There is a vibrant stride underway for the application of AI in marketing. Brands who are adopting AI are engaging with customers in a way which they want. The brands have greater insight with data and user experience [UX] making conversations possible.
Google is on a ‘code red’ got caught basking in its search monopoly. They have called in the founders to weigh in on the Open.ai & ChatGPT threat to their dominant position in search.
I/ we have been quietly mulling why searching on google is not a rapid process. It is best to anticipate customer needs, wants and the unidentified needs. ‘I/we’ are the customers in the image below. When I ask myself ‘how well am I served by google’ ? I would say – Not well at all. Google has woken up to a competitive threat rather than being in tune with the customer. Some of you may remember the browser ‘Netscape’ and how it was a threat to Microsoft. It led to a better browser. Well, we need a better search experience here. It is the smaller companies who innovate and seem to wake up the giants. That is a sad commentary for American technology innovation.
I searched for – ‘AI use cases for marketing in an essay’.
You be the judge of utilizing AI for content creation. A copy and paste may not be advisable. In conjunction adding your own content is an upgraded strategy. Unfortunately there is no emotion in the writing style (differentiates from human vs AI driven). Compensate for the ‘blah’ and robotic voice and tone.
Predictive analytics: AI can be used to analyze customer data and predict future behavior, allowing marketers to target their campaigns more effectively and improve ROI.
Personalization: AI can be used to personalize content and recommendations for individual customers, improving the customer experience and increasing engagement.
Chatbots: AI-powered chatbots can be used to provide 24/7 customer service and support, answering questions and helping customers navigate a website or app.
Image and video recognition: AI can be used to analyze images and videos, for example, to automatically tag and classify visual content for better organization and searchability.
Voice assistants: AI-powered voice assistants can be integrated into smart speakers and other devices to provide hands-free interaction with customers, allowing them to make purchases or get information quickly and easily.
Social media monitoring: AI can be used to monitor social media for mentions of a brand or product, allowing marketers to respond quickly to customer feedback and complaints.
Email marketing: AI can be used to analyze customer data and predict which customers are most likely to open and click on an email, allowing marketers to send targeted campaigns and improve their email marketing ROI.
Campaign optimization: AI can be used to optimize ad campaigns in real-time, adjusting targeting, bid prices, and other parameters based on performance data to improve results.
Fraud detection: AI can be used to detect fraudulent behavior, such as click fraud, in online advertising, helping to protect a company’s advertising budget.
Content generation: AI can be used to generate new content, such as product descriptions or social media posts, saving time and effort for marketers.
Ok good. What did you think ? Worth or not worth. The hoopla about school essay & AI manufactured content aside
Seriously, the navigation has the potential to be a minimalist & frustration free search journey. With, stellar results it will be the bomb.
We don’t really need semi-conducting to power up the speed of search. The flavors in this ice cream are good. In fact they are more than good. I can anticipate saving hours which I spend distilling ‘Google’ search results.
pertinent search | S Ernest Paul
The next iteration of the search experience has begun. The battle of the giants it is. Google versus Microsoft. The alarm bells for a $160B search pie. I have a feeling we are going to be the beneficiaries in the end.
A simpler interface powered by AI aid coming delivering a laser focused singular search result
OpenAI’s opportunity is to narrow search to the most relevant response and save consumers the painful experience of scrolling and picking links to click on.
“I led the Marketing Cloud selection process for Cigna, selecting Salesforce Marketing Cloud and implemented it in 14 counties including North America”
S. Ernest Paul
Ron Ross, Senior Strategic Account Executive @ Salesforce
The Marketing Cloud Journey
The Martech stack is evolving faster than ever, and to keep up, companies must adopt emerging products with technology advances of data consolidation, personalization, AI, ML, predictive analytics that will transform and accelerate their business. Th eleft brained marketer is now a right brained marketer as well. The Don Draper days have relinquished and Agile Marketing has taken shape. Which means, your technology platforms must be more versatile than just an ESP or a CMS. That’s where Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) comes in.
Originally known as ExactTarget back in the early days of email marketing, Buddy Media for Content creation, Radian6 for social listening, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has evolved from an email marketing software solution into a leading omnichannel marketing automation platform. Oracle Marketing Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud soon followed. With a robust suite of tools that covers and connects a variety of different channels in the customer journey, Marketing Cloud allows you to get a 360-degree view of your customers and engage them with the right message at the right time in the right channel.
