Lightning Architects

The transformation of marketing campaigns to align with evolving consumer behaviors and demands has made it necessary for businesses to adopt agile methodologies. To aid the success of these initiatives, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers comprehensive tools which can be leveraged to create innovative campaigns, driving business success. Although implementing the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, with so many features might seem harrowing at first, it is a very structured process, which, once understood, offers tremendous benefits to businesses. In this step-by-step guide, we will explain exactly how it can be implemented and leveraged. 

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Before understanding the ways for successfully implementing the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it is essential for beginners to understand what the platform is and how exactly it can help in boosting marketing initiatives. 

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a digital platform which has been designed to help marketers and businesses craft, organize, and optimize their marketing initiatives to get the best results. Complete with an array of tools and features such as the Journey Builder, the Advertising Studio, the Social Studio, Email Studio, Mobile Studio, and more, it helps in the optimization of omnichannel marketing efforts. 

With these and other tools which make it so unique, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a wide range of benefits including the following: 

• Businesses can customize their marketing campaigns easily by understanding target demographics and finding ideas that suit the varied customer segments. 

• Businesses that utilize varied channels for advertising and marketing can leverage Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s ability to efficiently enable multi-channel marketing. Whether it is social media, email marketing, mobile marketing, or web marketing, the platform facilitates it all. 

• The Salesforce Marketing Cloud also offers exceptional automation features with the help of which, businesses can advance their marketing efficiency and ensure the right promotions are launched at the right time. 

• Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s analytics and reporting features, businesses can effectively track performance of their marketing campaigns and make modifications as needed to improve success of the campaigns. These tools also enable the brands to identify key fault areas, and learn which methods do not work with their target audience.

Implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud

The process of implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud is quite comprehensive and structured, which makes it vital for businesses to know where to start. Before delving into the technical parts for implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the business should take time to define what the goals and desired outcomes are for the particular marketing campaign. The business should also focus on identifying the target audience for the particular campaign, which will help it design the  marketing campaign more effectively by properly harnessing the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

Steps For Implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Here are the main steps that need to be followed for implementing salesforce marketing cloud. 

Step 1: Setting Up Business Account:

The first step in implementing the salesforce marketing cloud is creating a business account. This step needs to be carried forward carefully in order to ensure that every team member has proper access to the platform. 

When creating the account, it is essential to remember the following:

• Make sure you add all team members who will contribute to the marketing initiatives. This includes marketers, administrators, supervisors, analytics teams, and more. 

• For every team member added, it is essential to add roles. This is vital because you can assign varied access levels to all members. 

• Following this, allowing all permissions and setting security measures such as two-factor authentication, is important. This includes implementing access control specifications with regard to every member. 

Step 2: Integrating Data 

Data integration is the next critical phase in successfully implementing the salesforce marketing cloud. With this, the business can leverage the import tools offered by the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to shift all existing customer data that the business owns on to the platform, which in turn helps enhance efficiency of designing marketing campaigns. 

The import tools allow businesses to upload data in the form of api integrations as well as csv files, making it simple and quick to transport all data. After integration, businesses can take a step further and create audience segments on the salesforce cloud which will further help boost productivity. 

Step 3: Organizing Marketing Channels

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud supports a number of marketing channels including emails, social media, website marketing, messaging, mobile marketing and more. 

Each of these channels need to be individually configured with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud in alignment with the business. 

Through this, businesses can leverage a multitude of Salesforce cloud features such as automation tools, analytics tools, reporting tools, etc, to optimize marketing campaigns. With respect to target marketing, the configuration process saves a significant amount of time when personalizing campaigns. 

Step 4: Personalizing Customer Journey 

As a next step, businesses can create customized client journeys, designing every step from the point of entry to creating a guided experience, leading up to the next actions which the campaign aims for the customers to take. By personalizing this journey using Salesforce’s Journey Builder,  businesses can ensure that the campaign delivers as close to expectations as possible. Using this tool, businesses can also set specific KPIs in place which can be used for measuring campaign success and performance. 

Step 5: Designing Campaign Materials

After having the customer journey built, the business or marketers need to focus on the content and materials needed for running the campaign. This includes the following: 

• Emails: Designing email content as well as layout is essential if emails are a part of your marketing campaign. For instance, if you are planning an email campaign for a store promotion, you need to design the email content using Salesforce’s email studio. Make sure you build in the relevant action buttons which will lead the customers to the right landing pages. 

• Social Media Posts: If a marketing initiative is to be launched on social media platforms by means of image and video posts, the marketers should ready all the necessary materials required for social media posts which will attract an audience. 

Step 6: Testing Campaigns

An optional but highly recommended set of tools to utilize are the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s testing tools. Offering options like multivariate testing and a/b testing, these tools can be leveraged for assessing the likelihood of a campaign succeeding based on certain parameters. While one the one hand multivariate testing allows comparing multiple variables and creating numerous combinations with different variables clubbed together, a/b testing is a simpler approach. 

Through this approach, campaigners can simply create two campaign options and compare which is more successful by getting a feel for how the two are being perceived. These methods allow the marketers to modify and refine materials and content before launching campaigns. 

Step 7: Launching The Campaign

Finally, when all this is done, the next phase of work will focus on launching the campaign as planned. If the campaign is to be launched on a single platform, it can be done in that manner, or if it has to be launched on multiple channels, the marketers can choose whether to post on all fronts together, or schedule it strategically in regular intervals. 

With either option, leveraging automation tools can be very handy because marketers can simply schedule when the campaign is to be launched, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud will ensure that the campaign is successfully launched at the chosen time. 

Step 8: Tracking Performance Of Campaign 

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is equipped with a number of features which make it possible to track the performance and success of the marketing campaign. This vital information holds critical importance not just for the immediate campaign, but also future campaigns. Utilizing this information, brands can analyze what kind of content the customers respond to, and what does not work. It also helps in building strong segmentation comparisons. For instance, if a particular segment is liking a particular kind of content, the future targeted campaigns can leverage this information to build and refine campaigns. 

The following tools help with this task: 

• Analytics Builder: The analytics builder is a helpful tool which allows the marketers to track and assess how the campaign is performing. By building in some key criteria within the analytics builder, it can track specific actions to determine success. For instance, the business can look for analytics related to:
  • click through rates
  • opening rates
  • conversion rates, and others. 
• The analytics builder can track such actions and provide information regarding each accordingly. 

• Reporting Tool: The reporting tool is another very helpful tool by Salesforce Marketing Cloud which creates thorough reports based on analytics findings to assess the success of a campaign. Using the information on these reports, future campaigns can be adjusted to derive greater success. 

Conclusion

Using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud could seem daunting at first, but once you learn how to navigate through the numerous tools, it becomes a very easy process. To drive the success of marketing campaigns and enhance efficiency, using this tool is the need of the hour. As the marketing landscape becomes more competitive, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud will provide you a competitive edge.