72% of consumers say they will only engage with marketing messages that are tailored to their interests. This means that industry leaders are expected to invest in digital marketing platforms that allow them to optimize their marketing messages that’ll resonate with their contacts.
One of the most popular and advanced tools in the market today is Salesforce Marketing Cloud and the various studios it offers. Marketers love how you can get a unified view of your marketing campaigns while automating repetitive tasks to boost productivity.
Marketing Cloud is Salesforce’s powerful marketing tool — with more than 7,700 companies using the software to form one-to-one relationships with their contacts. It’s primarily designed to be a B2C software for companies with high volumes of customers.
Salesforce positions Pardot as a Marketing Cloud product, but many organizations choose to use Pardot separately. Since these organizations prefer to concentrate on email marketing, they don’t require the advanced features provided by Marketing Cloud. Pardot’s ability to integrate with Salesforce CRM is a huge benefit to them.
We covered the differences between Pardot and Marketing Cloud and what you should consider before choosing one over the other in a previous post.
Marketing Cloud boasts high customization and adaptable AI technology, which means you can use the tool to execute whatever marketing campaigns you envision. With many studios and tools in its suite, Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers users the ability to connect with contacts on a personal level.
Here’s how Marketing Cloud allows you to build personalized relationships at scale:
Marketing Cloud studios are tools you can use to connect with contacts through different marketing channels. Each studio has its own specific area of focus, so many companies choose to use multiple studios to help them market better. Depending on which plan your organization purchased, some of these studios come out-of-the-box for you.
In this post, we’ll dive into the following tools:
Journey Builder helps you design customer journeys based on touch points and specific events. It allows you to visualize how your contacts are going to experience your brand and create customized journeys based on contacts’ preferences and behaviors.
It’s important to note that Journey Builder is not a standalone product; it must be integrated with other studios in order to build fleshed-out journeys.
Within Journey Builder, you’ll find 3 main canvas components:
The benefits of investing in Journey Builder are:
Here are some best practices you can use to optimize your customer journeys:
Email Studio allows you to communicate with your prospects through email campaigns and 1-to-1 messages. When paired with Content Builder, you can design responsive email templates that drive engagement.
Some other advantages to using Email Studio are:
Here are some best practices we find boost email engagement in Email Studio:
Content Builder consolidates your content and assets all in one place — making it easier for you to replicate high-performing email campaigns in the future.
With Content Builder, you can:
Our digital marketers recommend using the following best practices:
Automation Studio focuses on automating system activities for advanced data management. This means that it can help automate repetitive tasks — freeing up your digital marketer’s time.
With Automation Studio, you can even perform advanced segmentations and create journey audiences. The purpose is to automate tasks on a regular basis to help provide more context to your journeys.
Here are some of the reasons why we love Automation Studio:
These are some best practices our certified experts follow:
There are many different ways of organizing your folders. These are the 3 most common folder structures and naming conventions we’ve seen with our clients:
Advertise directly to your contacts with Advertising Studio. Connect your studio to the following platforms to reach your audiences anywhere:
The benefits are more than just reaching your contacts on their preferred channel. You can unify all of your paid marketing efforts without needing to exit the platform.
In fact, you can even create Facebook ad campaigns directly out of Journey Builder. This helps you align all of your email and advertising campaigns with ease.
Here’s how you can optimize your Advertising Studio:
Connect with your on-the-go contacts through their phones. With Mobile Studio, you can now utilize push notifications, SMS, MMS, and chat apps to nudge your contacts further down the buyer’s journey.
This is all done by a variety of Mobile Studio products:
These are some of the best practices we follow to optimize Mobile Studio:
Before you can use MobileConnect, you must first obtain a mobile short code — a unique 5-6 number code provided by a mobile carrier company.
This is an involved process that can take up to 12 weeks to complete. One advantage of working with a Salesforce consulting partner like EBQ is that we’re familiar with this process and can help. Learn what makes our Marketing Cloud services different.
Marketers need to know what customers are saying about their brand — even if the customers are not directly talking to them. With Social Studio, you can now listen in on those conversations using social listening.
Through social listening, you can manage your brand reputation easier. Because you’ll have a unified view of all your social channels, you’ll be able to address criticisms and respond to positive feedback faster.
You’ll also be able to monitor your social media campaigns all in one place.
Below are some of the best practices our own digital marketers follow:
Use Interaction Studio to track and analyze your consumer behavior in real-time — even if they’re offline. You can combine with Journey Builder to push customers into taking the next action as well.
Our digital marketers love Interaction Studio because it can:
Here are some best practices we follow for Interaction Studio:
Analyze all of your marketing data in a single source of truth. With Datorama Reports, you can build and edit dashboards based on your needs.
Datorama Reports allow you to configure your dashboards based on a few different out-of-the-box dashboard categories. These can be filtered, so only the most relevant data will appear on your dashboard.
Need more customization flexibility? Datorama Reports Advanced allows you to design your own dashboards for an additional cost. This will allow you to draw out deeper insights with its cross-channel marketing capabilities to make data-driven decisions.
These are some of the best practices we follow for Datorama Reports:
Datorama is a standalone marketing data tool. You can purchase it to gain additional insights into your marketing efforts. It also allows you to have more control over your dashboards compared to Datorama Reports and Reports Advanced.
Most digital marketers find that Marketing Cloud’s Datorama Reports will suffice. Datorama Reports comes out-of-the-box with most editions of Marketing Cloud, so it requires little setup. Although it’s lighter than its counterpart, the filters make it a truly customizable tool.
With Marketing Cloud and its various studios, you’re building one-to-one relationships at scale. Not only does it encourage contacts to convert, it’ll also make it more enticing for a customer to become a loyal customer.
With Marketing Cloud, you can benefit from:
At the center of it all, you can use Journey Builder to create stronger customer journeys — thus strengthening your relationship with your customers.
Knowing how each studio and builder works is one thing, but understanding how to use all of Marketing Cloud’s features to their fullest potential is another. If you’re looking to maximize your Salesforce ROI, you can look to our certified marketing specialists.
With more than 900 projects under our belt, we know how to execute your brand’s vision using Marketing Cloud. Contact us to learn more.
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