Guide to Salesforce Marketing Cloud 2020

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What is Marketing Cloud?

It’s a powerful platform for marketers that incorporates solutions to manage email, mobile and social campaigns, web personalization, content creation, customer journeys, data management and analysis.

It includes a plethora of features. If you would like to get to know a little bit about each of them watch Bart’s video, in which he briefly describes what they are and what the do.

Do you need Marketing Cloud?

The best way to answer this question is to talk about Marketing Cloud’s features. It’s a robust tool that allows your marketing team to leverage the data you have in your CRM (or in any source really), create personalized messages and automate them so they reach your customers whenever and wherever you want.

In other words, Marketing Cloud enables you to bring the power of 1:1 marketing to your business. Sounds simple, right?

But there’s more to it.

You can tailor each message - email or text - so it suits all your customers in a truly unique way, and this applies to both your marketing and sales teams.

You can easily manage your subscribers’ details and collect information from new prospects.

The automated tools - Automation Studio and Journey Builder - allow for sophisticated and creative customer journeys that bring a personalized experience for each of your customers.

Social Studio offers a powerful social media management tool that allows you to respond to social posts, manage your community and provide customer support.

Your messages can be enhanced by the power of AI - Einstein, enabling you to include dynamic content or automatically check for best subject lines or times of the day to deliver your messages.

All this in one platform that easily integrates with your Salesforce organization, so that everything that’s done by marketing is reported back in your Sales or Service cloud to finally bridge the gap between your marketing and sales departments.

All Marketing Cloud tools are designed to help your marketing team reach your clients across multiple channels no matter what product or service you are advertising, so all B2C, B2B or B2G can greatly benefit from using them.

What is a Customer Journey?

One of the most important principles you need to remember when marketing a product or a service is that every customer is different and wants to be treated as such.

Each person has unique preferences. So if we want our marketing efforts to be effective, it's necessary that we acknowledge everyone's individual needs. But manually tailoring each message is too time-consuming.

That’s where the Customer Journey comes in.

With Journey Builder you can create different paths that represent different types of customer. By utilising information from your CRM you can personalize each message with customers’ personal details or even show them products they might be interested in, based on their previous purchase or what they viewed on your website.

But the customization doesn’t end there.

The paths in your Customer Journey may vary depending on your clients’ interactions with your emails, your website or your sales teams. Leads, contacts, tasks or other objects can be automatically created or updated based on those interactions.

And AI helps you deliver the messages when your clients are most likely to read them.

Once set up and running, a Journey can be used to create a unique experience for every customer.

And as your business grows and your data becomes more granular, you can set up more and more Customer Journeys.

How to set up Marketing Cloud?

Marketing Cloud is one of Salesforce products, which means that you can find a lot of helpful information on Salesforce Support and Trailhead.

One of the biggest advantages of this platform is how easy it is to create beautifully designed emails so your marketers don’t need to spend too much time preparing content.

But as every platform, Marketing Cloud needs a proper configuration before it can be fully utilized.

For more information on how to set up Marketing Cloud see our articles:

Marketing Cloud Setup - Definitive Guide -find out how to configure your Marketing Cloud accounts, including creating users, granting permissions, setting up business units and sender authentication package.

Marketing Cloud Lists and Data Extensions - learn how to store subscriber data and use it for email sends.

Our Salesforce experts at Tech Gravel can help you configure Marketing Cloud and train your employees so they know how to get the most out of it.

Contact us today! We'll be glad to help.