Salesforce.com’s acquisition of BuddyMedia is but one more step in the integrated marketing puzzle that marketers are focused on solving. Silos are gone (or going) and integration between sales, service and marketing are key drivers of success. No matter what your business, no matter what your industry, no matter what your product.
And social media marketing and advertising platforms like BuddyMedia (and folks like Involver and WildFire, to name a few others) are proving to be key social media assets, designed with the knowledge that producing and distributing compelling content, affording clients the ability to place strategic advertising and measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing efforts are tools that marketing teams need. Then, when you factor in the listening and monitoring that the Radian6 acquisition delivers, Salesforce is definitely a major player in the solution space.
The marketing industry is changing at the veritable speed of light. Content marketing, hyper targeted advertising, focus on the sales funnel, understanding how to convert leads to sales, listening, monitoring, providing unparalleled customer service to customers who are on (and online) 24/7 and letting data be at the core of everything you do are all integral components of success.
Brands and agencies—large and small—are recognizing the importance of utilizing tools that allow them to build, manage and maintain relationships with customers. And if they want to produce results, they need those tools to integrate with the rest of the CRM equation. Those tools must provide a wide array of solutions and be built with the understanding that measuring social impact and evaluating ROI are an every day need for the marketing team.
We’re not surprised by the acquisition and this focus by Salesforce, from an enterprise software solution standpoint. Integration is the holy grail in this new frontier for the business world–certainly from an enterprise level—and it’s critical to understand how closely aligned sales, marketing and service are, and need to be, with what’s going on in the social media space. Understanding the social landscape, as well as the value of the data it can provide marketers is big. Very big.
This is but one step, err, acquisition, in that direction. We’ll definitely see more.
Now, what about you and your clients? Are you seeing them beginning to better understand the importance of integrated marketing solutions and the alignment of sales, service and marketing or are they still siloed? Do they fully grasp the role that social plays in their overall marketing operations or are they still at the beginning stages of accepting that social is here to stay and that they’ve got to devote assets to it? We have some of each. But they’re getting there.
Image by Bludgeoner86 via Creative Commons
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years’ experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging develoment, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly’s coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
