Salesforce Marketing Cloud brings together a number of tools to deploy cross-channel campaigns.
Depending on the specific campaign you would like to deploy, and your role in the team, you could be tasked with creating specific marketing assets such as emails, landing pages, images, or SMS templates, or more technical tasks such as writing SQL queries to handle advanced segmentation.
These actions might be performed by different teams like Marketing, IT (for technical integration) or external partners such as a Salesforce consulting partner or creative agency.
What’s the challenge you’re likely to face? For every campaign deployment, different teams must work to meet the given deadline.
Marketing Cloud includes a campaign dashboard accessible from the overview dashboard (home page), which brings together all the various marketing efforts related to a campaign, in one view.
Let’s see how Marketing Cloud campaigns can help coordinate your team’s actions, in 3 steps:
1. Create a Campaign in Marketing Cloud
From the Marketing Cloud overview dashboard (home page), click on the ‘Campaign’ section and create your campaign by entering its details (shown in the image below):
- Give your campaign a Name and Description. To make the name meaningful, I recommend you follow a naming convention; an example of one I’ve used previously is: Product_Campaign Topic_Channel_Initiative_Email Purpose_Version_Year_Month
- Select a color to be used when displayed on the Campaign Calendar
- Add a Deployment Date to make the campaign will appear on the correct day in the calendar
- Insert a Campaign Owner from your Marketing Cloud users. This should be the person in your team that will be able to modify all campaign settings.
- Give your campaign a unique Campaign code (to help you identify the campaign internally) and specific tags for reporting purposes (which I will cover next)
2. Use Tags to Categorize a Campaign
Marketing Cloud Campaign Tags are defined in Salesforce’s documentation as: “a way to categorize campaigns using multiple criteria. It can be used to categorize by any criteria, such as geography, marketing tactic and product line”.
I use tags based on the products I’m marketing, the target (ie. leads/prospects/customer/ex customer), customer lifecycle stage (acquisition, loyalty, retention), or milestone dates (eg. birthday).
Based on tags, you can filter your view of the campaign planning calendar to only display the campaigns associated with that tag, so they are worth adding.
You can define a tag based on your target (i.e leads, prospects, customer), a customer lifecycle (i.e acquisition, loyalty, retention) or moment of life (i.e birthday).
3. Associate a Message, Content or Marketing Activity with a Campaign
As Marketing Cloud gives you so many tools at your disposal, you could end up including several components in your campaign, ranging from emails, sms templates, landing pages, through to back-end automations or events (a type of entry source in Journey Builder).
To do so, click the Add to Campaign button to associate an asset among Email, Mobile, Web, Audience, Automation or Event.
Each asset requires people in your team with different skills. Centralization campaign information in a dashboard allows these different team members to have the same visibility, which:
- Facilitates the planning, execution, and reporting on different marketing activities, in one place.
- Allows managers to have an overview of campaign delivery with information like deployment date, campaign owner, campaign status etc.
Although the campaign dashboard facilitates communication across teams, there are some limitations you should be aware of.
One example is you cannot see which Journeys are associated with the campaign, as well as no ability for users to interact directly from one Marketing Cloud’s builders or studios, from a Business Unit. For example, a technical resource working on Automation Studio to write SQL queries/SSJS scripts cannot interact with a campaign manager working in Journey Builder to design a campaign).
I would love to see future developments of the campaign dashboard focus on collaboration, for example, embedding a Chatter component, or a plug-in-and-play integration with Slack/MS Teams that allow teams to better coordinate actions from Marketing Cloud faster (with notifications) and with other teams in the wider organization.