The Future of B2B Marketing in High-Tech: How Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integrates with Marketing AI

Today’s B2B buyers demand personalized experiences, and generic marketing tactics don’t cut it anymore. To stay ahead of the curve, businesses need to embrace the future: a future powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

AI helps you understand your customers more deeply—everything from their tastes and preferences to their demography, behavior, interactions, and buying journey—so that you can craft the most tailored and relevant messaging for every customer.

Salesforce is a robust platform that helps B2B marketers integrate AI in several ways to make their marketing efforts highly targeted.

Let’s look at how Salesforce Marketing Cloud works for high-tech industries.

The Future of B2B Marketing in High-Tech

In the past, the marketing landscape involved manual-intensive, generic campaigns. Today, marketers leverage AI to hyper-personalize their targeting to increase engagement, enhance customer experience, and drive more results. The future of marketing will be completely tech-driven, paving the way for more sophisticated technologies. Here are a few ways in which the future of marketing will thrive:

• Generative AI will be more advanced, helping marketers create hyper-personalized content based on customer behavior, past interactions, and persona.
• A digital twin is like a virtual replica of your customer. It is a constantly evolving model that uses real-time data and AI to help you understand your prospect.
• Traditional ABM will be replaced with real-time data and AI insights to help B2B marketers identify and target high-value accounts with laser precision and tailored messaging.

The Evolution of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (The Pre-Einstein Era)

 

 

Before the introduction of Einstein AI, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) had automation features that helped marketers save time and improve productivity. However, the capabilities lacked the intelligence that Einstein AI offers today. To start with the fundamentals, read our detailed overview of the core Salesforce Marketing Cloud Features. Let’s take a trip down the memory lane of SFMC in the pre-Einstein era:

• Managing email campaigns, social media posts, and landing pages could be automated. However, segmentation and personalization were primarily rule-based.
• The SFMC had ways to help marketers collect and store customer data. However, marketers needed AI features or predictive modeling to give them in-depth analytics and insights.
• The platform provided data on basic metrics such as open rates, click-throughs, and conversions.
• An automated email sequence could be sent based on a customer’s website behavior. However, these automations needed more personalization and dynamic decision-making.

Let’s look at how the Salesforce Marketing Cloud has evolved and the different AI-powered features that have completely transformed the marketing cloud from automation to an intelligent tool.

Four Ways Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integrates with AI

Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration with AI opens opportunities to elevate marketing performance with personalized journeys and optimized campaigns.

1. Personalize your message and gain customer insights with AI

Segment creation uses prompts (natural language processing and Generative AI) to create segments and plan targeted campaigns.

Data cloud helps you create target audience segments by connecting data from CRM, Product, ERP, and other relevant data sources to create a unified profile.

Lookalike modeling helps you replicate success by gaining access to customers similar to your most successful and high-value audience segment.

“Anticipating customer needs and providing relevant, personalized content is going to be key for successful marketing campaigns. Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud empower you to do that.”

– Selva Pandian, VP, Cloud Practice, LevelShift

Integrating the Data Cloud with your CRM can help you build a solid foundation for adding AI to your marketing efforts. Personalize your messaging, content, and offers based on the customer or prospect’s behavior and interaction. When integrated with your CRM, the data cloud gives you contextual insights into the customer’s interaction with your website and other marketing campaigns.

2. Build intelligent customer journeys with AI for better engagement

Journey optimization uses AI to personalize every touchpoint with built-in predictive AI. You can create, test, and optimize your campaigns to make the most personalized and curated customer experience.

Generative AI can drastically scale content creation. It has access to your data, brand insights, and campaign data and helps you create relevant and on-brand content.

Messaging insights give you an instant overview of your campaign performances. Whether there is an engagement drop, a surge of unsubscribes, or a high click-through rate, Einstein AI gives you actionable insights.

3. Fuel ABM efforts and scale lead generation

AI scoring automatically analyzes your marketing data by identifying the top leads and prospects. Critical account identification analyzes various data sources to automatically identify your most valuable accounts based on past interactions, purchase history, and industry trends.

Full-funnel multi-touch attribution helps you understand and attribute the impact of each channel and your activities on the pipeline.

4. Optimize marketing spend and boost results with AI

AI-powered data integration helps you simplify data management through automation and simplify extracting insights from analytics.

Marketing performance insights give you intelligent input on what drives more success and what is not working. They automatically optimize your campaign creatives and audiences and suggest strategies for success. Automated planning and pacing equip you with intelligent insights and recommendations to optimize ad spending.

Data cloud helps you integrate your marketing and CRM data with third-party ad partners like Google and Meta. This enables you to understand audience performances in a unified view.

How Does Marketing AI Benefit CMOs and Marketing Leaders?

For CMOs:

• Increase customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue per dollar spent on marketing.
• Predict future market demands and constantly optimize campaigns to position your brand for long-term success in the high-tech landscape.
• Empower your team with AI-powered automation, data-driven decision-making, and more intelligent workflows to help them focus on more strategic tasks.

For Marketing Leaders (VPs, Managers):

• With AI-driven insights, you can understand your target audience better and tailor your marketing messages accordingly.
• Identify high-value leads and prioritize your marketing efforts accordingly. This will help you focus your resources on the most promising opportunities.
• Leverage marketing AI to gain deeper customer insights, tailor your campaigns, and make them hyper-personalized, driving more engagement.

The Way Forward with AI for Marketing Leaders

The future of B2B marketing for technology companies is clear: it’s intelligent, automated, and data-driven. By leveraging the combined power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Marketing AI, you can transform your marketing efforts, personalize customer journeys at a scale, and achieve unprecedented results.

LevelShift is your trusted Salesforce partner and empowers businesses to unlock the full potential of Salesforce Marketing Cloud AI.

Our team of experts can help you with the following:

• Craft a data-driven marketing strategy fueled by AI insights.
• Implement and optimize Marketing Cloud for seamless automation and personalization.
• Develop AI-powered campaigns that resonate with your target audience.
• Gain real-time customer intelligence to make informed marketing decisions.
• Measure and optimize your marketing performance for continuous improvement.

Don’t wait—take the first step towards a future-proof marketing strategy. Contact LevelShift today to discuss how Marketing AI can revolutionize your B2B marketing efforts!