Automate Marketing Initiatives with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

In today’s era of digitalization, you need automation in marketing to boost revenue and improve customer satisfaction. A Statista survey found digital marketing automation to be the second most effective digital marketing technique, after content marketing [1]. In another survey, by Ascend2, 84% of the marketers surveyed had implemented marketing automation to some extent to reach their top priorities [2]. So, many teams now automate marketing initiatives.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is a powerful, feature-rich marketing automation platform from Salesforce. It helps organizations automate their marketing processes and activities across social media, email, websites, mobile applications, and more. In short, the platform acts as a hub for all organizational marketing activities.

Marketing teams across the world use SFMC to improve the overall customer journey and potentially bring more business to the company. This enterprise-grade digital marketing platform lets you personalize the customer experience. It also helps you maintain relationships with both B2B and B2C customers.

Challenges Marketers Face When They Automate Marketing Initiatives

Marketers and agencies across the world face some common challenges in digital marketing:

• Scattered customer interactions and dispersed organizational communication across mediums.
• Accessing important client and customer information when needed.
• Tracking the massive amount of data that endless content and a growing audience generate.
• Generating profit and ROI across various marketing channels.

These business issues created the need for a platform that can manage the huge amount of content and data. Salesforce built Salesforce Marketing Cloud to help marketers address these challenges.

What Can You Do With Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

SFMC gives its users a number of digital marketing functions. Here are a few of them:

• Content Creation and Management: The cross-channel content management platform gives you easy-to-use tools. You can keep images, content, and documents in one single location.
• SMS Automation: Send promotional text SMS without any hassle and monitor performance with ease.
• Social Media Marketing: You can easily create, schedule, and monitor social media posts. You also get insight into real-time engagement through analytics.
• Campaign Automation: Use visual maps to bring various channels into a single view.
• Social Listening: Listen to what customers, clients, and other brands say about your organization and products or services.
• Segmentation: The platform gives you segmentation tools, along with numerous features and attributes from your current CRM.
• Email Marketing and Automation: The solution lets you take control of your email marketing strategy and automate email campaigns.
• Mobile Push Notifications: Marketing Cloud lets you send push notifications and in-app notifications straight to the smartphones of your customers.
• ETL Activities and Data Management: You can transfer files, extract files, extract data, and more. You can also create multi-dimensional automated workflows.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Modules

Email Studio: Use this studio to create, preview, test, and send emails to your customers and audience. Salesforce added it to the platform for personalized email marketing campaigns.

Social Studio: Use Social Studio to create and schedule posts on all the social media platforms you use. It also gives you rich analytics, so you can see engagement and behavior in real time. Note that Salesforce has scheduled the retirement of Social Studio for November 2024.

Mobile Studio: Features like MobileConnect and GroupConnect let you send and monitor SMS. In addition, MobilePush lets you send push notifications, silent notifications, and in-app messages.

Audience Studio: This tool gets data and insights on your audience and campaign from any source or platform. It brings it all into one place. It also lets you conduct social listening, so you can create content that is more relatable and appealing to your audience.

Advertising (formerly known as Advertising Studio): This lets you streamline your current online advertising efforts with CRM data. You can also use it to find lookalike audiences (promising new prospects that are similar to and behave like your current customers). The tool also lets you tap into Google similar audiences and Facebook lookalike audiences.

Web Studio: This lets you create and manage your landing pages and microsites. With CloudPages, you can organize all forms of web content, including forms and coupons. The studio also collects data to enable further personalization of web experiences.

Builders in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

• Journey Builder (Marketing Cloud Engagement): Use this builder for campaign automation and building experiences. It also lets you map visually the journey your customers take before they buy your product or service. In addition, you can segment contacts into target audiences with paths.
• Content Builder: It lets you build email newsletters and landing page templates. You can also add interactive reusable content blocks to your content.
• Brand Builder: Enterprise 2.0 lets you create and manage multiple brands with ease. You can add your company logo and change the color scheme to match your company’s colors.
• Datoroma: Salesforce released it in 2021. According to the update, Datoroma reports replace Discover Reporting Tools. Until now, journey and campaign reporting were complicated. The pre-built dashboards of Datoroma reports now make this tedious process much easier.
• Pardot: This is an essential feature for B2B organizations. Pardot aims at making marketing automation simpler. Sales teams can use it to create meaningful connections and close deals. Pardot sends personalized messages with dynamic content to your audience. It also has real-time alerts that help you connect with prospects at just the right moment.

Benefits of Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Automate Marketing Initiatives

In a Pedalix survey, 55% of the responders said that easy CRM integration is the most important feature a marketing automation platform must have [3]. The Salesforce Marketing platform allows hassle-free integration with your existing CRM stack.

Additionally, the integration capabilities of this marketing automation software give you data from multiple sources. Apart from the obvious connection to Service Cloud and Sales Cloud (both by Salesforce), you can also integrate various other APIs, like SOAP API and REST API.

Leverage the Power of AI

• The State of Marketing Study by Salesforce Research found that marketers’ use of artificial intelligence grew from 29% (in 2018) to 84% (in 2020). It expects the use to keep growing [4].
• Salesforce has developed its own AI technology, Einstein, which fuels numerous useful applications in Marketing Cloud. 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 best time to communicate with each individual, which helps you improve the open rates of your emails and messages.
• Einstein lets you customize every single customer interaction. It also helps you deliver the most relevant content, material, and resources to customers.
• To sum it up, it merges customer information. It helps you communicate with customers more efficiently and makes the interactions more effective and personal.

Enhanced Security

When it comes to security, Salesforce is one of the best options available. Secure encryption keeps the information of your company, users, and customers safe in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Encryption keeps all your data in a highly secure, protected environment away from unauthorized access.

Why Use Salesforce to Automate Marketing Initiatives?

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 it to manage their marketing initiatives with finesse. It gives organizations an end-to-end view of their marketing efforts, so they can adjust their campaigns accordingly.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an intuitive platform with numerous marketing automation features. You can set up SFMC for all kinds of corporations, from any industry. The size of the company and where it is located do not matter. Salesforce is a cloud-based SaaS giant, and it has well-crafted plans for small, medium-sized, and large companies.

If you want help to automate marketing initiatives with your CRM, see our custom software services. You can also visit the official Salesforce site.

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]