I’ve had several Salesforce Admins and Developers speak to me about a constant frustration; lack of meaningful use of data. Marketing representatives have gone to conferences or events and collected data from people interested in their products, but nobody has followed up or perhaps they’ve followed up by sending a brochure but that’s the end of the line.

At this point I’m going to assume that you’re reading this because you know what that looks like and you want to jump to the solution. Here it is: communication and planning.

PLANNING
Identify and gather together your team. Your team should be made up of all the people who that can help you to create meaningful customer journeys for your customers from the data you have stored about them. Your team should at a minimum include: Product Stakeholders, Data Analyst and/or CRM Administrator, Digital Marketers, Storytellers / Writers.

Product Stakeholders
The stakeholders in any organization typically have been told that they need to move Product X, they came up with a plan to send out emails blasting everyone who has ever given them an email address even though they’ve since unsubscribed, because it doesn’t hurt anything. The problem there is that it does hurt something. It damages the customer relationship. Few people want to have a relationship with a company that clogs up their inbox like the email equivalent of a car dealership windsock dancer? Worse yet, how is your customer going to trust enough to buy your products if you can’t be trusted to acquiesce to a simple unsubscribe request?

The shifting paradigm in digital marketing comes with the power of a CRM. You have access to

Data Analyst / System Administrator
Knowing who your customer really is. No, really. Who is your customer? Are you sure? : “Then they discovered a fifth: lesbians. “When we did the research, we found pockets of the country like Northampton, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon, where the head of the household would be a single person—and often a woman,” says Tim Bennett, who was the company’s director of advertising at the time. When marketers talked to these customers, they realized these women buying Subarus were lesbian.” https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/how-subarus-came-to-be-seen-as-cars-for-lesbians/488042/

• Brainstorm.

Storyteller

• Once you find out who your customer is, craft your story for that customer.  https://influitive.com/blog/crafting-compelling-customer-stories-theory-every-good-marketer-needs-know/

Digital Marketer

• Craft your customer’s journey.