Unify Marketing and Sales With Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integration

 

Marketing Cloud is one of the go-to automation tools for marketers. It hosts a plethora of features in its modules through which one can run campaigns, schedule social media content, manage customer journeys, and take on omnichannel marketing needs.

While Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) has all the tools you need to run successful digital marketing for your business, you’ll need a planned implementation to make the most of your Salesforce investments. Hiring Salesforce Marketing Cloud consultants can help you optimize the capabilities of your license — ensuring maximum digital success.

WHAT IS MARKETING CLOUD AND WHAT PRODUCTS DOES IT OFFER?

Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing automation tool containing various modules for separate marketing channels. From running personalized email campaigns to posting social media posts from a centralized platform, users can do everything with SFMC products.

Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing automation tool containing various modules for separate marketing channels. From running personalized email campaigns to posting social media posts from a centralized platform, users can do everything with SFMC products.

Let’s take a look at some of the modules that come under Marketing Cloud. Each of these solutions is designed to accomplish a specific marketing purpose.

Journey Builder: Users can serve personalized experiences through Journey Builder by tapping into customer habits, preferences, expectations, purchase history, etc, offering a unified digital experience across web, email, mobile, etc.

Data Studio: It allows users to discover exclusive insights and make use of the unexplored potential of their data. With Data Studio, teams can store info about customers and share it with selected partners.

Dataroma: Dataroma offers users a unified dashboard through which they can monitor the performance of campaigns and digital content on various channels. With comprehensive insight and reports, users can optimize the content on social media, sales platforms, emails, and landing pages.

Pardot: Pardot allows users to automate sales and capture more territories. Teams can automate campaigns, produce more leads, score/grade leads, personalize interactions, and calculate overall marketing ROI with Pardot. 

Beside these solutions, Einstein Analytics, Advertising Studio, Mobile Studio, Interaction Studio, and Email Studio are some other modules that come under Marketing Cloud packages. You can select the desired modules as per the need.

Steps to Carry Out a Successful Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integration

Marketing Cloud implementation offers teams a complete solution to automate, manage, and optimize marketing operations. However, it can do wonders if you consider integrating it with your sales CRM with it. 

This is important because most marketing and sales teams work in a decentralized manner. With silos and poor collaboration, most leads cannot be converted in due time. Integrating Marketing Cloud with your Sales CRM can help you bridge gaps and boost collaboration. 

With a 360-degree view of customer data and minimum silos, teams can collaborate and make proactive decisions based on interactions with other departments. But integrating Marketing Cloud with other solutions requires ample planning and consideration. 

To make things easier, we have come up with some points. We hope this helps you in establishing a successful Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration.

List Your Integration Goals

Discuss with your marketing and sales teams before you start the integration process. You can choose to centralize activities from Marketing Cloud for better sales visibility. However, for this, you‘ll need to source some of the data from the Sales Cloud. 

Hiring a Salesforce Marketing Cloud consulting partner can help you list down goals for data access in a more clear manner. Remember, your sales team will need to free up some tactical control to ensure better visibility for marketing teams and vice versa.

Prioritize Data Needs

Before you get started with integration, you should identify what data needs to be sourced and what should be ordered. If you are finding trouble prioritizing data, here are some points for you:

Look at the attributes by which you can personalize the content of your e-mailers and text messagesLook at the attributes that may need to be updated back to your Sales CRMTriggers and automation workflows and what changes need to be made in thoseLook at the attributes that make a prospect eligible to be called a lead

Your Salesforce Marketing Cloud consulting partner can help you prioritize data needs by looking at various attributes in the marketing/sales process.

Create Data Workflows

After you have identified and prioritized data, consider checking data flow in respective systems. To help teams accomplish a seamless data flow between marketing and sales solutions, Salesforce Marketing Cloud consultants look at the following aspects:

Frequency and time of data updates from one solution to anotherThe order/urgency with which data has to be sentWhether updates will be added in Sales Cloud post-integration or will need to be added separatelyVarious groups of customers and how to segment themWhether data needs to be sent ad-hoc or via automation Select Your integration Method

There are multiple ways to accomplish integration in Marketing Cloud. CSV file-based data integration method, API-based integration, and data import from Sales Cloud are three of the most common ways to integrate SFMC. 

By using data loaders or third-party tools such as Mulesfot, Jitterbit, Informatica, and Dell Boomi, you can carry out most of the simple and complex integrations with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

Test Changes with Power Users

Once you have selected source/target data, integration platform, and patterns, and have executed integration, it is time to test changes with power users. You can choose power users from each department.

The main purpose of making power users is to check if the integration is accomplished in line with the requirements of both teams or not. Salesforce Marketing Cloud consulting partners like Damco conduct the following testing post-integration:

Structural preview testing Email client testing Testing with automation workflowsEnd-to-end testingLive testingA/B testing Train and Deploy Changes

After you have integrated and developers have tested the changes along with power users, it is time to train users. Users must be properly trained on how to use the applications for more collaborative decision-making. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud consulting experts offer training guides and in-person assistance so users are up-to-date with the latest changes and their issues are addressed in real-time. After your users are trained effectively, you can think of deployment to a production environment.

Ready to Implement Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Marketing Cloud contains all the tools you need to run and manage omnichannel marketing strategy. However, to make the best use of its features and product lines, you should consider its integration with sales apps.

Hiring Salesforce Marketing Cloud consulting partners can help you follow the right practices, procedures, and considerations to integrate similar/disparate systems. We hope the above points will give you a brief idea of how to proceed with the integration process. 

To understand the scope and complexity of your marketing-sales integration, connect with our team at Damco Solutions. We have carried out integrations on SFMC for businesses across domains and will be glad to help you bridge data silos between your marketing and sales apps.