Fuel Your B2B Marketing Engine With Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Are you considering implementing a top-notch marketing automation platform? Sure, it takes your marketing operations to the next level. But as you start your research, you will be surprised to see a plethora of such options available in the market. So, which one is apt for your business? While it depends on your business needs, there is an increasing need for marketers to create personalized, data-driven, and omnichannel messaging.

In fact, the marketing spectrum has changed dramatically over the years and it turns out that delivering a 1:1 customer experience is essential to meet the needs of potential and existing customers. According to Forrester, 52%^[i] of B2B marketing leaders plan to increase their spending on personalization technology.

That’s where Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be your best ally. In this article, we will look at the features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud that make it stand at the forefront of innovation and how you can optimize it for B2B marketing.

Features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud

• Journey Builder: It helps you create 1:1 customer journeys at scale by enabling you to identify the customer touchpoints and interactions. By using event-driven triggers, you can reach out to your customers with the right message at the right time. Journey Builder helps you build personalized relationships by –
  • Using customer data to understand their expectations and behavior.
  • Unifying customer communication across channels such as website, social media, mobile, apps, etc.
  • Using Journey Builder Analytics to measure performance across channels and provide a better customer experience.
  • Aligning sales and marketing teams by using data points to create leads, scheduling follow-ups, and transforming leads into opportunities.

• Email Studio: It helps marketers create smarter email campaigns by using data from all departments and reaching out to customers on any device for personalized interactions. With Email Studio, you can send thousands of emails at a time, customize the messaging to suit the needs of the customer at every stage of their journey, and utilize Salesforce’s Einstein Engagement Scoring to predict the customer segments that are most likely to engage with your content.
• Interaction Studio: It helps visualize customer experience in real-time and connect with them through any interaction. It gathers cross-channel customer insights by analyzing the path taken by them across channels and devices. It creates relevant and valuable experiences by prioritizing which messages are seen using frequency capping and pushing seamless communication across marketing, sales, and service teams for a unified experience.
• Advertising Studio: It includes powerful functionality for data-driven advertising. It helps the organizations take the next step towards digital advertising by managing the acquisition, retargeting, and alignment campaigns.

Rethink Your B2B Marketing Strategy With Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Unless marketers communicate with the right people, they are only talking to themselves. That’s why B2B brands are increasingly switching to account-based marketing (ABM). ABM enables them to target companies and not exactly people, having higher possibilities of conversions. Also, with ABM, both marketing and sales teams work together, which makes a platform like Salesforce Marketing Cloud the perfect fit for them. Salesforce Marketing Cloud can supercharge your ABM efforts by –

• Relaying tailored messages to the right accounts. It can help customize the content with the help of suitable templates, targeting businesses in specific geographies.
• Leveraging Einstein capabilities to automate account information gathering, predict steps that can benefit your marketing, and evaluate campaign performances.
• Automating your ABM campaigns. It not only saves you tons of time and effort but also enables you to handle a plethora of accounts without much heavy lifting.

However, the virtues of Salesforce Marketing Cloud are not only restricted to ABM. From a general perspective, it helps B2B businesses to –

• Have a single unified view of the customers.
• Personalize communication with the help of Einstein AI.
• Suggest activities that inspire customers to take action with the help of its predictive capabilities and insights on customer behavior.
• Map customer journey and measure campaign performance using AI and Analytics 360.

Optimizing Salesforce Marketing Cloud for B2B Marketing

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a robust platform. However, to make your marketing efforts more productive, you can optimize the same to improve your experience. Here’s a quick look at the ways you can do it:

• Planning the Customer Journey: Most organizations move their entire data to the Marketing Cloud. However, that’s not the ideal way to go about it. To make it more efficient, you need to plan the customer journey first. Here are a few steps to help you get started:
• Define your customers’ entry into the buying journey. For instance, if you count them in when they sign up, make it a field in your Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance.
• Identify the data points which enable your customers to make a decision.
• Identity the data points that help you achieve personalization in your messaging. This will enable you to filter the data that you need to sync over.
• Customizing Reports: It is important to keep a track of your campaign reports. However, you wouldn’t need all the reporting metrics. So, it is advisable to set up your own data-based reports. To be precise, you can decide the metrics you are interested in and focus only on the areas that matter.
• Liaising With Sales Cloud: This means that marketing leads will be seamlessly updated in the Sales Cloud, which helps you bridge the gap between Sales and Marketing teams.
• Accessing Additional Features: Even though Marketing Cloud is a powerful solution with many in-built capabilities, you can still get access to a lot of add-on features and extend its functionality. So, if there’s a feature that you need that is not on the Marketing Cloud, you can find it in apps listed on the AppExchange.

Conclusion

As businesses need to consistently up their personalization efforts in marketing, the increasing need for marketers to engage with customers across multiple channels and provide them with personalized experiences makes Salesforce Marketing Cloud an ideal choice.

If you have any questions about powering and leveling up your marketing operations with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, feel free to drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll take it from there.

Statistics Reference:
^[i] https://www.forrester.com/blogs/putting-b2b-personalization-in-context/