How Marketing Teams Can Leverage Salesforce Across Clouds

Over the past decade, there has been a huge increase in platforms and automation technologies – which have put the power of marketing back in the hands of the company. As a result, marketing leaders are moving support and cost center activities like branding and general awareness campaigns to customer acquisitions, engagement boosting, and customer lifetime value models. To enable this, marketers are connecting data, insights and experiences, automating more, and leveraging multiple technologies.

With marketers being brought in across business units and service lines, their points-of-view can be seen within the technologies that help enable and execute their objectives. Within the Salesforce ecosystem, this can take place via customer relationship management (CRM), customer service, e-commerce, marketing automation and community engagement. Let’s take a look at each one of these clouds and see how marketing impacts them – and vice versa.

Community Cloud

Salesforce’s Community Cloud is a dynamic platform that enables organizations to connect to a multitude of different audiences such as their customers, partners, and employees. In the past, this could be seen as “portal,” but in reality, Community Cloud helps connect specific audiences to the brand for an even more personalized and interactive experience. With this enhanced brand connection, marketers are impacting these communities with connected audience data points, digital messaging, and personalized assets based on where they are in their customer, internal, or buyer journey. You can also see marketers impacting communities by paralleling social engagement methods into this environment to increase the voice of the brand, asset engagement, and collaboration of the audiences.

Commerce Cloud

Whether it be for B2B or B2C, Commerce Cloud helps organizations build and scale their e-commerce storefronts for specific buyers. B2C e-commerce solutions continue to evolve for improved engagement with customers, by leveraging tactics such as real-time messaging and personalized content, and B2B commerce solutions digitally transform traditional partner and distributor markets for faster orders, hierarchies, contract pricing, and custom catalogs, marketers have been making their impacts known. This comes in the form of a variety of initiatives including, enhanced social inclusion for ratings and User-Generated Content (UGC). This has helped turn customers into advocates by promoting and sharing experiences, while also driving traffic and an organic following of people who are interested in the products. Marketers are also taking their increased omni-channel communications to help shopping cart abandonment and welcome journeys. The ability to also use AI and buyer data is helping marketers create customized 1:1 personalized content and copy for both pre and post purchases.

Service Cloud

Service Cloud allows users to automate customer service related processes, escalate issues, and find content specific to topics. Service Cloud can listen and respond to customers across a variety of platforms including social, website(s), point-of-sale (POS), etc. and route cases which allows the appropriate agent to gather a comprehensive picture of the customer to inform responses. This is the support that businesses provide and the care the brand portrays. As a result, marketing has been impacting the customer service side of things more and more. Marketers are inserting themselves into the customer service side of things to fully understand the complete customer experience (CX). One example of this is providing key messaging across email, social, and mobile based on case topics and content. It is also an opportunity for marketers to up-sell and cross-sell products and services based on the service topics and resolution. 

Sales Cloud

In the past, the CRM was considered a tool used solely by the sales team to manage leads, pipeline, and store customer information, however it has become an essential part of the marketers’ tool kit. With its ability to harness data, marketing is impacting CRMs more and more by creating personalized experiences for an organization’s prospects and customers as they move through the sales funnel and post-purchase activities. This marketing activity data, combined with engagement and conversion data, allows not only marketers, but the organization as a whole understand the return on marketing investment (ROMI) and prioritize marketing spend in the right areas.

Marketing Cloud

When looking at the list of multiple marketing technologies, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud hits all the buckets of advertising, content, social, sales, data, and management. This is why marketers utilize Marketing Cloud to engage and tie not only the Salesforce systems mentioned above but others including content management systems (CMS) and analytics to help enhance the customer experience. The impact marketers have on Marketing Cloud is extremely high, but much like other Salesforce systems, added collaboration from IT, business units, and partners play a role in shaping how it can enable the optimal engagement.

Marketing has always been a mixture of art and science, and the role of the marketer has evolved over time from “paint by numbers” to more “abstract modern expressionism,” especially as we embark on the fourth industrial revolution – digital transformation. 

For marketers, the goal is to foster scalable one-to-one marketing relationships with every customer, across multiple channels, on any device, wherever they are in their respective journey with the business. All these efforts fall under the umbrella of marketing and are enabled through several Salesforce technologies. Changing from a support/cost center, to more results-based structure via business outcomes can be hard, but knowing which of those technologies marketers can use to make an impact while staying true to the foundations of marketing artistry can make an unbelievable impact on organizations as they undergo their digital transforms – no matter where they are in the process.

Meet The Author
Kyle Simenson is a Sr. Account Executive at Lev, and has helped clients and brands expand their reach and engagement through marketing strategies and the Salesforce technology stack. Born and raised, he currently resides in Minnesota. Kyle loves spending time with his family and friends, partaking in as many outdoor activities as possible, and watching his beloved Minnesota sports teams unfortunately lose in playoffs.