For most companies, Salesforce is the gold standard when it comes to customer relationship management (CRM). On the marketing front, things are a little more convoluted.
The marketing tech stack tends to cover more categories, such as marketing automation, campaign management, analytics, content management, personalization, social media, email marketing, bid optimization, A/B testing – the list is nearly endless. For a glimpse down the rabbit hole, take a look at the recently updated 2019 martech landscape.
From a marketer’s perspective, this richness in technology and the endless software choices comes at a price: things can get dicey once you’ve crossed the on-boarding hurdle and the tool is in full operation. Every new software has the potential and, sadly, the susceptibility to become yet another technology island and data silo, disconnected from the other tools already in production.
The big reason why we, as marketers, continue to be drawn to all these shiny new tools, is their promise to enable marketing to create digital experiences for customers and prospects. With the rise of digital transformation, marketers and content managers are more focused than ever on making these content-driven experiences richer and more engaging for audiences, while at the same time ensuring that they have a meaningful impact on the business.
What are Content Experience Platforms?
Marketers using Salesforce can now enjoy all of their marketing tools in one single hub via the use of AI-powered Content Experience Platforms. They can create content and put them in front of the right people, at the right time, based on insights from Einstein derived directly from customers. In fact, Gartner's 2019 CIO Survey determined that AI implementations grew by 270 percent over the past four years, and 37 percent in 2018 alone. The research firm attributes that growth to the "maturation" of AI capabilities and how quickly AI has become an "integral part" of digital strategies.
Content Experience Platforms make it easy to incorporate (read: integrate) any third-party technology. Whatever is considered best-in-class in a specific category – Salesforce Sales Cloud in the CRM category, Salesforce Pardot for marketing automation, Salesforce Einstein – is seamlessly connected to the CMS to share data, gain new insights and make marketers better and more efficient in the process. With the right connected systems, value begins pouring in immediately.
Embedded AI is the Future of Digital Experience Platforms - 3 Use Cases
Developers and marketers who aren’t tapping the full potential of AI risk losing out to competitors using smarter tools to make more informed decisions.
Anxious to begin reaping the rewards of this investment? We’ve outlined three use cases that will bring more value to marketers and enable Salesforce users to create a more personalized digital user experience:
Use Case 1: Sales & Service Targeted Content
By connecting Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to a Content Experience Platform like Contentstack, users can create content and associated workflows that map back to account health and sales cycle. Instead of sharing generic or irrelevant content, a customer portal can now contain targeted information based on data gathered in real-time from Salesforce, such as:
- The most relevant case study to support an immediate upsell opportunity.
- A personalized FAQ and documentation for a customer with a technical question.
- Pre-approved support and status messages for a customer with open service issues.
This targeted information can make or break the engagement with your content and, by extension, with your brand.
Use Case 2: Einstein Prediction & Recommendations
With Salesforce Einstein and the infusion of AI into content management, content marketers can unlock even greater benefits. Einstein can help:
- Discover pipeline trends and analyze sales cycles to determine which content is most likely to inspire action.
- Speed up issue resolution by sharing intelligent, in-context conversation prompts.
- Suggest knowledge recommendations that can be delivered to the customer on any digital channel across any digital touchpoint by the CMS.
Use Case 3: In-app Experiences
For applications built on the Salesforce Platform and published on the AppExchange, Content Experience Platforms can deliver content for the in-app experience, as well as any other digital channel that matters to the app developer, including websites, community portals and online stores.
By providing a unifying content layer and digital content hub, companies can deliver a consistent brand experience across all digital touchpoints and throughout the entire customer journey. For an extra kick, the in-product experience and content can be personalized via adding Salesforce Einstein into the mix.
The result: Users are taken on a product journey that’s optimized for their profile, preferences and behavior which is a revolutionary approach to designing and delivering digital products.
Summary With Salesforce innovating across many technology domains, marketers should choose complementary, best-of-breed tools to take advantage of its continually evolving capabilities and features. Leveraging the same technology principles that Salesforce used to turn the CRM industry on its head – cloud, APIs, microservices and an extensible architecture – Contentstack is delivering the same benefits to the CMS domain. The result: By connecting their CMS to the entire Salesforce ecosystem, companies can gain new insights, enable new use cases and facilitate a new level of collaboration across sales and marketing. Marketers will have insight into which content will most effectively engage, motivate, or satisfy an audience – and receive SEO recommendations to make the final content asset rise to the top of search engine results.