A quick guide to marketing cloud integration solutions

Businesses today rely on mountains of information being shared between numerous departments to get the work done. This constant stream of data is nearly impossible to collect, transfer, and analyze manually. Fortunately, technology today allows businesses to connect their entire organization through the use of integrations. These integrations allow businesses to be more connected than ever before. Multiple departments can access the information they need to ensure processes run smoothly. 

Marketing is a central part of many businesses’ efforts. They must be able to access all sorts of information to help marketing efforts and grow the business’s user base. Connecting the marketing teams, and the rest of the business is typically done with marketing cloud integration solutions. These solutions are important integrations that help keep a business and its marketing efforts running smoothly. To understand why, let’s explore what marketing cloud integration solutions are, how they’re used, and how any business can quickly implement these integrations with Celigo. 

What are marketing cloud integration solutions?

Marketing plays a central role in how businesses find users. This means quick and easy interactions and data transfer are a must for a healthy business. In the simplest terms, a marketing cloud integration solution is an integration tool that connects the marketing cloud to other systems used by different teams throughout the organization. 

For example, if an organization has two marketing teams that either handle different platforms or separate mediums, a cloud integration solution can connect their marketing cloud systems to share information about what each team is doing. This includes what campaigns are running where, what the goals of those campaigns are, and what the results are. This means no marketing team is in the dark about what another is doing and instead, can learn and build from each other to create a more cohesive strategy.  

Additionally, connecting the marketing teams to the rest of the organization can help reveal key insights. A great example of this is integrations to share information between the marketing systems, CRMs (customer relationship management), and sales systems. Marketing, CRM, and sales are intrinsically linked together and can benefit greatly from marketing cloud integration solutions. With an integration, CRMs can be automatically updated with information from marketing efforts, and sales can be updated instantly when new prospects come in. Additionally, marketing can see which leads generated are high quality and then change their strategy to better target those types of individuals.

Benefits of marketing cloud integration solutions

A marketing cloud integration is a great tool for any business that wants to facilitate quick and easy data transfer across their marketing teams and the rest of the organization. Let’s discuss how a marketing cloud integration can benefit a business. 

Enhancing customer experience

One of the main benefits of a marketing cloud integration is enhancing the overall experience a customer has while going through a business’s funnel and sales process. For one, these integrations create a unified customer view. This information includes customer behaviors, preferences, and needs to allow for a more tailored approach to guide them down the funnel and turn them into a dedicated user. 

Additionally, a unified customer view ensures all customer interactions are consistent. If a lead enters the funnel thanks to a specific ad, that can be noted and future interactions from sales can address the product or service in the ad that most interested them, and then expand on that interest to other products and services. 

Streamlining marketing and sales

Marketing and sales are often the closest departments in a business. They feed and inform the processes and information of the other and work together to target prospective leads and grow the business. If they are siloed, information transfer is slow, inaccurate, and out-of-date. This creates unnecessary roadblocks for both departments and prevents either from doing the best job they can. Marketing cloud integration solutions remove these roadblocks and streamline how they interact with each other. 

The most obvious benefit to streamlining these processes is the ability to rate leads in real-time. As soon as a lead is populated, thanks to the efforts of the marketing team, they are instantly transferred to the sales team. The information provided to the sales team includes email opens, what pages they visited on the website, past purchases, and engagement levels. This drastically reduces the time the sales team needs to research prospects as much of that information is already available from marketing efforts. Then, in real-time, the sales team can score the leads and send that information to the marketing team so they can tweak their campaign to capture more relevant prospects. 

Real-time data transfer allows for each team to quickly determine the effectiveness of both marketing and sales efforts and better inform future campaigns. The information collected through marketing cloud integration solutions provides a holistic view of each campaign and can help determine what strategies have been the most successful for the different personas that have been targeted. This allows the team to create a more specific customer journey map as the journey of a single prospect can be followed from first contact to conversion, or from first contact to drop-off. This helps determine where in the journey the most leads are dropping off, and what was different for those that made it through that point. 

Marketing efficiency

One of the best benefits is improved efficiency. For example, the solution makes it possible for multiple marketing teams, working across multiple platforms or mediums, to sync on what campaigns are being run and how they can enhance each other. Without this integration, each team is working off out-of-date information that may influence a team in the wrong direction. This means you gain unqualified leads, lose leads, or drop qualified leads sooner in the funnel. Efficiently connecting marketing teams allows for a more cohesive strategy that drives the best results. 

Scalability

Finally, scalability is a key benefit of marketing cloud integration solutions. As a business grows it’s not uncommon to run into growing pains caused by the process of upgrading systems, bringing in new departments, and onboarding more users and customers. Marketing cloud integration solutions that come from an iPaaS, like Celigo, will have built-in integrations that allow your business to easily grow in size while avoiding those typical growing pains. If more marketing or sales teams are required, they can be easily included in the existing integrations. If the marketing team needs more information from other departments to meet their goals, those integrations can be easily created with one of many templates. The transfer of information is key to a business’s success, and this only becomes more important as the business grows. With a marketing cloud integration solutions growth becomes easier than ever.  

Types of B2B integrations

A B2B integration will fall into one of two categories: data-level integrations and people-level integrations. These are the two main types of B2B integrations available to help businesses streamline their processes. 

Data-level integration

The first type of B2B integration is data-level integration. This type of B2B integration is effectively a system through which applications communicate with each other and share relevant data. The most common example of this is accounting applications between two businesses. For example, if Business A buys a product from Business B, Business B’s accounting applications automatically populate a billing invoice and send it to Business A’s applications which then automatically takes care of payment. 

Data-level integrations can be complex as different businesses use different applications. The B2B integration system needs to be able to gather data, analyze it, and then transform it into a readable format for the other business applications. This process happens automatically and largely is used to help remove the human element that can cause errors and to automate as many processes as possible. 

People-level integration

The second type of B2B integration is people-level integration. This type of B2B integration aims to make human collaboration in each organization as easy as possible. Applications are still involved in this level of B2B integration, however, the difference is how people interact with those applications and the information they gather. Additionally, people-level B2B integrations still aim to automate as many processes as possible, but it does so to make them easier for the people involved. 

This type of B2B integration is best used in instances where cross-team collaboration is needed. This often includes relationship management, as well as customer dispute resolution. At the core, the goal is to ease communication between teams to ensure the different organizations’ business processes work together to meet the same objectives. Without this level of B2B integration, even businesses that work together would be siloed and have major issues as they work towards the same goals. 

How to implement marketing cloud integration solutions

If you’re deciding to implement a cloud marketing solution, you may be concerned about what the process looks like. Well, with Celigo it’s incredibly easy. As an iPaaS, Celigo offers fully built integrations with over 200 applications. This includes several between marketing cloud systems and Salesforce. Celigo makes the implementation and setup easy because we already have it handled.  

Marketing cloud integration solutions are a key piece of the puzzle for any business. The benefits largely speak for themselves. However, if you have more questions, or are curious about how Celigo and our suite of integrations can help your enterprise business, contact us today and request a personalized demo!