As we continue to reiterate the importance of better aligning your marketing and sales teams, we can’t ignore the biggest keeper of all things sales – Salesforce. The all-powerful CRM is where leads live, but much like the closed-loop reporting we’ve highlighted in A Marketer’s Guide to Winning at Sales and Lead Generation: Are you optimizing for the wrong metrics? marketers must now use more down-funnel data to make decisions about upper-funnel actions. In its Digital Advertising 2020 Report, Salesforce shared the trends it discovered after the company surveyed 900 advertising leaders across the world. One of the trends included that “Advertising metrics become more sophisticated. Brands continue to use legacy KPI metrics such as impressions, but are moving beyond simple metrics to quantify the lifetime value of a customer gained through advertising.”
(If you haven’t already, check out AdStage’s newest product, Join, which can link your paid marketing data to down funnel metrics in Google Analytics and Salesforce, automatically.)
Image from Salesforce Digital Advertising 2020 report
With Salesforce being the behemoth repository where leads go to flourish, languish, or perish, we wanted to take a look at how marketers can use Salesforce specifically to close the loop from lead to sale with better reporting, integrations, and insights.
Google AdWords Conversion Import for Salesforce
When it comes to meaningful platform integrations with Salesforce, this is the biggie. When this integration was announced a few years ago, marketers not only breathed a sigh of relief but also said sayonora to the multitude of spreadsheets they had previously relied on. It meant marketers could finally pin down the exact keywords that were generating sales. Since its debut, though, we haven’t heard much chatter about it in the marketing world, so don’t beat yourself up if you missed it. As Google explains in its announcement post, the integration allows marketers to automatically tally up Google Ads conversions for lead statuses and opportunity stages, or what it calls milestones, that you already track in Salesforce. Knowing that data gives you a clear look into milestones all way down the funnel and into sales. From there, marketers can take that info and make adjustments to targeting, budgets, and overall strategy.
The setup is a 7-step process that Google outlines here. The company warns that marketers should be aware that if a Salesforce-tracked user skips a status or stage, Google Ads will not record a conversion for the skipped stages.
Image from About Google Ads Conversion Import for Salesforce®
HubSpot
This integration promises to “keep your marketing and sales databases in perfect harmony.” A statement like that is truly music to a marketer’s ears. This platform partnership focuses less on closed-loop reporting and emphasizes closed-loop marketing, to help advertisers create more effective content to prospects already in the sales funnel or those just entering it. You could argue that this approach isn’t upper or lower funnel, but more mid-funnel, and still a very integral part of the process.
HubSpot says the integration allows for a bi-directional sync, which serves up email opens, CTA clicks, and form submissions. The partnership also supports:
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Lead Management: track individual users and create hyper-targeted campaigns.
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Analytics: dig into the entire funnel to see which marketing assets are working the hardest.
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Calls-to-Action: use data to design effective CTAs, reveal who clicks which CTAs, and measure performance to optimize clickthrough rates over time.
Image from Hubspot + Salesforce integration product
Once all that data is collected, marketers can share email opens, form submissions, web activity, and more with the sales team to help them prioritize outreach. Taking data from Salesforce into HubSpot allows marketers to personalize marketing emails, segment databases, or send emails on behalf of a lead’s assigned sales rep. Finally. Salesforce will send revenue data from closed-won customers into HubSpot so marketers can tie campaigns to ROI.
More info in their ebook here.
Facebook Lead Ads/Offline Conversion
This feature has been around for about a year and a half is meant to help marketers track lower funnel conversion activity. Facebook originally released Lead Ads to make mobile signups easier by letting people avoid filling out a whole online form. Easy lead capture, but what then? Facebook’s answer — Facebook Leads Ads with Offline Conversion, which provides marketers with the attribution they crave through campaign integrations with offline systems such as Salesforce. With the new feature, marketers can create campaigns based on sales funnel milestones by targeting high-value customers through Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences. Marketers can also push customers along through other cycles by retargeting buyers with another product or service.
In its announcement post, Facebook explains how to integrate your CRM.
Image from Facebook Improve Customer Acquisition with the Power of Lead Ads and Offline Conversion
Salesforce Advertising Studio
And of course, Salesforce has its own solution in the form of its slick Advertising Studio, which helps marketers integrate advertising with marketing, sales, and customer service. Broken down into actionable features, that means:
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Synchronizing customer records from any digital channel
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Targeting people on their preferred channels by building audiences with Salesforce DMP
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Finding new customers with Facebook lookalike audiences and Google similar audiences
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Suppressing ads to existing customers on Google and Facebook
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Automating leads from Facebook straight into Salesforce
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Automatically flowing Facebook leads into Salesforce
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Creating Facebook ad campaigns in Journey Builder
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Optimizing Google Search through AdWords by segmenting your campaigns.
Image from Salesforce Meet Advertising Studio
Whether you want to tighten the loop upstream with better down funnel metrics, desire a clearer look into how your content efforts are affecting closes, or wish for a more robust Facebook Leads Ads experience, there are many ways you can better meld your marketing and sales team using Salesforce.