And this transformation is resonating for brands. Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s revenue, along with Commerce Cloud, grew 28% year over year in 2020 as more brands moved to Salesforce as their innovative, 1:1 messaging engine.
S. Ernest Paul
But while it is easy to recognize at a high level why your business could benefit from Marketing Cloud, really understanding the power of the platform, along with how to implement it and connect it to the rest alleviate some of that burden by taking you through an overview of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, along with the benefits that the platform can provide and the keys for a successful implementation.
“Proven ROI on Salesforce Marketing Cloud selection & implementation”
S. Ernest Paul
“ Marketing Cloud’s revenue, along with Commerce Cloud, grew 28% year over year in 2020 as more brands moved to Salesforce as their innovative, 1:1 messaging engine.”
S. Ernest Paul
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Capabilities
The first step to realizing how Marketing Cloud can transform your business is to better understand its capabilities.
Personalization
As consumers’ expectations for personalization continue to accelerate, so do their expectations for omnichannel experiences. In 2019, consumers averaged nearly six touchpoints across channels when purchasing an item – and 50% regularly use more than four during their customer lifecycle – which is a staggering increase from 15 years ago when the average consumer used two touchpoints and only 7% used more than four on a regular basis.
Marketing Cloud works to meet those consumer demands by enabling brands to create seamless customer experiences across every touchpoint, including email, mobile, advertising, web, direct mail, sales, commerce, and service. It is a platform that allows your messaging strategies and customer engagement to shine.
Features
Journeys and automation: Unification and marketing automation, behavioral data integration, and triggering
Channel activation: SMS, social, push, ads, email, direct mail, and custom journey activities
Content production and builds: AMPscript for interactive email, mobile optimization, Einstein recommendations, and Content Builder SDK and customization
Capabilities activation: Einstein, journey path optimizer, Social Studio, and Interaction Studio
Unified customer view: Connecting all data sources and providing with a 360-degree customer view to solve data-silo issues
Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Elevate Digital Transformation
Most brands are striving to achieve a full omnichannel setup. But often this is attempted using different and fragmented platforms and stand- alone channels, leading to disparate tracking data without a unified customer experience. Additionally, the effort to unify the offline and online experience is a huge challenge, with separate business departments typically creating silos. Marketing Cloud provides one robust platform that can handle all global and local marketing efforts in one place so that businesses can overcome these challenges.
Benefits which Payoff
Cohesive messages and experiences across channels
The ability to unify offline and online experiences
A scalable platform that provides a constellation of add-ons for every need
Marketing automation strategies to send the right messages to the right people at the right time
Omnichannel capabilities that provide greater control for brands increasing engagement and conversion
Marketing Cloud gives a tremendous boost to business transformation because it provides the opportunity and instruments a brand needs to essentially rethink and redesign its go-to-market strategy.
“Keys to successful implementations, analytics, and support”
S. Ernest Paul
A common mistake that businesses make when implementing Marketing Cloud is to just use the platform to deploy emails, treating it as an email marketing service like MailChimp. With this approach, the ROI will not be realized, as brands are missing out on maximizing what they can achieve with automations, data insights, Einstein, and so much more.
01 Marketing Automation
The need for personalized, 1:1 experiences delivered viaPardot to every customer cannot happen through manually built and scheduled campaigns alone. Customers expect tailored messages delivered in the moment wherever they are, and no brand has the manpower to manage this on its own.
You must rely on automations to help drive engagement, from transactional emails (order confirmation, shipping, etc.) and next-best-action (abandoned cart, abandoned browse) to automated and personalized content blocks within your general campaigns.
02 Data centralization and CDP
While messaging activation is the main output of Marketing Cloud’s capabilities, a solid data foundation is critical to a successful implementation. Make sure you have a well-scaled first-party data asset that is rooted in customer intelligence. A CDP – specifically Salesforce CDP – can be your centralized hub for segmentation, identity management, and consent that pushes data.
“ Your brand still has to be organized to operate in a way to make the most out of the technology you have and reduce operational costs and deployment errors and improve time to deployment.”
out to your Marketing Cloud platforms and provides both a single view of your customers and the ability to personalize experiences.
