SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud: Features & how to use it

In today’s fast-paced world, effective marketing is essential for the success of any organization. SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud is a powerful tool that offers numerous features to manage and automate marketing workflows.

In this guide, we’ll provide you with an overview of SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud, explain the key features it offers, and describe some of the benefits of using it. We’ll also explore the main steps you can follow to implement the platform and touch on how LeadsBridge automation can help you get the most from this software.

Table of contents

What is SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud?

SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud is a cloud-based platform that allows businesses to manage their digital marketing campaigns across multiple channels, including email, mobile, social media, and web. The platform offers a suite of tools and services that enable marketers to create, execute, and track campaigns, and to analyze customer data to improve engagement and optimize ROI.

Overall, SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud helps businesses streamline their digital marketing efforts, improve customer engagement, and drive better results through data-driven insights and automation.

What is SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud used for?

Here are some key SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud features to help you understand what this tool can be used for.

Email marketing

Create, send, and track email campaigns. SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud provides tools for designing personalized emails, segmenting audiences, scheduling deliveries, and monitoring engagement metrics like open rates and click-through rates.

Mobile marketing

Send targeted SMS messages and push notifications to reach customers on their mobile devices. Marketing Cloud enables businesses to create mobile-responsive messages, track interactions, and integrate mobile marketing with other channels.

Manage social media campaigns across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Users can schedule posts, monitor social media activity, engage with followers, and track social media performance metrics.

Advertising

Create and manage digital advertising campaigns across various channels, including search, display, and social media ads. Marketing Cloud offers tools for audience targeting, ad creation, campaign optimization, and performance tracking.

Customer journey orchestration

Design and automate customer journeys across multiple touchpoints, from initial awareness to post-purchase interactions. Marketing Cloud allows businesses to map out customer journeys, trigger personalized messages based on customer actions, and optimize the customer experience.

Data management and personalization

Collect, organize, and analyze customer data to drive personalized marketing campaigns. Marketing Cloud integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) systems to leverage customer insights for targeted messaging and segmentation.

Analytics and reporting

Measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns through detailed analytics and reporting dashboards. Marketing Cloud provides insights into key performance indicators (KPIs) such as campaign ROI, conversion rates, and customer engagement metrics.

Benefits of SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud

Research shows that 66% of marketers increased their company’s credibility and trust through digital marketing tactics. By adopting this tool, businesses can streamline and enhance their digital marketing efforts for better results.

Below you can find some of the main benefits of using SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud.

Multichannel marketing

It enables businesses to engage with customers across multiple channels, including email, mobile, social media, web, and advertising platforms. This multichannel approach helps reach customers wherever they are, increasing brand visibility and customer engagement.

Personalization

Marketing Cloud allows businesses to deliver highly personalized marketing messages based on customer data and behavior. By segmenting audiences and leveraging data insights, businesses can tailor their messaging to individual preferences, increasing relevance and driving better results.

Automation

The platform offers powerful automation capabilities, allowing businesses to automate repetitive marketing tasks, such as email sends, social media posting, and campaign workflows. Automation helps save time, improve efficiency, and ensure consistent messaging across channels.

Check out all the automated integrations we offer for SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud.

Data-driven insights

Marketing Cloud provides robust analytics and reporting tools that offer insights into campaign performance, customer behavior, and ROI. By analyzing data, businesses can identify trends, optimize campaigns, and make data-driven decisions to improve marketing effectiveness.

Scalability

The platform is scalable and can accommodate the needs of businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. Whether businesses are running small-scale campaigns or managing complex, global marketing initiatives, Marketing Cloud provides the flexibility and scalability to meet their needs.

Integration with Salesforce CRM

Marketing Cloud seamlessly integrates with SalesforceⓇ’s CRM platform, allowing businesses to leverage customer data stored in CRM for marketing purposes. This integration enables a unified view of the customer across sales, marketing, and service, facilitating better targeting and personalization.

SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud implementation

Implementing SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud involves several steps to ensure a successful setup and integration with your existing systems and processes. Here’s a general outline of the SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud implementation process.

Phase 1 – Marketing Cloud account configuration

During this phase, you’ll have to ensure your Marketing Cloud account is perfectly set up before adding more users to the platform.

