In Uncertain Times, Marketers Look to Data to Deliver

BY Nishant Kalra, RVP, Digital Experience, Salesforce

As many companies tighten their belts amidst rising macroeconomic uncertainty, interest rates, and costs of doing business, marketers are having to make strategic investments with finite resources. In spite of all this change, marketers are more optimistic than ever about the value they bring to the business as post-pandemic trends continue to emerge. According to Salesforce’s 8th State of Marketing report, 91% of marketers say their work provides greater value than it did a year ago. Responding to economic headwinds, preparing for the retirement of third-party cookies, and removing silos to enhance the customer experience, marketing leaders face a huge challenge to balance customer data,
personalization, and trust. Marketers are adapting to changes in privacy regulations and calls for data transparency. Although 74% of Indian marketers still invest in third-party data, 81% say they have a fully defined strategy to shift from third-party data.

Redefining Customer Engagement With Innovative Channels and Tactics
Innovation is essential as customer expectations evolve, and marketers continue to adapt to rise in channels and fall in popularity. TV/OTT, digital, and video content has seen the largest increase in usage in the last year by Indian marketers. However, email marketing remains dominant, accounting for over 80% of all outbound marketing messages, according to trillions of messages sent from Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
With data playing a more important role than ever in understanding and reaching audiences, marketers are investing in tools and technologies that unify data efficiently, allowing brands to create unique customer profiles, execute automated campaigns, and infuse personalization at scale.
Personalization is about more than targeted messaging, it’s hyper-personal understanding. This explains why, as demand for data-driven, personalized, and scalable customer experiences continue to rise, more than half of marketers say they have invested in the power of artificial intelligence (AI). Leveraging dynamic customer insights is essential to every business’s ability to adapt its strategies and optimize the
impact of each interaction.
For marketers who rank customer engagement as their top priority, experimenting with new marketing strategies and tactics is a close second. As technologies continue to revolutionize the ways data is collected and understood, brands willing to innovate in new spaces stand a greater chance of attracting broad customer bases.

Balancing Personalization and Privacy

Marketers know that transformative, customer-centric engagement relies on data — and lots of it. Yet serving up personalization is not without its complications, particularly in the context of understanding compliance with emerging privacy policies and regulations. What’s more, as consumers grow more aware of data privacy, their peace of mind is essential to companies unlocking the benefits of personalization.
While not all third-party data is cookie-related, marketers will need to reconcile this strategy with looming changes in privacy regulations, to ensure they’re using customer data responsibly and evolving to collect zero- and first-party data.

Investing in Analytics
For organizations hoping to boost efficiencies and maximize value, identifying the right marketing metrics to track and show value is a business imperative. In order to understand if their efforts are moving the needle, analytics are becoming a vital part of any marketing strategy. The faster companies can unlock these insights, the quicker they can respond to customer needs and make informed decisions that will drive business growth.
With rising customer expectations, challenges around data management, and changing KPIs, marketers have their work cut out for them. And milliseconds matter in this new digital-first world. By prioritizing personalization, investing in the right tools to collaborate, collect and safely store data, and show value through analytics, marketers can continue playing a core role in driving business success.