As brands look for ways to get closer to consumers, more than half of marketers, 75% of marketers are already rolling up their sleeves and experimenting with or fully implementing AI. Our most recent State of Marketing survey found that top Marketing AI use cases are related to automation, highlighting the importance of scaling up speed and effectiveness. 

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Let’s take a look at 9 ways using AI and agents as a digital assistant can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your campaigns. It’s time to say goodbye to the redundant manual campaign tasks marketers wish they didn’t have to do – and let AI and agents help make the most of your time.

Table of contents

1. Make better decisions with automated data analysis and insights
2. Increase engagement and conversions with agent-driven audience segmentation
3. Anticipate your customer’s needs with predictive analytics
4. Save time with agent-driven end-to-end campaign assistance
5. Streamline workflows with campaign automation
6. Clearly show campaign success with performance tracking and reporting 
7. See what works best with A/B testing
8. Grow revenue with lead scoring and nurturing
9. Improve communication with internal collaboration tools

1. Make better decisions with automated data analysis and insights

AI can analyse large volumes of campaign data, including customer behaviour, campaign performance metrics, and market trends. It can identify patterns, extract insights, detect correlations, and provide actionable recommendations to improve campaign strategies and targeting.

You’ll get a deeper understanding of customers and campaign performance, enabling you to make informed decisions and find success faster.

Many brands are turning to AI agents, such as Agentforce, which uses secure data from your CRM to help you with tasks in a conversational way. For example, you can ask questions in the flow of work, just like you speak with a co-worker. Unlike chatbots and copilots, agents’ ability to plan and reason enables them to take action on the data, making recommendations and even doing things like build digital storefronts, draft custom code, and create data visualisations. And when needed, the agent can seamlessly hand off to human employees with a summary of the interaction, an overview of the customer’s details, and recommendations for what to do next. (Back to top)

2. Increase engagement and conversions with agent-driven audience segmentation 

After analysing the customer data, your AI agent can then segment audiences based on demographics, behaviour, preferences, purchase history, and other important attributes. AI eliminates the manual effort required for segmenting audiences and targets specific customers with more relevant offers. 

When you’re able to personalise messaging for different segments, you’ll see campaigns succeed more. (Back to top)

3. Anticipate your customer’s needs with predictive analytics 

AI predictive models use historical data to forecast customer behaviour, such as likelihood to convert, churn, or engage with specific campaign elements. 

This helps you stay one step ahead to proactively address customer needs and budget resources effectively. (Back to top)

4. Save time with agent-driven end-to-end campaign assistance

Creating a full end-to-end campaign with unique content frequently can be one of the most time-consuming tasks for many marketers — but an AI agent can help with using the right data foundation. Agentforce Campaigns powered by natural language prompts (NLP) and grounded by real-time data in Data Cloud can generate not only a campaign brief and target audience segment, but it can also save time creating content — such as ad copy, email subject lines, and social media posts — that resonates with your customers. 

You can provide the finishing touches to make sure the content is in your voice and tone. It can also improve your content by analysing performance data, identifying high-performing elements, and suggesting improvements. (Back to top)

5. Streamline workflows with campaign automation

AI and agents can automate various aspects of campaign execution, such as scheduling and deploying ads, sending targeted emails, or managing social media posts. This reduces manual effort and ensures that your campaign runs on time. 

What can you do with the time freed up, thanks to AI and agents? Focus on strategy and innovative ideas, helping you build lasting customer relationships. (Back to top)

6. Clearly show campaign success with performance tracking and reporting 

According to our State of Marketing report, high-performing marketers are able to analyse data in real time, giving them an advantage when it comes to responding to and optimising campaign performance.

Your AI agent can automate the tracking and reporting of campaign performance metrics — in ways that anyone can understand. AI can generate real-time dashboards and visually-pleasing customised reports, giving you and your stakeholders a clear view of campaign performance and key metrics, without the need to do it all by hand. 

This helps you make data-driven decisions, optimise campaigns on-the-go, and demonstrate the value of your efforts to stakeholders. (Back to top)

7. See what works best with A/B testing 

AI can perform A/B tests on campaign elements, such as ad variations, landing pages, or email designs. It analyses performance data, identifies winning variations, and helps you continuously refine your strategies. (Back to top)

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8. Grow revenue with lead scoring and nurturing 

With AI, you can automate lead scoring by analysing lead data, behaviour, and engagement history. It assigns scores to leads based on their likelihood to convert and deliver personalised content to move prospects through the sales funnel. 

With AI’s lead scoring, your team can focus on the most promising leads and nurture relationships at scale. (Back to top)

9. Improve communication with internal collaboration tools

AI shines as your digital assistant when handling internal collaboration needs. You can use this technology to automate messaging in your department, as well as project management, task assignment, and file sharing. Teams can even apply workflow automations that schedule meetings, send reminders, or organise files — taking care of the little details so you can focus on campaign success.

AI is transforming campaign management by allowing teams to automate manual tasks, freeing marketers to work on more big-picture ideas. With AI as your ally, you can streamline your campaigns, see better results, and start focusing on your next successes. (Back to top)

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Most importantly, generative AI technology can save time on tedious processes, so you can provide better care for your customers and focus on big-picture strategies. Let’s dig into how generative AI can help your business do more, and learn more about large language models.

What are large language models?

Generative AI is powered by large machine learning models that are pre-trained with large amounts of data that get smarter over time. As a result, they can produce new and custom content such as audio, code, images, text, simulations, and video, depending on the data they can access and the prompts used. 

To put things into everyday context, large language models provide answers depending on how a question is phrased. For example, “what are LLMs and how can they help my business?” versus “what are LLMs and what value can they bring to my business?” will yield different results. Although the questions are similar, responses can vary by context.

Because these models use natural language processing and machine learning capabilities, LLMs respond in a human-like, coherent, and relatable way. As a result, they excel in tasks such as text translation, summarisation, and conversations. 

With generative AI helping businesses perform these tasks, trust has to be at the core of your efforts. To make sure you’re using this technology responsibly, you can invest in a customer relationship management platform that has an AI-focused trust layer — which anonymises data to protect customers’ privacy. 

A trust layer built into a generative AI landscape can address data security, privacy, and compliance requirements. But to meet high standards, you must also follow guidelines for responsible innovation to ensure that you’re using customer data in a safe, accurate, and ethical way.

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How do large language models work?

Advancements in computing infrastructure and AI continue to simplify how businesses integrate large language models into their AI landscape. While these models are trained on enormous amounts of public data, you can use prompt templates that require minimal coding to help LLMs deliver the right responses for your customers.

Furthermore, you can now create private LLMs trained on domain-specific datasets that reside in secure cloud environments. When a LLM is trained using industry data, such as for medical or pharmaceutical use, it provides responses that are relevant for that field. This way, the information the customer sees is accurate.   

Private LLMs reduce the risk of data exposure during training and before the models are deployed in production. You can improve prediction accuracy by training a model on noisy data, where random values are added in the dataset to mimic real world data before it’s cleaned. 

It’s also easier to maintain an individual’s data privacy using decentralised data sources that don’t have access to direct customer data. As data security and governance become a top priority, enterprise data platforms that feature a trust layer are becoming more important.

Businesses can also leverage how LLMs work with other kinds of AI. Imagine using traditional AI to predict what customers may plan to do next (based on data from past behaviour and trends), and then using a LLM to translate the prediction results into actions. 

For example, you can use generative AI to build personalised customer emails with offers, create marketing campaigns for a new product, summarise a service case, or write code to trigger actions such as customer recommendations. 

These large language models save time and money by streamlining manual processes, freeing up your employees for more enterprising work. 

Now that you’ve learned what generative AI can do, let’s see how you can use it to help your business. 

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4 ways generative AI can help your business

The sky’s the limit when it comes to ways you can use generative AI for your business. 

LLMs are great at recognising patterns and connecting data on their own. Predictive and traditional AI, on the other hand, can still require lots of human interaction to query data, identify patterns, and test assumptions.

Feeding from customer data in real time, generative AI can instantly translate complex data sets into easy-to-understand insights. This helps you and your employees have a clearer view of your customers, so you can take action based on up-to-date information.

Now let’s dive into some use cases where large language models can help your business.

Using sentiment analysis to gain context into post-purchase actions

Sentiment analysis can help marketing, sales, and service specialists understand the context of customer data for post-purchase actions. For example, you can use LLMs to segment customers based on their data, such as using poor reviews posted on your brand’s website. These insights can help you act immediately on negative feedback. A great marketing strategy would be sending a personalised message offering the customer a special deal for a future purchase. This can help improve brand loyalty, customer trust, retention, and personalisation.

Generating email text for marketing campaigns

Text generation can help marketers reduce the time that they spend preparing campaigns. Generative AI can produce recommendations, launch events, special offers, and customer engagement opportunities for your social media platforms. Then, you can polish up the text to make sure it’s in your company’s voice and tone. For example, you can use the copy produced by generative AI to deliver personalised emails informing customers about a new product launch. This helps to improve personalisation, giving your customers a more consistent experience.

Surfacing related cases for service agents 

Case summarisation can help service agents to quickly learn about customers and their previous interactions with your business. Cases provide customer information such as feedback, purchase history, issues, and resolutions. Generative AI can help with recommending similar customer cases, so an agent can quickly provide a variety of solutions. This results in faster resolutions, time and cost savings, and happier customers. 

Automating basic code generation

Automation helps developers and integration specialists generate code for basic but fundamental tasks. For example, you can use code written by large language models to trigger specific marketing automation tasks, such as sending offers and generating customer message templates. This way, the overall language is consistent, personalised for the customer, and in your company’s voice. Automation can save time and improve productivity, allowing developers to focus on tasks that require more attention and customisation.

When used as part of a hybrid AI strategy, large language models can complement various predictive capabilities and drastically improve productivity. While generative AI can do so much, this technology still needs human guidance to be most effective for businesses. Generative AI can surface the insights you need to make decisions that can move your business forward. 

Think of it like a smart, automated assistant for your company, handling time-consuming tasks so your employees can work on complex problem-solving. When you blend the power of generative AI with the knowledge and expertise your company can provide, you’ll be able to do more for your customers.

Urvi Shah, Staff Technical Writer, contributed to this blog post.

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Marketers often approach problems through an intuitive lens. Engineers, on the other hand, use an analytical, structured approach to make things work. When it comes to AI, engineers have been coding for years. This experience helps them understand how to effectively communicate with AI, including how to structure prompts and refine instructions to achieve desired outcomes. Recognising the benefits of the different mindsets at play and blending the elements can help marketers think about AI, data, and technical challenges in a new way. 

The good news is there’s a new wave of AI that will make marketing problem solving easier. Agentforce is a team of autonomous agents that work side-by-side with your employees to extend your workforce and serve your customers 24/7. These intelligent agents can include anything from answering simple questions to resolving complex issues — even multi-tasking. Agents turn AI from a reactive tool into a proactive assistant that takes the tedious work out of everyday marketing tasks. 

A large language model (LLM) alone relies on vast amounts of data to generate standard responses. Agents, on the other hand, require specific knowledge to address business-specific challenges. Agentforce works by giving teams tools, services, and agents that can tap into the power of LLMs and their connected business data to identify what work needs to be done, build a plan to complete the work, and then execute the plan, autonomously. Let’s take a deeper look. 

What you’ll learn

• Detailed agentic prompts, smarter marketing problem solving
• Creative problem-solving
• Visualising
• Improving and experimentation
• Systems thinking

Detailed agentic prompts, smarter marketing problem solving

Just as a skilled engineer provides precise instructions to achieve the desired outcome, the quality of agent outputs depends heavily on the quality of input. Agents require well-structured information and clear guidance. Instead of simply providing vast amounts of data, marketers should focus on providing relevant information and clear instructions. This involves transforming human-readable information into a format suitable for the agent, ensuring the agent has the necessary context to effectively execute tasks.

