Is your marketing focus as broad as Salesforce?

I must admit I was surprised to be approached by Salesforce with an infographic to share here.

My initial reaction was to say no. I assumed it would be sales-focussed and seek to push their product. Sceptically, I also doubted I’d agree with their stats or message within the infographic.

Whilst I couldn’t 100% sign-up, to almost anything, there is much to commend this graphic summary.

Under the theme of “The Psychology of Trust in Marketing: How to Earn It & How to Keep It“, there isn’t much psychology. But, what it actually usefully summarises is the breadth of what the modern marketer needs to consider.

The main part of this infographic considers Content & Customer Service:

In the Content sections there are useful reminders to ensure contact details are prominent & to use your website analytics to optimise your site. But rightly, as research shows, the focus then moves off the rarely visited website to the off-site media that will prompt return visits. Leveraging your insights from research & analytics to make your emails more personalised & relevant (in timing, content & presentation) can have a huge impact on a media whose low returns frustrate many a marketer. Just as important is the reminder as to the importance of other voices.

Over the last decade, I’ve seen consumer research across categories reveal the growing importance of recommendation. The stats shown above, as to the importance of trusted experts & online review sites, support this. Extending your marketing to consider how to engage the trusted voices online & actively (not defensively) respond to feedback from review sites, is needed just as much as your internal NPS/CES/CSat programme. If I was to improve this part of the infographic, I would also highlight the importance to consumers of recommendations from family & friends. Without stooping to the buying of ‘recommendation’ with reward programmes, more sophisticated marketers will engage with network analysis to understood relationships between consumers and prioritize those with more influence.

Within an infographic on marketing, it is good to see customer service included. Most marketers will agree that the service experience is a key part of the brand & must live up to the promise. But too many still leave insight, design & delivery of such experiences to their Operations colleagues. Highlighting the practical consumer expectations in this infographic helps make that practical. So often, root cause analysis of low NPS scores reveals the main frustration is delays or customers feeling they are not being heard.

Then a very simple part of the infographic lands a powerful point about eMail Marketing:

Demonstrating once again that a visual presentation of the scale of phenomena has greater impact than just the number. Given that volume of envelopes (each representing a 1,000 emails sent every second), the marketer can understand how much work needs to go into email campaigns. It’s not just overcoming the hurdles of maintaining accurate email addresses & automatic junk mail filtering, it’s the sub-second time you have to avoid the “swipe of doom” (into ‘junk’ or ‘trash’). That is why, personalization, relevant content & timing are essential. All of which can be provided from Customer Insight if done well.

Finally, this infographic also includes some tips for customer service or Customer Experience:

This is the weakest part of the advice offered in this simple summary. The principles are right & worth reiterating to marketers (especially a focus on existing customer, deepening relationships & empowering frontline teams to intelligently respond), but in danger of just being platitudes. With so much high quality customer experience content now published online, including from experienced practitioners like Annette Franz, Gerry Brown & Peter Lavers – I think SalesForce could have done better here.

That said, in their article to accompany this infographic, SalesForce usefully  share both a link to Harvard Business Review advice on empowering your service colleagues and tips for prompt response to Twitter and email feedback. I’m uncomfortable with the platitude that the customer is always right (as insight-led customer marketing also identifies value-destroying customers), but the spirit of their advice is helpful.

So, all in all, I was encouraged to see such a major CRM vendor sharing this broader vision of what marketing now means. If you’ve found this helpful, then it’s worth also having a peak at their full article with links to related & supporting content (as well as the full infographic for you to download).

What about you? Have you seen your marketing or Customer Insight role expand over recent years? Have you mastered insight-led content marketing?