What has happened to marketing automation in the last seven or eight years? The short answer: a lot.

Corinne Sklar, AJ Bellarosa, and Thomas Gaydos took the stage at Dreamforce to talk about how leading marketers are using Salesforce.

As Corinne put it, “To be a marketer, right now, is so amazing.” Indeed, the modern technological landscape enables marketers to speak cogently and personally to their audiences — across all channels and devices.

But don’t get lost in the tools — focus on the strategy and creative. As marketers, we have to build programs with which people actually want to engage. We must be unique.

"As marketers, we have to be the stewards of data."
- Corinne Sklar

The Customer Journey

Map the customer’s journey from their point of view. If you’ve bought into the company culture and value proposition, it’s hard to remain objective; you need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes.

Think about your own frustrations as a retail customer. What is easy? Where do you get frustrated? To identify pain points and find solutions, we need to map the customer experience.

Tip One: The journey begins with data.

"We don’t need all marketers to be data scientists, but they need to understand data."
- Beth Comstock, GE

Modern marketers need to:

• Partner with IT
  Historically, IT has been a “barrier” to marketers. Now, both must speak the same language and align on business objectives.
• Assess Data Health
  Gain a complete and full understanding of your data health, so you can de-duplicate data.
• Implement Data Tools & Governance
  Governance benefits marketers more than any other department. The foundation of governance is controlling your data flow. 

Tip Two: Identify the travelers.

• Build Target Persona Profiles
  Get to know your buyers by identifying who your customers are and where they are in their buying journey. Integrating marketing automation and CRM will make your life much easier when developing target audiences. Use CRM reports to trigger marketing campaigns. This will also ensure clean data across the two systems. 
• Design a Relational Database to Build 360-Degree View of Your Customer
  Use a subscriber key to uniquely identify each buyer.

I hope these tips help you implement more sophisticated and personal marketing programs. Be sure to check out our latest The State of Salesforce Report or register for our webcast to hear six Bluewolf experts discuss key trends from the report.