At Dreamforce 2019, the biggest lessons for marketers centered around one key theme: creating rich, integrated customer experiences in an always-on, always-connected digital world. To compete in this landscape, companies must find ways to unlock greater insight into their customers and effectively act upon that data to deliver unmatched engagement.
The Marketing Cloud keynote at Dreamforce highlighted the fact that the future world of marketing will be as much about messaging, perception and trust as it will be about the numbers. Companies must utilize enriched data to help them make more advanced, strategic marketing messaging decisions. Today’s customers have more options at their fingertips than ever before, and they can be quick to move away from a brand that they feel doesn’t value their business.
- 73 percent of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations
- 65 percent of customers have stopped buying from brands that did something they perceive to be distrustful
- 92 percent of customers will trust companies with their data when they are given control
Given these trends, marketers now have three critical mandates going into 2020:
- Build trust through transparency, and empower customers with control over their own data and permissions
- Create seamless customer experiences by removing silos and connecting data
- Transform customer engagement to compete with the “new normal” in effortless, intentional customer experiences
Meeting the challenge with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
To help companies successfully address these mandates in 2020, Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a rich set of features and functionality—and it’s growing all the time.
- Customer 360 Truth is a set of capabilities that delivers the first “single source of truth” for digital marketing platforms, allowing organizations to connect, authenticate, and govern customer data and identity across Salesforce and other products. This deep, integrated view enables businesses to deliver more personalized customer experiences, as well as provide superior customer data transparency and control.
- Marketing Intelligence (Datorama) helps companies better understand the ROI of their digital marketing platforms and programs, identify those that effectively resonate with customers—and those that don’t—to make optimal use of their marketing dollars.
- Marketing Cloud Einstein takes advantage of the power of artificial intelligence to arm businesses with an in-depth understanding of customer intent and behaviors, enabling them to deliver personalized content and communications in a trusted way—along every step of the customer journey.
- Einstein for Marketing (Pardot) delivers account-based marketing data insights through a specialized marketing attribution dashboard, powered by machine learning and utilizing Einstein Analytics for B2B Marketing. In addition, features such as Einstein Messaging Insights, Einstein Content Selection and Einstein Copy Insights help companies boost the impact of email marketing campaigns through highly customized content and messaging, tailored to meet the needs of each customer.
Marketing Centers of Excellence
Another, less showcased but equally critical message at DF19 was the need for companies to establish Marketing Centers of Excellence (CoEs).
- What is a Marketing CoE?
- In academic circles, a CoE is any team of people from separate disciplines who have been brought together to pool facilities and knowledge. CoEs aren’t an entirely new concept in business and are becoming an increasingly common way to ensure marketing success—particularly when applied to digital marketing platforms.
- Why are CoEs a valuable use of time and resources?
- Executing on a digital marketing platform is no easy task, and the ability to collaborate with others is critical to success. As we continue to advance the use of customer data in marketing content, as well step/trigger point data (actions based on what a consumer does) in marketing journeys, it’s more important than ever that all parts of the marketing team are working in lockstep with their other Salesforce counterparts. The organizations utilizing Marketing Cloud and Pardot most effectively today are those that bring together all of the people who touch data and customer experience to make collaborative marketing decisions.
- Who should be included in the CoE?
- Content creators, marketing developers, customer service, IT and more. Essentially, all stakeholders in your company’s marketing strategy should be involved in your CoE in some capacity or another.
- How do I get started?
- Working closely with your Salesforce administrator to gain a greater understanding of your customer data is the first step towards identifying the type of marketing actions you should take, based on your customer’s engagement. Next, go a step further by adding more members to your CoE team, such as peers and company leaders who can help create a fuller picture of where the market is going, and identify ways to address key challenges in your marketing efforts. Conduct a maturity analysis of the current stakeholders working with Salesforce, what you’re looking to achieve through your CoE and who might need to be added to the group in the future.
For more tips on how to create a formal Marketing CoE, check out this helpful documentation from Salesforce.
A few honorable mentions
Another major addition to Salesforce’s valuable tools for marketers is Trailhead GO, a fully responsive Trailhead platform for iOS that represents a fantastic shift forward in making the resource more accessible for all. While it’s not currently available on Android, it is expected to be soon. Salesforce has also aggregated all available Marketing Cloud trails into one large supertrail.
Finally, Marketing Cloud Administrator Certification and Developer Certifications are now live, further adding to the portfolio of enablement and training options that Salesforce provides to help Marketing Cloud users ensure success at all levels of their progress.
To learn more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud and how Zennify can help you start taking advantage of this powerful platform, contact us today.
If you’d like to dive deeper into Salesforce Marketing Cloud and what it can do for your business, save the date for the upcoming Salesforce Connections event in Chicago, Illinois, May 4 to 6, 2020. Each year, Salesforce Connections offers sessions that dig into best practices, key lessons learned and even some technical trainings—all centered around Salesforce Marketing technology.