The key components of an effective prompt can include:

• Clear and concise objective: Clearly articulate the goal of the task. For example, instead of “Analyse the data,” specify “Analyse the data to identify the top 5 most profitable customer segments.”
• Contextual information: Provide relevant background information, such as data sources, constraints, and any specific requirements. For example, “Analyse customer purchase history from the past year, considering customer demographics and purchase frequency.”
• Desired output format: Specify the desired output format, such as a summary report, a list of recommendations, a data visualisation, or a specific action plan.
• Constraints and limitations: Define any constraints or limitations, such as budget restrictions, time constraints, or ethical considerations. For example, “Ensure all recommendations comply with data privacy regulations.”

Let’s use elements of the “Engineering Habits of Mind,” a taxonomy developed by the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering, to break down how marketers can better prompt agents to solve everyday marketing problems, and think about AI like an engineer. (Back to the top)

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1. Creative problem solving

Engineers are trained to clearly define the problem before they solve it. Rather than jumping straight into problem-solving, marketers should first ask, “What is the core challenge we’re trying to address?”

With this question at the centre, marketers can think like engineers by simplifying problems into smaller, manageable parts. This might include breaking down customer journeys into stages or jobs to be done, identifying pain points in each stage, and tackling them individually.

Engineering is often described as a team sport, meaning engineers often collaborate with other engineers to solve problems. Marketers can do the same by discussing problems and creative solutions with a cross-functional team of stakeholders. 

Solve with agents: Marketers can use Agentforce as a collaborator when solving problems by asking the agent questions about the underlying data. Marketers don’t need to be able to code or write queries to explore all of the rich data they have access to. Agents use plain, natural language to ask and answer questions. Marketers can start by asking an agent to describe the data, to summarise what’s missing, and to assess any trends in the data. Then, they can begin to explore more by asking follow up questions:

1. What are the poorest performing campaigns for the last quarter? For each campaign, provide specific reasons for its underperformance.
2. What segments saw the largest attrition in the last six months? For each segment, identify potential contributing factors to churn and quantify the impact of churn on revenue for each segment.

These prompts can ultimately help marketers understand what problems to solve. (Back to the top)

2. Visualising

Engineers are skilled at taking an abstract concept and bringing it to life. Many marketers may be adept at this too. They can dream of a campaign with a catchy email promotion, a witty tagline, or an engaging social media post and translate that vision into a concrete plan with measurable objectives. 

However, bringing these visions to life often involves numerous manual tasks and time-consuming processes. Agents simplify this process, helping marketers to more effectively translate their creative visions into successful realities with the right prompts.

Solve with agents: Agentforce helps by making campaigns incredibly easy to create, turning a vision into reality quickly and efficiently. Once marketers understand what problems to solve, they can access the agents ready-to-use skills to build an end-to-end campaign.

Using a AI prompts, marketers can generate campaign briefs, target audence segments, personalised content, and customer journeys based on user-defined goals and guidelines. Here’s how:

1. Campaign Creation: By using natural language prompts to describe campaign goals, the agent will ground that prompt in data from Data Cloud, as well as the company’s brand guidelines to generate a brief, target audience segment, email and SMS content, build a customer journey in Flow, and even provide a campaign summary. 

Let’s consider a marketer looking to build a comprehensive campaign plan for the launch of a new product. The marketer could use the prompt below to communicate to the agent exactly what they are looking for:

“Generate a comprehensive marketing campaign for the launch of our new summer product line, including target audience segmentation, creative briefs for social media, email, and display ads, and a proposed customer journey map. Consider our brand guidelines and budget constraints.”

2. Personalisation Decisioning: Agentforce can help marketers scale 1:1 personalisation by autonomously delivering the right content, products, and offers for each customer based on their profile.

Based on the detailed campaign the agent generated, the marketer then wants to target the identified target audience with a personalised social media messaging. This prompt to the agent could look like:

“Create five unique social media post ideas for our target audience of millennial parents, each with personalised messaging and relevant visuals. Ensure the content aligns with our brand voice and leverages current trends in parenting and family lifestyle.” (Back to the top)

3. Improving and experimentation

Engineers might be known as people who make things work, but they’d say they’re people who make things work better. An engineer’s work is never done; they’re constantly tinkering to build a better mousetrap. 

Marketers can take this to heart by continuously improving their work. Continuous improvement can take the form of testing campaigns using A/B content tests, trying out new webinar topics, delivering ads on a new social network, or cohort analysis on holdout and control groups. Best of all, marketers can use the data-driven insights to prove what works. 

Engineers often release an MVP, or minimally viable version of the product, to test the waters. Marketers can do this too, by launching smaller pilot campaigns before full-scale rollouts. This can save time and resources if things don’t go as planned. Teams can then learn from the outcomes and rapidly improve rather than waiting to launch a “perfect” campaign.

Solve with agents: One of the biggest benefits of assistive agents is freeing up a marketer’s  time by automating repetitive tasks that might involve a lot of manual work. Agents streamline workflows, making it easier to use existing marketing tools and adapt to new ones. For example, Agentforce can help marketers test their campaigns with an agent’s performance optimisation skill. Post-launch, the agent can optimise paid media by autonomously identifying and pausing low-performing ads, recommending optimisations, and adjusting metrics with auto-created goals. Marketers can even write a prompt to ask the agent: 

“Based on all of the campaign data for my company, what is the best way to create an A/B test to improve engagement?” 

Agents can look at all of the customer and campaign data in the data lake, and devise an A/B test to test the hypothesis. Best of all, agents are not just for analysing, but they can take action to execute the A/B tests quickly and efficiently. (Back to the top)

4. Systems thinking

Engineers see projects as interconnected systems. A big challenge marketers face is understanding just how everything is connected. Customers want a smooth experience, no matter how they choose to connect with a business. In fact, customers’ number one frustration is a disconnected experience. Yet, only 31% of marketers are fully satisfied with their ability to unify customer data sources.

Agentforce helps marketers overcome the fragmentation that often exists between departments and systems. Breaking down data silos is arguably the most important aspect of agents, a capability that previous AI tools couldn’t address. Agents serve as a central point of integration, pulling in customer data from various sources and ensuring a consistent brand experience across all touchpoints. Their skillsets allow customers to interact with a brand as one entity, rather than siloed departments lacking holistic data. 

Marketers can think like engineers by recognising the interdependencies in the entire customer lifecycle, like how the whitepaper on the website can influence the sales funnel and the marketing onboarding campaigns. 

Solve with agents: Agentforce can help by following a lead from the initial lead capture through to intent, purchase, and post-sales success. Marketers can ask agents questions to analyse and summarise the lifecycles of all of their customers, to see where channels might drop off or leads fall out of the funnel. These questions could include:

1. What is the typical customer journey across all touchpoints? 
2. What are the bottlenecks or areas where customer engagement significantly declines?
3. Visualise this data and provide insights into potential causes for these drop-offs.

These insights can be used to test or adapt new campaigns.

For example, an agent can autonomously greet visitors and offer to assist them with product or service recommendations, or suggest relevant resources to learn more. This process could include capturing the contact information needed to make the recommendations more tailored, registering the customer for a webinar, providing a relevant gated asset, or scheduling a follow up appointment with a sales rep.

From the information collected, agents can then power intelligent lead nurture journeys by mapping contact information, evaluating leads based on predefined scoring models, routing qualified leads to the appropriate systems and individuals, and orchestrating tailored follow-up sequences. They can also organise flow-driven personalised experiences based on a lead’s behaviour and past interactions with the brand. (Back to the top)

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The mindset shift to thinking like an engineer for marketers can refresh your approach to using AI and Agentforce. Once you reframe your approach, you find yourself back at the beginning, recognising that marketing problem solving will always be important. As a marketer, you can improve your agentic prompts and practice interacting with an agent using consumer tools. You’ll soon start to recognise the difference between effective and poor prompts and how you can improve them with more specifics. Your work as a marketer is never done, but with Agentforce, it only gets easier.  

The post Want To Improve Your Marketing Problem Solving? Think Like an Engineer appeared first on Salesforce.

Agentforce allows marketers to forge deeper relationships, from personalised conversations to proactive retention strategies. Let’s explore five use cases that you could build an agent to solve.

1. Automate personalised, two-way conversations on WhatsApp

Interacting 1:1 with every customer who might respond to a promotional campaign on WhatsApp is a tall order for any marketing team. Historically, there’s been limited chat bot capabilities that typically use only keywords, or no ability to respond to an WhatsApp message at all. But with Agentforce, you can connect a customer-facing, autonomous agent that acts like a personal concierge, right from the WhatsApp thread itself. 

Imagine a customer receiving an exclusive offer for a product they’ve shown interest in. They reply with a question, and an agent instantly responds with tailored product recommendations, current offers, or even information on complementary products. If a customer decides to make a purchase, the agent can guide customers through the entire checkout process, from completing the transaction to sending order status and updates. If they need additional help, the agent smoothly transfers the conversation to a human service rep, maintaining continuity.

Why it matters: This approach not only boosts conversions by keeping customers engaged, but it also builds satisfaction and loyalty through timely, relevant responses. By reducing support team load, Agentforce helps deliver a consistent brand experience that feels truly personal and seamless.

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2. Create personalised agendas for event attendees

Events are an invaluable tool for marketers to foster connections and create value for customers. However, ensuring each attendee finds the sessions and resources most relevant to them can be challenging. Trusting the attendees can find the sessions most relevant to them with a self-guided experience can result in more opportunities to abandon registration. Agentforce for Marketing can help you greet visitors on your event website, scaling the ability to provide 1:1 assistance to every visitor. 

The autonomous agent can recommend sessions based on interests and help attendees build personalised agendas. By analysing past attendance and engagement data, the agent can curate an agenda that aligns with each attendee’s preferences and priorities, from keynotes to breakout sessions. For repeat attendees, the agent can even suggest new content based on past sessions and complete registration with their customised agenda.

Why it matters: Personalised agendas help create a memorable event experience that leads to attendee satisfaction and loyalty. By making the registration journey seamless and reducing bounce rates, Agentforce supports stronger connections and builds long-term interest in your events.

3. Capture and qualify leads effortlessly on your website

When visitors land on your website, use Agentforce to welcome them with tailored product or service recommendations, offer exclusive content, and capture contact information. Depending on visitor behaviour, the agent can suggest gated assets such as case studies, demo videos, or even register someone for an event or webinar. This helps avoid self-guided experiences for the visitor, often resulting in opportunities to bounce before becoming a lead or talking to a sales rep.

For highly engaged prospects, the agent can schedule follow-up meetings with sales reps, ensuring they receive immediate value without friction. This proactive, conversational approach nurtures leads by guiding them to the right solutions based on their needs and interests.

Why it matters: Automated lead capture accelerates qualification and boosts conversions. By keeping visitors engaged and moving seamlessly through the pipeline, Agentforce for Marketing nurtures leads naturally, resulting in higher-quality opportunities, and, ultimately, loyal customers.

4. Improve customer journeys with intelligent reprioritisation

Keeping your audience engaged while respecting their communication preferences can be a balancing act. Before customers reach their communication limit, reassign them to the most relevant journey based on both their interests and your business goals. By reprioritising messaging, marketers can ensure high-value content is delivered at the right time, without overwhelming customers. For example, if a customer is close to their communications cap, use Agentforce for Marketing  to prioritise an upcoming product announcement or a VIP event invitation, aligning customer interests with timely opportunities for engagement.

Why it matters: Intelligent reprioritisation leads to higher conversion rates, lower unsubscribe rates, and stronger customer relationships. By adapting dynamically to customer behaviour, Agentforce helps ensure every interaction is relevant so customers stay engaged with your brand without feeling overwhelmed.

