Marketing comms provider Omnicom has sealed a deal with cloudy CRM provider Salesforce.com to give Omnicom’s agencies more personalised communications through the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud.
The partnership means companies can ‘connect the dots’ between marketing, sales, communities and customer service, leveraging data from a variety of sources and devices.
“As marketers, you need to be wherever your customers touch your brand,” said Lynn Vojvodich, executive vice president and CMO for Salesforce.com. “You need to be where that customer is, and provide them a consistent brand experience across all those touch points.”
Whether that’s a website, mobile device or in store, Salesforce and Omnicom aims to have you covered. Utilising Salesforce technology, Omnicom clients can manage billions of customer interactions on behalf of its clients across digital marketing, sales, and customer service. Clients can also build, deploy and manage apps through Heroku, part of the Salesforce1 platform.
“Salesforce.com and Omnicom will empower companies to connect to their customers in entirely new ways,” said Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff. “By utilising Salesforce as its customer journey platform for clients, Omnicom will strengthen its role as a trusted advisor to the world’s largest brands, creating amazing customer journeys that extend far beyond traditional digital marketing.”
Vojvodich added: “You have so much data. That data is totally useless unless you can act on it…unless you can use that data to create deeper, more meaningful relationships with your customers.”
The battle for supremacy in the marketing cloud space is gathering pace, particularly after Salesforce’s acquisition of ExactTarget. Big vendors, such as Salesforce, SAP, IBM and Oracle, are all putting their chips on the table. When MarketingTech spoke with Salesforce VP EMEA marketing Dan Rogers, there was a clear emphasis on brand advocacy in the company’s ethos.
“In the world of all these devices, there is a customer, and these customers are all talking to each other,” he said. “I think it’s never more important to have people that love your brand.”
It’s getting that ‘love’ into hard cash which remains the Holy Grail – and Salesforce and Omnicom hope that by connecting the dots, it’s made this task that much easier for companies.
