Chapter 5: Adopt Data-Driven Marketing Tactics

 

Marketers today operate in a volatile environment where customer expectations, market trends, and technology are rapidly evolving. Marketers must adopt data-driven marketing tactics for insights into what customers want, how effective the marketing campaigns are, what kind of ROI to expect,  and to enable faster, more accurate decision-making. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud comes loaded with powerful data-focused marketing solutions such as Customer Data Platform (CDP), Interaction Studio, and Datorama.

Here’s how marketers can use these solutions to benefit from data-driven marketing strategies:

CDP: Drive personalised customer experiences with unified customer data

CDP is a solution that helps marketers drive personalised and contextual experience across every touchpoint by – capturing, unifying, segmenting, and activating all their customer data. 

The solution helps marketers:

  • Unify customer data across multiple teams, devices, and systems, such as customer data available on CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, email database, etc. This way, marketers can create a single, consistent customer ID.
  • Collate first-, second-, and third- party data to create and analyse specialised audience segments.
  • Ensure customer consent and compliance with safe provisioning measures and dashboards for opt-outs and consent flags. Also, ensure automatic compliance with new legal standards such as CCPA and GDPR.
  • Glean customer insights from across channels – marketing, commerce, sales, and service interactions - to optimise live campaigns.
  • Advertise to the right segments and personas across social platforms, online ads, and beyond with tailored content. 

Here’s a quick checklist to address before the implementation of CDP to make the most of this solution:

  1. Identify project stakeholders involved in data decisions. Also identify anyone and everyone whose job is impacted by this implementation, such as marketing specialists, IT specialists, and so on. Unifying all customer data and interactions across your business ecosystem and identifying all use cases for CDP requires top-down support.
  2. Identify what systems and data sources need to be integrated for CDP to help you create marketing segments for planned campaigns. Find out who owns these systems and add them to the list of stakeholders.
  3. Identify the users and admin for CDP to grant the required permissions.
  4. Document all business requirements and use cases. Stakeholder and admin approved business requirements can help ensure you have a successful CDP implementation.

Learn more about CDP here.

Interaction Studio: Achieve 1-to-1 engagement at scale with real-time customer data

Salesforce Interaction Studio is a real-time personalisation and interaction management solution that can connect data from across touchpoints, including your company's website, mobile app, emails, onsite locations, call centre, and more. 

The solution adds value to Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s customer data, audience segmentation, and engagement capabilities by infusing data-based behavioural analytics and machine learning capabilities. It gives a comprehensive view of each customer and prospect and enables marketers to use that data to deliver relevant, individualised experiences to improve customer engagement.

Here’s what Interaction Studio can do for marketers:

Capture individual customer insights with data: Interaction Studio tracks data from every possible source – online and offline – to get to know each individual customer and prospect’s behaviour and affinities.

Make real-time decisions: The platform is powered by a built-in AI engine, Einstein, that runs customisable algorithms to help marketers make sense of all the captured customer data from across channels, in real-time. Einstein Personalisation Decisions helps you select the next-best action (or promotion). Einstein Personalisation Recipes recommends products, content, categories, brands, and more, so that every interaction is relevant at a 1-to-1 level.

Coordinate engagement across channels: In Interaction Studio, everything you learn about a customer or prospect by their interaction on one channel can be immediately factored into their anticipated next interaction on any other channel, whether online or offline. Marketers can use their findings on customer interactions to plan their next move, such as sending a promotional email that a website visitor will love.

Test and analyse experiences. The platform offers testing and analysis to optimise your personalisation campaigns and customer engagement efforts. For this, you can use native reports or tools like Tableau or Datorama to help review the performance of your campaigns.

Click here to watch this demo video for Interaction Studio.

Datorama: Optimise B2B and B2C marketing performance with Datorama

To bolster your data-driven marketing strategy further, Salesforce offers Datorama. This solution introduces innovative marketing intelligence into every marketing activity across all channels. With the world’s biggest marketing-focused API library, Datorama lets marketers:

  • Integrate data from the most popular social, search, display, video, programmatic, web analytics, CRM, and email platforms. 
  • Connect marketing data regardless of where the data lives, what format it is in, or how much it changes over time.
  • Turn data into insights using automated regression modelling and statistical analysis methods that turn hours or days of analysis into minutes.
  • Empower every decision maker, including the CMO, with customised dashboards and reports that capture investments, performance, and KPIs across teams, campaigns, and channels.  
 
With Datorama, you can connect all your marketing data into one single source of truth for holistic reporting, measurement, and optimisation.

Here’s how every B2C and B2B marketer can leverage marketing intelligence and optimise their campaigns using Datorama:

  • View KPIs for messaging, paid advertising, web analytics, and CRM in one place with built-in pacing and benchmarking to understand what success looks like. Drill down these results into campaigns and campaign types to capitalise on what’s working and course-correct what’s not. Marketers can benefit from day-to-day recommendations offered by the built-in AI engine to keep KPIs performing on track.
  • Find out how your channels stack up against one another. Datorama’s channel scorecard view presents KPIs for media spend, performance, and response across each channel and includes an index score to normalise your ROI across them all.
  • View KPIs for spend, engagement, and conversion across campaigns to identify what’s resonating and converting. Leverage AI recommendations for optimising campaigns and budget allocations. 
  • Connect ecommerce, point-of-sale, and product data on a single platform to align marketing efforts with business goals and availability for each product line. Get transparency into ROI to control your growth at the desired pace.
  • See the direct impact of marketing optimisation on conversion and sales and how cross-channel activities are helping achieve business goals on a unified dashboard.

Click here for a demo of Salesforce Datorama.

Conclusion

Salesforce Marketing Cloud transforms engagements and experiences for your digital-first customers. A part of the Salesforce Customer 360 suite, this platform has extensive features for audience segmentation, real-time engagement across channels, data-driven content personalisation, and marketing-sales alignment. 

All this is made possible and enhanced by Marketing Cloud Connect that combines Marketing Cloud’s digital marketing capabilities with the data management, segmentation, and campaign management tools in Salesforce. What’s more: Marketing Cloud Connect enables your sales and service teams to access powerful Marketing Cloud tools directly from Sales or Service Cloud. 

Marketing Cloud enables marketers to build 1-to-1 relationships with customers for life through more data-driven, personalised conversations and automated customer journeys. It helps marketing teams address changing customer expectations with relevant and empathetic marketing, ultimately driving more leads into Salesforce.

 

From best practices and strategic consultations to training and community support, Salesforce assists businesses every step of the way. To access more resources on how Salesforce can empower your marketing journey, click here.

Questions? We’ll put you on the right path.

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