So What Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
The term “marketing cloud” in itself refers to an integrated set of marketing tools and technologies that are delivered to clients via the cloud. In this case, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is one of the many modules within the Salesforce ecosystem, aimed specifically towards marketing teams and focuses on improving customer experience across multiple channels. The set of tools you find within Salesforce Marketing Cloud pretty much cover all the necessities of a marketing department, allowing you to centralize data storage on all of your customer (and potential customer!) interactions, and use that data to market the right information to them at the right time across email, social, web, and mobile.
What really makes Salesforce Marketing Cloud stand out is that apart from collecting data from multiple channels from your CRM to physical stores and compiling it in a single space for a complete view of your customers, it uses its artificial intelligence (through its own Einstein AI) to help marketing teams make meaningful decisions based on that data and personalize content in a way that few other marketing solutions can.
What problems does Salesforce Marketing Cloud Solve?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud solves two major problems that marketing departments all over the world face: the fragmentation of information, and the need for personalized content.
As I mentioned earlier, our modern world has seen a boom of digital communication channels, and that is in addition to all the traditional channels we already had before the internet and social media came along. For companies and brands that cater to large audiences, it can take a lot of resources (especially time!) to go through the data and consolidate it in one place so that their marketing teams can make the right decisions. Salesforce Marketing Cloud acts as a Data Management Platform (DMP) and brings all the information to the same place, giving teams a holistic view of their customers and how they interact with all your channels. It also allows you to listen to what your customers are saying on different platforms, so you can get a better understanding of what they are interested in.
Solving that first problem leads us to the second one: once you have all the data in one place, and you understand your customers, you still need to be able to use this information to easily share the content they want to see. Salesforce Marketing Cloud makes these 1:1 conversations possible through the use of dynamic content that shows each individual customer content based on their previous interactions with your brand. In addition, Salesforce Marketing Cloud uses Einstein AI to let your marketing team know when you are over-impacting certain segments so that you can optimize your number of interactions and content delivery times. This is only a sliver of what Einstein AI can do for your team in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The truth is nowadays clients decide when and where they want to interact with brands. Yes, even without any sort of marketing cloud you can make sure you are present in the right channels, but place yourself in the shoes of the customer (because we have all been there), isn’t it nicer when a brand shows you the products and information you are looking for when you need them, instead of filling your digital streams with generic content?
Learn more about Email Marketing Studio by Salesforce Marketing Cloud and other marketing tools on our YouTube Channel.
So what Is the big lesson?
If there is one thing we should all take away from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and in fact from Salesforce as a whole, is that we have to start viewing customers holistically. The days when we could look at channels separately, thinking that our Facebook Audience was interested in certain things while our email audience was looking for something different are counted. For customers, their journey has always been just one, a path that crosses various channels and intersections, but that ultimately revolves around themselves. In my personal experience working with luxury brands, I learned that you had to know absolutely everything about each individual customer to build a 1:1 relationship with them. Of course, it is easy to do that when you have a small customer base spending on high ticket items. For years, companies with larger audiences have struggled to create those 1:1 relationships, and when a solution like Salesforce Marketing Cloud comes along allowing you to do exactly that, everyone else has to rush to catch up.
