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Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful marketing tool right out of the box. But with so much scope for customisation, it can be tailored to better suit your requirements.‘Doesn’t an expert usually handle this?’
Eventually, with CRM customisation you’ll get to a level of depth that requires expertise, sure. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some steps you can take today to improve your Salesforce Marketing Cloud experience!
We spoke with Jennifer Birks, one of our Marketing Cloud consultant stars in the London office. She has spent the last 4 years working in marketing automation and specialising in Marketing Cloud. Jennifer will be your guide today, to make sure you’re squeezing every drop of efficiency out of your marketing automation software. First, let's take a look at why you should be using Salesforce marketing solutions.
Salesforce is mostly used to handle the sales side of the business. Like Pardot, Marketing Cloud is designed specifically for marketing. (It’s in the name!)“One of the main pain points we run into with large sales and marketing teams is that manually updating and transferring data often leads to either outdated information or incredibly time-consuming processes.
“This is what makes Marketing Cloud so useful"
“If you’re using Marketing Cloud along with Salesforce (to handle the sales side) - you’ll be able to seamlessly transfer data from one to the other. This means you don’t have to maintain your data in multiple places. You’ll be able to personalise and launch new marketing campaigns with ease and the confidence that automated processes leave much less room for error.
“Here are a few examples of lengthy processes that get slashed by the dynamic duo of Marketing Cloud and Salesforce:
“Especially ones that you didn’t initially need to include (such as gender or location etc.) Additional information can be added to your campaigns at the click of a button. Much faster.”
“Anyone who has managed opt-outs across multiple tools will know what a pain it can be. Since your marketing and sales activity will all be in one place, you’ve only got to update it once. This is going to help you avoid any illegal prospecting.”
“Marketing Cloud is a multi-channel platform. It can be used for email, text, mobile phone apps, push notifications and social media. It’s really useful for multi-touch marketing campaigns. This takes a lot longer when you’re running them through multiple platforms.
“Here’s the thing. Salesforce Marketing Cloud isn’t cheap. In order to get your money’s worth, you want to be automating more tasks and saving time.“We’re going to talk about how you can do that.”
Marketing Cloud is a powerful tool right out of the box, but there are some things you can do right away to improve your experience.
“When I help my clients out with their Marketing Cloud account, I often run into the same problem. People move all of their data into the Marketing Cloud, and it slows it down.
“I recommend coming up with an idea of the customer journey you’d like to build first, so you only have to move over the data points necessary for your plan. It requires a bit of planning, but it will make your campaigns that much more efficient.
“You have to spend some time to save some time!“Here’s how you plan out the journey:
“Seeing the performance of campaigns and finding out exactly how effective they are is effortless in Marketing Cloud. There are loads of reporting features out of the box.
“This is another benefit of staying within the Salesforce ecosystem, Marketing Cloud can feed tracking information back into Sales Cloud, making the gap between sales and marketing smaller.
“To get the most out of your reporting, make sure you set up your own data-based reports. You can decide which specific metrics you’re interested in, and receive these in your report. There’s an urge to include all the available metrics because you want to get the most for your money.“The truth is, if you load your reports with too much information, it’ll be harder for you to find the important stuff.”
“You can create lead capture forms and landing pages and get data straight into Marketing Cloud. This makes Marketing Cloud useful, not just for marketing to an existing audience, but creating a new one.”
“You can link campaigns in Marketing Cloud to campaigns in Salesforce. This means that leads in marketing will be seamlessly updated in Salesforce, and you’ll be able to quickly and clearly identify where they came from.
“It’ll require a liaison between the Sales and Marketing CRM managers (unless they’re the same person!) But it’ll make the entire revenue process more efficient.”
“Even though Marketing Cloud is very effective straight away, there are powerful add-ons which will give you access to additional features.“This means that if there’s a feature you’re after which isn’t on Marketing Cloud, you’ll probably be able to find it in the apps.”
Everyone knows that a great CRM needs to be fueled with great data. This is where the Cognism Salesforce app comes in. It’s a Salesforce-native prospecting application, bringing together Cognism Prospector and your own CRM. This will help you build a central hub for your sales and marketing efforts. What’s more, with access to over 400 million B2B profiles worldwide, you can be sure that your pipeline will stay stocked. To speak to one of Cognism’s Salesforce app experts today, click the link below.
