Five tips from SFMC pros: How to get started with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Five tips from SFMC pros: How to get started with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

We listened carefully to what real Heroes of Salesforce Marketing Cloud have to say.

It’s time to share a few tips from our YouTube series, ‘Heroes of Marketing Cloud, a collection of interviews with senior marketers keen to share their expertise with newcomers to the platform. Since the value of these lessons cannot be stressed enough, we collected some of the most helpful insights perfectly suitable for those of you just beginning to work with the platform.

Reach out to the SFMC community

Greg Gifford, Salesforce MVP, highly recommends tapping into SFMC communities such as #EmailGeeks’ Slack channel, Stackexchange, and technical blogs for technical tips and tricks. Greg also runs Gortington, a technical marketing blog. Here’s what he says: ”There are tons of hidden gem resource pages. Also, get into different groups and communities.”

Guilda Hilaire, a Salesforce community thought leader, also values the importance of community and continuous learning. In addition to recommending that you read various blogs on the subject, she also suggests joining Trailblazer communities. One key point she makes — which we fully endorse — is that you should never feel embarrassed about reaching out and asking for help. This community is incredibly supportive and open to any & all questions.

Never stop learning

Kaelan Moss, AKA ‘Minute Admin’, is a Learning and Development Consultant at Revolent Group. Kaelan encourages having a hunger for knowledge, suggesting that getting better in your niche is vital. After all, technology is constantly changing, and you need to keep up. He concludes by pointing out the simple truth, which is “The more you learn, the more you earn.”

Dror Meir, the CEO of Weku Solutions, suggests getting your hands dirty by challenging yourself to learn new things. In terms of Marketing Cloud, this means testing everything yourself, so you’ll understand better. According to Dror, factors that will bring success in your Salesforce career include being willing to learn something new and dealing with things by yourself, facing complex challenges. ”You learn the best by doing,” he says philosophically.

Dror warns of the need to be patient while not being afraid of challenges, since becoming a great Senior Solution Architect can take up several years.

Leverage non-digital strategies

During his interview, Michiel van Gaalen, Salesforce Application Architect & Marketing Cloud Consultant, shares more hands-on advice. He suggests leveraging the good old marketing techniques like RFM scoring. If you’re wondering how you do this in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, check out the article we wrote about it here.

He also mentions that if you’re an agency, be sure to educate your client about SFMC, so they know more about the system. Likewise, if you’re using an agency, then be sure to get to know their work better and learn more about the platform. He also mentions not to rely only on the metrics like opens and clicks that you’ll find in Google Analytics. Many businesses might not prioritize these metrics, needing to use completely different data points. For example, physical stores should care more about their in-store visitors than the open rate of their newsletters. There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to reporting on campaign success.

Danielle Laffey, Salesforce Insurance Consultant (and Salesforce MVP), offers great overall advice for marketers. She notes that customer engagement matters, creating personas and keeping them in mind while doing business. In addition, make sure you’re segmenting and personalizing your message accordingly.

Be kind to yourself

From our interview with Lucy Mazalon, SalesforceBen editor, we learned that it could often be overwhelming to follow up on everything that’s happening. So choose your focus and specialty from the moment you start. We would add that there are now plenty of resources to learn about Marketing Cloud and other Salesforce products. You might feel that you don’t keep up, but the reality is that no one knows everything about everything. What you have to do is find your focus, your niche, and area of interest, and start from there. It’s okay not to read every blog post or be subscribed to every newsletter.

Julien Coatelen, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Lead (and User Group leader), highlights the importance of being more human to your customers and your colleagues, especially when the concept of working environments has been redefined.

Simplify SFMC

The beauty of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is how much it can do. However, from time to time, it can get a little complex. As attested by many of our Heroes of Marketing Cloud: We never stop learning. With that in mind, we hope that this article (and our content in general) makes your SFMC education journey a little easier.

Keep an eye on our blog for many more SFMC tips that are being updated by our team that comprises SFMC experts. Also, if you’d like to learn more about how we make SFMC segmentation a lot easier, click here to arrange a live, no-obligation demo.

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