Salesforce Marketing Cloud Review

The need to build a single, comprehensive view of each consumer to power 1-to-1 journeys. Integrate every touchpoint and experience with your brand across advertising, marketing, commerce, sales, service, and apps.

• Allows organisations to engage customers with one integrated platform to unify sales, service, and marketing.
• Allows organisations to connect with leads and customers across every channel, on any device.
• Allows organisations to implement automated solutions, saving time and money.

Content Builder: Content Builder is a cross-channel content management tool that allows you to consolidate images, documents, and content in a single location for use in the Marketing Cloud. With an easy-to-use, drag and drop interface, Content Builder allows you to create re-usable templates for emails and landing pages.

Advertising Studio: Advertising Studio uses existing customer data from email, mobile push interactions and conversions on your site to securely sync with the contact's Facebook, Twitter, Google AdWords and Social Studio accounts. Engage customers with relevant, timely messages and find new customers with similar attributes by combining the functionality of Advertising Audiences and Advertising Campaigns.

Social Studio: Social Studio is a one stop solution allowing you to manage, schedule, create and monitor posts organized by brand, region or multiple teams and individuals in a unified interface. Social Studio offers powerful real-time publishing and engagement platform for content marketers, plus the comprehensive content performance by social network and time frame.

Journey Builder: Journey Builder is used for creating responsive, automated, multi-channel campaigns. Use Journey Builder to design a communication plan that reaches customers at every stage of their journey with your brand.

Marketing Cloud releases product updates every three months. With each update, users have to adapt to the product changes and new interfaces.

To improve user experience, there should be clear workflows to assist the user through the setup processes. The help documentation also needs to reflect product updates more accurately. Being at the front of innovation is difficult if you are playing a guessing game.

Marketing Cloud provide a live feed of any product issues, and users are notified in advance of any stability issues. As a side note, this product is cloud based and I would recommend using a Chrome browser to limit issues.

There are no issues with scalability as long as you have a well-defined solution prior to account configuration.

Customer Service:

This is dependent on the license you purchase.

• I would rate Standard Support 8/10.
• I would rate Premium Support 10/10.

Technical Support:

This is dependent on the license you purchase. If you have a standard support agreement and need a quick fix, I would recommend escalating your cases as soon as the option appears in your case log.

• I would rate Standard Support 5/10.
• I would rate Premium Support 9/10.

No.

This is dependent on what your business is trying to achieve.

An integrated approach is always recommended. If you are using Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud, the initial set up is medium complexity. If you are integrating with other CRM systems, websites and apps, you will need an experienced developer to implement your solution.

A non-integrated approach, such as manual imports and file drops is a straightforward setup. However, you will not reap all the benefits of Marketing Cloud.

As consultants, we will always implement Marketing Cloud for our clients. This requires working collaboratively with key stakeholders to discover, plan, build, test and deploy the correct solution.

We have have a dedicated Customer Intelligence Manager who works closely to define our clients' measures of success. We find it challenging to measure ROI directly through Marketing Cloud, often this is a wider conversation.

We make educated recommendations about which features would be used to implement our clients' solutions. Our clients engage directly with Marketing Cloud to negotiate licensing costs. In general, the costs are high.

Initially my previous company Davanti Consulting chose Marketo as an alternative Marketing Automation tool, however we did not see this as a good fit for the business.

My current company CloudShift Group stay ahead of the game by solely offering Marketing Cloud (B2C) and Pardot (B2B) as our preferred marketing automation tools.

Consider your options and stay true to what is best for your business.