At Dreamforce this week, Salesforce debuted its revamped marketing hub — now dubbed Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud — as part of its Salesforce1 platform. The Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud is designed to integrate apps for email, mobile, social, web and marketing automation, into a single location.
The marketing cloud also is designed to provide a consolidated view of every customer, help manage the customer journey and optimize content for every device.
“We are seeing a profound platform shift to cloud, social, mobile platforms and marketers are leading the business transformation,” Scott Dorsey, CEO of the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, told the audience during the keynote address unveiling the new platform.
Scott McCorkle, ExactTarget’s President of Technology and Strategy, highlighted that integrations with Radian6, Buddy Media and Social.com give marketing teams social-listening capabilities. He said the Radian6 integration will provide marketers with insights from online conversations using real-time listening tools. He also explained that Salesforce Buddy Media enables marketers to manage, schedule and publish content. Salesforce Social.com supports the creation, optimization and automation of social ad campaigns.
McCorkle said the tighter integration with Salesforce will enable marketers to input and analyze data from a variety of sources. “They can be looking at e-Commerce and web behavior, as well as data from the CRM,” to help understand the customer journey and move them along the pipeline.
The marketing cloud can alert marketers to “any data element that wasn’t there before,” McCorkle said. He used Ford as an example, and there was a “connected” Mustang at the event as a demonstration. If a customer is driving past a dealer and needs service, an alert could be sent to the car to remind the customer that they need their 20,000-mile tune-up. “In addition, if there are empty service bays, the customers could get an offer for money off the service.”
For B2B marketers, outside data such as company financial data, executive appointments and other relevant information, could be fed into the system.
Through the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud Journey Builder application, marketers can map customer journeys, define campaign objectives and map digital marketing interactions, such as email, mobile, social and web sites, to create personalized customer experiences that evolve based on consumer or customer engagement and ROI.
Adam Blitzer, VP and General Manager atPardot, said the new marketing hub is designed to optimize content for mobile email, automate campaigns and make it easier for marketers to automate the process of personalizing email campaigns. “Email is still the lead application for interacting with customers, but marketers have struggled a bit with personalizing the communication. The objective is to optimize and personalize content for every channel and device.”