Lead Generation Through Marketing Automation: How Marketing Intelligence by Salesforce Can Help You Generate High-Quality Leads

A brand is only as strong as its marketing. That is a fact. And marketing is only as strong as its team. But what makes a strong marketing team? What qualities does a perfect marketer need? Creativity? Communication skills? Stylistic confidence? Research skills? Multimedia literacy? An understanding of channels? Of trends? Analytical skills? Tool expertise? Agility?

Any of these and preferably all of them together. Nothing is impossible, to quote one of the most famous marketing slogans.

By the way: according to the Global Marketing Report, creativity is the top skill! We will come back to that later.

So how can it be achieved? This strong marketing that makes brands successful? One answer is certain: by using digital solutions. And that is what we will focus on today: marketing automation in general and marketing intelligence by Salesforce in particular.

In this article:

1. The Art of Marketing
2. The People Behind the System
3. Marketing Intelligence by Salesforce
4. Benefits of Marketing Cloud Intelligence
5. Solutions and Creative Minds for Excellent Marketing
6. Marketing Automation Systems Compared – Download the White Paper Now!

Customer relationship management has succeeded from the customer’s point of view if every customer gets the feeling that they are of utmost importance. From the company’s point of view, however, this is only the case when customers can be classified intelligently. This is called lead generation. It is accomplished with the help of software – if you have a marketing automation system.

For the art of marketing to be in tune with the times, companies, both small and large, should integrate marketing automation into their business. As we are all aware, knowing people is not enough for success. Not only do you have to know the right people, but you also have to provide them with the right content at the right time. This is often quoted as a causal chain – and rightly so.

Benefits of Marketing Automation at a Glance

• Productivity increase in marketing, sales and service
• Lead generation
• Modern customer communication through manageable campaigns
• Personalised customer approach across all channels
• Valuable customer-specific data
• Measurable success

Thanks to marketing automation software, it is easier to build good customer relationships without having to invest a lot of time. It also makes it more convenient to properly maintain existing data and avoid duplicates. Designs and product offerings can be tailored individually based on user behaviour and personal preferences.

In addition, when it comes to discount offers, companies can meaningfully differentiate between various user groups in order to convince hesitant buyers or encourage big spenders to make further purchases.

The market for these systems has recently experienced a tremendous amount of growth because they benefit everyone who values and wants to cultivate customer relationships beyond personal conversations. No business can afford to ignore the potential that lies in personalised contact with customers and the identification of real leads.

For e-commerce vendors, whether in B2B or B2C, elaborate marketing automation is a particularly important tool for attracting customers.

Lead Generation Through Marketing Automation: The People Behind the System

Excellent! There are tools that do everything you need to reach potential customers with the right content at the right time – in an automated and optimised way. Yes, they exist. But every tool is only as good as the people that (know how to) use it.

The planning, creation and maintenance of content often still takes up too much time. And money. For strong marketing, marketers should ideally create the right content for every channel and set rules to determine who should receive what content when.

So much for an understanding of channels, communication skills, stylistic confidence, analytical skills and tool expertise. If just one of these qualities is missing, strong marketing will be difficult. Some common pitfalls here are, for example:

1. All too often, gut instinct is still the deciding factor on who receives what content when, as there is no comprehensive reporting across all channels
2. Although marketers can often analyse individual channels properly, they do not always have the necessary overview of all channels

Lead Generation Through Marketing Automation Is More Effective with Marketing Intelligence by Salesforce

One way to not only avoid these pitfalls, but to get rid of them altogether is to use marketing intelligence tools, such as Marketing Cloud Intelligence (formerly known as Datorama) by Salesforce.

As the name suggests, this tool is closely linked to Salesforce Marketing Cloud and constitutes the enhanced reporting of the Marketing Cloud solution. With the help of the integrated reporting tool, marketers can not only evaluate e-mail campaigns, but also connect social media channels and thereby analyse campaigns across all channels.

This way, they have the opportunity to aggregate and analyse data from various channels and use them to plan their next steps.

