Salesforce Marketing Cloud in 2023: what’s inside

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: what is it?

In a nutshell, what exactly is Marketing Cloud? 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing service from Salesforce that contains tools for email marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, online advertising, marketing automation and more.

It lets marketers develop and manage marketing relationships with consumers, measure customer activity and engagement, and deliver tailored experiences for customers across numerous channels.

The platform provides marketers with valuable insights and statistics to analyze the performance of their campaigns and plans. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: who’s it for?

Alright, who is it intended for?

Well, it's a no-brainer. Marketers, sales teams, customer support teams, and other management-related professionals may all profit greatly from using Marketing Cloud. Here are some essential use cases:

• Marketers may use it to improve marketing and tactics, monitor consumer engagement, and create unique interactions with their target audience.
• Sales teams may use it to better understand their clientele, monitor their data and results, and develop more strategic approaches to closing deals.
• Support staff may use this information to keep tabs on client comments and use that information to improve their services.
• Company personnel may use it to understand client data and behavior, which in turn can lead to more informed choices and more productivity. 

What insights offers Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides a panoramic view of the client's activities:

• The platform gives insights into consumer data and behavior to help marketers make better choices and boost productivity. 
• It offers predictive analytics, allowing marketers to build tailored experiences for consumers across all digital platforms.
• Marketers use Marketing Cloud to acquire insights into customer data and behavior in order to develop more successful campaigns and plans, monitor customer activity and engagement, and establish stronger customer connections. 

How digital marketers build campaigns using Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Marketers design more effective campaigns and strategies by making use of all of the capabilities and tools that are accessible in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

• Marketers may use the results of predictive analytics to better understand their consumers and design more personalized interactions with them.
• Marketers monitor consumer interaction, connect with clients, keep tabs on comments and suggestions, and improve the quality of their products and services.
• Marketers can manage their customer data, monitor the effectiveness of their sales efforts, and design engaging customer care experiences. 

What could be challenging when using Marketing Cloud?

The Marketing Cloud is a powerful feature-rich tool, which is why, in order to conduct it like a massive orchestra with which you will play an ode to your success, you will need some skill, but more importantly, the advice of our experts. The main challenges to address when leveraging Marketing Cloud are:

• Setting up the platform correctly: This includes configuring settings, connecting with other Salesforce services, and setting user access and permissions. 
• Understanding the features and tools: Knowing how to use all of the features and tools available on the platform is essential for success. 
• Integrating with other Salesforce services: With the Salesforce ecosystem, there are many different services and apps that can be integrated with Salesforce Marketing Cloud for a powerful omnichannel experience. 
• Controlling user access and permissions: It is important to have the correct access and permissions set up to ensure that users have the correct access to the platform. 
• Developing successful campaigns: Knowing how to create and launch campaigns that reach the right audiences and achieve the desired outcomes is key. 
• Monitoring campaign performance: Regularly tracking and analyzing campaign performance is key in order to measure success and optimize campaigns.
• Analyzing consumer behavior: Understanding consumer behavior and using the right analytics and reporting tools is essential for success.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s comprehensive toolbox

What are the essential tools of the Marketing Cloud?

Digital marketers and folks in sales and customer service may find the wide range of products and resources available in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to develop more refined strategy and plans for their campaigns. 

• Email Studio to construct customized email campaigns with the world’s number one email marketing platform. 
• Journey Builder to create individual customer journeys across all channels and teams. 
• Marketing Cloud Personalization to offer real-time, 1-to-1 client encounters at each touchpoint. 
• Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform to unify, segment, trigger, and examine all your data. 
• Marketing Cloud Intelligence platform for all your marketing data, investments, KPIs, and decisions. 
• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement powered by Pardot to join sales and marketing on one platform for B2B marketing automation. 
• Marketing Cloud Advertising to target 1-to-1 campaigns using your CRM data to acquire and re-engage customers. 
• Mobile Studio to personalize mobile interactions like SMS, push notifications, and chat messaging. 
• Content Management to promptly produce and deliver amazing content experiences. 
• Google Marketing Platform to provide deeper, data-driven marketing. 
• Loyalty Management to build customers for life and keep them coming back with personalized loyalty programs. 
• Datorama Reports to analyze, visualize, and report on email, mobile, and journey data within Marketing Cloud.

Journey Builder

Wouldn't we all, as customers, want a personalized journey catered to our individual requirements? Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder is an automated marketing tool that helps enterprises make it a reality.

With Journey Builder, Salesforce admins and digital marketers can:

• Build journeys based on customer behavior, preferences, and data points. 
• Automatically respond to engagements such as purchases, clicks, and email openings. 
• Guide customers in the correct direction based on their present and forecasted behavior. 
• Generate custom customer experiences over channels, devices, and operational functions using email, SMS, push notifications, ads, web, and applications. 
• Integrate sales and service activities directly into the journey with a top-of-the-line CRM system. 
• Construct 1-to-1 journeys at a large scale by automating engagement and modifying customer interactions according to their behavior. 
• Utilize predictive intelligence to deliver timely, relevant content. 
• Provide simple or complex journeys for each individual, regardless of the size of the customer base. 
• Define specific goals, and measure everything from click-through rates, timing, channels, conversions, and more. 
• Analyze your progress and make optimizations as you go, yielding real results.

