June 28, 2016

Marketing Platforms For Newbies, Know-It-Alls and Everyone In Between

Marketing platform skill levels

Marketing technology is moving fast no matter where you are on the spectrum of marketing expertise and experience. However, marketers (both experts and green peas) know that they need to embrace cutting-edge marketing to both achieve goals and keep their heads above water. Recently, Geraldine Gray of Endiem, along with hosts Sam Achuff and Elna Miller of Salesforce, as well as Christopher Doran and Michel Kayyal of Invado Solutions, was featured on informative Salesforce webinar entitled, “Marketing Platforms: Getting started, staying on track, room to grow.” There was a little something for everyone, no matter where you are in your marketing journey.

Marketing platforms, defined and delivered

From social media to advertisements and from email campaigns to events, marketing platforms include systems that help you choreograph the experience for your prospects and customers. Each platform has its own features with different strengths and weaknesses—no single platform fires a silver bullet so when you’re setting out to source a marketing platform, you should evaluate each one carefully across the metrics that affect the way your processes work.

Geraldine recommends eight questions to evaluating the suite of features that each platform provides:

Can it manage all of your marketing activities?
Will it personalize the content that goes out to your customers?
Can it give you an understanding of a single customer’s journey?
Can it avoid delivering a tone-deaf customer experience?
Does it make orchestrating the customer experience achievable?
Is it robust enough to deliver dynamic, personalized experiences to your customer?
Can you manage and track ROI?
Can it learn what is successful for your campaigns?
Does the product company teaches best practices and new methodologies?

App like a pro

Whether your budget is tiny and your marketing experience is nil or your pro skills match your robust budget, incorporating apps into your marketing regimen can boost your marketing prowess and productivity considerably.

Beginners with a small budget can get a start on the power of marketing platform features by using apps like Cirrus Insights and Campaign Calendar. Cirrus Insights enables you to closely track interactions with your emails, add campaigns seamlessly and use Salesforce to email templates—all from inside Outlook or Gmail. Campaign Calendar then helps plan budgets and resources, manage content schedules and create parent-child relationships within campaigns.

Intermediate marketers will love Musqot for deeper analysis—it’s perfect for those that need a robust set of tools that can get more detailed across marketing activities. For example, if you need to manage a complex calendar of email campaigns, events and conferences with assigned resources and budget tracking.

Experts will get even more out of Salesforce with Full Circle Insights. It’s a comprehensive platform that puts your data to work. It allows you to bridge your data better from marketing automation software by serving configurable ROI attribution models, lifecycle management and many more highly sophisticated reporting features.

Drive B2B sales with automation

Traditional contact-based engagement is becoming a thing of the past—the focus is now on Account Based Marketing. This includes nurturing a lead through the engagement process until they are ready to buy; scoring the lead quality based on behavior; managing the leads; and reporting ROI upon closed. It’s an orchestration of the lead process – from awareness to retention.