Salesforce has a similar backstory to many tech companies. It started in March 1999 in a one-bedroom apartment with four guys with a vision to create business software applications in a totally new way. This vision was the birth of SaaS (Software as a Service). Salesforce snowballed into the industry’s first on-demand application service, as Sforce 2.0. Today, it’s known as Salesforce.com and is still creating new and better processes to skill up your people, operations, and your revenue. They didn’t just stop at the sales processes. They’ve developed a digital marketing cloud – Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC).
SFMC is a digital marketing platform that automates marketing strategies across email, social media, mobile apps, SMS, and websites. While SFMC is a Salesforce product, it is not built on the core Salesforce platform. SFMC connects and synchronizes your data between the core Salesforce org and your SFMC account. These connections are made using multiple powerful tools that create a feature-rich product. By connecting SFMC and Salesforce, you can now organize and combine all your marketing channels in one place. SFMC gives marketers the ultimate ability to send highly personalized messaging via the right channel at the right time.
SFMC automation platform is used for:
- Email marketing
- Content creation and management (emails, landing page templates, forms, images, and coupons
- SMS monitoring and sending
- Mobile push notifications including in-app notifications
- Social media marketing – scheduling and monitoring posts, the ability for real-time engagement with analytics included
- Visually map out campaign automation with multiple channels, all visible within one view.
- Targeted online advertising that allows you to build lookalike audiences that behave like your current high-volume customers
- Website ‘listening’ to dynamically tailor webpages to the specific prospect’s interests.
- Powerful segmentation with access to many attributes from your CRM and other sources
- Data management / ETL activities such as importing files, file transfer, data extract, SQL query, filtering, and script. This feature is extremely useful in creating multi-step automated workflows.
It is built on two in-depth modules that allow you to access all these features from one navigation bar: Studios and Builders. Let’s look at what these modules can do for you.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Modules
Studios manages the content and specific marketing channels: Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Social Studio, Advertising Studio, Web Studio, and Automation Studio.
- Email Studio builds emails (content builder) with preview, test, and send capabilities.
- Mobile Studio creates, sends, and monitors SMS messages, sends push notifications, Bluetooth beacons, and geo-location mobile pushes.
- Social Studis creates, schedules, and monitors social media posts and takes advantage of real-time engagement along with providing rich analytics, all within one unified interface.
- Advertising Studio aligns online advertising with your CRM data. This studio allows you to find new prospects using lookalike audiences that behave like your current high-value customers.
- Web Studio manages your customers’ web experience (i.e., landing pages and microsites). Cloud pages organizes all your web content, including forms and coupons, and collect data to further personalize a prospect’s web experience.
- Automation Studio creates marketing automation and data management activities, automatically adding to Journey Builder canvases to make multi-step automated workflows, for instance, importing files, file transfers, data extraction, SQL queries, filtering, and scripts.
Builders manages data and campaign automation: Journey Builders, Audience Builders (Contact Builders), Content Builders, Brand Builders, Analytic Builders (standard reports), Analytics Builders (Datorama reports), and Marketing Cloud Connect.
- Journey Builders provides a unique campaign automation building experience that visually maps out the ‘journey’ your contacts will make through your marketing touchpoints. You also can segment contacts into targeted audiences using paths and leveraging a sidebar of different entry sources and activities (e.g., sending SMS) with flow controls.
- Audience (Contact) Builders manages data about your contacts pulled from records within the marketing cloud. It gives you access to demographic and behavioral information organized into ‘attribute groups’ (e.g., abandoned carts), ‘events,’ and ‘populations’ that can be segmented.
- Content Builders builds emails and landing page templates, including reusable/interactive content blocks.
- Brand Builders customizes the look and feel of your marketing cloud account. Upload your company logo and change the default color scheme to match your color scheme.
- Analytics Builders (standard reports) uses built-in marketing cloud reports on email campaigns, web and mobile analytics, contact behavior, administrator monitoring, and more.
- Analytics Builders (Datorama reports) replaces the Discover Reporting tool. Until now, campaign and journey reporting has been a major pain point for users. Now, it’s much easier with ‘Datorama reports’ pre-built dashboards. These are available as an app within SFMC when you have a Datorama account. The dashboards are created automatically in the background.
- Marketing Cloud Connect is the ultimate feature in the Salesforce to Marketing Cloud connector which allows your data to synchronize from the core Salesforce platform to SFMC and vice versa.
Decision Foundry is here to help you get started using these advanced marketing cloud tools. How cool would it be to have all the information from all your marketing channels accessible in one dynamic platform. It also allows you to automate your marketing strategies with flexible workflows that are realistic responses based on your customers’ preferences. You can build content for emails, your website, SMS, and more. This content is relevant and valuable to your current customers and appealing to new prospects, which means that you retain existing customers longer (CLV) and acquire new customers more quickly, proving a realistic ROI for your executive team.
About Decision Foundry
Decision Foundry is a Salesforce, independent software vendor, managed services provider, and a certified award-winning Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration partner. Decision Foundry closes the gap between data accessibility, platform adoption and business impact. Our consulting services include the integration of Data Cloud, Account, Engagement, Personalization, Tableau, and Intelligence.
