MANILA, PHILIPPINES – On March 18, adobo Magazine presented an exclusive adoboTalks session with Salesforce, to address the growing need for brands to cater to their customers’ specific needs, through data-and AI-powered cloud solutions. Adobo founder, president, and editor-in-chief Angel Guerrero hosted the Zoom event, and was joined on the virtual stage by Salesforce’s Director of Market Strategy, Mathew Sweezey, Salesforce Digital360 Regional Vice President, Mr Juancho Jerusalem. They were also joined by a Salesforce Customer Trailblazer, UnionBank’s Customer Experience Group Head, Ms. Tracy Lim.
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To prime the audience, Guerrero did a quick survey to gauge the state of data usage among the gathered attendees, with 31% grading themselves an 8/10, with 53% grading themselves in the 5-7/10 range, while only 15% gave themselves a perfect 10/10. Noting the jump from 8-10, Jerusalem reiterated data’s importance in helping modern business reach out to their customers.
Transcending the future of marketing mindset
Following the poll, Sweezey took centerstage to speak on the importance of embracing new concepts in order to market more effectively. The acclaimed author of The Context Marketing Revolution, Sweezey shared that, in an age of infinite media battling for customer attention, it falls to brands to find new ways to break through. Rather than just renovating old ideas and applying them to new contexts, brands need to accept that it’s time to evolve, and transcend everything that’s come before in order to stand out.
The remit of marketing has expanded beyond branding to encompass business growth. Customer experience is the new battleground between brands. Therefore, marketers and businesses have to adapt to new metrics and decision-making frameworks. Data integration and analytics to measure impact are the new essentials. Providing a great customer experience can make or break a brand. So, how do you create meaningful experiences that improve loyalty and drive conversions? The answer begins and ends with data.
With Google doing away with third-party cookies in the coming year, Sweezey stressed the importance of first-party data to brands in addressing their customers’ needs, tying it back to the notion of evolution, by treating it as dynamic, rather than something to be siloed, acted upon, and forgotten. Furthermore, businesses now have multiple ways of gaining such data, ranging from their platforms to the content they create.By understanding and utilising these data integration insights, marketers like you can lead data-driven decision making to deliver better performance and return on investment. In this changing business environment, that knowledge is essential to business success and growth marketing.
How personalized data can help businesses to drive marketing performance
Now more than ever, it’s important to speak to customers with the right message, in the right tone, at the right time. Personalization is a need now to uncover new opportunities for customer growth and acquisition. Despite social media and the internet giving brands unprecedented means of reaching their targets, the means by which they conveyed the message had more weight than the messaging itself. When all was said and done, people tend to trust human-to-human interactions and recommendations rather than any number of online executions. Thus, the importance of proper engagement, placements, and the encouragement of user-generated content.
“You need to ask yourself, before you do any marketing program, ‘Am I working with my marketplace at this moment, or am I working on my marketplace?’ – we live in a new world, customers now have the ability to interact, and they expect to be able to do that.”
Jerusalem assumed the stage next, by reiterating that the world has changed and, while there’s no going back, we shouldn’t be afraid to embrace new ways of living, working, and playing. He pointed out that Salesforce was primed to help companies humanize their customer service experience across products and platforms.
“One of the highlights for me has been working with companies big and small, understanding their challenges, and providing the right technology, the right solutions to really drive them forward and deliver better experiences for their customers.”
Through end-to-end support, Salesforce aids its customers in crafting data-powered marketing strategies to create beneficial digital relationships with their customers across touchpoints. From apps to learning resources, marketing solutions that helps to personalize customer communications across every digital touchpoints, expert services, and an active Trailblazer community, Salesforce provides an entire ecosystem that has made it the world’s #1 CRM provider.
Unionbank of the Philippines empowers their business through a data-driven decision
To show how a properly managed customer experience can elevate a business, Jerusalem welcomed Lim onstage for a fireside chat on how working with Salesforce led to UnionBank of the Philippines being honored as the Philippines’ top Digital Bank for 3 years in a row. The challenge, according to Lim, was learning to approach the customer experience as an ongoing challenge.
“There are new customer behaviors, new interests, and so on – in marketing, each moment, each fleeting feeling matters, and if you lose it, it’s gone, so it’s important to be able to pivot and offer the right products and services at the right time, at scale, and for us, that’s Salesforce’s Market Cloud.”
“We use data to really understand our clients’ perspective,” said Lim, “Before designing and delivering experiences, and in that way, we build trust and confidence. Data helps us understand our customers in ways that they may not understand themselves!
Jerusalem rounded off the session by emphasizing the importance of trust, not just on the business level, but on the customer level. With the so-called “new normal” bringing with it no shortage of uncertainty, it’s good to know that Salesforce exists to help companies foster, develop, and grow this most crucial of equities.
Roadmap to innovate, evolve, and succeed
“Customer journeys aren’t just about onboarding,” said Lim, when asked on how UnionBank of the Philippines changed its ways of working in the pandemic. “It’s about nurturing. It’s important that you look at them from that perspective, and that creates trust, which has a rippling effect, and that’s what we did, by giving them the best customer journey possible, connecting with them on a human-to-human level.”
The new year signals a time to truly understand your customers by leveraging technology, and provide them with the right experience, now and in the future. As our world continues to adapt, business and marketing leaders are finding ways to deliver innovative marketing experiences that are meaningful, engaging, and create 1-1 customer connections.
Want to know more about how you can pivot your marketing strategies around a new landscape of customer engagement? Watch the entire webinar to learn from these distinguished speakers.
Salesforce is a global leader in integrated customer relationship management – The world’s most powerful 1:1 digital marketing platform. Marketing Cloud offers solutions for digital marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, customer journey mapping, marketing analytics, marketing automation, and B2B marketing to help you personalize customer communications across every digital touchpoint — from anywhere.
For more information on Salesforce and its Digital360 solution offerings, visit sfdc.co/digital360-ap
