The 2016 State of Marketing Report is here. It's a 60-plus-page survey of nearly 4,000 marketers from around the world about their top priorities, challenges, and best-performing campaigns for this year.

As you might guess, the report has a lot of data. That's why we brought an expert on the Marketing Cloudcast, the marketing podcast from Salesforce, to cover the report's key findings and recommendations for you.

In the podcast, Mat Sweezey, Principal of Marketing Insights at Salesforce, reveals what top marketing teams are doing - and why they're effective. Because, as we all know, it's one thing to do what's popular. And it's another to do what's actually working. Grab a cup of coffee and listen in.

You can download the episode for free now on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher. Don't forget to snag a copy of the report or check out the interactive site as your companion to the episode - that way you can follow along with charts and stats.

Check out a preview of the episode here:

Here are a few of the top discoveries about top-performing marketers from our conversation with Mat and the full report.

1. The best marketers know the importance of the customer journey.

As the chart below shows, high-performing marketing teams are 8.8x more likely than underperformers to strongly agree that they've adopted a customer journey strategy as part of their overall business strategy. Seventy-three percent say that a customer journey strategy has positively impacted overall customer engagement.

Mat says a customer journey strategy doesn't have to be exhaustive at first, but you definitely need to have a strategy.

2. High-performing marketers align with business leadership.

The world's best marketing teams have buy-in from company leaders. As such, marketing budgets are more likely to be prioritized.

Eighty-three percent of high performers say their executive team is completely committed to supporting the overall marketing strategy, compared to only 31% of underperformers. If you're not working closely with execs to garner support for marketing projects, you're missing out on a big opportunity.

3. The best marketers drive revenue through super-smart emails.

Top teams are 4.2x more likely than underperformers to leverage predictive intelligence or data science to create personalized emails.

As shown in the chart below, 49% of marketers say email is directly linked to their business' primary revenue source - a notable jump from the 20% of marketers who said the same in 2015.

4. High-performing marketers respond fast on social.

Last year, three of the top five areas where marketers planned to increase their spending involved social outlets. Now, those investments appear to be paying off; 75% of marketing leaders report that social is generating ROI compared to just 29% last year.

What exactly do high-performing marketers do on social? One thing's for sure: they respond to social interactions quickly, as shown by this chart. High performers are 11x more likely to respond to customers' social messages at hyper-speed.

5. Top-performing marketers are increasing spend on social ads.

Nearly two-thirds of marketers are boosting budgets for advertising on social platforms in 2016, making it the third largest area for increased investment. Among high performers, 80% will increase spending on advertising on social platforms.

That's just the tip of the iceberg from our State of Marketing conversation with Mat Sweezey! Get the full episode now on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher.

New to podcast subscriptions in iTunes? Search for "Marketing Cloudcast" in the iTunes Store and hit Subscribe, like this shows.

Tweet @youngheike with marketing questions or topics you'd like to see covered next on the Marketing Cloudcast.