As businesses place a greater emphasis on connecting with customers in meaningful ways and having a customer-first mindset, customer-centric marketing skills like Salesforce Marketing Cloud are in high demand.
So how does Marketing Cloud help businesses put customers first, and how can talented independent professionals help them do it better? We spoke with top-rated independent professional Nathan Garrett, a systems consultant and Salesforce administrator on Upwork, to hear more about Marketing Cloud’s features and benefits and how he helps his clients put their customers front and center.
Marketing Cloud at a glance
According to Salesforce, Marketing Cloud “provides a single location for all cross-channel content, enabling brands to speak with one voice and deliver a consistent experience.” The cloud-based product provides a centralized hub where businesses can create data-driven experiences for every channel, on a personalized, one-to-one scale. It offers an array of products and options that can be chosen with different subscription plans.
These include “studios,” which are add-ons for
- Social media: Schedule posts, manage communities and funnel data from all platforms directly to the teams who need it
- Data and analytics: Target messaging and new users based on user data and behavior
- Email: Create tailored messaging or complex campaigns using predictive intelligence
- Advertising: Deliver relevant ads based on data such as past purchases, recent browsing history, and email engagement
- Mobile: Send timely SMS alerts, transactional notifications, and more
You can also create landing pages and microsites with CloudPages. And, with Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s partnership with Google, you can do even more, including sync data, contacts, and activity with your Email, Analytics, Calendar, Drive, data housed in Google BigQuery, and more.
By connecting these channels, businesses get unparalleled insight into each customer’s one-to-one journey. This makes it possible to deliver the most relevant messaging to each person, at the right time and in the right place.
“Marketing Cloud puts more meat into an organization’s marketing analytics by adding some of the data that goes missing from a traditional marketing platform. They’re able to be really granular.”
—Nathan Garrett, Salesforce Administrator
Garrett summarizes the benefits: “The Marketing Cloud integration puts more meat into an organization’s marketing analytics by adding some of the data that goes missing from a traditional marketing platform.” That data can be anything from A/B email testing results and performance stats to recipient tracking. “Tracking can be as simple as the number of recipients that opened a particular email or robust as cataloging e-commerce conversions and KPIs,” says Garrett.
It can also help to create more cross-departmental collaboration. Too often, marketing teams and sales teams operate in their respective data silos, but Garrett suggests adding Marketing Cloud to an existing Salesforce platform remove the walls between these teams. “It allows them to work together towards their common goals, filling in missing data and increasing sales conversions.”
“Marketing teams can more easily utilize the organization’s sales data to track the entire marketing and sales cycle,” says Garrett. “They’re able to break it down to be really granular, from marketing target, trade show participant, or website visitor to signed contracts and completed sales.”
For businesses that are struggling to leverage their data, or don’t have the data they need, it can be a great solution. “Ultimately, that’s the reason that I recommend Marketing Cloud to organizations already using Salesforce for their sales operations. It fills in the data-less or data-loss trenches that can exist between teams in an organization.”
How can a Salesforce consultant help you get more from your Marketing Cloud?
Garrett explains, “Marketing Cloud is a separate product from the Salesforce CRM, but it can be easily added to an existing Salesforce platform as an upgrade. Setting up Marketing Cloud itself is quite simple, but the data that it leverages from Google Analytics 360 into Salesforce Marketing Cloud is extremely robust.”
Optimizing and customizing a Salesforce platform is where a consultant’s expertise comes in. “When I start work with a client, sometimes I’m tackling a ‘hair-on-fire’ situation like an automated email not firing or social media accounts not syncing. Other times, I’m completing implementations for organizations that are just getting started with Salesforce, or adding Marking Cloud to their already established platforms. ”
“I’m always looking for ways to holistically improve their platform in a way that is simple, powerful, and tailor fit for their organization. That’s the beauty of Salesforce,” Garrett says. “Whether it’s a flagship Sales Cloud or Service and Marketing Clouds, you have the ability to scale the platform as an organization scales.”
