Marketing automation has been proven time and again to produce incredible results. It increases productivity by 34%, with 76% of businesses seeing a return on investment within twelve months of implementation. Despite this, only 85% of marketers believe they are fully utilizing automation tools such as Marketing Cloud.
The reason is straightforward. Good automation tools like Marketing Cloud are comprehensive and complicated. It makes maximizing Salesforce Marketing Cloud ROI difficult. The product has so many different elements such as the Email Studio, Content Builder, Pardot, Advertising Studio, Journey Builder, etc. that it’s not easy to master it.
Even experienced marketers remain unsure of how the features of Marketing Cloud fit together to achieve their strategic goals. Fortunately, Salesforce offers an abundance of resources through Trails: an interactive method of learning various Salesforce products.
Which Trails Can Help Grow Salesforce Marketing Cloud ROI?
From videos to tutorials, trails contain everything a Salesforce customer needs to learn about the ins and outs of Marketing Cloud. That said, there are 29 trails tagged under Marketing Cloud, comprising hours of material. Browsing through this compendium of resources and distilling a trail useful to your business is a tedious task. We save you the effort. Here are five trails to better grasp the marketing automation tool and amplify your ROI.
1. Learn The Basics of Salesforce Marketing Cloud
The first step is an introduction to the automation tool. The best trail for it is the Get to Know Marketing Cloud. The 2 hours 20-min-long trail starts with the basics, a crucial module for every beginner. If you’re new to Marketing Cloud, the module will set a clear foundation.
The trail also includes a module on all the products of Marketing Cloud, like email, analytics, social media management, etc. Besides letting you explore the features, the trail comes with a resource module that teaches you to save time by customizing user settings and how to troubleshoot issues with Marketing Cloud.
In a gist, the trail tells you exactly how Marketing Cloud works, what tools it contains, and how a business can leverage it.
2. Utilize Data with Google Analytics 360
The biggest weapon in a business’s arsenal is customer data, or rather quality, consolidated customer data. Marketing Cloud relies on a person-centric data model. It captures all the relevant information and links it to a specific customer. So, a business has access to cataloged data.
While this data is important and useful, distilling valuable insights from it through analytics is just as necessary. Therefore, the second trail indispensable to boosting Salesforce Marketing Cloud ROI is Google Analytics 360 Integration.
The 1-hour 15-minute-long trail guides you on how to integrate an Analytics 360 account to Marketing Cloud, and start a journey in Journey Builder. By using Journey Builder to its fullest potential, customer experience is improved. That, in turn, increases investment returns.
The trail also walks through setting up a Journey Analytics dashboard, giving a clear view of how customers are engaging with content across channels – all from one place. Another takeaway of the trail is Audience Activation that enables businesses to engage customers based on behavior and journey interactions.
3. Reach New Audiences Through Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Big Data has its place, but small data, i.e., the minute interactions a customer makes with a business through digital advertising is equally important. Collated and optimized, this data paints a better picture of the customer. That’s what the third trail, Optimize Data, Audiences, and Digital Advertising is about.
The 2-hour 20 min long trail has five comprehensive modules. The first prepares a business to take an audience-first approach in digital advertising. The second gives an A to Z of Advertising Studio, a tool that helps capture new leads by coordinating “campaigns across social, mobile, sales, and customer service.”
The third module, on Audience Studio, educates on how to capture cross-device data and utilize Marketing Cloud for better decisions like who to target, what messages to share, and which are the best channels and platforms.
The fourth and fifth modules explore managing data and keeping it secure. Altogether, the trail gives the means to reach the right audiences and improve ad spend through Marketing Cloud.
4. Master the Best Practices with Marketing Cloud
To increase productivity and, therefore, ROI, a business needs to leverage the right data and processes. However, fine-tuning the strategy for each channel further amplifies the result. The fourth Marketing Cloud trail explores just that: Marketing Best Practices.
The entire trail is almost 5 hours long, divided into 8 modules that touch upon varied topics like email strategies, social media marketing, and customer interaction management. Of all, the second module of the trail is critical: Marketing Automation Strategies.
By automating workflows using Marketing Cloud, a business personalizes touchpoints and drives productivity. For instance, emails can be planned ahead and sent at scheduled times or triggers. Automating communications like these greatly reduces the effort on a team’s part and maximizes the return.
5. Refine Customer Journeys with Marketing Cloud
The Journey Builder is a key part of the Marketing Cloud for businesses because it enables tracking multi-channel journeys and tailoring messages to customer action in real-time. The trail to master the tool is Manage Campaigns with Journey Builder.
Marketers who can’t afford to dedicate another three and a half hours to a trail should pick the Journey Campaign Analytics and Optimization module. The short 30-minute module is part of the trail and explores “how to use analytics to measure against goals and refine journeys with versioning.” It fully teaches the workings of the Journey Builder, from optimizing a journey to measuring the performance to organizing them in folders and tags.
Better Business ROI with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Marketing Cloud equips businesses to provide a customized, high-quality customer experience. It enhances customer loyalty by engaging with a customer on the right channel, at the right time, and with the right message. Because this fosters a deeper relationship, Salesforce Marketing Cloud drives ROI.
However, achieving that outcome is contingent on fully utilizing the marketing automation tool. Cloudiate has the technical expertise to implement Marketing Cloud for your business. Furthermore, we offer Salesforce training and support to ensure that you get the most out of the tool. To know more, get in touch with us.