Salesforce Distributed Marketing Empowers the Local Marketer

Distributed Marketing, Salesforce's latest release, wants to help marketers add personalization to corporate-level marketing campaigns. The new product enables local, franchise, and partner marketers to add personalization and context to corporate marketing developed for national audiences.

Here's how it works: A national, corporate marketer will create an automation in Salesforce Marketing Cloud's Journey Builder. This pathway is generic, anonymous, and constructed for a mass audience. With Distributed Marketing, local marketers can hop into a Sales Cloud, a Service Cloud, or a Community Cloud edition of Salesforce to add the personalization and context required to catch the attention of the customer or prospect.

If you're an auto dealership, then you probably have a string of generic emails that you send to customers within your marketing list. With Distributed Marketing, local dealers can pop into Salesforce, find a customer with whom they've recently interacted, and tweak the campaign to include the customer's name, any recent interaction data, and localized offers.

"The research says that customers expect connected and personalized experiences," said Meghann York, Director of Product Marketing for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. "They want it to be obvious they're opening an email or on the website, that each of those touchpoints is connected and that they're known as themselves on each of these channels."

"For our customers who have partner networks, that becomes really difficult," York continued. "You might have corporate marketing handling national campaigns, but you have relationships being built outside of corporate marketing. Those owners or dealers or partners are communicating in a really personalized way but they don't have access to the branding or the corporate message. So it seems like the company is speaking in two different voices."

Compliance and Analytics

Salesforce is also touting Distributed Marketing as a way for national marketers to set expectations for local and partner marketers. By creating the initial campaign in Marketing Cloud and then distributing the campaign to local marketers, they gain better control over how the company's messaging is crafted. Sure, the local marketer can add personalization and make adjustments but the basic framework of how the company as a whole interacts with its customers is there.

"You can take a corporate marketing, branded email but leave places open for a dealer or partner to personalize it," said York. "This makes sure the corporate marketing message is up to date with the last local conversation that was had."

Secondly, the tool gives local marketers who may not be familiar with marketing software the ability to see the kinds of analytics enterprises gain by using email marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), and marketing automation tools in conjunction.

"At the partner level, advisors, franchise owners, and dealers can now see how each individual consumer is interacting with the messages they've delivered, while corporate marketers can see how the journeys they've developed for partners have performed in an aggregate view," according to a Salesforce statement promoting the new product. "For example, after sharing suggested journeys with all of its franchisees, a fast food franchise can look at engagement analytics to uncover that email marketing works better than digital advertising when offering a seasonal discount."

Distributed Marketing from Salesforce is available as Salesforce Lightning components in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or Community Cloud in limited pilot today, and will be generally available in February 2018. Pricing will be announced during general availability.

The Salesforce Experience

Salesforce has put vast amounts of time, effort, and resources into beefing up its marketing chops. In June, the company announced Einstein Account-Based Marketing (ABM), a business-to-business (B2B)-focused tool that seeks to automate the work done between sales and marketing teams to identify target accounts, marry data between sales and marketing databases, and execute campaigns to each account's primary decision maker. Think of ABM as a mutation of Einstein artificial intelligence (AI), CRM, and Pardot marketing automation—except everything is geared toward prospect groups rather than individual prospects.

The company also built Salesforce Lead Analytics for Facebook, a solution for lead generation that lets marketers tie data from Facebook, Instagram, and the Facebook Audience Network (Facebook's ad platform). The tool monitors details such as a customer's first interaction (filling out a lead form) to a first purchase through to subsequent resells and upsells. The Lead Analytics for Facebook dashboard shows marketers ad performance metrics (i.e., views and leads generated), ad-related sales performance (i.e., "Did someone convert subsequent to clicking on this ad?"), and AI-based lead scoring via Einstein.

Additionally, Salesforce wants marketers to have better access to groups of data from trusted partners. Hence, they've announced Salesforce Data Studio, a standalone product that falls under the Salesforce Marketing Cloud umbrella. The platform can be purchased solely for the purpose of selling and buying data. It can also be added to the Marketing Cloud for integration with Salesforce tools catered to email marketing, mobile marketing, digital advertising, and social content creation, among other use cases.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.