Step 1 – Configuring account settings

You can easily input your company details, like the company name, address, country, and time zone, right here.

For optimal security, establish your alert manager and fine-tune your security settings. These settings encompass preferences for session timeout, login expiration, multi-factor authentication, and other crucial aspects.

Take a look at SalesforceⓇ’s top recommendations for boosting your security settings.

Step 2 – Approving IP addresses

Moving forward, it’s essential to identify the IP addresses that require approval. By doing so, you empower authorized team members to effortlessly access Salesforce, eliminating the need for manual permission granting every time they log in.

Step 3 – Creating business units

In SalesforceⓇ, business units empower you to maintain control over data access and information sharing within Marketing Cloud. By creating business units based on various brands or divisions, organizations ensure that users have access to only the most relevant information, safeguarding data integrity along the way.

By assigning Marketing Cloud roles – which include Administrator, Viewer, Channel Manager, Security Administrator, and Content Editor/Publisher – you’ll be deciding who gets access to Marketing Cloud and the extent of their data privileges.

Step 4 – Ensuring email deliverability

Ensuring optimal email deliverability is crucial in keeping your messages out of the spam folder for your contacts.

First, personalize your Email Display Name and Email Reply Address – this will become your default email identity, allowing your company to be easily recognized by recipients and boosting brand awareness.

When you create a new Marketing Cloud account, you will be assigned a fresh IP address. As ISPs exercise caution with emails from new IP addresses, it is necessary to establish a reputable sending record by gradually increasing email volume.

Step 5 – Setting up FTP accounts

FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, empowers you to seamlessly move files between computers or servers across a network. In the dynamic realm of Marketing Cloud, you have the freedom to create FTP accounts and grant FTP privileges to your users.

This ingenious functionality significantly curbs the volume of data stored within your Marketing Cloud account, optimizing efficiency. Additionally, you can effortlessly kick-start automations as soon as new files are uploaded to your FTP client. Fascinatingly, Marketing Cloud permits up to 10 FTP accounts for each Member Identification Code (MID).

Phase 2 – Getting started with Marketing Cloud data modeling

During this phase, your main objective is to ensure accurate mapping of each of your data sets to Marketing Cloud. By doing so, you are setting the foundation for future-proof infrastructure and establishing the correct approach for inputting your data going forward.

Step 6 – Enabling Marketing Cloud Connect

You can experience the seamless integration of your SalesforceⓇ Sales Cloud and Service Cloud with Marketing Cloud Connect, an innovative AppExchange package. Whether you’re utilizing a third-party CRM or currently without one, it is highly recommended to transition to SalesforceⓇ for its effortless synchronization with Marketing Cloud.

Step 7 – Creating data extensions

In the world of Marketing Cloud, think of a data extension like a special notebook where you keep important details about your customers. It’s a place where you collect bits and pieces of information that will later help you understand and categorize your customers better.

There are two main types of these notebooks:

Sendable data extension: This is like having your customer’s email address handy so you can send them email directly.
Non-sendable data extension: Here, you keep useful facts that don’t involve sending email but help you know your customers better – like their orders and favorite products.

Then, you can organize these notebooks into three groups:

Standard data extension: It’s a custom-made notebook where you create unique sections to note down what you need.
Filtered data extension: Imagine you have a big list of customers, and you want to focus on just a few based on certain details – this type helps you do that.
Random data extension: Sometimes, you might want to test which marketing strategy is best. This type is like drawing names from a hat to create random groups for comparison.

It all comes down to tailoring how you talk to your customers, making sure they get what they need and you learn more about them along the way.

Step 8 – Using SQL Queries

SQL, or Structured Query Language, is a tool that helps you get the data you need, whether you’re creating reports or dividing your audience into different groups. It’s really handy when dealing with databases that store their data in organized relationships.

When you’re starting out, there are some basic SQL commands to get familiar with:

SELECT: Think of this as the command for pointing out the specific data you’re looking for.
FROM: This lets you pinpoint exactly where in your database, or Marketing Cloud, your data is stored – typically, it’s stashed in a data extension.
JOIN: Imagine using a magnifying glass to examine more than one table or data extension in Marketing Cloud all at once.
WHERE: Use it like a filter to sift through data, keeping what you want and ditching what you don’t.

As you dive into SQL, these commands are your starting blocks for managing and understanding your database with confidence.

