The corona crisis accelerates innovation in marketing
Salesforce’s State of Marketing Report shows that digital technologies are continuing to raise customer expectations and shifting the standards for customer relationships in Switzerland as well. Marketers must evolve even more quickly from brand ambassadors to managers of customer relationships that extend far beyond the initial purchase.
The trend is being accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic and changes in shopping behavior. Digital services are penetrating all areas of life faster than ever before and more and more people are using online services for everything from banking to shopping. Swiss marketers also expect wearables and voice technology to have a transformative impact by 2030.
The transformation of marketing is accelerating
The expectations and behaviors of consumers, companies and society as a whole are changing faster and more comprehensively than ever before. 74 percent of Swiss marketing professionals are already leading customer experience initiatives in their companies. These include both technological and organizational innovation. In Switzerland, these innovation processes are a top priority for the marketing executives surveyed. The creation of consistent customer journeys across various channels and devices as well as real-time communication with customers represent the greatest challenges.
Empathetic marketing based on customer data
Consumers have to adapt to more and more changes and expect personalized and empathetic customer experiences. Individualized messages and offers require deep insights. Marketers are changing the way they obtain and manage customer data. For example, they are increasingly using technologies such as artificial intelligence, 95% do this primarily for personalization reasons. Forecasts predict that marketers from Switzerland will go from using 14 data sources in 2019 to 24 data sources in 2021.
Marketers strengthen their business value
With metrics such as customer satisfaction, digital interaction and customer lifetime value (CLV), marketing experts gain a complete picture of the success factors along the entire customer journey. In B2B marketing, business growth through account-based marketing (ABM) plays a particularly important role. In Switzerland, 56% of marketers use CLV to measure success and thus position themselves as a strategic force within the company.
"The Covid-19 crisis is an opportunity for Swiss marketing managers to rethink every aspect of their business - from strategic priorities to the technologies and skills required within the team. Especially in the current crisis, it is important to further improve and expand the customer experience in order to be optimally positioned for the economic restart and the coming years," says Guntram Friede, Head of Marketing Salesforce Switzerland.
The State of Marketing Report The trends analyzed in this report are based on data from marketing executives from B2B, B2C and B2B2C companies in 30 countries, including 200 respondents from Switzerland. For this 6th edition of the State Marketing Report, Salesforce surveyed nearly 7,000 marketing executives worldwide from January 8 to February 11.