5. Reduce churn with proactive, personalised promotions

Retaining customers is just as important as acquiring new ones, especially when they may be at risk of churning. Agents can identify these at-risk customers by analysing specified churn indicators — such as low engagement or decreased purchase frequency — and autonomously send a tailored promotion based on their profile and guardrails set by the marketer.

For example, if a customer’s churn score nears a threshold, reach out with an exclusive loyalty discount or renewal incentive that guides them through the redemption process. By reaching out proactively, agents helps identify where to rekindle interest and engagement before the customer decides to leave.

Why it matters: Proactive AI-powered retention strategies boost customer lifetime value, reduce churn, and foster brand loyalty. With minimal manual effort, Agentforce helps marketers stay connected to customers who might otherwise drift away.

Agentforce is more than an automation or co-pilot tool — it’s an essential partner that empowers you to deliver the seamless, personalised experiences your customers expect. By building agents to implement these five use cases, marketers can increase customer engagement, increase conversions, and build deeper, lasting relationships.

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At this year’s Dreamforce, Salesforce launched Agentforce, a set of tools to create and customise agents, as well as the collection of agents we provide across the Customer 360.  Agentforce Campaigns is a part of this launch, and I’m already being asked by customers how they can take advantage of it. According to Salesforce’s 9th State of Marketing Report, 71% of marketers plan to use both generative and predictive AI within the next 18 months.

In this blog, I will introduce you to how marketing agents, such as those in Agentforce, can help you win customers while also making your internal teams more productive and cohesive.

How humans and marketing agents can be successful together

If you’re new to working with AI, it’s worth taking a moment to explain what a marketing agent is, and on the mindset shift these features will bring to your approach to campaign delivery.

Marketing agents form part of a broader suite of AI virtual assistants. These assistants work with humans to use data to build and execute plans. They analyse and understand the full context of what a human is asking, then reason through decisions on the next steps. In the marketing space, these tasks may include generating content, optimising campaigns, analysing results, and more.

Salesforce has developed AI agents to act as partners to humans within the customer experience. Our agents help you in the flow of work by taking on time-consuming tasks, allowing you to focus on high-value activities.

For marketers, this means spending less time trying to source your data and more time acting on it. It means less time creating multiple versions of content and more time strategising ways to be more targeted and personalised.

My challenge to you is to change your thinking from, “How can these agents help me deliver business as usual more efficiently?” to “How can these agents radically change the way I deliver an exceptional customer experience?”

This can be a hard mindset for an entire organisation to embrace, but it’s very important to get the best results over the long term.

How marketing agents streamline the creation process

Let’s dive into features and explore how Agentforce Campaigns can help you build, launch, and track campaigns.

1. Stay on track with intelligent recommendations

Marketing Cloud’s AI functionality, Einstein, already monitors your data and tracks progress against your goals, then provides you with contextual recommendations for where you should focus to better achieve those goals. Agentforce Campaigns takes this a step further by turning that static recommendation into an action.

This might be adjusting an existing audience or campaign, or building an entirely new campaign you hadn’t considered before.

2. Build your campaign brief in a flash

When Einstein recommends that you build a new campaign, you need to start with a brief – just like you would for any other campaign. Marketing agents can now build this brief for you, with all the context of your organisation’s goals and marketing guidelines.

Marketers can prompt Agentforce Campaigns in simple language to create a brief in seconds, which they can then refine until it meets their needs. Plus, the brief is already embedded in Salesforce, making it easy to share with stakeholders for approval.

3. Content that’s contextual to your business

With your brief approved, it’s time to create some content. Marketing agents can take that next step by generating emails and landing pages based on your brief and the brand guidelines pre-configured on the platform.

For example, Marketing Cloud’s Agentforce Campaigns will generate subject lines, body copy and calls to action across email and landing pages, all within a branded template. You can then refine the content using natural language prompts to ensure it fits tone of voice and campaign strategy.

If you’re not the content expert in your organisation, Agentforce Campaigns can help you and your creative team. As a specialised team, they may be better placed to shape the agent’s pre-configured guidelines, and the final outputs.

4. Generate an audience like a data scientist

You might not be an SQL expert, but you definitely know the kinds of customers you want to target. Marketing agents allow everyone to build an audience.

With Agentforce Campaigns you can use natural language prompts to describe the target audience you want, and the agent will translate that into the appropriate segment attributes. 

5. Activate at scale in a journey 

Successful campaigns are activated through intelligent, multi-channel journeys where personalisation is integrated into every step. Marketing agents help you activate and scale your campaign automatically by building a full journey flow from the original brief.

Using a natural language prompt, Campaign Agent will configure a draft journey with all your campaign content that you can further refine, approve, and activate.

6. You are no longer limited by your content

Marketers have been constrained by how many content variations they could produce within a given timeframe or budget. Marketing agents can now generate multiple content versions in seconds.

Take advantage of this capability by strategically planning for personalised content in your brief with Agentforce Campaigns doing the heavy lifting. For example, it can automatically generate different content for high-value customers versus those who are new to the brand versus more seasoned fans.

7. Explore segments you never had time for before

Many organisations rely on specialised data science teams for segment creation. These teams are often at capacity, limiting the number of segments a marketer can request. With marketing agents, you can build segments on your own, allowing you to explore more nuanced audiences.

For example, you can use Agentforce Campaigns to build separate churn segments based on engagement scores, age, location, or past purchase behaviour with a simple natural language prompt.

8. Easily foster a culture of testing and learning

Testing often falls low on a marketer’s priority list due to time constraints. Marketing agents automate the build of your journey flow, making it easier to embed testing into your campaigns.

This is a game-changer as you can now incorporate continuous testing and learning into every campaign without significantly increasing time spent. 

Any unreleased services or features referenced here are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.

Get started with marketing agents

Agentforce Campaigns is generally available in Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions for small businesses. Learn more about how the technology works.

Get the details

The post 8 Ways Marketing Agents Can Help You Build, Launch, and Track Campaigns Like Never Before appeared first on Salesforce.

As a promoter, affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate passive income online. Once you sign up for a participating platform, you’ll get a unique affiliate link. You can then embed this in your website, blogs, emails, or social media. When a consumer clicks that link and buys a business’s products, you’ll receive a percentage of the sale. 

In return for providing a cut of the profits, the participating business benefits from cost-effective marketing, helping them attract more customers and generate more sales. Think of it as a mutually-beneficial partnership. It’s not surprising the global affiliate marketing industry is currently valued at $16 billion.

Affiliate marketing for beginners

If you’re just getting started with affiliate marketing for the first time, you’re likely wondering how the process works. Let’s break it down.

1. The aspiring affiliate marketer finds an affiliate program that interests them. After inspecting the types of products they’ll be selling, the commissions on offer, and the payment structure, they sign up and await approval confirmation.
2. Once they’re accepted into the partner program, they’ll receive custom affiliate links for different products. These links are entirely unique to the marketer, meaning the business can track which customer purchase came from which promotion.
3. The marketer utilises different channels to promote products to their customers. They might include an affiliate link in a blog, place it in a podcast description, or add it to their social media along with a video explaining the benefits of the product. Note that the marketer needs to tell the audience that they’re promoting a brand via an affiliate link.
4. A consumer sees the marketer’s promotion, clicks the link, and buys from the business website. As the affiliate link contains a tracking ID, the merchant business can see when the marketer has referred a customer to them. 
5. After the affiliate earns enough commissions, they can withdraw the funds. Depending on the affiliate model, the business may offer the money directly or provide a different form of reward, such as a voucher. 

This is the standard type of affiliate marketing program. Common affiliate sites that offer this include Amazon, Etsy, and the eBay partner network. 

On the flip side, brands may also approach content creators directly to become affiliate marketers — usually with a larger commission fee attached. This is a common tactic for brands to form affiliate partnerships with influencers, as well as popular websites that receive a lot of traffic.

What happens if the consumer doesn’t buy the product immediately?

Affiliate marketers often worry they won’t receive a commission if the customer doesn’t click the link and buy right away. Fortunately, this isn’t the case.

When a consumer clicks an affiliate link, a cookie (small file) is stored on their device. That way, even if the customer abandons the page and returns to the site later via a Google search, it still counts as the marketer’s referral because they initially sparked interest in the product. 

What are the different types of affiliate marketing?

To further explain the concept of affiliate marketing, let’s break down three major types you should know about:  unattached, related, and involved. 

Unattached affiliate marketing

With unattached affiliate marketing, the marketer promotes a business’s products without having any expertise or personal connection to the niche. They’re simply relaying information without having any relation to that product. This is the most common type for paid advertising. 

Related affiliate marketing

In this type, the related affiliate marketer promotes products that align with their audience’s preferences and interests. An affiliate doesn’t necessarily use the products, but the products they promote are related to the theme of their content. For example, a cleaning YouTuber receives a commission for promoting a new detergent. 

Involved affiliate marketing

With this type, the involved affiliate marketer promotes products they’ve used and believe in. For instance, a dedicated tech review site that tests products and promotes the best ones earning a commission in the process. 

Which type of affiliate marketing should I choose?

Every type of affiliate marketing has its own considerations, benefits, cons, and use cases. Let’s break it down.

What are the benefits of affiliate marketing?

Is affiliate marketing right for you? Here are four compelling benefits to consider. 

1. Passive income 

Once you begin the initial work to grow your marketing channel and choose one or more affiliate partners, you’re all set. Your unique links will open passive affiliate income streams without you having to do anything else. 

2. Low investment

With affiliate marketing, you don’t need to buy or own any of the products you’re selling online, meaning the initial affiliate marketing spend is quite low. All you need is a marketing channel. 

3. Flexibility

The low initial investment allows you to switch affiliate programs without incurring extra costs. You can experiment with different products to find out which gain the most traction. As affiliate marketing is a passive form of income, you can also work it around your regular job. 

4. Scalability

One of the most enticing parts about affiliate marketing is that you can commit as much or as little time to it as you want. Test the waters by investing a few hours a week. If you find it’s a good source of income, you can quickly scale by joining more affiliate programs and promoting more products.

How to get started with affiliate marketing?

Building an affiliate network isn’t necessarily complex. However, the more time you invest in the beginning, the better your chance of making serious cash. Let’s dive into our seven steps to successful affiliate marketing. 

Step 1: Choose an affiliate niche

You don’t have to decide on a single affiliate marketing product, but carving out a niche will often help you land more commissions. 

Picture it this way. If you were to trust an affiliate link for a new smartphone, would you be more likely to trust a credible tech review site or a car blog? The more your audience trusts your recommendations, the more affiliate marketing conversions you’ll get. 

How do you choose a niche? Here are a few considerations to think about:

• Is the niche going to make me any money? Choosing a niche that isn’t very popular might seem like a good idea, but this could mean consumers won’t be interested in the products you’re promoting. Opt for a niche that strikes the balance between popularity and oversaturation.
• Does the niche genuinely interest you? To really connect with consumers, you’ll need to have a genuine passion for your speciality. You don’t have to use the products you promote, but you do need to prove you’re an expert on your topic. Choose something that engages you.
• Am I experienced enough in this area? You don’t have to be an expert in your niche right now, but it helps to have some background knowledge of your sector prior to getting started.

Choosing a niche with good financial prospects is one thing, but selecting a speciality that interests and engages you is equally important. Affiliate marketing takes time. If you choose a niche that you’re not passionate about, you’ll risk losing interest, plus your audience will be less likely to trust you.

Step 2: Decide on your marketing channels

With your niche secured, decide on your marketing channels to promote other businesses’ products.

