Building Blocks Of SFMC

Let's take analogy of a building construction. Bricks, Stones, Sand, Cement, Steel rods etc., plays a major role during construction of a buildings. These are the components/building blocks involved in physical building construction. Similarly, construction of SFMC is based on 2 main components which we will chew over here.

Image Source: Google

Here are the two Building Blocks of Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

• Studios

• Builders

However there are few other add-ons included in Marketing Cloud utilized for different functionalities.

Studios & Builders

Studios manage the content and specific marketing channels*(communication channels). Based on the plan your organization purchased, some of these studios come out-of-the-box. Each studio has its own specific area of focus, so many companies choose to use multiple studios to help them market better. for you. In short, Studio components aim at engaging with communication channels.

*Marketing channels involves email, social media, mobile apps, SMS, and websites.

Builders manages data and campaign automation. i.e. Builder deals with data, content, and customer journeys across the channels. Journey Builders, Audience Builders (Contact Builders), Content Builders, Brand Builders, Analytic Builders (Standard reports), Analytics Builders (Datorama reports), and Marketing Cloud Connect.

Builders can use the items you create in the studios (eg. Journey Builder uses the activities you build in Automation Studio), OR studios can use the items you create in the builders (eg. Email Studio uses content blocks created in Content Builder). It’s this functionality crisscrossing between builders and studios that make the Marketing Cloud product suite flexible, sometimes tough to understand the relationship.

All Builders and Studios are accessed from the top navigation bar in Marketing Cloud Home Page.

Let's break the studios & builders into smaller pieces as below:

Studios

• Email Studio

• Mobile Studio

• Web Studio

• Automation Studio

• Advertising Studio

• Social Studio

Builders

• Journey Builder

• Audience Builder (Contact Builder)

• Content Builder

• Brand Builder

• Analytic Builder (Standard reports)

• Analytics Builders (Datorama reports) and

• Marketing Cloud Connect

Image Source: Google

Email Studio: Email Studio, build emails (Content Builder), preview, test, and send.

A successful email campaign requires sending the right message at the right time. Email Studio from Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows businesses to automate these processes and helps marketers craft tailored emails. Using customer data, you can send out emails at the most suitable time and reach the intended audience. On top of that, the tool comes with custom report generation and the ability to import data from a plethora of sources.

Mobile Studio: Create, send, and monitor SMS (MobileConnect, GroupConnect). Send push notifications (plus silent notifications, in-app messaging, Bluetooth Beacons, and Geo-location (MobilePush). The ability to communicate with the customer in multiple ways across different platforms is a vital advantage in a business’s marketing strategy. Mobile Studio enables smooth communication using MobileConnect, GroupConnect, and MobilePush options. MobileConnect allows you to create, send, and track SMS messages, as well as generate automatic replies and manage keywords. GroupConnect handles all communication over messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. By integrating this feature with Journey Builder, you can collect message data and set up triggers to facilitate instant replies. MobilePush is created to send out push notifications over the company’s app. This feature is meant to incentivize people to use company's application and gain the intended value from it.

Web Studio: Manage web experiences (ie. landing pages, microsites). CloudPages organizes all web content (including forms, coupons). Collect data to further personalize web experiences.

Automation Studio: Automation Studio focuses on automating system activities for advanced data management. This means that it can help automate repetitive tasks — freeing up your digital marketer’s time.

With Automation Studio, you can even perform advanced segmentations and create journey audiences. The purpose is to automate tasks on a regular basis to help provide more context to your journeys.

Advertising (formerly Advertising Studio): align online advertising with your CRM data. Find new prospects with lookalike audiences that behave like your current high-value customers (also tap into Facebook lookalike audiences, and Google similar audiences). Advertising Studio is created to drive lead generation and acquire new customers across various channels. The leads can also be automatically pushed to the SFDC Marketing Cloud to allow marketers to take further actions and turn them into paying customers.

Interaction Studio: Another useful tool from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud suite is Interaction Studio which is designed for real-time content personalization and interaction management. In simpler words, marketers can promote their products in real time based on how the user interacts with the website. While the user is browsing the website and clicks on certain pages, the system records this data and uses this insight to generate personalized recommendations. As a result, you get a website with dynamic content that is tailored to each individual customer.

Social Studio: [Scheduled to Sunset, Nov 2024] Create, schedule, and monitor social media posts and take advantage of real-time engagement, and rich analytics – all in a unified interface.

Monitoring every post, comment, like or any other interaction manually is virtually impossible, and Social Studio streamlines these tasks. This solution can create, schedule, and track the posts while also measuring performance indicators and analyzing the outcomes of your social media campaigns.

Journey Builder: Journey Builder helps you design customer journeys based on touch points and specific events. It allows you to visualize how your contacts are going to experience your brand and create customized journeys based on contacts’ preferences and behaviors.

It’s important to note that Journey Builder is not a standalone product; it must be integrated with other studios in order to build fleshed-out journeys.

Audience Builder

Contact Builder: manage data about contacts (the ‘people’ records in Marketing Cloud). It gives access to demographic and behavioral information, organized into ‘attribute groups’ (eg. abandoned carts), ‘events’, and ‘populations’ that can then be segmented.

Content Builder: Build emails and landing page templates – including reusable/interactive content blocks.Content Builder consolidates your content and assets all in one place — making it easier for you to replicate high-performing email campaigns in the future.

Brand Builder: customize the look and feel of your Marketing Cloud account by uploading your company logo and changing the default color scheme to your own. In Enterprise 2.0, you can create multiple brands and assign them to business units.

Analytics Builder: Analyze all of your marketing data in a single source of truth. There are set of Standard Reports (Classic) which can be used to pull analytics and tracking details for different categories.

With Datorama Reports, you can build and edit dashboards based on your needs. Brand

Datorama Reports allow you to configure your dashboards based on a few different out-of-the-box dashboard categories. These can be filtered, so only the most relevant data will appear on your dashboard.

Marketing Cloud Connect(MC Connect) combines the digital marketing capabilities of Marketing Cloud with the data management, segmentation, and campaign management tools in Salesforce. Create unitary customer relationships with more data-driven, personalized conversations and the ability to automate the customer journey. Salesforce to Marketing Cloud connector that allows data to sync from the core Salesforce platform(SF CRM) to SFMC, and vice versa.