Remember those texts and emails you receive frequently from your favorite brands? Those little reminders of promotions and discounts or even just a wish of happy birthday? It is highly probable that it has a system like Salesforce Marketing Cloud behind it.
Technically, Marketing Cloud is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) – but for Marketers. It is a platform that delivers relevant, personalized journeys across multiple channels and devices. It enables marketers to deliver the right message at the right time throughout all phases of the relationship with costumers. Marketing Cloud includes integrated solutions for customer journey management, email, mobile, social, web personalization, advertising, content creation and management, and data analysis.
Back in the day, all these marketing activities took place on several platforms, using many add-ons and plug-ins to measure and analyze performance. What Salesforce Marketing Cloud did was brought planning, publishing and analysis together in one place. Plus, all of these activities can be connected to Salesforce, so that marketing efforts can be aided by Sales Cloud data and vice versa. Can you imagine how much time you will save on a daily basis?
How exactly Marketing Cloud help companies?
As I described earlier, companies gain a lot of time and efficiency. Marketing teams can focus on communicating meaningful messages and stop jumping from application to application. And… all of this is completely measurable! You can view and analyze the performance of your marketing efforts all in one place. Cool, huh?!
But, in my opinion, Marketing Cloud stands out for helping companies make each customer feel special and unique. As a customer, we all want to feel that brands are talking to us and not to us, plus everyone else.
But, let’s face it, when you have a business with hundreds, thousands or millions of customers, it isn’t easy to build that 1-to-1 relationship we all love… Unless you have the right technology behind it.
With Marketing Cloud, we cover every imaginable customer interaction. It unites customer data with customer behaviors in real-time to create more intelligent communications and interactions that anticipate customer needs. What more can we want and need?!
When companies engage with their customers with the right message at the right time and on the right channel, they create a deeper, meaningful, and loyal relationship.
What is the difference between Marketing Cloud and Pardot?
The major distinction between the two platforms is that Salesforce Marketing Cloud is designed to serve B2C businesses, while Pardot performs best in a B2B environment.
However, they do not compete, in many cases organizations use both. Every company should analyze their sales process and test which option is best for their business.
Not familiar with Pardot? Check this article to know all about this amazing B2B Marketing Automation Software.
All in one: studios, builders, and other amazing tools
As we discussed before, Marketing Cloud includes integrated solutions for many marketing activities. We like to call it an integrated marketing hub. Most of these tools are drag & drop and a point & click interface, making it super easy to create sophisticated digital marketing campaigns.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud has many tools, but we will highlight the 7 studios and builders that will revolutionize the way you communicate with your audiences. Let’s go over each one:
Journey Builder
Journey Builder is Marketing Cloud’s visual mapping solution, where marketers can coordinate many marketing actions of different studios on customer journeys. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder, you can bring together multiple ways of communications, such as emails, SMS, and advertising, all into one platform. Building them in a single, holistic, multi-channel journey.
The fun part is that you can trigger these communications to leads based on specific dates and durations, the information you have about the lead, and how they engage with previous communications. The possibilities are almost endless.
According to Salesforce’s State of Marketing report, 73% of high-performing marketers say that journeys positively increase customer engagement. That’s because this builder is critical to help marketing teams to communicate the right message, at the right time, on the right channel, based on their behavior. This helps to better understand how customers navigate across touchpoints and anticipate how they may react in different scenarios. Powerful, huh?!
Audience Builder
The significant advantage of using this kind of software is that you not only communicate with your audience, but you are also collecting a bunch of data. The Salesforce ecosystem is particularly effective to combine multiple sources to help your marketing teams build strong and complete customer profiles.
The audience builder captures, unifies, and activates your data to strengthen consumer relationships across every touchpoint with a powerful data management platform.
Email Studio
Email Studio is one of the most important tools for a marketer. For those who think email marketing is dead, pay attention: the average expected ROI is $42 for every $1 you spend on email marketing.
Did I get your attention? Good! So, let me explain the wonders that Email Studio can do for your business.
If your company doesn’t invest in email marketing and you are kind of lost on where to start, this tool will help you. With Marketing Cloud’s Email Studio, you can build emails with no technical expertise through simple drag-and-drop content blocks and segmentation tools to enhance your subscriber list.
