The Salesforce State of Marketing report shows that marketers are evolving their practices in a highly competitive landscape. They’re looking to AI, both generative and predictive, to help personalise at scale and boost efficiency.
Implementing/leveraging AI is marketers’ number one priority on a global scale, as well as their biggest challenge. Locally, improving use of tools and technologies is South African marketers’ number one priority, while building and retaining trust with customers is their number one challenge.
The report covers the latest trends on how marketers are evaluating and implementing AI into their operations; approaching data acquisition, maintenance, and application strategies; and ensuring customer trust and security as vulnerabilities increase. The report shares insights from over 4800 marketing leaders across 29 countries, including South Africa.
Other Key Insights:
Marketers embrace AI with an eye on trust. Marketers are intent on successfully applying AI in their operations with the right data, but are concerned about security. 85% of marketers in South Africa are already experimenting with or have fully implemented AI into their workflows.
AI implementation is also a point of differentiation: high performing marketing teams are 2.1x more likely than underperformers to have fully implemented AI within their operations. The most popular AI use cases among marketers in South Africa are: content generation, automation of customer interactions, programmatic advertising and media buying.
Full personalisation remains a work in progress. To meet rising customer expectations around personalisation, marketers are graduating beyond broad audience segmentations, like location or age, to more specific identifiers like individual preferences or past interactions. There’s also a difference between how the highest- and lowest-performing marketing teams adapt.
High performers in South Africa fully personalise across an average of 6.0 channels, compared with underperformers, who fully personalised across 4.0.
Marketers seek unified analytics. There is no shortage of data sources, but putting that data to work is a challenge, especially when it demands a holistic or long-term view of data. 53% of marketers in South Africa track customer lifetime value (CTV) while 89% of marketers in South Africa say they have a clear view into marketing’s impact on revenue.
Deeper relationships emerge with account-based marketing (ABM) and loyalty programmes. Companies are increasingly turning to strategies like ABM and loyalty programmes for better acquisition and retention. Yet many of these programs’ information sources remain disjointed, as does the customer experience. Only 58% of marketers in South Africa say loyalty data is fully integrated across all touchpoints. 38% of marketers in South Africa say loyalty programme functionalities are accessible across all touchpoints.
61% of B2B marketers in South Africa use ABM for customer acquisition, but less than half use it for upselling and cross-selling, 50% and 44%, respectively.
‘We are in a new era of AI, catalysed by the generative gold rush, and marketers are leading the charge by embracing rapid advancements in the technology to better connect with customers and prospects. A strong data foundation will be critical to AI success for marketers as they work to bring together and unify customer data for real-time activation,’ said Linda Saunders, Salesforce Director Solutions Engineering, Africa.
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