03 ESP implementation and migration
It’s critical to ensure that the right solution is designed during the implementation, as this will be key to a scalable and successful marketing automation program. Use the implementation process as an opportunity to refresh your existing programs. Be ambitious, set high goals, and use this step to build all your key requirements that meet your business objectives.
04 Social Studio, Interaction Studio, and Advertising Studio integrations
Our recommendation is to pick and choose these solutions based on your brand’s needs. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If your business relies on a lot of social behavior, then you will want Interaction Studio to better understand and target based on behavior. But there is also some service crossover if you already have Service Cloud. So, evaluate your business needs and choose accordingly.
05 Operational audit
Just having the technology isn’t enough for success. Your brand still has to be organized to operate in a way to make the most out of the technology you have and reduce operational costs and deployment errors and improve time to deployment. An operational auditoffers an in- depth review of your existing operational process across your people, processes, technology, and data. This will help to build an operating model that covers the entire marketing journey across touchpoints based on industry and platform best practices.
06 Third-party integrations
Despite how robust the Marketing Cloud platform is, you will still likely need to rely on third-party tools for specific and targeted tactics. Salesforce’s connectors allow the platform to integrate easily with nearly any external tool, and for added simplicity and ease in the integration, see which platforms can be installed and integrated directly into Marketing Cloud using Salesforce’s AppExchange.
07 Deliverability and inbox placement
Many brands face challenges that limit their email marketing effectiveness, with the most common challenges beinginbox placement and email deliverability. Meaning, did your emails reach your customers’ inboxes and do they have the highest probability of being seen? Many times, inbox-placement issues result from poor list hygiene. If you have a large number of inactive subscribers, for example, that will impact your deliverability and diminish your engagement metrics. Starting out with a clean list from the outset is the best way to ensure your messages are hitting the right inboxes
“Keys to successful campaign management and journey management”
S. Ernest Paul
Once you have the pieces of Marketing Cloud in place, you will be ready to start running campaigns. Here are some tips for successfully managing customer journeys and campaigns.
01 Journey creation
Remember, journeys are non-linear. The retail purchasing cycle can be long, rapid, sporadic, and unpredictable. Consumers expect brands to meet them with continuity where they are and on their terms.
Utilizing Journey Builder can help you map cross-channel touchpoints against customer-need states to identify highs, lows, and gaps in the experience across the lifecycle.
02 Behavioral and triggered email campaigns
While emails that promote your latest deals and products are undoubtedly important, to get the most out of Marketing Cloud, you need effective behavior and triggered emails. These are emails like abandoned cart, abandoned browse, and post-purchase transactional emails that provide transparency and encourage customers to take action.
03 Campaign segmentation and deployment
An important part of personalized experiences is not just that customers receive the content that matters most, but also that they don’t get any content they don’t care about. Audience segmentation is critical to maintaining an engaged based and preventing churn. So, not only do you want to avoid overwhelming subscribers with messages, but you also don’t want to turn them away by sending them deals or announcements for products they aren’t interested in buying.
04 Content creation
Leverage Marketing Cloud’s Content Builder for building highly engaging and mobile-optimized content in just minutes thanks to its intuitive and codeless platform. Content Builder allows for brands to use their own templates or built-in templates, and the drag-and- drop method adds flexibility and simplicity to the content-building experiences. The content you create can then be leveraged throughout email, SMS, and mobile, and by incorporating Journey Builder, you can then execute omnichannel journeys.
Connecting Marketing Cloud to the rest of your technology stack
S. Ernest Paul
While Marketing Cloud can serve as a standalone platform, it works best when connected with Sales, Service, Experience, and Commerce Cloud.If you have one view of the customer, with all the data in one centralized place, it’s easier for a brand to engage with them at the right time. Salesforce allows you to connect with your customers in real time in a singular view instead of having the connection broken. It also provides the customer with a seamless experience whenever they are engaging.
Implemented Salesforce Marketing Cloud in 14 countries with outstanding results
S. Ernest Paul
Conclusion
Marketing is now an always-on experience as brands try to meet consumers’ needs and stand out in a crowded marketplace. From the acquisition stage through post-purchase loyalty, 1:1 messaging is a necessity and Marketing Cloud is increasingly becoming the platform of choice to power those critical messages. And while the sophistication and intuitiveness of the platform will make these experiences easier to produce, plenty of work still must be done from brands themselves to ensure they have the resources, processes, and capabilities to make the most of what Marketing Cloud has to offer.
