4 Ways to Nail Your Content Marketing with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Back in 2016, Salesforce found that content management platforms were the #1 tool for 1×1 marketing. At the time, content marketing was already a mainstay for 72% of marketing leaders.

In 2020, although tactics and technologies like AI and Account-based Marketing are gaining in importance, content marketing continues to remain a vital focal point for marketers, both in B2C and B2B sectors.

Clearly, content marketing matters. With great content – whether it’s transactional, promotional, educational, inspirational or something in between – you can:

• Provide useful information to your audience
• Guide readers towards actions that can benefit them
• Promote your brand in a non-intrusive way
• Build trust in and loyalty, and create long-term brand advocates

Here are 4 ways you can nail your content marketing with Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

1. Publish targeted, dynamic marketing content across multiple channels with CloudPages

Today’s customers expect companies to engage with them across channels in a dynamic manner. They want to see brand messages and content on one channel that are tailored based on their actions on another channel. But when 71% of customers use multiple channels for a single transaction, creating “dynamic” multi-channel content can be a vexing challenge. But not with SFMC and CloudPages.

CloudPages is an SFMC application to create, edit and publish targeted marketing content to customers across multiple channels:

• Landing pages
• MobilePush pages
• Microsites

With the CloudPages editor, you can build a collection of content and optimize it to build distinct mobile, social and web experiences. You can choose to publish this content immediately, or you can schedule it to publish later. But that’s not all. You can also monitor all your published content to gauge how it performs across each channel. This can show you the gaps in your content marketing strategy, and guide you towards making the improvements required to meet – and even exceed – customer expectations.

2. Manage all of your content and assets with Content Builder

With SFMC Content Builder, you can seamlessly consolidate, manage and track all your cross-channel content and assets (images, documents, etc.) from a single, centralized location. You can also create messages that deliver a consistent customer experience throughout their 1-to-1 journey.

Leverage Content Builder to easily handle assets with advanced search, categorization, and filtering capabilities. Assign tags, campaign associations, and owners to your content. You can also share and approve content throughout the enterprise to improve collaboration within your content marketing processes.

Content Builder allows you to build profiles of customer preferences, then use sophisticated algorithms to determine and automatically deliver the next best content, offer, or product for every individual across multiple channels. Then with its drag-and-drop smart content blocks, mobile-optimized templates and a user-friendly content editor, you can design and build intelligent content quickly. You can also keep track of your content (and content changes) as you build with the persistent preview function.

Content Builder is so versatile that you can use it to create all kinds of content that power your content marketing strategy including:

• Templates
• Content blocks
• Emails
• Mobile messages

For more sophisticated content, you can even create code snippets to save reusable bits of HTML, AMPscript, and Guide Template Language. If you’re in a hurry and need to publish new content, say, in an email, you can use duplicate content in Content Builder to copy the style or format of a previously created content asset.

Finally, with its content repository, you can:

• Leverage the global search and filtering tools with a new content properties framework
• Search and filter for the email of your choice
• Add tags and campaign associations to associate related content
• Make edits to all your content inside the application

3. Create content “intelligently” with Einstein Content Selection

SFMC’s built-in Einstein AI engine is a time-saving way to create tailored content based on individual user profiles or behaviors. So whether you’re a campaign manager, content designer or copywriter, Einstein’s powerful insights and recommendations enable you to create content that has the maximum impact on your audience.

With Einstein Content Selection (formerly known as Einstein Content Block), you can create content that is personalized for each customer when they open your messages. Once you supply Einstein with your content assets and customer information, it will automatically choose the right asset that’s most likely to engage customers and lead to a desired action (e.g. complete a purchase on your store).

With its no-code, drag-and-drop interface, you can automate the entire content personalization process so you don’t have to manually build different audience segments or write SQL queries. Instead, you can conditionally include relevant content that drives subscriber engagement. The tool gets “smarter” the more you use it. By continually analyzing click results to assess which assets are engaged by specific segments, it can inform your future content marketing strategy in the direction that has the greatest potential to increase conversions.

4. Deliver cross-channel personalized content experiences with Journey Builder

With Journey Builder in SFMC, you can build a single, holistic, multi-channel journey to bring all your marketing communications into one module. You can also guide your prospects and customers as they progress through their journey along many touchpoints including email, mobile and advertising with tailored content. In short, you can tell the story of each customer’s experience to serve them better with every initiative. Journey Builder is completely scalable so you can deliver both simple or complex personalized journeys with tailored content for hundreds to millions of individual customers.

You can also deliver tailored content across your “partner network” by building personalized customer journeys using Journey Builder and then leveraging the power of “distributed marketing”. Your partners can access your pre-built journeys that they can personalize and send to consumers. This allows you to deliver consistent and on-brand experiences across a distributed sales network. It also gives you greater control over what is being communicated, to whom, when, and how.

Nail your Content Marketing with SFMC and Email Uplers

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is one of the most complete digital marketing tools out there. Not only is it a comprehensive ESP, it’s also great for social media marketing, mobile marketing and digital advertising. Plus, you can leverage its plethora of features to nail your content marketing strategy. In this article, we showed you 4 such ways. Go forth and conquer!If you’re not sure how to get started with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, get in touch with our team today.