Standard connectors and a predefined data model can help your marketing team connect data quickly and easily. Cheers to more analytical skills and a better understanding of channels!

Marketing managers will no longer need to search for KPIs across all channels, but rather have them all readily available in a dashboard in one tool.

• How much revenue did my campaign generate?
• How many conversions did I achieve across all channels?
• And, most importantly: which channel was most successful for a certain campaign?

This is especially helpful when the time for reporting is limited. If we look back at the conglomeration of qualities and to-dos that make up a perfect marketing team, we are not kidding ourselves when it comes to the importance of the time factor.

All the more important to automate the automatable and make more room for creativity. This is not just marketing blah-blah. It is necessary, as these frightening figures prove:

• Marketing managers are only able to dedicate about 21 per cent of their workday to creative tasks
• That is only an hour and a half in an eight-hour workday
• 71 per cent of marketers say that too many different tools make their work more difficult rather than easier

This does not need to be the case. And honestly: that is not the way it should be. Automate processes. Save time. Make more room for creativity once again. Triple check.

Lead Generation Through Marketing Automation: What Other Benefits Does Marketing Cloud Intelligence Offer?

The previously mentioned standard connectors of Marketing Cloud Intelligence ensure that the tool is not just the way to go in a pure Salesforce landscape.

Besides Salesforce solutions, many other marketing automation tools such as Mailchimp, Marketo or HubSpot can also be integrated.

But especially if you are already using a Salesforce marketing cloud, Marketing Cloud Intelligence is a smart next step to optimise your marketing automation. The integration into the marketing cloud is seamless. The basic version »Intelligence Reports« is already integrated free of charge.

Your marketing team can use it to

• create reports
• access and edit predefined pivot tables
• automatically send reports directly via e-mail
• store reports on online platforms such as Google Drive, an FTP server or Google Cloud Storage

Surprise: this is just the tip of the iceberg. With »Intelligence Reports Advanced«, for example, the predefined dashboards that the basic version offers can be customsied and enhanced with additional widgets and graphics.

Your marketing team can use it to

• compile overview pages and only add the KPIs that are important to them
• link data from the marketing cloud to reports
• enrich reports with additional information (place of residence, language)
• connect social media accounts
• benefit from free apps such as Cross-Channel Marketing Insights
• track individual campaigns on different social media platforms
• start and stop campaigns directly from the marketing intelligence tool

The icing on the marketing cake is Salesforce’s artificial intelligence: Einstein. It offers suggestions such as how to adjust the budget for a certain campaign or how to stop campaigns entirely.

»Intelligence Reports Advanced« also offers many other features, making it a good way to further optimise reporting in marketing without having to directly implement a powerful tool.

Marketing teams that already use Salesforce Marketing Cloud do not even have to get used to a new interface, as they can access »Intelligence Reports Advanced« directly from the marketing cloud.

For marketing managers who not only want to link tracking data from e-mails and social media channels, but would also like to add data from other sources such as website or e-commerce to the data model, the stand-alone Marketing Cloud Intelligence platform is a suitable solution.

It has over 100 standard connectors to other systems as well as an expanded marketplace where even more apps are available, most of which can be used free of charge.

Lead Generation Through Marketing Automation: Solutions and Creative Minds for Excellent Marketing

A marketing automation tool can help automate recurring marketing tasks, but in order to check whether a campaign was actually successful, you need a tool that can display all the KPIs in aggregated form.

The data can also be summarised manually, but this is a very time-consuming process, which is why campaign reporting is usually lost in the mass of tasks. Yet this is exactly what is important: plan, do, check, act!

The solutions are there. So are creative marketers. Now it is time to give them the opportunity to turn strong ideas into successful marketing. In other words: give them more time for the top marketing skills.

Lead Generation Through Marketing Automation: Download the White Paper for Free Now!

Now you know how marketing automation systems and marketing intelligence tools make it possible to unleash the full potential of your marketing team.

For a concise overview of the benefits, possible applications and tips for selecting the right marketing automation solution, read the »Selecting Marketing Automation Systems – Providers and Systems Compared« white paper. Fill out the form now and receive a free copy in your inbox!