4 steps to make your Marketing Cloud implementation a success.
Recently I got an opportunity to work for a FinTech company. They’ve implemented a leading Marketing Cloud platform 3 years ago and now switching to a Salesforce Marketing Cloud tool. In those 3 years, they never got a chance to automate customer engagement or provide the best customer experience. This is due to lack of technical skill sets, management steer and goals, which translates to efforts. So, what you need to do to make sure your marketing automation platform implementation a success?
This blog series will help you to overcome pitfalls in Marketing Automation projects. You get to learn how you and your team would be able to make the most out of your Salesforce Marketing Cloud Platform?
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1: Define your business and marketing goals
Just having the marketing automation platform is not enough to achieve results. At its best, marketing automation is a combination of software and strategy.
You should start with the question – What are your business and marketing goals and how can this software help you to achieve these goals?
Begin with goals, setting goals also makes the measurement of marketing cloud success easier.
2: Build a Marketing Cloud Mindset
You can do so much with it, but most people think it’s just an expensive email platform. Bring your sales and customer service team on board, understand their process and demonstrate how they can save time using auto-notification emails or how easy to identify high quality leads using lead scores. Take time to “sell” the change to your internal teams. You need to find ways to bring your customer-facing teams into the project and show them how the platform works and they will gain by adopting a new way of doing their job.
Marketing cloud adoption requires a significant change in people’s mindset because it’s not just a tool for delivering campaigns its impacts business process and enhances customer experience.
3: Sketch out your customer journey
Understand your business process and translate requirements into demand generation solutions by leveraging the strength of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform.
Customer journey mapping
First and the foremost thing is that you should understand your customer’s decision-making process. Start mapping out all touchpoint in the customer buying process. A flowchart diagram is a great way to visualise interactions and assets (forms, emails, reports, and so on) that are involved. It’s also an excellent way to identify pain points and hot spots that marketing automation could solve. By extending the right message, you increase the chances of customer engagement and campaign response rates.
Marketing and Sales alignment
Use your sales reps’ expertise to improve your leads management process. Establish a definition of lead stages, what’s the time frame to qualify a lead, when to handover the leads to marketing when a deal abandoned and SLAs. You will need a well-defined lead management process to create a lead nurturing campaigns.
4: Get a Marketing automation Expert
If your team don’t have the right skill sets, your marketing may forever remain stuck in Email Editors, and it’s likely your team may never utilise the true benefits of marketing automation in reality.
Main reasons why companies switch between marketing automation tools is that they either didn’t choose the right tool or failed to realise the benefits due to technical complexity or lack of skills.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a support service but when you are in a hurry and stuck in a step in campaign canvas or journey builder steps, you will not have the luxury to wait for the support team to investigate and fix the issue for you. Whether you are needing assistance with your email/SMS campaigns or wanting strategic guidance to help drive your nurturing and digital marketing projects forward, we can help. We love helping companies to transform their marketing automation.
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