Salesforce Marketing Cloud overview: what’s in the toolbox?

Salesforce^® Marketing Cloud is a powerful digital marketing platform that helps organizations everywhere to understand their customers and reach them more effectively. It provides a wide array of capabilities that allow users to improve marketing activities across the board. In this article, I’ll give you a Salesforce Marketing Cloud overview so you can understand them. 

You may be thinking “Where do I start?” 

With such a versatile toolset, people new to Marketing Cloud may find themselves a little overwhelmed by the possibilities. It’s like when you’re considering buying a new multi-cooker kitchen appliance, or a multi-tool for home improvements — you know that it can do a lot of things, but how will you use them all in your daily life? 

That’s why I decided to write this article: to give you a simple, easy-to-digest rundown of the key Salesforce Marketing Cloud features and capabilities. It will tell you how each important app or function in the features list can benefit your business.

Let’s get started: 

Understand and automate customer journeys

I’ll begin with a set of Salesforce Marketing Cloud tools that can help you get a better idea of customer interaction with your brand. They also enable you to automate customer journeys and connect with your customers via email messages and more. 

Journey Builder

Identify key points in the customer experience and personalize cross-channel communication at all touchpoints, including onboarding, engagement and loyalty.

Marketing Cloud Personalization

Get valuable insights into real-time interactions with your customers and track digital, offline and customer-assisted engagements.

Email Studio

Segment lists for email communications, create personalized messages and send and track emails, whether they’re one-to-one or one-to-many.

Mobile Studio

Send SMS, MMS, push and chat messages to your customers in real-time using the MobilePush, Mobile Connect and GroupConnect applications. 

Optimize ad campaigns by harnessing your data

With the tools I’ll look at now, you’ll be able to make the most of your ad spend and improve return on investment (ROI) from every campaign. They do this by helping you get through to the right audiences with content that’s relevant to them. 

Customer Data Platform (CDP) 

Collect customer data, create unified customer profiles, activate data  to personalize customer experiences and gain insights for audience segmentation and more.  

Salesforce Data Studio

Discover and create audiences for your Marketing Department, monetize your data and provision it at scale to partners with data governance. 

Marketing Cloud Advertising

Integrate marketing and CRM data with digital advertising to create engaging ads, run campaigns across channels, score leads and track effectiveness.

Transform reporting and analytics 

At this point in our Salesforce Marketing Cloud overview, I’ll take you through the marketing analytics and measurement tools Marketing Cloud offers. These help you to boost the effectiveness of your marketing activities and also optimize brand engagement. 

Marketing Cloud Intelligence 

Unify your marketing data in one place, from all your sources, and share them for easy reference and use via widgets and dashboards. 

Custom dashboards and views 

Achieve a complete view of your marketing funnel with custom reports on any section, drill down into specific data and save the view for further use. 

Google Analytics 360

Seamlessly integrate Google Analytics for insights into Google Ads campaign performance, relevance of content, click-through rates (CTRs), ad spend and more. 

Boost your business-to-business marketing

Marketing Cloud isn’t only useful for business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. It’s also valuable for business-to-business (B2B) marketing. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) connects to Sales Cloud to automate and streamline B2B marketing and sales processes. 

B2B marketing automation

Speed up your sales cycle and reduce team workload by automating marketing tasks such as sending timely lead-nurturing emails and alerts to team members.

Lead generation 

Create and launch branded landing pages, forms and email marketing campaigns, and integrate SEO and SEM to analyze the effectiveness of your efforts. 

Marketing analytics

Analyze your marketing efforts, including relating closed leads to specific marketing activities, and tracking deals’ lifecycles and the state of your marketing funnel. 

Integrate the whole Salesforce Customer 360 Platform

While Marketing Cloud itself helps organizations in a wide range of ways, the benefits increase greatly when Marketing Cloud is used in coordination with the rest of the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform to create a 360-degree view of customers and conduct after-sales activities.  

Commerce Cloud

Use loyalty programs to drive customer retention and get alerts on shopping cart actions (e.g., a product has been added to the basket but hasn’t been bought yet).

Experience Cloud

Provide customer portals to drive engagement and interaction, and set up and deliver campaigns targeted to members of your online communities. 

Service Cloud

Keep service agents and others up to date on customer service cases and informed about customer details to expedite the cases’ resolution.

Sales Cloud

Onboard your new customers and provide them with offers based on their previous actions and interactions with your brand.

Thanks for reading our Salesforce Marketing Cloud overview

Has this Salesforce Marketing Cloud overview has helped you to understand the features list? If you’d like your own organization to benefit from these powerful tools, we want to help. 

VRP Consulting is an award-winning, Salesforce-certified consulting partner. We offer consulting, outsourcing and managed services to help you gain full value from all the Salesforce Marketing Cloud features and capabilities. 

Following all industry best practices, we can implement and customize a solution built around your unique needs and goals. That can include creating any necessary branded company marketing assets that you can use for current campaigns and adapt for future ones. We also offer QuickStart packages ideal for small businesses, nonprofits and others facing challenging budgets. 

If you would like to know more about how VRP can help you harness all the power of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud tools, we would be happy to explore the possibilities together. Just get in touch. 

Get in Touch

About the Author

Anastasiya Vinogradova

Marketing Cloud Practice Director, VRP Consulting

Anastasiya has led VRP’s Marketing Cloud activities since 2017. As an experienced Marketing Cloud and Pardot architect, she has extensive expertise in data management, analytics development and automation process configuration, among other areas. Anastasiya is dedicated to constantly increasing VRP Consulting’s Marketing Cloud capabilities so we can deliver the utmost value and innovation to our clients.