November 15, 2022

A Closer Look at Marketing Cloud – Features and Key Focuses

Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you to build engaging, results-driven campaigns that are built on customer data.

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As a business owner, one of your main concerns is deciding how to reach and connect with customers throughout the customer lifecycle. Having a diverse customer base makes things even more challenging. How do you reach a diverse customer base with different concerns and requirements?

Your customers are not all the same, nor are they at the same point in their customer journeys so tailored marketing that takes unique customer considerations into account is essential. However, manually creating, managing and tracking multiple marketing campaigns aimed at different segments of your customer base is time-consuming and can easily backfire.

Research from Forrester recently found that 35% of businesses have suffered from inaccurate targeting in their marketing efforts and a further 30% have lost customers as a result. With competition rife, particularly in the world of e-commerce and customer expectations at an all-time high, you simply can’t afford to lose customers to misinformed marketing efforts.

To create marketing campaigns that will delight your customers and drive your bottom line, you need the power of data on your side. Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you to build engaging, results-driven campaigns that are built on customer data. Keep reading to learn all about Salesforce and how it can elevate your marketing output.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a marketing automation platform that offers automation capabilities for marketing across a variety of channels such as website, email, social media, mobile, SMS, to name a few. Marketing Cloud allows you to connect with customers on every channel by combining all marketing channels in one place, allowing you to send personalised messages to customers through the right channel at exactly the right time to drive customer engagement. Using Marketing Cloud’s built-in capabilities you can:

Create and automate multi-channel marketing campaigns.
Build and nurture engaging customer journeys.
Create and automate social media campaigns and track engagement.
Assess campaign success and conversion rates using in-depth analytics.

How Does Marketing Cloud Work?

Marketing Cloud is made up of two different types of modules that help to create all marketing campaigns:

Studios for creating and managing content and certain marketing channels.
Builders for managing data and campaign automation procedures.

The Studios in Marketing Cloud include:

Email Studio

Build email campaigns.
Preview and test campaigns before sending.
Send mass email campaigns at the same time.

Mobile Studio

Create and send marketing SMS messages.
Monitor the performance of SMS campaigns.
Create and send push notifications (including silent notifications and in-app messaging).

Social Studio

Create, schedule and track the performance of social media posts.
Engage with post interactions in real-time.
Assess social media post performances through detailed analytics.

Advertising Studio

Reach new audiences and identify new potential prospects.
Identify high-value prospects with similar online behaviours to your current high-value customers.

Automation Studio

Automate marketing activities and add them to the Journey Builder to pre-designed journey workflows.

The Marketing Cloud Builders consist of:

Journey Builder

Segment contacts into targeted audiences using journey paths consisting of marketing touchpoints.
Build engaging customer journeys based on unique customer data and metrics.

Audience Builder

Manage data of the contacts who make up your audience.
Access demographic and behavioural data organised into ‘populations’, ‘attribute groups’ and ‘events’ that can be segmented.

Content Builder

Build marketing content like emails and landing pages to be used for campaigns.

Personalisation Builder

Pair customer profiles with ML algorithms to discover the type of content you should be showing to each customer.

Analytics Builder

Track and measure your campaign and journeys’ performances.
Unlock new insights about customers through in-depth reporting and predictive analytics.

Marketing Cloud Connect

Keep customer data synced across sales, service and marketing interactions.
Trigger journeys to begin and messages to send as customers interact with any department in your company.

Should I Use Marketing Cloud For My Business?

Deciding whether to opt for Marketing Cloud as your business’s marketing automation tool can be tricky, especially when Salesforce has another, very similar tool for marketing automation called Pardot.

When deciding whether or not Marketing Cloud is the right fit for your business, focus on the following key points:

You need a wide variety of marketing tools to help you manage your multi-channel marketing across various platformsincluding social media, mobile, webpage and email marketing, as well as your marketing automation activities.
You’re aiming to create brand awareness and encourage brand interaction and engagement from customers via advertising campaigns online and on social media channels.
Your business has a large customer database and a lower value per sale.
Your business is based primarily on transactions and has a fairly short sales cycle.
Your business resides within the B2C sphere or B2B sphere where your target customers expect a more B2C customer experience.

When To Use Pardot Instead Of Marketing Cloud?

Every business considering marketing automation software will inevitably face the Pardot vs. Marketing Cloud debate. It’s understandable, seeing as both of these tools offer similar functionality for targeted campaigning, customer personalisation and segmentation and analytics.

Although they appear to be almost the same, there are differences between Pardot and Marketing Cloud that make each tool better suited for different businesses targeting different audiences.

You should be opting for Pardot in your marketing efforts if:

You need a marketing tool that offers lead nurturing functionality to help you determine high-potential leads to focus your efforts on.
Your business has a longer sales cycle consisting of multiple decision-makers.
Your business has a relatively high value per sale and a smaller database.
You want your marketing and sales activities to inform and work from each other, ensuring that you’re targeting the right customers and approaching them at the right time
Your business resides within the B2B sphere or B2C sphere where your target customers might take longer to consider and decide to purchase your product or service.

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