In this blog, we take a look at what Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform is, what sets it apart from other marketing tools, as well as how marketers can use it to achieve their goals, faster.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (previously known as Pardot) is a powerful marketing platform designed with B2B marketers in mind. While Salesforce’s B2C Marketing Cloud tool is well loved by marketers everywhere – from in-house to agency-side – MCAE can sometimes be overlooked and considered no more than an email engine. In actual fact, this useful tool goes way beyond that; Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has a whole host of essential features that makes it perfect for B2B marketers looking to take their processes to the next level.
What is Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?
MCAE is a Salesforce-powered platform designed to make life easier for marketers. It offers an email builder, automation, and lead management tools for marketing and sales teams to use in a B2B setting. You may have seen it compared to platforms like MailChimp or Dotmailer, but it goes well beyond just being an email builder. Think of Pardot as an all-encompassing toolkit that marketers can use to efficiently manage their workload.
Going beyond email building, mailing list segmentation, and email analytics, MCAE can also help with the following:
- Crafting digital marketing campaigns
- Tracking links, website, and customer behaviour
- Creating and managing web forms, as well as landing pages
- Social media scheduling
- Putting together reports based on all of the above
Harness the Power of Automation
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s powerful automation tools also allow you to personalise landing page content to fit different viewers, craft email drip campaigns, and nurture leads. It comes with a scoring system that can be used to track and measure engagement levels, and it also comes with powerful analytics that can be used to track ROI. It also seamlessly integrates with Salesforce’s core CRM solution, so if your organisation is already using Salesforce (eg: your sales department uses it to manage prospects and leads), it might be worth introducing MCAE to your marketing team, so both departments can work together in harmony.
With Account Engagement’s automation functionality, marketers can sit back and allow MCAE to do the work for them. Did we say sit back? Most marketers know that the work never stops, so while MCAE won’t provide you with an excuse for an off-day, it will free up time to focus on more high level work. By automating repetitive tasks, marketers can focus on strategy, in-person events, and other ways to maximise ROI. With a large chunk of your daily marketing activities being taken care of automatically, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement gets you one step closer to crossing off everything on your to-do list.
What Marketers Think
MCAE is designed for B2B marketers, and who better to speak on the quality of the tool than our newly appointed Marketing Manager, who had this to say:
“Before joining Bluewave Technology, I was familiar with the core Salesforce platform, but had no idea how useful the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement tool could be. Before Account Engagement, I was using a myriad of different SaaS apps in order to carry out my regular marketing tasks: Buffer, Bit.ly, MailChimp, etc. Although I was able to keep on top of my work this way, it was only when I started using MCAE that I realised how much time I had been wasting before and how much easier my work day could have been if I were using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement then.
Now, I won’t lie – I found the tool a bit daunting initially and was worried I may not get to grips with it straight away. Thankfully though, the MCAE platform was super intuitive and I quickly began to recognise processes I had used before, just packaged in a neater way and all integrated together. Following a quick tutorial with a member of our technical team, I was up and running.
The great thing about this tool is that it brings together so many marketing functions into one interconnected interface, with insights and reporting available in just a few clicks. Prior to this, I was assembling information manually and putting it all together to create my marketing reports, but now I can do that at lightning speed. Additionally, the Automations tab in MCAE has freed up time (something all marketers know to be more precious than gold) by allowing me to map out a journey that turns leads into customers, with pre-set touch points, ensuring they remain engaged with the Bluewave brand, without me having to lift a finger. This allows me to focus my attention on other aspects of marketing, which is invaluable to me, and our business.”
– Shauni Adekoya, Marketing Manager at Bluewave
Is Your Business Ready For Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?
If used correctly, MCAE 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 – and you’ll hear more about those in our next blog, so stay tuned for next week’s post.
In the meantime, if you’d like to find out more about how a Marketing Cloud Account Engagement implementation could benefit your business, please get in touch with us today.