Audience Builder

Have you always dreamed of working more closely with your audience? So, here it is. 

Audience Builder is a service in Salesforce Marketing Cloud that enables you to build and manage client groups. You may use Audience Builder to build segments based on customer profile traits, purchase history, and other factors, and more:

• Utilize data from multiple sources, such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud data, web analytics, and offline data to form a single view of your customers. 
• Convert raw data into marketer-friendly dimensions to make complex data easier to manage. 
• Segment and filter data from multiple sources with drag-and-drop features to create precise, tailored messages. 
• Uncover new opportunities and trends with a dimension-based approach. 
• Target smart audiences using predictive scores powered by Einstein AI to engage customers based on what they will do next.

Personalization Builder 

Personalization Builder is a tool of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud that helps you build customized customer experiences.

It presumes the creation of a profile for each consumer, the definition of customization rules, and the creation of tailored content. 

Begin connecting with your consumers more effectively by leveraging Personalization builder:

• Monitor customer clicks and actions to build a behavioral profile for each individual to model their content and product preferences. 
• Use pre-defined rules and templates to swiftly produce tailored content.
• Leverage machine learning algorithms powered by Einstein AI to forecast the right content. 
• Construct personalized experiences, driving 1-to-1 interactions and automatically supplying predictive content across email, the web, or mobile applications.

Content Builder

The Content Builder is another excellent tool to help you get on the path to giving your consumers an effortless omnichannel experience. 

It allows you to play efficiently with the content for your campaigns:

• Generate, manage, and monitor content across all your digital channels from a single location. 
• Create custom HTML and text-based material, as well as photographs, videos, and other multimedia.
• Assign tags, campaign associations, and owners to your content. 
• Utilize quick search functionality to locate content quickly. 
• Construct profiles of customer preferences to identify and deliver the next best content, offer, or product for each individual across channels. 
• Design and build intelligent content messaging with drag-and-drop smart content blocks and mobile-optimized templates. 
• Monitor your progress as you build with the persistent preview function. 

Analytics Builder

A digital marketer would be nothing without analytics tools, right? 

The Analytics Builder generates sophisticated analytics reports. You can build and modify reports using Analytics Builder to acquire insights into consumer behavior, engagement, and marketing performance.

Make the most of it:

• Monitor on-going engagement by tracking website and mobile app visitor's behavior.
• Gather insights with configurable tiles like visitor location, site search terms, and abandoned cart value.
• Get powerful email analytics and reporting to understand opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and more.
• Visualize reports and take timely action with bar graphs, pie charts, scatter plots, or heat grids.
• Uncover patterns and trends using conditional formatting, data bars, trend arrows, or robust filtering.
• Gain predictive insights with Einstein and score customers based on their likelihood to engage, purchase or unsubscribe.

Marketing Cloud Connect

With Marketing Cloud Connect, you can transfer data between Marketing Cloud and other Salesforce assets, enabling you to more effectively customize campaigns and target clients.

After configuring the connector, all the data will be synchronized automatically. Gain as much Salesforce data unification as you can: 

• Leverage all Salesforce data by creating a single, 360-degree view of each customer. 
• Inspire engagement at every touchpoint with activities that connect interactions across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and beyond. 
• Create seamless experiences for customers, employees, and partners.
• Easily collect data from across the Customer Success Platform and act on it instantly and automatically. 
• Create a complete picture of each customer with relevant content across all channels and devices.

Einstein AI 

You have probably already observed this Einstein pokes his nose into practically all of the instruments that make up the Marketing Cloud. 

In short, Salesforce Einstein is an AI engine for making informed business choices. It allows business to analyze consumer activity and marketing results, make educated predictions, tailor communications to individual customers, and streamline administrative marketing operations.

Better understand client tastes, run more successful ads, and provide more satisfying interactions - this Einstein AI dude will give you a hint. 

Wrap-up: Salesforce Marketing Cloud makes it all combined

Salesforce ensured that marketing experts had access to all the resources they needed to do excellent work for customer bases of every size and subject.

Campaign management, analytics, a journey builder, reporting - all combined with the extended email and social media marketing toolkit. On top of this, AI-powered features, such as sentiment analysis, predictive analytics, and personalized recommendations.

Well, it's a pity there is no button that, when hit, instantly turns leads into sales. However, we shouldn't exclude the idea given the constantly expanding Salesforce capabilities.

"All of this is excellent," you say, "but how precisely can I apply it to my project?" Keep cool, this is exactly what we break down in Part 2 of this blog.