Phase 3 – Email Studio in SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud

Email Studio makes it easy to send emails to your contacts. Most marketers using Marketing Cloud start here, as email is a key way to chat with your audience. In fact, 99% of people check their email every single day.

Step 9 – Configure email admin settings

Haven’t set up your email admin essentials in Marketing Cloud yet? No worries – SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud features include a Setup Assistant that will guide you with a clear task list to get you started.

Here’s what you’ll tackle:

Enter vital Marketing Cloud details.
Set up the data structure tailored to your email marketing needs.
Craft, dispatch, and monitor your initial batch of emails.

Just a heads-up: it’s crucial to warm up your IP first before you hit go on a large-scale email campaign. This step is key in building a solid sending reputation and helps decrease the likelihood of ISPs flagging your emails as spam.

Step 10 – Setting up sender and delivery profiles

Maintaining a consistent “From” name and email address is a key strategy for enhancing brand recognition in your email campaigns. It enables your subscribers to immediately identify and associate your emails with your brand amidst the flood of messages in their inbox.

Always make sure you have a backup address. This guarantees that, in the event your data extension lacks information, your emails remain coherent and on-brand, ensuring you never miss an opportunity to connect with your readers.

Phase 4 – Implementing other SalesforceⓇ marketing tools

SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud features offer much more than just Email Studio. There is a whole set of tools designed for seamless communication with your audience through multiple channels.

Here are some SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud features that you can explore:

Content Builder: Create engaging on-brand content with ease.
Journey Builder: Map out a sequence of automated interactions that reach your customers through various channels.
Automation Studio: Streamline your marketing and data tasks to avoid repetitive tasks.
CloudPages: Design user-friendly landing pages and forms to streamline the process of collecting customer information.

Automating SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud

Automation can help marketers streamline their marketing workflows and improve campaign performance. With automation, businesses can:

Save time and reduce manual effort: Automation can help businesses save time on repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on more strategic activities.
Improve accuracy and consistency: Automation helps eliminate errors and ensures that processes are followed consistently.
Scale campaigns more effectively: Automation enables businesses to scale their campaigns more efficiently by automating tasks that would be challenging to manage manually.

Automating SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud requires businesses to use a third-party tool such as LeadsBridge or leverage native integrations. While SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud offers some native integrations, such as Facebook Lead Ads and Google Ads lead form extensions, we recommend using a more advanced, comprehensive integration tool like LeadsBridge.

LeadsBridge integrations VS native integrations

The main differences between SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud native integrations and LeadsBridge integrations are the sync time and the values/data retrieved from the source channels.

Here are the key benefits of using LeadsBridge integrations:

Newly captured leads are automatically transferred in a real-time sync.
LeadsBridge can retrieve all the form fields, including hidden values (e.g., Ad Form ID – Form Name – Campaign ID – Campaign Name – Created Time – Creative ID – Creative Name, etc).
The function feature in the fields mapping step helps change the data format before sending it to SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud.

If you’d like to learn more about automating SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud with LeadsBridge, take a look at the resources listed below:

SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud integrations by LeadsBridge

LeadsBridge supercharges your customer acquisition workflows from top advertising platforms with seamless integrations to your revenue tech stack. By harnessing the power of over 380 integrations, you can synchronize your leads, target custom audiences, and track conversions to skyrocket sales and productivity.

Check out some of our most popular SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud integrations.

Conclusion

SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud is a valuable platform for businesses looking to optimize their marketing workflows and drive revenue growth. Its robust set of features, centralized data, and advanced analytics capabilities make it a must-have tool for modern marketers.

To get the most out of the platform, businesses should consider automating their marketing workflows. With the right integration tool like LeadsBridge, businesses can streamline their marketing data and leads, saving time and resources, while increasing ROI.

Marialuisa Aldeghi

Marialuisa brings a wealth of expertise to the table as an accomplished content writer and creator with years of experience in the B2B digital marketing landscape. After getting her Bachelor’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures in Milan, she got a dual Master’s Degree in Communication in both Italy and the U.S. Her dynamic background has shaped her into a true cosmopolitan spirit with an appetite for adventure. Don't be fooled by her wanderlust though - she enjoys peaceful evenings at home just as much.

SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud: Features & how to use it

What is SalesforceⓇ Marketing Cloud?