This may already be obvious to you. You may already have a well-established website, blog, or social media profile. However, if you’re starting from scratch, here are a few potential options:

• Create an informative blog related to your niche: A blog related to your specialism is one of the most effective strategies to build a loyal following. For instance, posting about the latest news in the health sector will draw a specific audience that is interested in that field.
• Create videos for social media platforms: You probably already know that social media is the new way to connect with a large audience. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok, choose a channel best suited to your niche and skill set, then post informative content to grow your user base.
• Build a product review site: Product review sites are one of the easiest ways to get started with involved affiliate marketing. Simply buy a product, review it on your blog, and link to it on your preferred affiliate program.

Again, the best practice is to choose a marketing channel that you know, are interested in, and are related to your niche. 

Step 3: Choose your affiliate program

Next, you should choose an affiliate marketing program that aligns with your niche. While a broad platform like Amazon’s affiliate program is never a bad option for beginners, there are more niche programs that may appeal more to your target audience. Here are some things to consider:

• Does the affiliate tie in to my speciality? You aren’t going to have much success promoting a health and wellness brand if you’re focused on the tech space. Choose an affiliate program that aligns with your niche.
• Do the products align with my audience’s needs? You should aim to find a business with products that can be genuinely useful to your audience. This will help you build trust and improve affiliate sales.
• Does this affiliate offer reasonable commission rates? Make sure your chosen affiliate program offers a commission you’re happy with. But remember that high pay rates aren’t everything. A low-commission product category that’s in demand may make you more money with affiliate marketing in the long run. 

One great option is to start with brands you know and check if they have an affiliate program. For example, if you’re running a beauty blog, which beauty brands do you love? Over 80% of brands use affiliate marketing, so your odds of finding a program offered by a business you trust are high. 

Step 4: Create valuable content

Now, for the hard part. There are millions of blogs and social media channels online. To stand out, you need to create high-quality content that draws your audience in and makes them want to stick around.

Whatever your marketing channel, you must prioritise providing value to the audience. What are they looking for? How can you offer something unique? What will make consumers keep coming back? Here are some ideas to consider for excellent content creation. 

• Conduct original research.
• Collaborate with experts to offer insights. 
• Buy products and test them to provide an honest review. 
• Incorporate engaging visuals and infographics. 
• Be conversational and authentic.
• Answer common questions your audience might be having. 
• Back up your information with data. 
• Incorporate storytelling into your content. 
• Provide more up-to-date information than competitors. 
• Create lead magnets (like eBooks and PDFs). 

Ultimately, your affiliate marketing efforts will only scale if you can bring more traffic to your marketing channel. It’s important to invest the time to create content that facilitates that. 

This could range from developing relationships with brands and influencers to email newsletter collaborations. For example, content marketers who have an email list might run cross-collaboration email campaigns if they share similar audiences. To streamline this, you could also use email outreach software to automate the process.

If you are a YouTube content creator, it is also quite common to organise talks, interviews, and discussions with another YouTuber who has a similar target audience to increase your YouTube subscribers on both YouTube channels. This is especially common in the personal finance space.

Step 5: Build an audience

Once you’ve started creating exceptional content, there’s still work to do. You need to start driving traffic to your channel through digital marketing so people can find the material you’re producing. 

There are a few ways to achieve this. You can use search engine optimisation (SEO) to target specific keywords and help users find your content organically. On the flip side, you can also opt for paid advertising to bring website traffic to your content faster, though be wary — this can get expensive. 

Once you have an initial following, you’ll need to build trust with your audience to keep them returning to your site. An email list for fans will let you create authentic connections with consumers. You can also communicate directly with followers on social media platforms or in blog content.

Ultimately, the goal here is to build an audience that trusts you and respects your credibility. Once you’ve done that, gaining passive income from affiliate marketing becomes a whole lot easier. 

Step 6: Optimise your link placements

Once you’ve cemented a following, you can begin to include affiliate links. Here are some tips.

• Include your links only when relevant. Don’t force them in, as this looks dishonest. 
• Place your links in positions that are easy to see. Use tables and buttons that draw the eye.
• Remember to tell your followers you’re promoting a brand as an affiliate. Failing to disclose this is a compliance breach.

Step 7: Monitor your progress

You’re all set. The last thing to do is to track your progress as you go. Note which products and affiliate programs drive the most success. You can use this information to improve and refine your approach over time. 

What are the most popular niches for affiliate marketing?

While it’s always best to choose a niche based on your own interests, some sectors have been historically more lucrative than others. Let’s take a look at a few top performers in 2024. 

Technology

Tech is a seriously profitable niche because it never stops evolving. Promoting gadgets and Software as a Service (SaaS) products to a tech-focused audience will always be a lucrative choice for those who can prove their credibility. Just make sure the field interests you, as your audience will be able to tell if you lack knowledge in the niche. 

Example: Tom’s Hardware

Image source: Tom’s Hardware

Tech site Tom’s Hardware integrates affiliate links into its reviews. If a customer reads the product review and buys the product through the link, the site earns a commission on every sale. Incidentally, they even provide affiliate links for products they’ve deemed poor, showing you don’t have to love a product to promote it.

Image source: Tom’s Hardware

Personal finance

Promoting financial products offers a lucrative opportunity for affiliate marketers. However, you need to prove your authenticity and transparency to consumers to build trust in this field.

Example: Money Crashers

Image source: Money Crashers

Money Crashers posts educational finance content helping users ‘turn the tables on money.’ As part of this online business model, they use affiliate marketing to generate commissions. See how they provide links to ‘open an account’ with leading banks on their blog about the best rewards checking accounts.

Image source: Money Crashers

Health and fitness

The sheer number of health and wellness products available for affiliate marketing makes this a lucrative niche. As with tech, this field is always growing and evolving as more people make fitness a priority.

Example: Roo’s Home

Image source: Instagram

Health, wellness, and beauty influencer ‘@homewithroo’ earns commissions through affiliates by providing her followers with recommendations for various products. For instance, in this Instagram post, she advertises the Laura Mercier Translucent Powder and Blush on Amazon.

Image source: Instagram

You’ll notice the influencer speaks conversationally to her followers and offers actionable tips. All of this helps to build trust, leading to higher conversion rates.

Travel and adventure

This is a particularly good niche for involved affiliate marketing. Who doesn’t like the sound of travelling the world while testing out different products and earning commission? 

Example: Travel Tom Tom

Image source: Travel Tom Tom

For instance, some affiliate websites, like Travel Tom, review local and electronic SIM card options worldwide to provide information to travellers. On reviews of different SIMs, he provides affiliate links to a partner site, known as SimOptions. When a consumer purchases their eSIM from that site, he makes a commission on the sale.

Image source: Travel Tom Tom

Summing up

An affiliate campaign is one of the most effective ways to earn passive income online. With a commitment to your niche, an understanding of your audience, and a small amount of investment, you can earn consistent cash with little risk. 

The first step to becoming an affiliate marketer is creating a marketing channel that customers want to engage with. Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you segment your audience, learn what they need, and create tailored content that builds trust and drives web traffic to your chosen marketing channel. 

Our CRM platform will keep your customer data in one place, making connecting with your audience easier and providing them with value at every touchpoint. 

View the Marketing Cloud demo to learn how Salesforce can make your affiliate marketing journey a success. Or browse the full range of Salesforce products today. 

FAQs

Browse our top affiliate marketing tips and frequently asked questions below. 

Do I need a website or blog to do affiliate marketing?

Not at all. A website is an excellent affiliate marketing choice but only one of many options. You can use social media, email marketing, or a YouTube channel instead.

How do I choose a niche for affiliate marketing?

Choose a niche that is likely to be profitable but also one that interests you. Ultimately, you’ll need to have a passion for your specialty for your audience to buy in. 

Can I join multiple affiliate programs?

Yes. You can join as many affiliate programs as you like. This can increase your earning potential. Just be sure they align with your audience and niche. 

Are there any risks associated with affiliate marketing?

If you’re relying on affiliate marketing as your sole source of income, you may have good and bad months for revenue. In addition, there’s the possibility of noncompliance if you fail to disclose you’re an affiliate of a brand. 

How do affiliate marketers get paid?

Many affiliate marketing platforms offer a pay-per-sale structure (a percentage of the final sale). Some might offer a pay-per-click (a flat fee for every click) or pay-per-lead (payment for every lead generated) structure instead.

The post What is Affiliate Marketing and How to Get Started? appeared first on Salesforce.

Growing a business would be easy if you could place a product on a supermarket shelf and watch as it generated consistent sales for eternity. But as you know, it’s rarely that straightforward.

Products come and go. Inventions that were once the bee’s knees grow outdated and get replaced by new technological advancements and hungry competitors. The same market trends and consumer preferences that made a product viral overnight can also cause its rapid decline. 

The product life cycle lets companies make sense of this journey. They can then use this knowledge to make more informed decisions, tailor their strategies, invest in the right areas, and decide on the next best steps.

What are the different stages of the product life cycle?

The product lifecycle tracks the trajectory of most products, and consists of six stages: development, introduction, growth, maturity, saturation, and decline.

Understanding these stages helps you decide on the best strategy for your product at any given point in time.

Let’s break down each stage one by one. Along the way, I’ll discuss key considerations, risks, and best practices.

1. Development stage

Every product starts with an idea that needs to be fleshed out. For most modern businesses, this is the process of research and development (R&D). It involves determining which product you want to create based on market research and your understanding of your target market. 

There are several steps involved when taking a product from ideation to launch-ready. While it’s always a unique journey for every business, it generally looks something like this.

The R&D stage can be a long, bumpy road because the steps won’t necessarily be linear. Testing, refining, and iterating can take weeks, months, or even years, depending on your research and the complexity of your product. 

Customer feedback is key during your product’s development phase, but you also need to set a timeline, especially since you won’t be driving revenue at this stage.

2. Introduction stage

Once you have a final product, it’s time to launch it in the market. This is the ‘introduction’ stage, which is characterised by low sales volume, limited product adoption, and slowly increasing demand. At this point, marketing becomes your best friend. You need to build brand awareness and introduce your product to consumers. 

Your strategy will differ depending on the market. If competition is low at this stage, you should focus on getting consumers to understand your product and how it meets their needs. If you’re already entering a market with established competition, you’ll need to invest a lot of time in product differentiation to get consumers to switch from their existing product preferences. 

Your goal here is to make early sales and get your foot in the door against any competition. Here are some common tactics you can use during this crucial period.

Build excitement

During this early stage, demand doesn’t come for free. It needs to be manufactured. How long this process takes depends on your product’s complexity and uniqueness and how well it aligns with your target audience’s needs. 

Craft compelling campaigns that create buzz and spark curiosity. You need to make consumers see why your product could be a solution to their problem. If you’re entering an established market, you’ll also need to show your consumers how your product differs from the competition.

Take an omnichannel approach

Don’t limit yourself to one form of marketing. Build a website and create blogs around relevant topics. Use social media and influencer marketing to reach a wider audience. Consider paid advertisements to spread the word. The more channels you use, the easier it will be to capture the vital few initial customers.

Price strategically

Align your pricing strategy with your product positioning and marketing efforts. Undercutting competition based on competitor analysis could be a smart move, but if you’re trying to appear as a luxury, superior product, this could send the wrong message to consumers. 

Prioritise customer satisfaction

Word-of-mouth recommendations from early adopters are golddust at the introduction stage. Prioritise creating personalised, engaging customer experiences to capture this audience. The more you can show consumers that you’re a trustworthy, authentic brand, the more likely they’ll be to recommend your product to others. 

Once you’ve begun your marketing campaigns, you need to refine them. Take stock of customer feedback and sentiment, and use this to improve as you progress. 

This is the stage where most businesses falter. Few things are more filled with hazards and littered with unexpected costs than an initial product launch. Ride the wave and be prepared to reinvest your revenue. At this point, you’ll succeed if you can tread water, break-even, and continually iterate until you reach the growth stage.

Product life cycle example at the introduction stage

Examples of products currently in the introduction phase include:

• Lab-grown meat products.
• Augmented reality (AR) glasses.
• Self-driving cars.

