Define Your Digital Marketing Strategy with Marketing Cloud Engagement

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Understand how Marketing Cloud Engagement will help you define your digital marketing strategy.
  
• Summarize two ways to work with the Marketing Cloud Engagement Service team experts to make the most of Marketing Cloud Engagement.
  

Introduction

We all know that technology alone can’t solve all your business problems. A new technology can only take you partway to your goals without the right implementation plan, business strategy, or appropriate partners. Your platform can only get you so far. As a marketer in a multichannel world, your digital marketing strategy plays a central role.

Define Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Start by assessing your current strategy. Is it closely aligned to your business objectives? Are you collecting the right data about your customers, and are you reaching the right people? If you’re focused on driving customer loyalty, are you able to measure success?

If you answered no to any of the above—or said, “What digital marketing strategy?”—it’s time to revisit your plan. As you start to define or update your strategy, consider how Marketing Cloud Engagement can empower you to:

• Know your customers.
  

• Unify first-party marketing data and augment it with other second- and third-party data sources.
  
• Create a unified view of customers across all business units (for example, marketing, customer service, commerce, and sales).
  
• Track customer interactions on your website.
  
• Monitor your brand on social media.
  
• Determine your most loyal and most at-risk customers.
  
• Discover new audiences.
  
• Optimize resource allocations by determining which customers are most likely to engage with a particular offer.
  

• Personalize with intelligence.
  

• Automate and segment marketing messages at scale.
  
• Align marketing voice, messaging, and campaigns across your entire business.
  
• Predict the best outcome for your customer.
  
• Make targeted content recommendations.
  
• Reengage customers who abandon an online shopping cart.
  
• Deliver unique experiences for each individual.
  
• Manage all your marketing interactions with customers in one place.
  

• Engage across the entire journey.
  

• Make a strong connection with customers, starting from their first interaction with your brand.
  
• Interact with customers in real time.
  
• Ensure you’re reaching your customers on the channel they prefer.
  
• Be prepared when a customer tweets negative comments about your product or service.
  
• Engage your customers with mobile messaging.
  

Now check out these five digital marketing strategy tips.

Tip 1: Put Yourself in Your Customers’ Shoes for Every Interaction

• Identify how your prospects and customers interact with your brand.
  
• Take note of the advertising, website, and marketing messaging, content, calls to action, process steps, data inputs, and duration between communications.
  
• Uncover challenges your customers can face when interacting with your brand.
  

Tip 2: Inventory Your Existing Data Assets and Technologies

• Identify the technology platforms (CRM, master data management, ad serving, and so on) you already have in place. How do they impact your customer? How do they impact your customer’s experiences and interactions with your company?
  
• Identify which systems store personally identifiable information (PII)–for example, customer ID, email—and which don’t.
  
• Record the unique identifiers that exist in each technology. And use all this information to create data extensions and your data model in Marketing Cloud Engagement.
  
• Be sure to consider GDPR: Consult with your technology and data teams to determine how GDPR impacts your strategy.
  

Tip 3: Prioritize Your Business and Customer Use Cases

• Determine the level of effort, business impact, and customer impact for each of your customers’ challenges. Use a grading score of 1–5 to help rate the challenges.
  
• Identify quick marketing wins based on the scores.
  
• Identify any technology overlap and technology gaps.
  

Tip 4: Determine Your Success Criteria

• Assign key performance criteria to each customer challenge. For example, clicks, opens, conversion, likes, shares, cost-per-acquisition, and cost-per-conversion.
  
• Use and track your progress with SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) objectives.
  

Tip 5: Create a Single View of the Customer

• Identify technology platforms that you can connect to maximize use of customer data. For example, connect your commerce platform to Marketing Cloud Engagement to deliver the right offer at the right time and increase conversions and order value.
  
• Document the complete 360-degree view of your customer based on all the first-, second-, and third-party data you collect across platforms.
  

Partner with Marketing Cloud Engagement Experts

Finding the right partner is key to making the most of Marketing Cloud Engagement. You can think of Marketing Cloud Engagement Services as an external part of your marketing team. Here are a few ways you can count on them to help you with implementing and managing Marketing Cloud Engagement.

We’ve Got Your (Implementation) Back 

Implementing a new system can be a daunting task, but Marketing Cloud Engagement experts partner with your marketing team to get your system running the way you need. The Marketing Cloud Engagement Services team works closely with you and your tech experts during the entire process. Involve your IT department and key stakeholders early in the process so you can get a clear picture of everything that’s required to happen for a successful and smooth implementation. You know your customers, we know marketing, and together we can find a solution that’s perfect for you.

Clean and Migrate Your Data 

You collect a lot of data about your customers, and sometimes that data needs a little housecleaning. Marketing Cloud Engagement experts partner with your tech experts on the best way to clean and organize your data before you implement Marketing Cloud Engagement. It’s not just about clean data, but also the right data. Are you collecting the right data to impact your customers’ experience with your brand? We have experts who can help you identify the right data to collect, and then make that data available in Marketing Cloud Engagement.

We’re Here Just for You 

Your partnership with Marketing Cloud Engagement Services doesn’t end after implementation. We work to understand your business goals and help you achieve them, even when your business goals change. We can help you improve adoption, deployment times, reporting and analytics, automation rates, or whatever your business needs to engage your customers. We can provide mission critical support and strategic guidance that helps you execute your vision. You’re not alone in this adventure; marketing is what we do.

Resources

• Salesforce: Customer Journey Mapping Resources
• Salesforce: Trailblazer Community (Signup required)
• Trailhead: European Union Privacy Law Basics