
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