Salesforce Marketing Cloud: A Deeper Dive
As we entered the New Year, there were a few trends we saw a rise in demand for skilled contract and full time resources in. One of the biggest areas of demand was functional and technical Marketing Cloud resources. We connected with Corrina Cohen, an award-winning, conference presenting, 2020 Marketing Champion, 2x Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Developer, to dive deeper into what Marketing Cloud is and why it’s picking up speed.
Q: What is Marketing Cloud?
A: A digital communications automation tool empowering marketing to create unique customer experiences via email, SMS, social, and more. Marketing Cloud helps you contact the right person, at the right time, with the right message to increase sales and improve the customer experience.
Q: Who uses Marketing Cloud?
A: Developers - integrations and automations
Data Scientists, Analysts – tracking, reporting, and forecasting
Marketing Consultants – anything from strategy to customer development
Email Specialists, Marketing Managers – marketing communications
Q: Who does Marketing Cloud benefit in the company?
A: Marketing Cloud benefits the entire company. The CRM team’s work shines when great data can be fed into SFMC for hyper personalized experiences, the web team benefits when the customer gets excited about a product in an email and converts to a buyer (even more so when they become a repeat purchaser. When sales grow from great customer experiences; the company leadership takes notice and invests more into future innovations.
Q: What channels can be used to reach customers with Marketing Cloud?
A: Email, social, SMS, Push via app
Q: What trends are you seeing specifically in Marketing Cloud?
A: Predictive intelligence in the form of product recommendations, content recommendations, send time recommendations, and engagement predictions.
Q: What 3rd party applications and integrations are you regularly utilizing?
A: Adobe/Omniture Analytics, Qualtrics Surveys, BazaarVoice reviews
Q: What is your favorite feature in Marketing Cloud to help users?
A: My favorite feature is the Einstein suite. With these products you can use customer engagement for recommendations on content, send times, products, and more. With the new metrics available you can quickly see how your messages are performing against each other for a true view of what is resonating with your customers.
Q: What makes Marketing Cloud different from other clouds?
A: The platform is highly adaptable. An entry level email specialist can be trained in a few hours to build and send a simple email for a company while more experienced developers can create entire multichannel customer experiences on the same platform.
Q: When screening for a strong Marketing Cloud candidate, what are some of the “must knows” for someone who claims to be an expert in their respective cloud?
A:
● SOQL queries for data retrieval and testing
● Knowledge of SOAP and REST data transmission protocols, not write but understand the concepts
● Common AMPscript solutions and examples where used
● Journey Builder and Automation Studio use cases
● Know the SFMC studios and what each one is used for
● Know what it takes to develop engaging templates including animations, media queries for responsiveness, and complex dynamic content that meet Pixel Perfect rendering standards
● Understand HTML, CSS, JavaScript at a minimum
● Understand deliverability best practices and steps you can take to troubleshoot
● Should be able to explain data security, management, hygiene, and transmission of personally identifiable information relating to subscribers
A massive thank you for Corrina for the time and sharing your insight into Marketing Cloud! Want to hear more from Corrina? Check out her feature on The Marketing Cloudcast here!
All in all, Salesforce has been busy rolling out new features to allow customers to gain a larger audience in this online world such as:
● Personalizing the Journey: Leveraging both your data and artificial intelligence to create highly personalized integrations, as well as respond to demand with unique marketing experiences.
● Cross-Channel Data: Allows you to get to know your customers by collecting insights from multiple sources throughout the buyer journey by capturing first, second, and third-party insights for better growth.
● Analytics: The ability to measure how effective your marketing campaigns are with in-depth analytics designed to help you understand the ROI of your channels.
○ We’ll dive deeper into Analytics in an upcoming post.
For those looking to get more experience with Marketing Cloud, try out this introductory Trailhead: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/trails/personalize_customer_journeys_marketing_cloud.
For those with Marketing Cloud projects in your pipeline, how can Hireforce help?