Ayaz Nanji wrote a really nice article on MarketingProfs this month where he provided some information about how CMOs Are Struggling to Master Omni Channel Marketing. These sorts of articles are great for people like me who like to propose solutions to problems teed up by surveys.
The article highlighted a survey from the CMO Club describing why CMOs are struggling with omni-channel marketing. On a large pie chart on the first page, the top three reasons are these:
- Customer data and customer interaction data is unavailable or spread across many different “data silos.”
- Lack of appropriate tools or technologies required for omni-channel
- Inability to measure cross channel performance or ROI
Let’s tackle these issues one a a time.
1. Customer Data Spread Across Data Silos
From my view this is an easy one. Customer data should be in your CRM system! Every interaction from sales, every response from a marketing campaign, every deal teed up by a partner — it all should be in CRM system. And if you are using a CRM system like Salesforce, the Salesforce1 Platform provides a myriad of ways to get the data into Salesforce. For example, marketing automation systems have pre-built integrations into Salesforce and the Web2Lead interface is commonly used by companies to integrate a Webform from your Website.
2. Need Appropriate Tools for Omni-Channel
Modern marketing automation systems today all do omni-channel marketing automation. Check out Act-on, Marketo, Pardot, Silverpop, and Treehouse Interactive where they keep track of email marketing, social media campaigns, and more. Since most of the customer experience journey today is digital, you can track about 80% of the customer journey which gives you the lions share of what you need to make decisions on how your marketing is performing.
3. Inability to Measure Cross Channel Performance
Of course this is where the shameless Full Circle Insights plug comes in. If you’re using Salesforce and a popular marketing automation system, Full Circle does a great job of measuring campaign performance across all your channels. The application is built on the Salesforce1 Platform so all the marketing, sales, and channel data is stored in one place. And you can get funnel metrics, weighted campaign influence, and even a straight ROI if you want. Our VP of Products Andrea Wildt did a nice 15 minute webinar Optimizing Your Marketing Mix in Salesforce which discusses many of these topics.
