OREANDA-NEWS. May 30, 2016. If you missed Connections, the digital marketing event of the year, you're in luck: we've pulled together our top ten takeaways from the event. These takeaways are straight from our Connections takeaways webinar, which you can now watch to get more details and examples.

From technology announcements to marketing trends, these were the ten hottest topics that marketers in Atlanta were talking about.

1. Marketing Cloud has been struck by Lightning. 

The biggest announcement for Marketing Cloud at Connections is Lightning. We’re bringing data across the entire Customer Success Platform together for you to power journeys across the sales, service, and marketing lifecycle. Learn more about Marketing Cloud Lightning and what it means for your marketing.

2. Marketers officially lead the customer experience. 

In his keynote, Scott McCorkle quoted this Gartner stat: 89% of companies believe that customer experience is now their primary basis for competition. And according to our 2016 State of Marketing research, customer satisfaction is now the number-one success metric for marketers. Marketers are in the prime position to lead this transformation.

3. Mobile is the message. 

Mobile device growth is quickly outpacing every other type of device. And 77% of marketing leaders who use mobile marketing tactics now see direct ROI from mobile — up 147% from 2016. Humanity finally has a unifying tech platform, and we've just begun to scratch the surface of what that means. Mobile truly is the medium and the message for marketers. Every interaction is mobile, whether your marketing is prepared for it or not.

Make sure you get the new Marketing Cloud mobile app to run your marketing from your phone.

4. Email is the workhorse of 1-to-1 marketing. 

At Connections, we heard the email message loud and clear: email is still customers' preferred channel to hear messages from brands, and its ROI is higher than ever. Why? Email is there through every stage of the customer experience lifecycle: awareness, evaluation, and purchase, all the way through repurchase and advocacy.

We also announced Email Studio at Connections, our new email marketing solution to give marketers the ability to deliver personalized, relevant content to their customers’ inboxes at scale.

5. Ads are more targeted and effective than ever. 

Social media is now the epicenter of direct response advertising. As more pieces of the journey tie together, marketers can get more targeted in how they pay to broaden audience and message reach. So we announced Advertising Studio, which allows users to leverage Salesforce CRM data to deploy smarter digital advertising across the open display ecosystem. Learn more.

6. Customer service should be your new best friend. 

Bestselling author Jay Baer took the Connections stage to talk about why marketing and customer service should work closer together than ever before. With 50% of consumers preferring social media to the telephone for logging customer service queries and complaints, and 72% of consumers who post a complaint on social expecting a response in one hour, it's clearly time for service and marketing to join forces for a better customer experience.

7. Marketing departments must stop riding solo. 

In the age of the customer, it's vital to connect across every stage of the lifecycle. A truly connected customer experience is something that should matter not only to marketing, but to everyone in the organization. Marketers must dissolve the boundaries between teams to achieve that holy grail.

8. B2B marketing isn't so different these days. 

Remember the days when B2B marketers felt their customer journey was so different from B2C? Today, it's not the case. Customers expect even enterprise apps to have the same usability of Fitbit and Uber. Watch the Pardot keynote to learn more about the era of intelligent B2B marketing engagement.

9. The best marketers market their marketing. 

Whether or not you have executive team buy-in on your marketing can make or break your strategy. In fact, high-performing marketers are 2.6x more likely to say their executive team is completely committed to their overall marketing strategy vs. underperforming marketers. So market your marketing internally. You can't get support if people don't have visibility into what you're doing.

10. Budgets reflect the shift to the journey. 

We now believe that digital vs. traditional marketing spend will be split 75 to 25% by 2021 (check out the research — see slide 4). Marketers are putting their money where their strategy is, relying more on marketing technology than traditional spending channels (like TV and radio) to reach customers.

That's a quick look at what we discussed in-depth during the Top 10 Takeaways from Connections webinar. Check it out, and also download download the full report for an in-depth look at marketing trends in 2016.