introduced unprecedented levels of digital transformation in response to shifting consumer behavior. 84% of customers now say the experience a company provides across channels is as important as its products and services. To help prepare your marketing operations for the next wave of change, I suggest these three tips; evaluate where your data lives and how well it’s used, always tie your marketing activities to business outcomes, and break down data silos through better cross-functional alignment.

Want to dive deeper into the top five improvements marketers are making right now?

Download the full Salesforce 2021 Marketing Intelligence Report