Salesforce’s State of Marketing Report Delivers Key Insights, Recommendations for 2015

Earlier this year, Salesforce released its 2015 State of Marketing Report that delivers marketing insights from over 5,000 global marketers. The comprehensive report is a powerhouse of information that looks at areas of increased spending, rising trends, as well as the challenges facing today’s businesses.

Key among the takeaways is that 84 percent of marketers plan to increase or maintain their spending on marketing and technology in 2015. As part of this, mobile apps, marketing analytics and CRM tools are considered critical investments for building and strengthening interactions between customers and brands—a central focus for 2015. Also noteworthy is that 38 percent of respondents plan to shift their spend away from traditional mass advertising to advertising on digital channels.  

Among the report’s highlights:

– Last year, the top five areas where marketers planned to increase their spend were scattered across multiple disciplines. In 2015, the top five areas all related to social and mobile channels, which have become integral customer touchpoints. In fact, 64 percent of those surveyed view social media as a critical enabler of their brand, products and services. With regard to mobile, that number rose to 70 percent.

– Email continues to be an important tool for reaching and engaging customers, with 73 percent of those surveyed agreeing that email marketing remains integral to their business. Again, email designs that make for easy responsiveness via tablets and other mobile devices were among the recommendations.

– Increasingly, marketers are shifting attention from traditional metrics like conversion rates and ROI to metrics that better reflect the customer experience. The top five digital marketing metrics for success in 2015 are revenue growth (32 percent), customer satisfaction (30 percent), return on investment (23 percent), customer retention rates (23 percent) and customer acquisition (i.e., audience or list growth) (23 percent).

– Marketers see new business development, quality of leads and remaining up to date with current marketing technology and trends as being their primary challenges.

The report includes breakdowns by country and business sector, with those for the United States and B2B largely mirroring the global survey. The United States summary also noted “using existing data to drive more relevant messages” as a top challenge, while the B2B sector identified “demand and lead generation.”

In comparison with previous Salesforce surveys, the 2015 report makes it even more clear that while digital marketing was once viewed as just one category within marketing, that’s changed to a more holistic view in which all marketing is now being seen as part of the digital world.

To download a copy of the Salesforce 2015 State of Marketing report, click here.