Salesforce Marketing Cloud, formerly known as Exact Target, is what digital marketers trust these days to reach out to the potential audience with the right message.
Marketing Cloud helps in achieving a myriad of objectives. It creates a two-way conversation with the customers and helps to collect and analyze known and unknown customer profiles for a consolidated view of the target market. Marketing Cloud helps to measure, optimize, and report the market performance of your product or services across different channels and also provides increased predictability with AI support.
- Start with a clear purpose
When we talk about Marketing Cloud, we have to consider everything in it like:
- Journey Builder
- Email Studio
- Salesforce DMP
- Social Studio
- Advertising Studio
- Mobile Studio
Always remember that you won’t be able to successfully implement ALL of these tools and begin leveraging their capabilities overnight. List out your business priorities and customer needs and plan your processes accordingly. Determine a jumping-off point that will allow you to gain quick, meaningful wins and momentum. After that, you should find out which tool can be the most efficient. For some clients, Journey Builder is a great start for marketing automation. But every business has different requirements so you need to prioritize what works for you.
- Match problems and strategy
Getting the professionals on the team is essential for a successful Marketing Cloud implementation. Seek team members that can represent your business strategy and be the voice of the customer. Also, look for colleagues with a strong technical background – so they can uncover business requirements and design a technical strategy around them.
You need to identify key sponsors and stakeholders, along with assigning their roles in the implementation process. Ensure your team has agents who are not afraid of embracing the unknown and developing new skills.
- Assess where you need help
When you have determined your starting point and gathered your team, take time to look at the work to be done ahead. Acknowledge where you may have blind spots or gaps in skills or experience. Seeking help from a qualified Salesforce consulting partner could work here. Implementing the marketing cloud and syncing your legacy systems with it needs expertise, which could make the process smooth while ensuring data safety during migration. The right Salesforce consulting service makes it possible by considering your business objectives while marketing cloud implementation, along with considering the suitable campaigns you wish to run.
- Pick targets early
Marketing is all about reaching out to the audience, and for that, you must know who to target. With your team set right, get clarity of the audience from both technical and business perspectives. Marketing Cloud is about executing campaigns to the target audience. Thus, you need to be aware of who your customers are and collect the data needs required to execute campaigns for them.
- ‘Draw your customer journey’
You may already be following your marketing efforts according to the existing customer journey. The Marketing Cloud implementation can be an opportunity to head back to your drawing boards to revamp it. Bring in the new tools at your disposal and different touchpoints for data collection that could help to identify the critical challenges to be met with the marketing cloud capabilities. This is how you can successfully align customers’ expectations with the marketing cloud capabilities while working on the implementation.
- Track and access
After the implementation, take time to do the post-mortem on what worked and what didn’t. With every campaign conducted after the implementation of Marketing Cloud, start tracking the performance, pondering on what worked, what crashed, analyzing the variations for the next time. Celebrating successes and collecting feedback is critical to developing your Marketing Cloud practice over time, making the implementation worthwhile.
Your Team For Salesforce Marketing Cloud Implementation
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an ever-evolving playing field. Getting it implemented is your first step. As you keep moving ahead, your next goal should be to introduce the advanced features to stay updated on the advancements in the marketing realm. What you need here is a team of professional Salesforce consultants who can keep your business upright as it evolves. Our Salesforce implementation service will work closely with you, emphasizing your business objectives, and aligning them well with the Marketing Cloud.