In part two of our Marketing Cloud Account Engagement series, we take a look at the markers that indicate it’s time for your organisation to invest in MCAE, as well as how Salesforce’s B2B marketing solution can help your marketing and sales teams work better together.
If you haven’t read part one already – a written overview of what Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is – make sure you check out the first blog to get familiar with the tool before reading on. In this instalment of our MCAE series, we’ll dive a little deeper into how you know your organisation is ready for Salesforce MCAE, and what you can achieve with it, post deployment.
When used correctly, Account Engagement (previously called Pardot) can boost your marketing ROI, but it’s important that business leaders and marketers assess whether their organisation is ready to implement this useful tool. Some tell-tale signs that a company is ready for an integrated MAP like Account Engagement can be classified in three areas: growth, analytics and alignment, so we’ll elaborate on those below.
Growth
Growth is an easy one: the scalability that Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers provides organic, sustainable growth through efficient practices. If your marketing team is so busy that steam is coming out of their ears, however the budget to add more marketers to the group isn’t quite there yet, look to MCAE to help free up time within your existing team. With an integrated outreach and lead generation platform built into the solution, marketers are able to run queries on all known data to build their lists. For example, rather than asking the sales team something like “can I have a list of email addresses for all the people you’ve sold to in the last two months,” marketers can construct a rule to create a list in Pardot that fills that requirement. Instead of the marketer waiting around for the salesperson to manually create the list and send it over, they have the ability to do it themselves, and in a fraction of the time.
Analytics
Analytics is a common area that our technical staff receive questions about from customers when they’re mapping out and conducting an implementation. The reason behind this is because as businesses grow, they often look for more transparency on Marketing ROI and influence over sales. Successful marketing plays a heavy role in the expansion of an organisation, but in order to be granted access to the budget required to make this happen, marketers will need to justify their proposals. The best way to do this is with analytics, proving the success of a campaign in black and white.
When deployed alongside Salesforce, Account Engagement allows marketers to leverage the campaign object, campaign influence models, and auto-association
rules to automatically tie opportunities to campaigns – this in turn gives us the suggested ROI attached to each campaign, event, or action. MCAE offers more analytics to support marketers across social, website, email, and more, as well as A/B testing and Email Render tests to support open and click through rates, helping marketers to better understand their audience.
Pulling together data from multiple sources is another thing that Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can do with unmatched efficiency. As organisations scale up, it’s good to know that MCAE can handle a lot of the time-draining tasks that would have previously been given to members of staff, freeing those employees to work on higher-level projects, or eliminating the need to hire (and therefore spend extra budget) altogether. This is another way that Account Engagement can save time and money within your marketing department.
Alignment
Alignment is a natural benefit to using MCAE with Salesforce, as Account Engagement is built within Salesforce, marketing teams can instantly leverage sales data to run queries. A good example of this would be “Collect every prospect with a closed/won opportunity” who could then be sent a follow up email that thanks them for their business, or they could be added to the organisation’s monthly newsletter. This works vice-versa as well: sales teams can also use MCAE to send content rich and well branded one-to-one style emails to their leads and contacts.
Salespeople are also granted the visibility to see how a lead or contact is engaging with marketing content to help drive conversations. Combine that with Account Engagement’s scoring and grading tools, and marketing can then score each person based on sales activity a well as engagement – providing a full picture of each prospect’s activity. Sales can use this score to determine how engaged a prospect is with the brand; an instant qualification as to how interested in the prospect the sales team should be. This adds up to essentially become an instant prioritisation model that Sales can leverage for the best end result.
It’s safe to say that Account Engagement’s connectivity with Sales Cloud and Salesforce Core is a huge asset to businesses that already use either of those platforms and are now looking to add marketing to their arsenal.
To summarise: if your organisation is going through a period of growth, or is striving towards one, if you’re looking for increased visibility over your ROI, alignment across your Sales and Marketing teams, and a more efficient marketing operations, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a fantastic tool to help you achieve all of these goals. It’s great for improving the quality of your leads and monitoring digital asset reach; it’s natively integrated into Salesforce, with enhanced metrics that can yield a high ROI if used correctly. As your business develops, ensure you get the most out of your marketing team (and the budget they work with) with the help of a solution designed to maximise their efforts effectively.
If you’ve recognised the signs and think your business may be ready for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, please get in touch with us to find out more about the solution and how a bespoke implementation could work for you.