Salesforce brings CRM data to ad targeting
Following Silicon Valley's invasion of Cannes a few years ago, this year has seen the marketing cloud firms, such as Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle, pitch to marketers. The firms believe their technologies can help marketers organize, measure and execute data-driven ad efforts. Salesforce has announced this week, its next-generation Marketing Cloud, which brings CRM data to media buying, will allow companies to sync their customer information in Salesforce with their ad targeting. This will allow marketers to personalise ads based on a customer's history and experience with a brand.
In the new version of Active Audiences, companies can sync the information they have about their customers in Salesforce CRM with their ad targeting.

Thanks to new partnerships with LiveRamp, LiveIntent, Neustar and Viant, CRM data can be used to target across more than 100 ad networks. Through integration with Salesforce’s campaign planning tool, Journey Builder, Salesforce promises that its customers will be able to:

[orchestrate] digital advertising based on the customer’s entire experience with a brand – the emails and mobile messages they open, their purchase history, their engagement with the customer service team and where they are in a sales cycle.

The holy grail of personalization?

In short, Salesforce is offering what looks to be the holy grail of personalization. As Scott McCorkle, the CEO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, puts it:

The next generation of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud uniquely helps companies take action on data from any customer interaction to deliver the right content at the right time across every channel.

What might that look like? AdAge’s Alexandra Bruell offers up a hypothetical example:

For example, if a Salesforce service-cloud client sees that its customer tweets a complaint, the client, through the marketing cloud, can automatically adjust advertising targeting that client until the issue is resolved. An email marketer can also use customer information from its contact database to serve ads across devices with the goal of driving more email conversions.

Of course, such targeting requires that companies collect the right data and have it present in Salesforce’s cloud.

Just a few years ago, this might have meant that a limited number of companies had the opportunity to take advantage of Salesforce’s new offerings, but today, many companies, including even SMBs, have robust and relatively sophisticated CRM programs built on Salesforce.

In theory at least, that gives those companies the ability to follow in the footsteps of brands like furniture retailer Room & Board, which applied CRM data to its marketing initiatives to realize a 16% increase in its average order value and a 225% increase in its email open rate.

While mileage may vary and CRM data probably isn’t a panacea for brands, the capabilities of Salesforce’s next generation Marketing Cloud are a reminder to companies that data is an appreciating asset and, increasingly, a competitive necessity.