CDPs have become incredibly popular for companies looking to get more out of their data. It’s easy to see why. CDPs help companies unify their data, get a better understanding of their customers and create more personalized marketing campaigns.
Finding the right CDP for your company isn’t an easy process. There are a lot to choose from, but it’s not something that should be taken lightly. That’s why we put together this guide to help you easily identify the best CDP for your company.
CDPs do this by consolidating data from different customer touch points. By breaking down da and bringing together first-party data covering all customer interactions, you can get a detailed, 360-degree view of how customers use your product and what those customers do on your website or mobile app.
A potential customer might start with an organic search on a laptop that leads her to a blog post. The next day, she visits your website again from her phone while commuting to work. Two days later, she signs up for email updates from you. A week later, she clicks through an email for a free trial. Her free trial expires after a week, and then nothing. She doesn’t visit your website again for a month. Eventually, she does come back to your website, and signs up for a monthly subscription to become a new customer.
Without a CDP, that scenario would be hard to track. You’d have all these data points, but it would be stored in multiple places. As a result, you might only know that she took a free trial and then made a purchase. Your CDP brings all of those interactions across different data sources together and consolidates them into a single omnichannel customer profile to help you get a full understanding of customer behavior and engagement.
With that knowledge, marketers can create better marketing campaigns that facilitate customer engagement at the most opportune times. A single customer view enables detailed segmentation (e.g. using demographic or behavioral data) that marketing teams can further use to create personalized experiences and improve conversion rates by targeting the ideal customer profile.
And, CDPs can help with more than just marketing. With a superior understanding of your existing customers and how they use your product, you can improve customer loyalty and retention.
If you’re ready to take that jump and use a CDP to make your company more data-driven, you need to start by comparing different CDPs to find the best one for your company.
Finding the right CDP for your company isn’t an easy process. There are a lot to choose from, but it’s not something that should be taken lightly. Your CDP is going to be handling customer data. Anytime you’re dealing with your customers’ data, you need to be extra sure that their data is safely and ethically handled.
That’s why we put together this guide to help you easily identify the best CDP for your company.
6 steps to choose the best customer data platform (CDP)
Below we walk through 6 important steps that you should go through when choosing a CDP. Following these steps will ensure that you choose a CDP fitted to your goals and resources.
Step 1: Bring stakeholders into the process
Before you even decide which CDPs you’re going to evaluate, you need to bring internal stakeholders into the process. The CDP you choose is going to be working with data from different departments within your company, so it’s important that everyone is bought in.
The question you need to ask yourself at this point is: Who else collects data that your CDP will handle?
There’s a good chance your sales team’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform stores data that your CDP will need access to. A stakeholder from sales should be part of the buying process.
What about your customer success team? There’s a good chance that your customer success team uses tools that handle customer data. A stakeholder from the customer success team will likely be part of this process too.
You don’t need each stakeholder individually evaluating each CDP, but you will need their input on various parts of the buying process. At the very least, talk to each stakeholder and let them know why you’re looking to purchase a CDP and what you hope to get out of it.
Step 2: Define use cases
There’s another big question you need to answer before deciding which CDP is best for your company: What is the reason you’re looking to use a CDP?
It’s easy to get caught up in the fact that you need a CDP because it will consolidate your data into a single customer database, but what are you actually hoping to get out of that? Consolidating your data isn’t going to make you more data-driven. It’s just a step along the way. To choose the right CDP, you need to define your use cases ahead of time.
Take some time to think about what you want your CDP to help with. Then, talk to the other stakeholders about their ideal use cases. From there, try to identify three or fewer ideal use cases. Limiting your use cases to just the top three will make it easier to evaluate all of the CDP vendors.
Here are a few of the most common use cases:
Fully understanding our customer journey
Creating a more personalized customer experience on our website
Creating more targeted multichannel advertising campaigns
Combining online and offline data
Once you’ve defined your use cases, spend some time studying your potential CDPs. Look at their website; read reviews of their products; talk to colleagues at other companies who use these tools. Does your ideal use case fit with what any of these companies are doing? If yes, make a list of those companies. At this point, it’s probably going to be a pretty big list.
Step 3: Determine the tools needed
You need to get a handle on the tools your company uses that will be connected to your CDP.
