One day away from MarTech: Monday’s Daily Brief

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MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, I’m feeling a little less virtual today.

Tomorrow MarTech kicks off. It’s virtual, sure. And while thousands of senior-level marketers will be able to participate both live and on-demand (free registration here), it’s very real to me.

A wide range of experienced speakers are assembling to discuss all the changes and innovations in the marketing world that we’re dealing with right now. MarTech is where all the great minds in our space come together to make sense of it.

That’s our mission, and we look forward to welcoming everybody in the coming days to help us navigate these thrilling times.

Chris Wood,

Editor

A holistic personalization technology strategy

In the second part of a three-part series, Apoorv Durga of the Real Story Group lays out a strategic approach to omnichannel personalized marketing. His key premise is that omnichannel personalization requires several related capabilities across a potentially wide range of use cases.

The first and most important capability is having unified customer data. That’s a huge challenge, of course, and one that many businesses are on a journey to address. It’s necessary to ingest, manage, cleanse and duplicate the data before opportunities arise to segment audiences within the data and ultimately use it as the foundation for personalization.

The other prerequisites for a successful strategy are the selection of content to present to customers based on behavior, the ability to manage content assets effectively, and a plan to analyze how it performs. Once the key parts of the strategy are understood, the process can begin mapping them to elements in the marketing tech stack that support them.

Read more here.

Salesforce updates Service Cloud  

Salesforce announced updates to their Service Cloud, including workflow tools powered by AI and contact center solutions.

The new workflows are built into the Customer 360 platform assisting customer service teams. Predictive capabilities allow reps, in some cases, to flag a problem before a customer is aware of it. The release also includes innovations for digital contact centers for video, chat, voice and workforce engagement that accounts for both the customer side and service employees.

The new Customer Service Incident Management offering gets out in front of service issues by allowing teams to identify and track incidents, and manage them from a single screen. 

Customer Service Incident Management also includes “Swarming,” allowing the customer service team to bring in internal and external partners to collaborate on a problem or incident, using Slack. Robot process automation capabilities (RPA) for Service Cloud come courtesy of Salesforce’s recent acquisition of Servicetrace.

Why we care. There are at least two trends in this release that marketers should keep an eye on. One, customer service is a crucial place where brands can gain a competitive edge. It also remains an important channel or channels (chatbot, SMS, etc.) where marketers can engage customers and develop a relationship with them.

In the technology space, this is also an important sign that workflow is paramount for marketing teams and organizations overall. Swarming is one example of how Salesforce is putting its acquisition of Slack to work. In some form or another, work-from-home and other remote work collaborations are here to stay.

Read more here.

Facebook is testing a new marketing tool called Ad Strategies

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Img: https://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2021/09/facebook-ad-strategies.jpeg

“Ad Strategies uses automation to help you build complete customer pipelines,” according to an email to advertisers. We first saw this in a tweet from Matt Navarra. The idea is to provide an easier-to-use advertising setup that doesn’t require as much effort for advertisers.

In the thread, Navarra shows screenshots of the step-by-step that social media managers would go through to set up Ad Strategies. It’s a five-step process that includes answering questions about your chosen ad strategy including what you’re selling, your sales cycle, whether you want to prioritize sales or leads, and what your budget is. From there, you can set locations, add creative and review the campaign before launch.

Why we care. Facebook has been saying it cares about small businesses for a while now, and this seems to be a step toward demonstrating that. Ad Strategies would make it a lot easier for SMBs to set up social media campaigns. But just like with Google and Microsoft Advertising’s automated tools, there’s potential for humans to lose the control that many advertisers like to maintain. The most common complaint about automation in ad tools is that it prioritizes impressions over conversions, and we’re interested to see if the Facebook Ad Strategies tool follows the same pattern.


About the author

Kim Davis
Staff
Kim Davis is currently editor at large at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Shortly thereafter he joined Third Door Media as Editorial Director at MarTech.

Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

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