3. Growth stage

Once customers have accepted the product and you’ve begun to gain traction, you’ve entered the growth phase. This stage is characterised by rapid sales growth and a steady increase in revenue. 

Marketing is slightly easier in this stage because customers are already familiar with your product. However, you’ll need to shift goals and focus more heavily on market expansion. There are several ways you can achieve this:

• Market expansion: Entering into new market segments and demographics based on ongoing research. 
• Marketing strategy: Changing your growth stage marketing strategy to focus on product preference rather than product awareness. 
• Distribution: Expanding your distribution channels to expand product availability. 
• Retention: Implementing loyalty and referral programs to encourage customer retention and loyalty. 

You’ll need to reinvest much of the profits at the early growth stage to scale up your operation. The challenge is scaling effectively without stretching your resources too thin. You’re gaining momentum, but if you can’t keep up with demand, your upward trajectory might not last for long.

At this point, you may also start to see emerging competitors as other organisations try to take their slice of the market. As such, highlight your product’s unique value proposition and stay one step ahead by iterating and improving your product design.

Product life cycle example at the growth stage

Some examples of products currently at the growth product life cycle stage include:

• AI tools and large language models (LLMs).
• Electric vehicles.
• Fitness trackers.

4. Maturity stage

At the product maturity stage, sales have begun to level out from the growth stage; however, costs are declining, so profits remain strong. At this point, you’re maximising your product and seeing the largest returns. This is the ‘golden phase’ that businesses want to maintain for as long as possible.

You’ll also find you’re putting in more work to fend off the competition and keep your product offering fresh. The market at this stage will be growing increasingly saturated, so your priority should be introducing new product features to differentiate from your new competitors. 

There are a few approaches to take to maximise your time at the top.

Competitive pricing

At this point, most businesses will have developed their manufacturing and production processes enough to achieve economies of scale. This means they can lower the price of the finished product without significantly impacting company profit margins.

Hone in on your unique value proposition

You need to reiterate why your product differs from every alternative on the market. 

• What makes you unique? Perhaps your product has better features than your competition. Maybe you create your products sustainably. 
• Or is it that you offer superior customer service? Focus on what you do best and use that to stand out.

Encourage long-term loyalty

Your customer base is already familiar with your brand. You have a dedicated fanbase, but will this loyalty last if a competitor ups their game?  Prioritise nurturing your existing bonds and exceeding customer expectations through exclusive content and loyalty programs.

Establish feedback loops

It is important to develop a feedback loop between your customers and your development team. Understanding what your audience really wants will help you extend your time in the maturity stage and show your customers that you take their suggestions seriously.

Product life cycle example at the maturity stage

Examples of products currently at the maturity stage include:

• Smartphones.
• Laptops.
• Streaming services.

5. Saturation stage

During the saturation stage, profits will truly level out as competitors begin taking their market slice. Sales aren’t declining yet, but they aren’t growing either. The market is so filled with options that consumers have too much choice, making it much harder for your product to continue growing.

There are two possible outcomes during this stage. The first is that your product eventually enters a market decline. The second is that you become consumers’ brand preference and revitalise interest. 

The good news at the market saturation stage is that your business efficiency has reached its apex, and you have more data than ever before. You should use this to decide on the best way forward. You could decide on one or more of these approaches:

Continue to iterate your product

Try to breathe new life into your product. Create a new version with added features, or offer new deals to add value to your offering. For instance, an extended warranty, a complementary service, or an exclusive community can all set you apart from the competition. At this stage, you can usually afford to offer more value than your newer competitors. Leverage this to remain at the top for longer.

Be novel with your marketing

One of the most effective ways to maintain your product longevity is to be unique and innovative with your marketing. Spark curiosity with your messaging, tell stories, or try out a guerilla marketing tactic. You can also build a connection with your audience through social media with humorous content and authentic interactions.

Explore new R&D opportunities

Consider investing in product line extensions. Consider complementary products and accessories. Diversifying your brand will add value to your portfolio and even extend the product life cycle. 

In an ideal world, you’d love to produce a superior product to your competitors forever more, but this becomes much harder in the saturation stage. To counteract this, focus on building emotional connections with consumers through exceptional service, consistency, and reliability.

Product life cycle example at the saturation stage

Examples of products currently at the saturation stage include:

• Gas-powered cars.
• Digital cameras.
• Soft drinks.
• Breakfast cereals.

6. Decline stage

No product lasts forever. The decline stages involve a decrease in sales and a reduction in profits. This can happen for several reasons:

• A new, high-tech invention replaces an outdated product. Think mobile phones replacing the pager. 
• Changes in tastes, lifestyle habits, and consumer preferences.
• Economic forces, such as recessions or inflation. 

Usually, brands will either decide to invest in rejuvenating the product or pull the plug and discontinue it. Some businesses can sit in the declining phase for years, with several long plateaus along the way. However, it’s important to regularly reassess to determine if holding strong is the best course of action. 

Let’s elaborate on the different strategies available to you at this stage:

• Relying on your brand: If you have a strong brand, you can use innovative marketing strategies to pull yourself out of your decline. 
• Revitalisation: It’s never too late to expand into a new market or invest in a newer version of a product. 
• Discontinuation: Once the marketing and production costs outweigh the potential for revenue, it may be beneficial to discontinue the product and invest in other areas.

Revitalisation is always possible, but it is rarely a long-term fix. Every product eventually declines to the point where it isn’t worth marketing, and at that point, it will reach the end of its life cycle.

Product life cycle example at the decline stage

Examples of goods at the decline stage of the product life cycle include:

• DVD players.
• Flip phones.
• Desktop computers.
• Landline phones.

Benefits of using the product life cycle

When used correctly, the product life cycle offers a wealth of benefits. 

1. Improved decision-making

The product life cycle can help you determine the best strategies for each stage. It offers a guideline that helps businesses decide at the right time.

2. Enhanced planning

The product life cycle allows businesses to ‘beat the curve’ proactively rather than responding to market changes. If a company knows its primary market will soon become saturated, it can use this to stay one step ahead.

3. Optimised resource allocation

This also allows for better resource allocation. Companies can push and pull investment in different areas, like marketing, sales, and R&D, based on the stage of the product life cycle that they’re in.

4. Maximising profitability

Ultimately, the product life cycle allows companies to optimise product management at every stage. It ensures companies capitalise on their most profitable opportunities and discontinue products before costs exceed revenue.

Drawbacks of using the product life cycle

However, it isn’t a perfect system. There are also several limitations to consider.

1. Limited applicability

The product life cycle only applies to products. It doesn’t usually have a use case for brands and services. For instance, Amazon has released dozens of products — some are mature, some are new, and some have declined. But this doesn’t mean that Amazon is in one stage or another.

2. Risk of planned obsolescence

The product life cycle is a static model with planned strategies for each stage, and it can be self-fulfilling. If a business believes it’s entering a decline, it may invest more resources into other areas, such as accessories and complementary products. But if the decline was simply a temporary dip, it may be investing in the wrong areas.

3. An inconsistent model

The reality is that many businesses don’t experience the product life cycle. Around 60% will fail within their first three years of operation. This means many companies won’t experience the full benefits the system offers. 

The product life cycle has many advantages but also a few drawbacks, so it’s important to combine product life cycle management with thorough market research and customer feedback to ensure the right approach in every context.

Singaporean produce life cycle example: Grab

Singaporean ‘Everything app’ Grab is a compelling example of how a company can evolve and adapt throughout the life cycle stages.

Introduction stage

Grab launched in 2012 as a simple ride-hailing service in Malaysia. Back then, it was known as GrabTaxi. The brand focussed on building awareness but faced heavy local competition from taxi firms and other emerging apps. 

While the business quickly gained initial customers, Grab realised this business model wouldn’t be sustainable with competitors like Uber knocking at the gates.

Growth stage

Once Grab gained momentum, it quickly used its position for market expansion. The business was in a rapid growth phase, allowing for high market penetration and significant capital investments.

Grab launched GrabBike in Vietnam and Indonesia to compete with local rivals. They also released GrabExpress (logistics) and GrabFood (food delivery). 

The key here is that Grab expanded into areas related to its core offering. The fleet of drivers working under the brand meant on-demand delivery services and food delivery were natural next steps. This culminated with the business acquiring Uber’s SEA division in 2018. 

Maturity stage

Over time, Grab has slowly expanded to become a super app. It is currently in its most profitable phase and a household name in SEA, offering everything from payment solutions and insurance to grocery shopping and hotel booking.

As the market leader, Grab is highly profitable but also faces heavy competition. PayPal, Gojek, Foodpanda, and Bolt all offer similar products that could threaten the brand’s market share in the future. 

However, the brand still aims to differentiate itself by offering superior customer service, personalised experiences, and exceptional user safety. If it can maintain this image of reliability and trustworthiness, it isn’t likely to go anywhere anytime soon.

Summing up

Charting your product’s life cycle from development and introduction to saturation and decline will help you decide on the right product life cycle strategy at the right time, but it won’t provide you with the complete picture. 

You also need to understand how to market your products and how to guide consumers from brand awareness to customer loyalty. Ultimately, that will be the key to growing your business and maximising your product’s time in the sun. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you deploy smart, tailored campaigns across the entire product life cycle. With our platform, you can personalise content for your audience with unified data that lets you make informed business decisions. 
Watch the Marketing Cloud Demo today to learn how Salesforce can catapult your product’s growth and maximise your ROI.

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In a market as competitive as today’s, with increasingly demanding consumers and a multitude of solutions emerging every day, it is common for marketing efforts to be diluted in a sea of ​​offers. However, there is a strategy that aims to break the premises of this scenario: guerrilla marketing.

In this article, we will explore the concept of guerrilla marketing, its advantages and challenges, and tips for successfully implementing this strategy. Follow us and check it out!

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What is Guerrilla Marketing?

Guerrilla marketing is an unconventional marketing strategy that aims to attract the public’s attention creatively and unexpectedly, using innovative resources and techniques. The idea is to create a unique experience for consumers, generating engagement and strengthening the brand’s connection.

This approach is inspired by war tactics, where soldiers seek to surprise more powerful enemies with limited resources. Guerrilla marketing focuses on creating campaigns that have the potential to go viral, which generates famous buzz.  

Finally, guerrilla marketing aims to break with the monotony of traditional advertising campaigns, which are often forgotten (or not even noticed) by the public amidst the excess of information in the digital environment.

Guerrilla Marketing Examples to Inspire You

Below are some surprising Guerrilla Marketing actions taken by major brands.
Check them out and get inspired!

Red Bull Case

In 2012, Red Bull sponsored Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner’s jump from a stratospheric capsule at an altitude of over 39 km. This extremely radical and disruptive action is in keeping with the brand’s identity, further strengthening the initiative.

It is also worth mentioning that the event was broadcast live worldwide and generated extensive media coverage, creating a huge buzz around the brand.

Dove Case

Dove is already a well-known supporter of diversity causes, especially when it comes to female empowerment. With this in mind, the brand created a campaign called “Portraits of Real Beauty,” in which an artist drew portraits of women based on their descriptions and those of others. 

The result was that women tended to describe themselves more critically than other people described them, showing that we are often our own harshest critics. The campaign generated a positive response on social media and helped reinforce the company’s positioning.

Burger King Case

The dispute between Burger King and McDonald’s often attracts media attention, as guerrilla marketing actions, in which one rival takes a dig at the other, are quite common. In 2019, for example, BK created a campaign called “Whopper Detour”. 

The idea was to encourage customers to visit McDonald’s, a direct competitor, and use the Burger King app to unlock an exclusive Whopper offer for just $0.01.  The campaign succeeded on social media and increased the brand’s sales.

Why invest in Guerrilla Marketing?

