The Envy Of Mad Men: Everything Possible In Marketing Cloud

An Overview the Most Powerful Tools in Modern Marketing

“Advertising is based on one thing: happiness,” Don Draper famously said.

If you’ve watched the hit show “Mad Men,” you know marketing and advertising used to be more of an art than a science. Don Draper types thought up madcap campaigns and market research was largely open to interpretation. There was no concrete way to know which messages most resonated with customers … but there was a lot of day-drinking and office intrigue.

Today, real-time data is a marketers’ best friend, instead of fuzzy concepts that make great quotes. ROI is correctly attributed to successful campaigns while customers expect to be listened to and engaged across channels. Guesswork in marketing is a thing of the past.

Enter Salesforce Marketing Cloud, an industry-defining tool that bundles myriad functions.

According to the Salesforce website, “Marketing Cloud includes integrated solutions for customer journey management, email, mobile, social, web personalization, advertising, content creation and management, and data analysis.”

Yet skeptics may still wonder whether they truly need such a robust collection of sophisticated tech. That’s why we’re offering a quick tour of everything possible in Marketing Cloud:

Marketing Process Automation

The legacy marketing process was fragmented and inefficient. Marketing writers often collaborated in Google or Word documents and then copied and pasted text for social media posts (in case you haven’t guessed, Social Studio solves this particular issue). These kinds of tedious tasks ate up time marketers could have spent creatively.

The rise of social media segmentation, cookies, caches and beacons have allowed marketers to be more efficient. Now, Marketing Cloud takes this efficiency to the next level with automation.

Using Marketing Cloud, teams can automatically segment, import and filter data to create highly-targeted campaigns. For instance, if the firm Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce observes a certain customer group only opens emails with the word “free” in the subject line, they can use segmentation to send a tailored email to this list. They can even dynamically change emails to show different messages to individual recipients using details about their purchase history.
Mobile marketing benefits from automation as well (courtesy of products like Mobile Studio and Advertising Studio, now known as MC Advertising), with targeted messages triggered by specific user behaviors. For instance, an automatic SMS could congratulate customers of a retail brand on their birthday and offer a special discount.

Personalization

Companies such as Amazon, Netflix and Apple have set the bar for personalization. Modern customers demand seamless, continuous experiences across channels and devices. According to the 2020 Salesforce State of Marketing Report, 54% of customers say they get annoyed if they are targeted with an ad for something they’ve already bought. If a consumer patrons a brand, that business is expected to pay close attention.

The type of personalization that drives marketing results goes far beyond using someone’s first name. For instance, Betty Draper should receive a follow-up email shortly after abandoning her cart online. This type of targeted, timely reminder is a powerful sales driver.

Using Journey Builder and Interaction Studio (now known as MC Personalization), marketers have the power to influence customer behavior. A journey can start with a couple of emails, then continue across Facebook and Instagram ads, depending on the recipients’ actions. Once a prospect clicks on an ad and fills out a form, they can be automatically enrolled in a customer welcome journey. As marketers collect more data at each step, the customer’s experience will become more personalized and ultimately more satisfying.

Think of this as the modern version of Roger Sterling and Pete Campbell catering to their clients’ individual preferences – even outlandish whims – to close a deal.

A/B testing

A customer’s journey with a brand is marked by various touchpoints: an in-person experience, a mobile app, a website visit, seeing the brand’s social posts and more. Any interaction, whether in-person or digital, counts.

Each of these touchpoints, big or small, is a chance to build brand affinity and customer loyalty, which in turn maximize LTV. Done right, this self-reinforcing cycle of brand affinity that translates to higher sales also allows companies to set competitive pricing.

Thanks to Marketing Cloud, marketers possess a nearly limitless ability to A/B test at scale and ship different experiences to leads and customers.

For instance, a sports emporium site is equipped with a beacon that uses machine learning to track customer behavior. The beacon can track an individual unknown user and record this person’s high affinity for running gear. The unknown user might even keep buying running-related products anonymously for a year.

The sports company’s marketing team can target this mysterious user with a banner ad offering a discount on running shoes for anyone who signs up for their newsletter. Now, the previously anonymous user is identified as Joan Holloway, a single mother interested in staying in shape. The marketing team now has access to a full timeline of Joan’s brand engagement: how much money she’s spent, what pages she’s browsed, what items she’s abandoned and more. Thanks to a combination of data gathering and A/B testing, the company was able to connect with Joan.

Marketers who create A/B tests can get a little help from Einstein Analytics; this system creates its own recipes to suggest different permutations and combinations for landing pages and other digital assets. Creating custom algorithms is a power the Mad Men couldn’t have imagined.

As Salesforce collects more user data, marketers can increasingly personalize customer journeys, setting their companies ahead of the competition.

Data-informed marketing strategies

As marketing has become more of a science, savvy strategies stem from hypotheses informed by tangible data. Happily, Datorama (now known as MC Intelligence) captures plenty of data, from email and SMS campaigns to social media account performance.

For example, a marketer – let’s call her Peggy Olson – can monitor how many emails are opened and read by customers versus how many bounce. Bounces affect future deliverability since company communications can get marked as spam and stop getting into inboxes. Thanks to Marketing Cloud reporting, hard bounces are easy to track. Peggy can even create an automation where contacts are immediately unsubscribed after a hard bounce.

Marketers can also survey deliverability across inboxes and formulate strategies to better engage key customer groups. In a drip email campaign, the intrepid Ms. Olson can play around with personalization and see if that affects open rates. The possibilities are endless, especially for someone as detail-oriented and tenacious as her.

Note that Marketing Cloud is a popular choice regardless of the size of a given company, from smaller businesses to enterprises with six-figure advertising budgets. Large enterprises that spend hefty sums on advertising across channels want to clearly see the cost per lead per channel in order to compare customer acquisition costs.

The bottom line is that data-informed strategies simply perform better.

Scaling with Salesforce

Marketing Cloud is a part of Salesforce. This fact is as obvious as a loose John Deere lawn mower at an office party – and it shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s the reason Marketing Cloud can seamlessly integrate with other key products like Sales Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, Google, Shopify, social media platforms and more.

Salesforce users benefit from unparalleled support and integration possibilities as well as a robust partner network. There’s also an entire ecosystem of peripheral tools that users can add when they need to scale fast.

Marketing Cloud, like other Salesforce products, follows a release schedule of four updates per year. This iterative approach of predictable upgrades keeps the platform sharp. Salesforce also stays ahead of the curve by regularly acquiring other companies. For instance, the tech giant’s recent acquisition of Slack has made the news recently.

This ability to scale with Salesforce is an important asset for marketers. More partners brings strength and increased opportunity; just ask the folks at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

Tech-savvy modern customers expect a sophisticated level of engagement from the brands they patron. Clever ad slogans alone aren’t enough. Marketing Cloud enables marketers to create highly-personalized experiences to meet these new demands.

If a business tried to build a similar solution in-house, it would take years to achieve a comparable level of integration, system stability and cloud nativity. With Salesforce, all a marketer needs is an Internet connection and a decent work laptop and they can engage audiences from anywhere in the world.

The five benefits outlined here are just the tip of the iceberg. Much like Don Draper, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface.

If your team is flirting with the idea of setting up Marketing Cloud, contact us!