Marketing Cloud Advertising: More Important Than Ever?

With businesses allocating more of their marketing budgets to digital advertising, especially video formats and social media platforms, any tool that can help marketers manage and integrate advertising efforts with their wider marketing strategy is vital.

Marketing Cloud Advertising does exactly that.

Side note: Marketing Cloud Advertising was previously called ‘Advertising Studio’. Salesforce is in the process of updating its platforms and documentation to reference the new name.

Available in Marketing Cloud Engagement but easy to connect with Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), Marketing Cloud Advertising is a central place to manage ad campaigns across multiple channels, while tapping into your CRM data.

Spanning Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Pinterest, and Snapchat, Marketing Cloud Advertising means you no longer need to access every single one of these platforms; replicating your ads and copy or building multiple audiences. Instead, you can create a single campaign within Marketing Cloud that will run across them as many as you need.

This saves hours of campaign setup time, but also simplifies monitoring and reporting because again, there’s no jumping between channels reviewing a handful of separate analytics dashboards. Everything is in one place.

This alone makes Marketing Cloud Advertising a no-brainer for Salesforce marketers running ad campaigns in 2024 and beyond. But there are plenty more benefits…

Benefits of Marketing Cloud Advertising

Target CRM data (compliantly!)

The beauty of running campaigns directly within Marketing Cloud is that you can create Advertising Audiences using your existing CRM and Marketing Cloud data. 

Whether the objective is to upsell, cross-sell, launch a new product, or nurture, it’s possible to build an audience of known contacts and run campaigns to them.

Without Advertising Studio, this is still possible. However, it relies on exporting your customer data and uploading it to each of your chosen advertising platforms. As I’m sure you’re aware, exporting and importing data comes with compliance risks. Incorrectly stored or shared personal data can violate GDPR, potentially resulting in fines and headaches.

Marketing Cloud Advertising removes this risk, handling the secure, hashed import of your data to advertising networks.

Then there’s the matter of how up to date that data is. Manually imported data can quickly become stale whereas audiences synced in MC Advertising will always be up to date. This means contacts can be removed from ad campaigns when need be.

Use any of the following data sources to build an Advertising Audience:

• Marketing Cloud data extensions or lists

• Sales Cloud

• Audience Builder

• Data imports

• Journey Builder

What’s more, MC Advertising enables you to create Lookalike audiences from your customer data too. Lookalikes tend to generate much higher click and conversion rates than audiences created using general targeting. In fact, brands report conversion rates that are 50% higher when targeting lookalike audiences

Suppress customers from campaigns

Let’s say you’re running a lead generation campaign across social media networks. You’re targeting your ideal buyer persona and running ads with a sign up offer that is specific to new customers. However, you haven’t excluded existing customers from this campaign, which means they’re seeing these ads in their social feeds too.

If you were a customer seeing a sign-up offer for new customers that you didn’t have access to, how would you feel? Perhaps a bit slighted? This is why it’s important to exclude existing customers from lead generation campaigns, particularly those with heavy sales promotions. The last thing you want is to alienate customers and lose their business because of sloppy advertising.

Thankfully, MC Advertising solves this problem. Just as you can build ad targeting audiences using your CRM and marketing data, you can suppress contacts from advertising too.

Customer experience aside, ensuring your campaigns only run to those most relevant improves efficiencies and helps avoid wasted spend on irrelevant ad clicks.

Consistent omnichannel experience

‘Omnichannel marketing’ means providing a unified and consistent experience for customers or prospects, no matter which channel they’re interacting with. In layman’s terms, it means aligning your messaging across all of your marketing and ad channels. 

Think of it like this: email marketing does not exist separately to ad campaigns. The two can (and should!) be used in hand-in-hand for a seamless user experience. 

For example, a customer visits your website and triggers an automated ‘upsell’ email for the product or service they viewed. At the same time, they are added to an ‘upsell’ advertising campaign for that product or service. The overarching message or promotion within both marketing comms should be consistent, sending a stronger, more memorable message using both channels.

With Marketing Cloud Advertising, aligning your campaigns with other activities for an omnichannel experience is far easier, thanks to the way Salesforce products integrate seamlessly, connecting interactions across email, mobile, advertising, and web pages.

Build advertising into customer journeys

Many people think of advertising campaigns as short ‘runs’ to a mass audience, even if that audience is highly targeted. For example, a product launch campaign that runs for a few weeks and then wraps up. The brand chooses the timing based on their marketing schedule, not the customer’s digital behaviours.

Combining Marketing Cloud Advertising and Journey Builder (an amazing customer journey automation product available in Marketing Cloud) flips this approach on its head.

It allows marketers to create ‘always on’ advertising campaigns that run to select contacts as and when they join or reach a certain stage in an automated journey.

Let’s say you have a welcome journey for new customers and within this journey, you send a sequence of emails over the space of three weeks. Towards the end of that journey, you promote your new product as an ‘upsell’ offer, but the customer doesn’t open the email - or they do but they don’t click.

Instead of sending another email to try and coax that engagement, the customer can be added to an ‘upsell’ advertising campaign, containing the same upsell offer. 

Now, they’ve either seen your advertising in their feed even if they missed/ignored an email, or they’ve seen a consistent message in multiple places.

The average number of marketing touches needed to gain more sales is debated but is generally accepted as between three and eight. Naturally, these touches are more effective if they’re integrated and across multiple channels. 

Add new leads straight into your CRM

Many advertising networks have lead capture ad formats, whereby a user can submit a form without ever leaving the page or network they are browsing. Facebook has ‘Lead Ads’ and LinkedIn has ‘Document Ads’, while Google has ‘Lead form assets’.

When campaigns run via Marketing Cloud Advertising, leads captured in ad forms are automatically added to your Salesforce accounts. Meaning they’re immediately available to the sales team for fast follow up, or can be added to lead nurture campaigns using Journey Builder, or Engagement Studio in Account Engagement.

Once again, this prevents GDPR compliance risks but it also allows you to respond quickly and effectively to new leads entering your system.

Get started with Marketing Cloud Advertising

You’ll be pleased to know that getting started with Marketing Cloud Advertising is pretty straightforward. It’s a user-friendly tool that doesn’t have a steep learning curve.

There are three main steps:

1. Configure Advertising user roles i.e. Admin, Viewer, Channel Manager, etc. You can see which permissions apply to each role on the Salesforce help page.

2. Assign team members a role i.e. which of your Marketing Cloud users should be assigned as an Admin, Viewer, etc.

3. Connect ad accounts by navigating to Advertising Audiences > Administration and clicking the icon for the channel you want to connect, then authorising.

4. Create Advertising Audiences/add to Journey Builder - according to your marketing strategy (don’t skip documenting your strategy before jumping into running ads).

Assuming you don’t encounter any issues with authorising your accounts or getting to grips with creating ad audiences, that’s all there is to it! Of course, if you do get stuck at any point, you can contact MarCloud for technical support.

No doubt, the focus on advertising will only increase in the coming months and years, so now is a better time than ever to take advantage of Marketing Cloud Advertising and ensure your campaigns are leveraging all of its features from the start.

As a Salesforce Partner, we have a team of Marketing Cloud consultants ready and able to help you strategise, implement and manage advertising campaigns. Get in touch for a chat about your business and advertising goals.