As we mentioned, guerrilla marketing has been increasingly used by companies looking to differentiate themselves in the market and gain greater visibility with a low investment.

Investing in guerrilla marketing can bring several benefits to a company, such as increased engagement and interaction with customers, expanding the brand’s reach and increasing sales. Let’s check out some reasons to invest in this strategy:

Increased engagement and interaction with the target audience

Unlike regular advertising, guerrilla marketing can capture people’s attention in unexpected, surprising and creative ways. This way, the brand can establish a closer relationship with the target audience, increasing interaction and customer loyalty.

This unusual approach can even generate spontaneous media coverage for your brand. This means social media posts about your actions or even press coverage of consumers interacting with your brand.

Expanding brand reach

The creative nature of guerrilla marketing campaigns has great potential to generate buzz on social media and other media, which expands the brand’s reach. 

Shares, comments and likes can make the campaign go viral and reach a large number of people without the company having to invest in paid advertising. This increases the brand’s visibility and strengthens its image among the public.

Read More: What is Social Selling? A Guide to How it Works

Low cost and high impact

One of the main advantages of guerrilla marketing is its low cost compared to traditional campaigns. Instead of investing large amounts of money in advertising, you will focus on aspects such as creativity, planning and execution. 

The idea is that, with this change in perspective, your action will generate more results and impact more people than with traditional advertising. A successful guerrilla marketing campaign can generate a much higher return on investment than a conventional campaign.

Strengthening brand identity

Successful guerrilla marketing campaigns convey the brand’s identity clearly and consistently. By investing in this strategy, the company has the opportunity to reinforce its image among the public, which can strengthen its identity and create a positive and memorable image.

Increased sales and ROI

Finally, investing in guerrilla marketing can generate a significant increase in a company’s sales and, consequently, in its return on investment (ROI). Creative and unusual campaigns can attract the public’s attention and encourage the purchase of products or services. In addition, the buzz generated by the campaigns can increase brand visibility, attract new customers and consolidate the existing consumer base.

Read More: What is Performance Analytics?

7 tips for implementing the strategy efficiently

Know your target audience

The first step to creating a guerrilla marketing campaign, as with any other marketing or sales strategy, is to know your target audience well. 

Only by knowing the demographic, behavioural, and psychological characteristics of your consumers will you be able to create an effective and relevant campaign for the public, increasing your chances of success.

Set clear goals

Once you know your target audience, the next step is to define the campaign’s objectives and plan its execution. These objectives may include increasing sales, strengthening the brand image, or expanding the campaign’s reach. With defined objectives, the company can create a focused and efficient strategy, concentrating its efforts on what really matters.

Be creative and innovative

Don’t forget: guerrilla marketing is a strategy that relies on creativity and innovation. That’s why it’s important to think outside the box and create campaigns that are unusual and surprising. Originality and impact are essential to the success of this strategy, so you need to invest time and resources to create something truly different and memorable.

Use technology to your advantage

Digital platforms allow you to create interactive, personalised campaigns with great engagement potential. In addition, technology allows you to measure and monitor campaign results in real-time, which helps you assess the success of your strategy and make adjustments when necessary.

Read More: Sales Prospecting: How to Find the Right-Fit Customers You’re Looking For

Be aware of trends

Guerrilla marketing is a strategy based on always being one step ahead of market trends. Therefore, it is important to be aware of new developments and changes in audience behaviour. 

Campaigns in tune with trends are more likely to attract the public’s attention and generate buzz on social media. Just don’t forget your target audience! There is no point in running an action on TikTok if your audience is not there!

Integrate with other marketing strategies

Guerrilla marketing should not be seen as an isolated strategy but as part of an integrated marketing plan. The campaign must be aligned with other company initiatives, such as branding, sales, content marketing and customer relations. This will increase the campaign’s effectiveness and produce a more consistent and long-lasting result.

Measure results and make adjustments

Finally, measuring the campaign’s results and making adjustments when necessary is essential. This involves monitoring audience engagement, campaign reach, return on investment, and other relevant metrics. Based on this data, the company can assess the strategy’s success and make adjustments to improve its performance.

If your action occurs outside of social media, in the real world, a good tip is to prepare a team to produce content with the participants! 

Ultimately, guerrilla marketing is an increasingly important strategy for companies that want to stand out in the market and build customer loyalty. With creativity and innovation, it is possible to create impactful and memorable campaigns on a small budget.

Did you enjoy learning about guerrilla marketing?

Our blog and Resource Centre are always up to date with news and content about CRM, marketing and sales. For further insights, check out these related articles:

• Referral Marketing Guide: Turn Fans Into Advocates
• 50 Sales Statistics that Reveal How Great Teams Sell
• What is Drip Marketing? Campaign Tips & Strategies
• 5 Small Business Marketing Tools To Generate More Leads

Take the opportunity to check out all the features of Marketing Cloud and understand how our CRM transforms your sales routine. Good work, and see you next time!

The post Guerrilla Marketing: understand what it is and how to do it. appeared first on Salesforce.

Can you grow your business without increasing sales or the average ticket price of products sold? You’ll probably say no. So, here’s another question: How can you sell more without investing in marketing? Difficult. That’s why, for many, marketing is what makes the world go round.

Marketing is essential for increasing sales and average product prices. The ability to create, explore, and deliver value satisfies market and consumer needs. It aims to attract customers, increase brand awareness, generate new relationships, and produce profitable results.

The term has become so prevalent that professional and academic courses are now dedicated to it. However, make sure its broad scope is clear to you. At its core, marketing is about understanding and meeting customer needs.

In the following sections, we’ll explore what marketing is and provide you with the essential knowledge to understand this dynamic field.

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What is marketing?

Suppose you have ever looked into the concept of Marketing. In that case, you must have come across the following phrases:

Comparing these definitions, we see that the AMA’s version is broader, reflecting the multifaceted nature of modern marketing. This expansiveness is necessary, as different marketing approaches – such as affiliate and internal marketing – often have distinct objectives.

In this way, marketing balances what the customer (or target audience) desires and the company’s goals. After all, good marketing aims to generate value for the company and its target audience.

Marketing encompasses all these aspects and more. As a field, it continually evolves, seeking innovative strategies to approach, delight, and engage its audience.

READ MORE: 9 Sales KPIs Every Sales Team Should Be Tracking

What is the origin of marketing?

Tracing the origins of marketing is challenging, as it depends on how one defines propaganda and persuasion. Notable figures in philosophy and culture used forms of marketing to attract followers and leave their mark on history. Aristotle and Napoleon, for instance, are names that have endured through time.

However, one thing is certain: marketing today is very different from the “advertising” of the past. This is because today, marketing is a field of knowledge, with books and texts covering its main concepts, producing qualified professionals and opening up a range of possibilities that further complicate the use of the term. 

Below is a timeline that can help you better understand marketing and its origins. Check it out!

Marketing timeline

As we have already said, marketing has been present in society for a long time, even if it was hidden in the past. It is possible that many merchants were marketing without knowing it since they defined their products, positioned them, priced them, and advertised them (the famous word-of-mouth marketing ).

One invention that facilitated the development of marketing was Gutenberg’s printing press, invented in 1450. This device revolutionised communication and facilitated intellectual distribution. In addition, some theorists argue that marketing gained momentum during the Industrial Revolution, at the end of the 18th century, when mass production exploded, and competition increased. 

With more than one supplier selling similar products and services, the competitive market triggered companies to go beyond just negotiating. With widespread competition, it was more necessary than ever to position, price, and promote the product before selling it.

The 4 Ps of marketing

The concept of the 4Ps of marketing was created by Professor Jerome McCarthy and widely disseminated by Philip Kotler. It is also known as the marketing mix and represents the four basic pillars of any marketing strategy.

The 4 Ps of marketing are:

• Product.
• Price.
• Place.
• Promotion.

Check out what each one means below in more detail.

Product

The concept of product encompasses everything the company offers customers, such as shape, design, packaging, quality, warranty, technical assistance, services, etc. Kotler states, “a product can be offered to a market for appreciation, acquisition, use or consumption and to satisfy a desire or need”.

This is where analyses are made of the aspects of the product, its function, appearance and design. It is also time to develop an analysis of the product levels, such as:

Product core (the essence of the product) – the basic product (the benefits it can bring) – the product itself (colour, brand, physical aspects) – augmented product ( after-sales aspects, such as warranty, delivery, installation, support, etc.).

It is worth mentioning that the study of this first P also includes the product life cycle, that is, its introduction to the market, growth stages, achievement of maturity, decline, and withdrawal from business.

Some questions that help define what a given company’s product is are:

• What customer desire or need does this product satisfy? What makes a specific audience need to have your product?
• What functions or new features does this product need to attract attention?
• What is the production process for this product?
• What makes your product different?
• What is its design like, including technical features?
• What is your product’s life cycle?

To answer them, it is essential to know the target audience for which a given company’s product is aimed, and to try to understand which attributes are valued by the public and ignored by the competition, precisely to create a product that stands out. 

Using the BCG Matrix may be a good strategy if you have encountered difficulties studying your product. After all, the methodology looks specifically at the company’s products and how they perform in the market, taking into account elements that generate more profitability and others that end up causing losses.

Price

This refers to the amount charged for your product or service. It encompasses both how much customers pay and the payment methods accepted. Products can fall into various price categories, from budget-friendly to premium or luxury offerings.

Kotler emphasises that the price can be charged once or in periodic instalments – usually monthly. It is the only component of the 4 Ps that generates revenue and is one of the main elements in determining a company’s market share and profitability. 

Pricing is more complex than simply calculating production, distribution, advertising, personnel, and sales costs, dividing by units sold, and adding a profit margin. The process involves additional factors and considerations.

Pricing is a strategy designed to define the product’s positioning and value proposition. It is how the product or service will be positioned in the consumer’s mind. The market sets the price, but the customer defines how much they are willing to pay, and this is one of the fronts on which companies need to act.

More than calculating everything that is spent in the production and sales process, it is necessary to take into account the added value that your product has beyond the concrete and measurable benefits.

All of this must be thought out in a way that leaves the customer satisfied but does not harm your working capital. It is important to understand that price volatility is linked to a brand or product’s market positioning.

Place

Place, also called distribution, is the pillar that addresses how the product and/or service are distributed in the market and how the customer reaches the product/service, whether through points of sale, distribution channels, websites, etc. In short, this is the ‘P’ responsible for answering how you will reach your customer.

In this ‘P’, more than just distribution channels, it is also necessary to think about logistics, such as making the product visible in the market through digital marketing strategies or trade promotion marketing, etc. Distribution systems can be transactional, logistical or facilitating. Distribution analysis involves coverage studies (areas of operation, scope), selection of channel types and characteristics, logistics, motivational elements for the channels and the service levels that each element of the chain must offer and comply with.

Again, when considering this aspect, it is necessary to have a good understanding of your buyer personas. After all, investing in the best places (physical and digital) is only possible to distribute your product if your audience is there.

Promotion

For Kotler, promotion is related to communicating and selling to potential customers. Since promotional campaigns involve high costs, it is interesting to perform a break-even analysis to check whether the strategy will have a cost compatible with the additional consumers it will bring. In other words, whether the increase in customers and the benefit will be greater than the promotion cost.

It’s important to note that we’re talking about more than just distribution channels here. We’re also addressing the communication style and language you’ll use to reach your personas. It’s about making your brand known and showing how your product meets your audience’s needs and desires.

Some interesting questions to answer:

• How do your competitors promote their products and services? What influence do they have on your actions?
• If your market is seasonal, what should be the timeline for taking advantage of sales and promotion opportunities?
• What are the best channels (print, internet, radio, TV) and public relations actions to present your actions to potential customers?
• When and where can you effectively communicate your business’s marketing messages to your target audience?
• Another important aspect to consider is the company’s voice and tone of voice. Is the communication more relaxed or more serious? Formal or informal? Aggressive or calm?

