The Marketing Cloud: A New Era For Marketing

We attended the Salesforce Cloudforce Essentials day in Melbourne yesterday and we wanted to share with you some of the interesting discussions from the day. Salesforce recently launched Marketing Cloud™ which is a collection of cloud based marketing services to make both internal and external marketing communications easier to manage and be more effective.

Derek Laney who is the Director of Product Marketing Management at Salesforce gave a presentation yesterday called “Introducing The Marketing Cloud” which we really enjoyed.

Even if you are not interested in using their cloud based platform there were still some great points raised about how we need to engage more with customers, integrate our marketing efforts both online and offline and also measure our performance so we can continually improve and find new opportunities. You might also be interested to check out our article on using Inbound Marketing In Your Marketing Mix where we also discussed the importance of customer engagement.

There were three key take outs we wanted to share with you that we took note of from Derek’s presentation:

Improve customer engagement via social channels for increased return on investment – Business is now more social so it is more important than ever to align social goals with our business goals. In Derek’s presentation he talked about the real opportunity for marketers to listen to customers in real time and to build and engage with them.
Streamline and intergrate both offline and online marketing – While social is exciting it has certainly created chaos for marketers. There’s social media, PR, messaging, marketing, community management, creatives, media, eCommerce, digital etc. We need to find ways to better streamline marketing efforts across multiple platforms. Derek then shared with us how Salesforce’s new Marketing Cloud™ helps to turn insights into actions and connect with customers for life.
Measure and report on your data – We all know how important it is to not only look at our brands performance but also our competitors. We need to listen, analyse, engage and then also measure and report on how we are performing so that we can better develop insights and key strategies. There is a wealth of customer information we have right at our finger tips, we just need to find ways to better utilise this data.

If you are interested in finding out more, check out Derek Laney’s presentation slides. Thanks to Derek for a great presentation and for sharing this with us. You can also follow Derek on Twitter @derektweets.