Dec 15, 2014 By Salesforce

It Is a Great Time To Be a Marketeer!

in Customer Service, Marketing, Social

As a Marketer, you own the customer journey, Bryan Wade

Listening to the keynote at our recent Connect 14 event for Digital Marketers in Sydney, it struck me perhaps more powerfully than ever what an incredible opportunity, and responsibility, exists for those who have chosen a career in digital marketing.

Led by Bryan Wade, the Chief Product Officer for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the 90 minute session outlined how crucially important the digital marketing team has suddenly become to an organisation. On one hand, they, more than anyone else, own the customer journey; and on the other, they are quickly becoming the trusted advisor of the C-Suite because of their intimate understanding of the customer.

We all now understand that in an age dominated by social media and search marketing, it is the customers’ view of your brand that defines it. As a result, the customer’s experience of your brand, from first filling in a form to after-sales service, is now the domain of the digital marketer. Every aspect of the brand where there is a customer touchpoint (billing, customer contact centres, delivery, etc) has the potential to have a powerful impact on the perception of your brand.

For this reason, it is so important for companies to have a tool that allows you to map that journey so you can understand the experience you are designing, and you can ensure that experience is consistent throughout. Did you know that 67% of customers who begin a transaction with a brand on one device finish it on another. The transition from one channel or device to another must now be seamless. That is what today’s consumers expect from us.

It isn’t just through social, email and the web that digital marketers get to define the online experience for the customer. Being able to engage the customer within the app at exactly the time the customer is connecting with your brand is an incredible opportunity to be relevant and responsive.

By understanding everything about the customer, location, purchase patterns, artist affinity and what channel they like to be contacted on, brands such as LiveNation are able to use Salesforce Journey Builder to create compelling experiences. Visualising and creating journeys is an important skill, but only when combined with a keen understanding of the impact or results. Marketers are moving in from campaign planners to experience managers and optimisers. It is these 2 key skills which will make the Digital Marketer so invaluable.

Ultimately, this intimate understanding of, and relationship with, the customer base places the digital marketing profession in a uniquely qualified position to engage the C-Suite in strategic discussions around the customer experience.