Again, it all depends on your personas and who you want to establish a dialogue with. This is related to branding work.

READ MORE: 3 Keys to a Winning Social Commerce Strategy

What types of marketing exist?

Below, we will see the main types of marketing that exist and the main characteristics of each of them.

Digital marketing

Perhaps the most famous of all and the one largely responsible for the digital transformation we are experiencing. If our lives are no longer the same with the internet, the same can be said of the purchasing process.

Digital Marketing employs strategies tailored for internet-connected devices. These include smartphones, notebooks, and desktops. It also addresses various content formats consumed online, such as blog posts, videos, and reels.

The field uses specific techniques and metrics designed for the digital landscape. Think of Digital Marketing as a large umbrella. It covers new marketing branches like email marketing, content marketing, and outbound marketing.

Content marketing

Content Marketing is the strategy of producing content for your target audience that helps them throughout the purchasing process and naturally and spontaneously attracts them to you. It is the fuel of Inbound Marketing.

The idea is to inform people so that in the future, they will not only respect your brand and use it as a reference, but also become customers of your company. It is worth mentioning that there are several ways to apply and execute a good Content Marketing strategy, such as:

• Blog.
• Rich content.
• Videos.
• Social media.
• Email Marketing.

As you can see, content marketing is not just about writing a text on a blog or creating a post on Facebook; it is also about waiting for the results to appear on your desk magically.

You need to consider what to write, when to publish, which channel to promote on, which format to use, which persona to target, and what result you want to achieve.

Inbound marketing

The main goal of Inbound Marketing is to attract and retain customers. The main idea is not to go after the customer, but to arouse their interest so they come to you and become interested in your company’s offerings.

This attraction is achieved through quality content for your audience. Since content production is the main fuel for Inbound, this content must communicate with the right people.

Just as the main idea is to attract the public and spark their genuine interest in the company’s products or services, it is necessary to understand who this public is. In other words, first find out what their interests, doubts and challenges are, and then offer materials that help them solve their problems or make them see a business opportunity with your company.

This path is what we call the sales funnel, in which your company’s objective is to help this audience “walk” to the bottom of the funnel and effectively become a customer.

Outbound marketing

Outbound Marketing, or traditional marketing, aims to go after customers and offer products or services. The idea is to prospect actively and not necessarily generate genuine interest from this potential customer in your company.

You’ve been interrupted by an advertisement while watching a video online. This methodology uses banners, mass emails, and pop-ups, among other types of advertising.

Investment in Outbound differs from Inbound because the media is much more expensive. In Outbound, if, for example, you need to cut investment from one moment to the next, you “disappear” from the media. This does not happen in Inbound since your content remains on the internet and can be accessed anytime.

Relationship marketing

Relationship Marketing encompasses strategies for building and disseminating a brand, prospecting, building loyalty and creating authority in the market. The goal of the relationship is to win over and retain customers and turn them into advocates and promoters of the brand.

Another goal is to become a reference in the market, mainly due to the good experiences offered to the user. To achieve all this, the company creates a relationship that gives advantages to its customers and prospects.

Companies like Apple understand this very well, and for this reason, they have legions of fans. The impact is significant: satisfied customers boost sales, revenue, and company longevity.

Technology allows you to build lasting relationships using internet tools. For instance, WhatsApp can help you maintain contact with customers and leads. You can use it to offer relevant promotions and keep them engaged.

Product marketing

Product Marketing is the segment of marketing that deals with promoting and marketing a product to potential customers, recurring customers, etc. It is also responsible for introducing a company’s new product to the market.

The focus here is to connect the company’s product with people, finding the ideal audience for this product. Some of the functions of this segment of Marketing include:

• Product positioning.
• Create the company’s message about the product.
• Develop the product’s competitive edge compared to its competitors.
• Alignment between Sales and Marketing teams.

In general, there are seven stages of Product Marketing: developing the consumer profile, positioning and message; educating the company about the positioning and message; developing a launch plan; developing content for the launch; training the team; and launching.

Guerrilla marketing

Guerrilla marketing is a strategy companies use to promote products and services unconventionally. It is an alternative tactic designed to create a memorable experience for the consumer.

For a guerrilla marketing campaign to be successful, spending large amounts of money is unnecessary. The most important thing is to have creativity and energy. That is why these actions are often carried out in public places with much foot traffic, such as shopping malls, parks and beaches.

Viral marketing

Viral Marketing can be defined as any marketing strategy that exploits connections between people to spread and go viral. It is considered a technique with lower costs than traditional actions since the media is the target audience.

You’ve probably been impacted by a marketing campaign that went viral, that is, shared by many people and spread through conversation circles and timelines.

READ MORE: Referral Marketing Guide: Turn Fans Into Advocates

SEO marketing (search engine optimisation)

SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimisation, is a set of practices and techniques for improving a website’s positioning in search engines like Google.

It doesn’t matter if your business is small, medium or large. It doesn’t matter if it’s B2B, B2C or even if you sell online or not. You will always need potential customers to know about your business.

SEM (search engine marketing)

SEM (search engine marketing) is SEO’s paid cousin. Boosting your website’s organic search ranking can be challenging. Depending on your niche, it may require significant effort, take considerable time, and still not yield results — even if you do everything correctly.

There are types of services or products with high search competition, that is, many websites and blogs working on the terms, which can raise competition to almost impossible levels.

To make the game more profitable, you can sponsor some words so that you appear in the paid results. It is faster and simpler since 50% of the clicks go to the first and second results; you will undoubtedly get a lot of hits, but you will have to pay for each one.

Affiliate marketing

Imagine that you are the number one customer at a restaurant. You recommend the place to your friends, who eat with their families. When it’s time to pay the bill, they tell the manager that you were the one who recommended them. As a reward, the owner gives you a percentage of their bill.

This is affinity marketing, and it is increasingly being used. Referral programs with financial returns for those who refer are common online. Companies like Amazon and Uber work this way. You can share the link to a product from the Amazon store on a social network, and if a friend clicks on that link and buys the product, you receive a small commission.

Affiliate marketing generates passive income, and the online environment has enabled high financial gains without much effort. In addition, this strategy is excellent for generating results, and both parties (affiliate and company) win.

The affiliate can monetise their blog, website or page without having to think of an innovative product or dedicate time to its creation. In addition, of course, they can earn money working from home (or wherever they want!). The company also benefits, as its product or service will be widely promoted without having to bear the risk.

Internal marketing

Since marketing is the company’s communication with the market, internal marketing is nothing more than internal marketing, for the company’s employees.

In other words, this segment uses traditional marketing strategies to sell the company’s image and products to its own employees, engaging them to become brand ambassadors. The strategy also aims to reduce the company’s turnover rates.

What are the main marketing channels?

Marketing channels are the way your product or service reaches your target audience. Let’s examine the main ones.

Wholesale and retail

These are your products’ traditional distribution and sales channels. One way to work with them is to invest in Trade Marketing with attractive communication focused on winning sales. You can also invest in external actions that bring people into the stores.

Internet

Could the Internet be today’s most significant marketing channel? Customer experience and digital advances in the field indicate that it is. Invest in satisfaction and audience surveys to monitor this channel and build a website with good navigation and user experience practices.

READ MORE: What is Self-Service Customer Service?

Sales team

Having your own sales team or sales representatives who sell various products (including yours) is a great way to reach people since many segments still rely heavily on consultative sales before closing a deal. But remember that it’s very important to train them to be well-aligned with your business goals and target audience.

Telemarketing

Many people turn up their noses when it comes to Telemarketing, but the truth is that this channel is very strategic for many market segments. Once again, what will define its importance is your knowledge about the target audience so that your company is not one of those contacts blocked on the audience’s smartphones.

It is also essential to carry out training so that the service is as personalised as possible and avoids the everyday annoyances that we usually hear about telemarketing.

How to make a marketing strategy?

We’ve covered marketing in its various forms and seen how crucial a solid strategy is for business success. Now, let’s dive into creating a strategy.

Keep in mind that developing a marketing strategy isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. You must adapt these steps to fit your business’s unique needs.

Set goals

Establishing clear goals is crucial for any marketing strategy. Without well-defined objectives, you risk investing resources without a clear path to return on investment.

The first step in developing an effective marketing strategy is identifying your specific marketing goals. These should be distinct from other departmental objectives, such as sales targets. Marketing requires its own set of goals and metrics.

Consider involving your team in the goal-setting process to ensure alignment and commitment. This collaborative approach helps ensure everyone understands the priorities and can contribute effectively to achieving the agreed-upon objectives.

Keep yourself updated constantly.

Marketing is a field of constant change and evolution. Digital marketing, in particular, undergoes rapid transformations with ever-increasing demands. This dynamic environment underscores the importance of ongoing education and team development.

Embrace new strategies, tools, and updates to online advertising platforms as opportunities rather than challenges. These advancements should stimulate creativity and innovative thinking within your team.

Observe the results

Analysing results may seem obvious, but business owners and even some marketing professionals often overlook it. This analysis is crucial — it validates whether a strategy succeeded or failed. With it, you can know if your efforts paid off or if they’re worth repeating.

This is where online advertising shines compared to traditional methods. Digital marketing is fully measurable, while traditional advertising doesn’t allow for detailed data collection. With digital marketing, KPIs (key performance indicators) clearly show how consumers react to your strategies.

Have well-defined personas and ICP

Personas are essential for your strategy to be successful. They describe your audience and need to be created in detail and with great care. However, to build detailed personas, you need a well-defined ICP (ideal customer profile). 

When creating your personas, be thoughtful about the survey questions you’ll ask your audience. Take your time with the process and take steps. And remember, you only sometimes need multiple personas – depending on your market niche, one or two may be enough.

Choose the ideal KPIs

KPIs vary depending on your marketing strategy and goals. For instance, if you aim to increase website contact form submissions, your key metric might be the number of unique forms submitted. On the other hand, if generating traffic is your goal, you’d focus on metrics like sessions, new users, and pages per visit.

Work with reliable tools

Good tools solve practically all the challenges that a professional will encounter, from strategy, through process and execution, to metrics and results analysis.

There are countless options to make your daily work easier. These include image banks, Chrome plugins, and integrations between online tools. Look for anything that optimises your time, automates actions, and allows you to focus on your strategy.

READ MORE: 5 Small Business Marketing Tools To Generate More Leads

Extra materials to help you master the concept of Marketing

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve certainly learned a lot about what marketing is and all the details surrounding the subject. But how about delving even deeper into this knowledge? We’ve compiled a variety of resources to help you on this journey – from research papers and articles to films and books. Check it out!

Films about marketing

• Thank You for Smoking (2006), starring Aaron Eckhart, tells the story of a campaign manager for a large tobacco company who, despite knowing the problems the product causes, defends its consumption. It is a great lesson in lobbying and consumer strategies.
  
  Although Nick Naylor (Eckhart) is a competent professional, the film shows how marketing work can have adverse effects on people, and how manipulated information can lead people to consume what they do not need.
  
  However, the character shows that it is important to remain firm in your goals and use strategy to achieve your objectives and overcome challenging situations in your profession with creativity and proactivity. But of course, you cannot forget about ethics.
  
• The Social Dilemma (2020) is a Netflix documentary that caused a huge buzz when it was released. Directed by Jeff Orlowski, the work is divided into a fictional plot, which follows the life of a young man who spends a lot of time on social media and accounts from former employees and executives of so-called big tech companies. Some of those responsible for tools that revolutionised companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are interviewed.
  
  In addition to helping us understand the power of social media and how algorithms work, the documentary criticises the time spent browsing social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, directly relating it to polarisation, which is present in both Brazil and the US.

Books about marketing

• The Purple Cow – How to Transform Your Business and Stand Out from the Competition, by Seth Godin. This book is a more recent option among established marketing books and is ideal for those seeking strategies aimed at developing a competitive edge.
  