If you are already an Email Marketing Pro, take a step forward and start creating smarter email campaigns, with data from all departments. Go after those customers who only use small devices and communicate in a hyper personalized way based on the interactions they have with your company. And you can increase email conversions with AI by using Salesforce’s Einstein Engagement Scoring to predict which segments are most likely to engage with your content.
Thank me later! ?
Mobile Studio
Marketing Cloud gives companies a competitive edge in their mobile marketing strategy. From this studio you can send personalized SMS messages, push notifications, and group messages to their smartphones. Did you know that SMS marketing can provide customers with timely and location-sensitive, personalized information in seconds? Plus, SMS text messages have a 98% open rate!
We know that an effective marketing strategy should target multiple channels, like email, social and web. But mobile marketing gives you something extra — the ability to deliver time-sensitive messages right to the devices customers use most – 2.7 billion people own a smartphone to be exact (according to Statista.com).
Social Studio
Maintaining a relationship with your customers beyond your app and website is crucial. Social Studio helps you quickly create, publish, share, schedule, and boost new content within seconds using drag-and-drop tools.
This casual communication will help you engage with your customer and get a complete picture of him so that their needs can be met with relevant content and timely customer service.
But the best return on the investment of Social Media is Data. You need to listen. This feature allows you to listen to what your customers are saying about your brand, market, products, and competitors. You’ll not miss another mention, a conversation, or any question that your audience has. You’ll get a real-time monitoring and a big picture view of what is happening!
#Pro-Tip: If you want to save time or just don’t have any editor software, Social Studio has a built-in photo editor to customize images for your campaigns. And it is mobile friendly, which allows you to perform as timely as social marketing needs to be!
Advertising Studio
Advertising Studio is an integrated solution to build targeted one-to-one advertising campaigns for personalized customer experiences. This studio uses first-party data available in Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud to help shape and guide advertising. It collects customer data from mobile push interactions, site conversions, and email to sync with the contact’s Facebook and Twitter accounts securely. Isn’t it cool?!
This tool has three key features that make all this possible: Advertising Audiences, Journey Builder Advertising, and Lead Capture.
- Advertising Audiences: We all understand the importance of profiling and segmentation. With this feature you’ll be able to create lookalike audiences between platforms (Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Google Ads, etc.) and identify audience segments within your email and mobile contacts data.
- Journey Builder Advertising: With this feature, you can build cross-channel journeys that combine email, mobile, and Facebook advertising, from a single place.
- Lead Capture: It maximizes your social channel by connecting Marketing Cloud with your Facebook advertising leads in real-time.
But the magic sauce is once again… [insert drum roll here] DATA!
By listening and collect all data from these various channels, you’ll be able to efficiently target the right people, and generate fresh leads with engaging content and offers.
Interaction Studio
Ok, let’s talk about data… again. Please don’t stop reading this article because you’ll see how customer information is so valuable.
Here is where you visualize, track, and manage customer experiences with real-time interaction management. And real-time is the keyword here. Why? Because by driving valuable engagement at the right moment, just the way your audience prefers, it exponentially increases your power of inspiration and influence.
Another vital keyword and a common theme throughout Salesforce strategy approach is personalization. With all the data you collect from other Salesforce products and Marketing Cloud Studios and builders, you can use Interaction Studio to micro-manage the customer journey, by allowing you to drill-down into each customer touchpoint to provide an experience that benefits their specific needs and desires.
I can’t stress it enough that to grow your business and increase your audience’s loyalty, you need to be proactive and anticipate your customers’ needs and offer them the best content.
Close de gap and up your game
After this long text and so many words (thanks and congratulations for making it so far!) something was left unsaid, and that it’s super important to remember: this powerful hub helps to close the gap between the marketing and sales teams. Marketing Cloud plays an important role in creating bridges with other departments, but mainly in sales. Besides collect information from first and third-party platforms, it also provides crucial data for the sales team to close more deals, faster.
From this blog post, I hope you have got a comprehensive understanding of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is and its potential. If you are looking to innovate and grow your marketing strategy, this is definitely the way to go.
Here, at Near Partner, we love Salesforce. How does your company engage with your audience? Are you still jumping from app to app? We want to know everything!
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