If you’re using Salesforce Marketing Cloud for your marketing automation, you already understand the importance of leveraging technology to drive customer engagement and loyalty. However, even the most advanced platforms are only as good as the strategy that underpins them.
A Salesforce journey map, a critical tool for understanding customer interactions, can significantly inform and enrich your Salesforce Marketing Cloud strategy. More importantly a journey map is common language and guidance to the technology and data experts who will help systemize this journey.
In this post, we’ll explore how journey mapping integrates with Salesforce Marketing Cloud to create a more cohesive and personalized customer experience.
Business (B2B) vs. Consumer (B2C) Journeys
B2B Journeys: A Complex Web
- Longer Sales Cycles: B2B journeys often involve longer decision-making processes and multiple stakeholders. Each touchpoint might need to be more personalized to cater to different roles within a company, from end-users to decision-makers.
- Content-Focused: In B2B, content marketing plays a huge role. The journey map could include multiple touchpoints involving whitepapers, case studies, or webinars, all of which can be effectively managed and tracked via Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
- Relationship Building: B2B marketing often focuses on relationship building, usually over a longer term. Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help automate relationship-nurturing touchpoints like follow-up emails after a meeting or reminders for contract renewals.
B2C Journeys: A Race to Conversion
- Quick Decision-Making: B2C journeys often involve quicker decision-making processes. The journey mapping process might reveal the need for fast, highly engaging touchpoints that prompt immediate action.
- Broad Target Audience: In B2C, you often target a broader audience. Salesforce Marketing Cloud can manage large volumes of data and segment audiences effectively, allowing for more targeted messaging.
- Emotion-Driven: B2C journeys often leverage emotional triggers. Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, businesses can customize messaging based on data points (like past purchase behavior) ensuring that emotional triggers are hit effectively.
How to Map and Communicate Marketing Journeys for Salesforce
This article will not dive into the details for constructing a journey, but the example below will illustrate a real journey I built for Salesforce. It covers who the person is, what actions they take, how they take action, what they feel, and where (and when) they advance in the journey. We use Lucid Chart for most of our visual communications, but there are other sophisticated journey mapping and management solutions.
How Does this Salesforce Marketing Journey Complement Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
1. Customer Segmentation Iteration
Both journey mapping and Salesforce Marketing Cloud focus heavily on customer segmentation. But starting simple is important to ensure you can serve your most important segments and customer personas.
By integrating insights from your journey map exercise, it’s much faster and easier to iterate in a diagram, than building directly in Salesforce journeys in Marketing Cloud.
2. Data-Driven Personalization
Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides a plethora of data analytics tools that can feed into your customer journey maps. The high level personas and segments through your journey mapping inventory can, in turn, be used to create more targeted campaigns in Salesforce, improving ROI and customer satisfaction.
3. Real-Time Engagement
With the real-time capabilities of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can make immediate adjustments based on the touchpoints identified in your journey map. This ensures a seamless experience for the customer, right when they interact with your brand.
4. Multi-Channel Coordination
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows for a multi-channel approach to customer engagement. Journey mapping helps you understand which channels are most effective at different points in the customer journey, enabling you to optimize your multi-channel strategies.
5. Workflow Automation
Journey mapping identifies the steps a customer takes from initial engagement to conversion (and beyond). Salesforce Marketing Cloud can automate many of these steps, such as email follow-ups, retargeting ads, or personalized content, making the customer journey more efficient.
Steps to Integrate Marketing Journey Mapping with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Initial Assessment: Use your existing journey map as a starting point to evaluate what Salesforce Marketing Cloud features can best address the needs and pain points identified.
- Sync Data Sources: Ensure that all relevant data from Salesforce is being utilized to update and refine your journey map to identify the persona and determine real-world pain points.
- Identify Touchpoints: Use Salesforce analytics to validate or add new touchpoints to your journey map, such as interactions through email campaigns, social media, customer service channels, or in-product interactions.
- Create Campaigns: Based on the insights gained from your journey map, develop targeted campaigns in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. These could range from welcome emails to retargeting campaigns.
- Automate Workflows: Use Salesforce’s automation features to operationalize the steps identified in your journey map. For example, automate email sequences based on actions that a customer takes at different touchpoints.
- Monitor and Optimize: Use Salesforce’s suite of reporting and analytics tools to monitor the success of your campaigns and continually update your journey map to reflect new insights. Selecting, solving for, and managing by the right metrics is critical.
- Iterate: The world of marketing is ever-changing, and customer behavior shifts over time. Regularly revisit your journey map and Salesforce Marketing Cloud strategies to ensure they evolve with your customers’ needs.
Summary
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful platform, but when integrated with a well crafted customer journey and the right data you can make magic happen. Journey mapping provides the detailed customer perspective that can shed light for the execution team responsible for implementing data-driven capabilities of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. In return you can craft more compelling, personalized customer experience.
Need help planning and mapping your journey or transforming your journey into insights and actionable Marketing Cloud powered journey? Contact me on LinkedIn and I’d be happy to help.