Among the recurring themes Wednesday at Dreamforce in San Francisco was the need to develop customer-centric experiences that are both channel-agnostic and measurable.
Online job finder CareerBuilder and CPG giant Unilever were among the major brands that took turns on stage and dished about their digital priorities, best practices and thoughts around their marketing investments.
“Every CEO I know keeps a secret budget stash and, throughout the year, gets proposals from all areas of the business on how to use that,” said Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder. “When I hear from my marketers the returns they’re getting, I allocate dollars there. With the cloud and [connected technologies] it allows marketers to make their argument in a data-driven fashion.”
Mobile is a key area of investment for CareerBuilder, which is experimenting with win-back messaging (it’s been an ExactTarget user for more than a decade) to reactivate job-seekers — particularly those who searched for a job, but didn’t apply.
By prompting users 24 hours after a search and surfacing similar job posts, “we’ve seen 500% increases in CTRs (click-through rates),” Ferguson said. He acknowledged that the company is still in “the early innings” of mobile, but it continues to work with ExactTarget to do responsive design in emails and to surface relevant and targeted content across all devices.
Similarly, Unilever — one of the largest ad spenders in the world — is becoming increasingly data-driven with its content strategy. For its many brands and products, the real-time nature of its campaigns is paramount.
The question is: “How do you create quality content that’s always on and that’s effective in [its respective] channel?” said Luis De Como, Unilever’s SVP of global media, during the Marketing Cloud keynote. “If you can’t scale it, combine it, analyze it, you can’t act on it.”
More than 7,000 marketers and agency partners use social listening, marketing and collaboration tools from Salesforce.com to gauge the impact of campaigns such as Dove Real Beauty Sketches, which garnered 170 million views globally for the campaign.
Two of the most important things to the brand are “creating content that’s really rooted in a deep human truth and aligned around a purpose … then distributing that content,” De Como said. “One of the things we’ve learned is the power of crowdsourcing [content] and collaboration and putting [the consumer] at the center of everything we do.”
Scott McCorkle, president of technology and strategy at ExactTarget, said digital asset creation and the analytics that measure success are in demand with marketers. Having an omnichannel platform is one piece of the puzzle, he said, but ensuring all of those channels work in tandem is another.
