Salesforce Advertising Studio: Powering Data-Driven Advertising
What do you think of when you read the word “whassup”?
Today, the Budweiser “whassup” campaign is old enough to drink. Despite being over 22 years old, Budweiser’s advertising has left its mark on pop culture and the collective memories of a generation. When you read the word “whassup,” chances are good that you still think of Budweiser after all those years.
Advertising is powerful. The advertising industry is worth nearly $150 billion today, and companies have invested that much money into their ad campaigns because advertising works. The challenge facing today’s businesses is to carve out a niche in that $150 billion industry. Companies can’t simply throw money at the problem to brute force their way into advertising success—in the modern day, companies have to think smarter about their advertising.
The best way for companies to stay competitive and relevant is to use data-driven advertising, and one of the leading platforms for modern advertisers is Salesforce Advertising Studio and its family of products.
Salesforce Advertising Studio Overview
Salesforce Marketing Cloud began as ExactTarget in 2000. 13 years later, Salesforce acquired ExactTarget, rebranding it as Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Today, Salesforce Marketing Cloud creates marketing automation and analytics tools, including Advertising Studio.
Advertising Studio encompasses three different applications: Advertising Audience, Journey Builder, and Lead Capture. These distinct applications provide unique tools marketers can use to streamline their advertising process.
Advertising Studio helps companies engage with prospective companies via email marketing, social media coordination, and a 360 view of customer relationships. Managing these tools doesn’t have to be difficult. Rainmaker specializes in Salesforce integration to make your management of Salesforce’s Advertising Studio as seamless and painless as possible.
Advertising Audience
Salesforce Advertising Audience helps companies manage ad campaigns by targeting customers across multiple advertising channels.
A billboard on the side of the road targets every customer who drives by it. That means the budget of a billboard advertising moisturizing skin cream is reaching people who don’t use moisturizer, people who are happy with their current moisturizer, people who can’t afford moisturizer, and people who already buy your moisturizer, etc.
That isn’t an effective use of advertising dollars. Although billboards can be effective advertising channels for some applications, in the digital age, more and more focus should be on targeting individual customers, especially those in the market for your product and are not already converted customers.
Advertising Audience facilitates this approach to marketing in several ways:
- Creating lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences target new customers based on shared characteristics with your current customers. Since this new target looks like your current customer base, the term “lookalike audience” describes this approach. Lookalike audiences can look like your customer base in several ways: demographically, geographically, psychographically, etc.
Lookalike audiences are one of the powerful ways that Advertising Audience uses data to drive your advertising strategy. By using the data you already have about your current audience, lookalike audiences allow you to reach a much larger pool of prospective customers.
- Targeted messaging. You wouldn’t talk to a senior employee the same way you’d talk to an interviewing candidate. When you already work with somebody, your knowledge, expectations, rapport, and messaging differ completely from how you approach an applicant off the street. Similarly, how you engage with your current customers should look different than how you engage with targeted markets.
Advertising Audience accomplishes this by targeting engagement to existing customers with specific messaging. This gives you more control over how you reach people and what message you’re communicating to them.
- Removing redundancy. The key counterpoint to targeted messaging to existing customers is to eliminate existing customers from acquisition campaigns. Advertising Audience eliminates this overlap, so you aren’t stuck in a cycle of wasting advertising dollars targeting an audience you’ve already converted.
In short, Advertising Audience gives companies greater flexibility and control over managing their ad targeting. This helps you get the most value out of your advertising dollars and ultimately helps your company get the greatest return on your investment.
Journey Builder Advertising
Imagine planning a road trip across the country: highways, hotels, restaurants, attractions, etc. You wouldn’t pick your attractions before determining your destinations or book a hotel without knowing what date you’ll be there.
That approach wouldn’t make sense for planning a trip, and it doesn’t make sense to approach advertising without a comprehensive view of your journey.
Salesforce Journey Builder coordinates customer moments and cues across different platforms so you can provide consistent messaging across every ad channel. Journey Builder allows you to visually lay out your customer journeys and plan out your messaging at every step.
Journey Builder enables data-driven marketing automation by putting you in the driver’s seat by allowing you to define moments and journeys with any level of complexity that fits your needs.
Lead Capture
Communication between different ad channels is a frequent sore spot for modern marketers. Salesforce Lead Capture streamlines this process by importing first-party data from platforms like Facebook and Google into Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud.
This connects your sales and marketing departments so your sales team can leverage your marketing data to drive sales. Salesforce Lead Capture maps audience data from your marketing activities onto lead objects so your sales team can pursue actionable leads. This makes your sales process more streamlined and efficient.
Without Lead Capture, manually exporting leads from various ad platforms is a time-consuming process filled with opportunities for human error. Taking the guesswork out of capturing leads is essential to creating an expedited, well-functioning sales workflow.
Rainmaker Salesforce Managed Services
When Salesforce Advertising Studio is well-managed, these powerful tools improve your sales team’s efficiency and put your data to maximum value. But if the time you spend managing your Salesforce services replaces the time you would have spent managing your marketing without these tools, then Salesforce isn’t a help. It’s just an added expense.
These tools should make your job easier, not harder.
That’s why Rainmaker specializes in Salesforce managed services. By taking the guesswork out of managing your Salesforce applications, Rainmaker handles the technical integration so you can spend your time on the things that matter to you.
To learn how Rainmaker can revolutionize your marketing process, schedule a meeting today to take charge of your Salesforce integration.
