Digital marketing has never been more challenging than it is today. Customers are bombarded with all kinds of marketing messages, from their inbox, to their social media feed, to the display ads that follow them on every website they browse. It is getting harder to cut through the clutter and create the chemistry between your brand and your target customer on just about any digital channel.

To bring out your best game and impress your customers at different touchpoints, you need some secret weapons. Look no more. We’ve got you covered. At Salesforce, we’ve been focusing on customer success for 18 years and have been rewarded with the fastest growth of any top five enterprise software company. In this post, we will share with you some of our top secrets to create successful marketing campaigns. If you want to learn more, download our e-book here to get a full list of handy tips.

1. Align Your Goals Across the Team

To start with, whether your marketing team is big or small, make sure everyone is one the same page about goals and priorities before you start a campaign.

Here at Salesforce, we look at V2MOM whenever we have new initiatives. The V2MOM — which stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures — is a goal-setting process that starts with our CEO Marc Benioff. Benioff publishes his V2MOM across the organization for every new fiscal year, and others in the management chain will follow suit. Everyone sets their V2MOM, with objectives tailored to their own jobs and their managers’ goals. Most importantly, everyone’s V2MOM is visible to all other employees in the company. Whenever we have multiple campaigns at the same time, we turn to V2MOM to prioritize them and align our goals.

2. Start to Measure Your Content Marketing

Creating compelling campaign stories is important, but measuring their effectiveness is even more crucial in the long term. At Salesforce, we create content with three main objectives in mind: awareness, engagement and conversion. Some content is designed to get our names out, and others are crafted to help prospects make informed decisions. We look at different metrics for each content type and constantly fine-tune benchmarks to see what resonates with our audience. It is also helpful to set success metrics early in a project. That will save you the trouble to pivot after investing a lot of time and money.  

3. Listen to Your Customers on Social Media

You’ve probably already set up accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (and whatever places millennials hang out nowadays), but are you using them effectively?

Take advantage of what social media has to offer - a place to start conversations that add value to your audience. Don’t treat your social platforms as a broadcasting channel. Listen to your audience and engage with them on topics (and platforms) they are interested in. Our social media team always stay on top of all kinds of conversations about Salesforce through Social Studio. We provide content that help solve people’s business problems because our data tell us that’s what our audience need. We also make sure to connect people on social with our support team as quickly as possible when they reach out for problems.

4. Bring the Party to Your Customers

To bring your campaigns to the next level, hosting live events for your partners and customers to build a thriving community, and take the events to wherever your customers are. Every year, we highlight and reward the most active members in our community at Dreamforce - one of the largest cloud computing conferences in the world. And if you can’t make it, don’t worry. We have live events and world tours all year round to connect you with Trailblazers and partners in our Ohana (Ohana means “family” in Hawaiian). Remember, each event is a learning opportunity for both you and your customers, to build meaningful relationships and share insights and best practices. Pro tip: make it fun with live music and amazing prizes.

5. Launch and Relaunch Your Product

Building an impactful product launch campaign is not a one-time effort. You need a relaunch strategy to announce new features, new customers stories and new milestones of your product over a period of time to get customers intrigued and involved. For example, we unveiled Salesforce Einstein — AI for CRM — last year before Dreamforce. Since then, we’ve had a number of announcements about new features of the Einstein Platform Services. Each time, the announcement comes with new partners and new customer success, which helps our ecosystem grow steadily.    

There is never a one-size-fits-all solution for the challenges facing today’s marketers, but hopefully these tips can get you started. If you want to know more lessons we’ve learned at Salesforce, download our e-book here to get ahead of the game!