To get an idea of what tools and functionality you’ll need, start by focusing on your use cases. Which tools do you need to accomplish the specific use cases that you laid out in Step 2? Make a list of those tools.
Next, make a list of all the tools that interact with your customer in one way or another. You’ll want to include website tools, CRM systems, real-time live chat, payment processors, email platforms, and help desk systems, just to name a few.
At this point, go to your other stakeholders and double-check that you haven’t missed any important tools that will need to be connected.
Once you’ve determined the tools you need, make sure the CDPs you’re evaluating already have those integrations. If one doesn’t have the majority of the tools you use, knock it out of contention. This step might narrow your list by a large number.
Step 4: Gather requirements
There’s more to a CDP than a way to consolidate data and solve your use cases. You also need to think of the other requirements for your CDP. Requirements are different than your use cases because a requirement is more like a feature, rather than an outcome.
For example, let’s say one of your requirements is that the CDP you choose should help you get a solid understanding of each piece of data that you’re collecting. To pull that off, you’ll need a CDP that can help you build a data-tracking plan.
If you’re not sure what other requirements you need to consider, here’s a list of common requirements that our customers have:
We’d like our CDP to help with GDPR and CCPA compliance. If that’s something you’re interested in, then you’ll need a CDP that will that will enable you to suppress data collection or delete customer data when requested, which is a requirement for both the GDPR and CCPA.
Our CDP should help us get a full view of our customer journey. If this is a requirement for your company, make sure that the CDP you’re evaluating has some form of identity resolution, which helps identify users across different channels.
Our CDP needs to have top-notch security. This is becoming a more frequent requirement. Make sure the CDP you’re evaluating has a credible, independent security certification like ISO 27001 or SOC 2. Those certifications ensure that the CDP is continuously monitoring and upgrading their security practices.
Another good place to gather requirements from are the pricing pages of each CDP. Read through the features that are listed on those pages, and make a note of anything that’s going to be important to your company.
For example, you might see that one CDP has an uptime guarantee, while another doesn’t. If an uptime guarantee is important, you might want to make it a requirement.
Step 5: Compare vendors
At this point, you should have a list of just a few CDPs that fit your use cases, have the necessary integrations, and meet all of your requirements. Now, it’s time to compare each CDP. Don’t take pricing into consideration yet. We’ll get to that in the next step.
Start by considering your industry. Find CDPs that have customers most similar to your company. If you work at an enterprise-level company, find a CDP that has a track record of working with companies at that level. If you work at a startup, make sure the CDPs you’re evaluating have experience in that space. Chances are there will be an overlap with CDPs that have a track record in all industries, but that’s okay.
If you’ve determined that all of the CDPs you’re considering have the right experience, it’s time to go a step deeper. Make sure each CDP has:
A track record of accomplishing the use cases that you defined in Step 2.
A solution for data compliance. CDPs handle data, so they should enable your compliance with the GDPR or the CCPA.
The right integrations for your current and future use cases. Is each CDP continually adding new integrations to their integration catalog?
Excellent customer service to help you set up, use, and maintain your CDP.
Don’t forget to look at review websites for user reviews of each CDP too. G2and Capterra both have dedicated pages for CDP reviews.
Step 6: Consider ROI
The ROI of the CDPs you’re evaluating is the final piece you need to consider. ROI doesn’t mean that you should choose the cheapest option. It’s more about which option will give you the best value. How do you determine that value upfront, before you choose your CDP?
Start by using our ROI worksheet. This will help you determine the cost of your engineers’ time. Without a CDP, your engineers have to spend hours building and maintaining integrations for each tool. Those hours add up quickly, which can result in significant costs just to build and maintain one integration. If you have ten integrations that need to be handled by your engineering team, you can see that the hours will quickly become unmanageable.
That cost is one of the biggest reasons to use a CDP. Good CDPs should reduce the amount of time your engineers spend building integrations between tools, which can result in a huge cost savings.
That’s why you need to calculate the costs and consider ROI ahead of time. If you choose a CDP that doesn’t give your engineering team the maximum amount of time-savings, it may not be worth the cost at all.
What CDP do you need?
Choosing a CDP isn’t a quick process. You need to make sure you’re doing your due diligence to find the right CDP based on your specific use-cases and requirements.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to get more value out of your data and get a better understanding of your customers. Plus, your engineering team will thank you for reducing their workload since they won’t have to spend time building and maintaining integrations with your tools.
