In today’s era of digitalization, it is imperative to leverage the power of automation in marketing to boost revenue and enhance overall customer satisfaction. In a survey published by Statista, digital marketing automation was found to be the second most effective digital marketing technique (after content marketing) [1].
In fact, in another survey conducted by Ascend2, it was found that 84% of the marketers surveyed have implemented marketing automation to some extent for achieving their top priorities [2].
Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is one such powerful, feature-rich marketing automation platform developed by Salesforce. It is a digital marketing automation platform that helps organizations automate their marketing processes and activities across social media, email, websites, mobile applications, and more. The platform essentially acts as a hub for all organizational marketing activities.
SFMC is a disruptive solution by Salesforce that is leveraged by marketing teams across the world to enhance the overall customer journey and potentially bring more business to the company. This enterprise-grade, all-encompassing digital marketing platform enables you to personalize the customer experience and maintain relationships with both B2B and B2C customers.
Challenges Faced by Marketers
Some of the common challenges in digital marketing faced by marketers and agencies across the world are:
- Scattered customer interactions and dispersed organizational communication across mediums.
- Accessing important client and customer information when needed.
- Tracking the massive amount of data being generated from endless content and an increasing number of audience and customers.
- Managing to generate profit and ROI across various marketing channels.
The above-mentioned business issues led to the need for a platform that could help manage the insurmountable amount of content and data being produced. Salesforce built its disruptive marketing automation platform – Salesforce Marketing Cloud – to help marketers address these challenges.
What all can you do with Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
SFMC provides its users with a number of digital marketing functions. A few of the many functions are listed as follows:
Content Creation and Management: The cross-channel content management platform provides you with easy-to-use tools to consolidate images, content, and documents in one, single location for convenience.
Social Listening:Listen to what customers, clients, and other brands are saying about your organization and products/services.
Segmentation: The platform provides you with access to segmentation tools, along with access to numerous features and attributes from your current CRM.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Modules
Email Studio: This studio can be used for creating, previewing, testing, and sending emails to your customers and audience. It has been added to the platform for performing personalized email marketing campaigns.
Social Studio: Leverage Social Studio for creating and scheduling posts on all social media platforms you use. This Studio also empowers you with rich analytics that help you get insight into engagement and behavior in real time. Note that the retirement of Social Studio has been scheduled by Salesforce for November 2024.
Mobile Studio: Features like MobileConnect and GroupConnect allow you to send and monitor SMS. Additionally, sending push notifications, silent notifications, and in-app messaging is also possible with MobilePush
Audience Studio: This tool enables you to get data and insights on your audience and campaign from any source or platform and bring it all in one single place. This Studio allows you to conduct social listening for creating content that is more relatable and appealing to your audience.
Advertising (Formerly known as Advertising Studio): This enables you to streamline your current online advertising efforts with CRM data. It can also be used for finding lookalike audiences (promising new prospects that are similar to and behave like your current customers). The powerful tool also lets you tap into Google similar audiences and Facebook lookalike audiences).
Web Studio: Lets you create and manage your landing pages and microsites. With the help of CloudPages, all forms of web content, including forms and coupons, can be organized. The Studio also collects data to enable further personalization of web experiences.
Builders – Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Journey Builder (Marketing Cloud Engagement): Use this Builder for campaign automation and building experiences. The Journey Builder also enables visual mapping of the journey your customers will go through before finally buying your product or service. Segmenting contacts into targeting audiences with the help of paths is also possible with Journey Builder.
- Content Builder: Enables building email newsletters and landing page templates. You can also add interactive reusable content blocks to your content.
- Brand Builder: Enterprise 2.0 allows you to create and manage multiple brands with ease. Options for adding your company logo and changing the color scheme according to your company’s color scheme are also possible.
- Datoroma: It was released by Salesforce in 2021. According to the update, Discover Reporting Tools will be replaced by Datoroma reports. Up until now, journey and campaign reporting were complicated. The tedious process has now been made much easier with the pre-built dashboards of Datoroma reports.
- Pardot: An essential feature for B2B organizations, Pardot aims at making marketing automation simpler. The sales teams can use it to create meaningful connections and close deals. Pardot allows sending personalized messages with dynamic content to your audience. It is also equipped with real-time alerts that assist in connecting with prospects just at the right moment.
Benefits of Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud
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In a Pedalix survey, 55% of the responders said that according to them, easy CRM integration is the most important feature that a marketing automation platform must have [3]. Salesforce Marketing platform allows hassle-free integration with your existing CRM stack.
Additionally, the integration capabilities of this marketing automation software provide you with data from multiple sources. Apart from the obvious connection to Service Cloud and Sales Cloud (both by Salesforce), various other APIs (like SOAP API and REST API), can also be integrated.
Leverage the power of AI
- State of Marketing Study by Salesforce Research found that the use of artificial intelligence by marketers increased from 29% (in 2018) to a whopping 84% (in 2020), and is expected to only grow from there on [4].
- Salesforce has developed its own AI technology, Einstein, which fuels numerous useful applications in Marketing Cloud. AI-powered Einstein has an engagement scoring feature that tells you which user is likely to interact with your brand through messaging. Moreover, it helps you predict the perfect time to communicate with each individual (which helps you optimize the open rates of your emails and messages).
- Einstein does not only enable you to customize every single customer interaction, but also empowers you to deliver the most relevant content, material, and resources to them.
To sum it up, it merges customer information and aids you in communicating with customers more efficiently while helping you make the interactions more effective and personal.
Enhanced security
When it comes to providing security, Salesforce is one of the best options available out there. The information of your company, users, and customers is absolutely safe with Salesforce Marketing cloud due to its secure encryption. Encryption ensures that all your data is kept in a highly secure, protected environment away from unauthorized access.
A place for big ideas.
Reimagine organizational performance while delivering a delightful experience through optimized operations.
But why should you buy Salesforce Marketing Cloud for your organization?
Salesforce is one of the most renowned names in cloud technologies. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a sophisticated and powerful platform digital marketing teams can use for managing their digital marketing initiatives with finesse. The platform helps organizations in getting an end-to-end perspective on their marketing efforts and adjust their campaigns accordingly.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an intuitive platform that is equipped with numerous marketing automation features. No matter from which industry, SFMC can be set up for all kinds of corporations. The size of the company and where it is located also do not matter. Being a cloud-based SaaS service giant, Salesforce has well-crafted plans for small, medium-sized, and large companies.
Sources
[1] Statista (2020) “Most effective digital marketing techniques according to marketers worldwide in 2020” [Online] Available from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/190858/most-effective-online-marketing-channels-according-to-us-companies/ [Accessed October 2022]
[2] Ascend2 and Research Partners (2021) “The State of Marketing Automation” [Online] Available from: https://ascend2.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/The-State-of-Marketing-Automation-Survey-Summary-Report-210722.pdf [Accessed October 2022]
[3] Pedalix (2021) “MARKETING AUTOMATION REPORT 2021” [Online] Available from: https://www.pedalix.com/en/marketing-automation-report-2021 [Accessed October 2022]
[4] Salesforce (2020) “Sixth Edition – State of Marketing” [Online] Available from: https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/assets/pdf/salesforce-research-sixth-edition-state-of-marketing.pdf [Accessed October 2022]