  In the book, the author uses the purple cow as a metaphor to say that you need to be different and memorable to stand out in today’s market – as would happen with a purple cow among a herd of common cows.
  
• Hacking Growth: The Innovative Marketing Strategy of the Fastest-Growing Companies, by Sean Ellis. The author, who is not only a writer but also an investor, coined the term growth hacker to define a person focused on growth. From this, Ellis developed the growth hacking methodology, focused on the scalable growth of companies. The goal of the strategy is to promote accelerated and sustainable business growth through the recognition of opportunities.

Articles about marketing

• 3 Ways Generative AI Will Help Marketers Connect With Customers, by Bobby Jania, Senior VP of Marketing, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Ever wondered how artificial intelligence can impact marketing?
  
  In this article written by one of our executives, you’ll discover some predictions about how AI can improve business and generate connections.
  
• What Does ‘Real-Time Marketing’ Really Mean? by Martin Kihn, Senior VP of Market Intelligence at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Working in real-time has never been more important, right? Thanks to the instantaneous nature of social media, customers have become accustomed to fast responses, and any wait time can be detrimental.
  
  In this article, Kihn discusses the real concept behind real-time marketing, demystifying misconceptions, and explaining the role of data intelligence in the entire process.
  
• How AI Is Helping Adidas Boost Its Personalised Email Marketing Game, by Armita Peymandoust, VP of Product Management at Salesforce. There’s nothing like a success story to understand the importance of marketing strategies. Here, we look at the email marketing process of giant Adidas and how Salesforce’s artificial intelligence helped change the performance of its emails to customers once and for all.

Did you enjoy learning more about what marketing is?

Digital and traditional marketing play crucial roles in expanding audience reach and capturing leads. When used strategically, Marketing promises to boost results and, as a bonus, further strengthen consumer engagement. Therefore, it’s essential to incorporate marketing strategies into your action plan.

Visit our Resource Centre for the latest in Marketing, CRM, and Sales, visit our Resource Centre. To learn more about Salesforce solutions, feel free to contact us.

We look forward to supporting your business success.

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Seamless handoffs between departments are crucial to making this happen. Marketing, Commerce, Sales, and Service all need to be in lockstep. This requires both a cohesive strategy and a strong tech foundation. Oftentimes, poorly integrated technology and processes leave customers feeling like they engage with separate departments rather than with one unified company. But that will soon be a thing of the past. 

With access to unified data that’s actionable across the entire organisation, as well as advanced AI and automation capabilities, departments can work together to deliver hyper-personalised, connected, frictionless experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. Today’s most successful marketing and commerce pros engage on the customer’s terms and provide value across the entire customer experience. 

On that note, this week we announced Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud innovations that will help businesses use data from across their company to deliver customer-driven relationships, while also improving internal team efficiency and productivity. Let’s take a look at the details. 

What you’ll learn in this blog…

What Salesforce Marketing Cloud Dreamforce innovations mean for you

What Salesforce Commerce Cloud Dreamforce innovations mean for you

What Salesforce Marketing Cloud Dreamforce innovations mean for you

First, a little background. These four Marketing Cloud innovations are built on the Salesforce Platform and are grounded in customer data and metadata through Data Cloud. This gives marketers easy access to customer records from across their entire businesses to enable seamless handoffs, great customer experiences, and ways to measure success.

1. Agentforce embedded in the flow of work 

Agentforce for Marketing brings generative and predictive AI together into an end-to-end campaign experience that’s initiated by the marketer and actioned on by the agent. Agentforce for Marketing helps marketers:

• Plan, launch, and optimise campaigns. Agentforce Campaigns will use predefined campaign goals and brand guidelines set by the marketer to create an entire campaign. It will create a brief, identify and create target audience segments, generate the first draft of an email and landing page, and build a customer journey. It will then continuously analyse campaign performance and recommend how  to optimise the target audience, content, and channels based on target KPIs.
• Personalise 1:1 engagement at scale. Using real-time interactions, conversations, and customer profile data, Agentforce Personalisation predicts which content fits each individual customer, what the best time and channel is to send it, and then actions on this.

Let’s look at an example of how this works. A marketer uses Agentforce Campaigns  to launch a campaign to re-engage potential churn customers. It can identify  the target audience, bring together data from various departments (such as device usage and upcoming renewal status). Agentforce Campaigns agent can even generate a personalised multi-channel campaign including building the journey and the first draft of an email to entice customers to renew or upgrade.

2. More capabilities for small and medium-sized businesses 

The new Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition expands on Marketing Cloud Growth Edition with more advanced AI and automation capabilities to build better relationships, scale personalisation and improve productivity. This helps marketers: 

• Make SMS messaging more fruitful. With Conversational SMS in Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, brands can bring together SMS conversations across Marketing and Service, so customers can have two-way interactions within a single phone number.

• Test your journeys in real-time. The Path Experiment feature helps you understand how your customers can interact with different, personalised paths in Salesforce Flow – allowing you to measure or optimise your customer journeys.

• Use predictive AI to send fewer, better messages. One of the cardinal rules of marketing is to never inundate your customers with too many messages. However, this can be challenging when you are running multiple automated journeys at the same time. With Advanced Edition, marketers in small businesses can use Einstein Engagement Frequency to automatically remove customers who are getting too many messages – and add customers to journeys if they need more outreach.
• Use predictive AI to find your most interested customers. Scoring is key to understanding how engaged your customers are with your marketing. However, maintaining scoring rubrics can be a highly manual process. With Einstein Engagement Scoring, small businesses can use predictive AI to understand which customers are ready to buy and which customers need additional nurturing. This takes manual analysis out of the equation so marketers can just act. 
  
  For more on Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition and updates on Growth Edition too, check out this blog by our colleague Eric Zenz.

See Growth Edition in action

Learn how Marketing Cloud Growth Edition can help your business connect with customers in new – and powerful – ways.

Watch the demo

3. Automate marketing data preparation and analytics 

Einstein Marketing Intelligence (EMI) uses AI and Data Cloud to connect, harmonise and enrich your marketing data in three clicks. It gives marketers one place to optimise spend and cross-channel campaign performance in real time. This helps marketers:

• Make faster and better decisions. EMI automates the complexities of data ingestion, transformation, and mapping across first- and third-party data using out-of-the-box connectors and prebuilt marketing data models. Einstein classifies new dimensions and identifies patterns, generating additional data for analysis.

• Gain transparency into marketing spend. Marketers can use unified data and attribution models to forecast and track cross-channel campaign performance and ROI against goals, from anonymous visit to closed revenue. 

• Optimise campaign performance in real time. Marketers can evaluate the health of their marketing programs and adjust spend in the moment to optimise performance with AI generated campaign summaries, ready-to-use insights, and out-of-the-box, marketing-specific, Tableau analytics dashboards. 

4. Automatically recommend products or content based on individual preferences

Einstein Personalisation is our new AI-based decision engine that enables businesses to create real-time 1:1 customer experiences. Einstein Personalisation will help you:

• Optimise for customer intent and business goals. Use rules or AI-based recommendations to surface the most relevant products, content, and articles for each individual. 

• Test and learn with dynamic content experiments. Use Salesforce Flow’s A/B split testing to select and send dynamic email content by audience – and then track performance and adjust content to optimise impact.

• Empower cross-department personalisation. Einstein Personalisation automatically surfaces recommendations in the Data Cloud customer profile based on the person’s engagement and affinities. A service agent or sales rep can use that to personalise their interaction without the customer having to repeat what they said or did before.
  
  For example, a service agent can offer a discount for a product the customer was recently browsing, and a sales rep can recommend relevant content and have a more personalised interaction with the customer.

Take your marketing to the next level

Learn how Marketing Cloud helps you action all your data faster, deploy smarter campaigns, and personalise across every touchpoint.

Make the connection

What Salesforce Commerce Cloud Dreamforce innovations mean for you

Commerce is complex. Especially now, as companies collect vast amounts of data, expand into new channels, and navigate the new era of AI. Disparate, disconnected systems make it even more difficult to manage all the complexity. To meet this challenge, Salesforce is extending Commerce Cloud capabilities and making it easier than ever for businesses to deliver truly unified commerce. 

Unveiled at Dreamforce, new out-of-the-box features will further extend commerce into all areas of the business. Here’s how:

1. Simplify complex, cross-functional tasks

What if you could predict which promotions and marketing campaigns would turn casual shoppers into paying customers? Or discover what motivates shoppers on a more granular level? With unified data from across your business, you can. Unified commerce is making every part of the business better together.

• Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud: Easily build campaigns using detailed engagement and purchase data. Create precise marketing segments to reach customers with highly personalised offers. Abandoned cart? Re-engage shoppers with perfectly timed notifications. 
• Service Cloud and Commerce Cloud: Increase visibility for service agents by connecting point of sale, checkout, and the contact centre. Now reps can check on orders, process returns or exchanges, and place orders on behalf of customers from within the service console — and manage every order with ease.
• Revenue Cloud and Commerce Cloud: Create product bundles, offer and manage digital subscriptions, and streamline revenue options with recurring billing invoices.

Explore new Commerce Cloud innovations

The most complete, configurable, AI-powered commerce platform on the planet just got more powerful.

See what's new

2. Scale assistance with Agentforce commerce agents 

Grounded in trusted, secure customer data and metadata from Data Cloud, new AI-powered commerce agents help simplify and speed up key processes for merchants, businesses buyers, and consumers alike. Here’s how they work:

• Merchant Agent: As a business leader, it can be difficult to know where to focus your efforts to increase revenue. With Merchant Agent, you can use the power of unified data to set and achieve business goals faster. Not sure which levers to pull to increase average order value? Want to create a product bundle to help sell unpopular inventory? Get suggestions from Merchant Agent by simply typing a prompt.  
• Buyer Agent: Business buyers want — and deserve — the same commerce experiences as consumers. Powered by generative AI and natural language processing, Buyer Agent allows business buyers to use chat and photos to find, buy, and reorder products.
• Personal Shopper Agent: Give customers a digital concierge that mimics a helpful, personable in-store associate. Bring conversational search and product recommendations to any digital experience.

3. Streamline checkout — for you and your customers

What if you could turn any customer touchpoint into a transaction? With Commerce Cloud Checkout, you can. New express payment options like Link by Stripe and Amazon Pay help merchants improve conversion by an average of 14% and enable shoppers to checkout 3 times faster.

Commerce Cloud now also offers an integration with Amazon’s “Buy with Prime”. Here’s what that means for the customer experience on your site: Shoppers can conveniently pay using their Amazon Prime account and choose to have their items delivered with Prime in a matter of days.

With this integration, you and your customers receive all the benefits of Prime, including fast and free delivery, a trusted checkout experience, and hassle-free returns. You can even embed reviews from Amazon directly into your product listing pages. 

Introducing the next generation of unified commerce

Unlike isolated, incomplete point solutions or outdated systems, Commerce Cloud natively connects all facets of commerce onto a single platform with sales, service, and marketing. This enables a truly 360-degree view of the entire customer journey. And that’s good news, because commerce should be connected with the rest of your business — not a secluded island. 

Unified commerce means you can bring B2B and B2C experiences together. Easily deliver B2B and D2C from one platform. And it all runs on the same catalog and pricing engine. With everything in one place, you can focus on what matters most: your customers, your teams, and your goals.

By bringing together enterprise-wide data and trusted AI with cross-department workflow automations  Salesforce helps you easily scale personalised, intelligent experiences across sales, service, and marketing. This approach turns every customer interaction into an opportunity for growth, setting a new standard for what it means to succeed in customer-driven relationships today. 

Watch us unveil new product features

Want more details? Watch the Commerce Cloud keynote on Salesforce+.

See the innovation

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