Cross Functional Teams - A practical example

Together we are stronger - we all know that. And this also applies to cross-team collaboration in companies. Terms such as MarTech (= the combination of marketing and technology) are cropping up more and more frequently. In this blog post, you will find out how we utilise these synergies in customer projects.

Status quo

One of our clients was planning an extensive digital marketing campaign for a major sporting event at the end of 2022. It was important to play this out efficiently across multiple channels. At the time, our client was using various different marketing tools to publish the campaigns on all channels. For example, he was using the Salesforce Service Cloud, among other things. This was primarily used for processing service tickets, but also as a single source of truth for all relevant customer email addresses.

However, there was a lack of integration between the marketing tools used and this service cloud, which meant that the customer data collected could not be used properly for marketing purposes. The systems were not connected on a technical level and were therefore silos. This was an obstacle to an effective and automated multi-channel marketing campaign.

The client was therefore forced to transfer and synchronise data manually. This not only led to time losses, but also to errors in the execution of the marketing campaigns and inconsistencies in data quality.

The challenge

Our common goal and our task as digitalisation drivers was therefore to manage the marketing campaign from a central system, create the target groups centrally on one platform and use the technical solution and content expertise of our cross-functional teams. In the case of our client, we opted for Marketing Cloud Engagement from Salesforce, as this, in combination with the existing toolsetting, offers various advantages and synergies and thus represents an optimal solution for the client.

Why cross-team collaboration pays off

Our customer also benefited from these advantages in the course of the collaboration. The same applies to the collaboration between a marketing automation consultant and a content creator expert, who worked closely together to realise this project. This collaboration offers the customer an invaluable advantage. Thanks to our many years of experience in the marketing sector and in-depth knowledge of the industry, we were able to guarantee optimum coordination between the experts involved and thus generate the best possible output.

Thanks to our in-house expertise, we were able to successfully combine two marketing streams, namely existing customer marketing and target group retention via Salesforce and classic social media marketing, which are often operated independently of each other in many other companies. A major advantage of an agency is that it can flexibly adapt its resources and capacities to the needs of its customers in order to be able to react quickly to changes.

By connecting the Salesforce Service Cloud to the Marketing Cloud Engagement and integrating the social media platforms, target groups can now be easily created. These can then be used for various channels such as email, SMS and social media.

The tools for success

Another important tool that Marketing Cloud Engagement offers is the Journey Builder. This is responsible for cross-channel communication and enables target group-specific retargeting. This allows customers to reach target groups that have shown interest in the services but are not yet ready to buy. This increases the likelihood of a potential customer completing a purchase. Salesforce's Journey Builder recognises this situation and can play out a useful and relevant message in a targeted manner - even across channels. Our customer was also able to make use of this and establish successful retargeting.

Retargeting and multi-channel communication are important aspects of reaching the target group and offering them personalised communication. Through retargeting, customers who are already interested are addressed again and through multi-channel communication, a campaign can be harmonised across several channels to enable a seamless and consistent customer experience. This leads to greater customer loyalty and satisfaction, which in turn contributes to higher conversion rates.

Our customer also benefited from these advantages in the course of the collaboration. The same applies to the collaboration between a marketing automation consultant and a content creator expert, who worked closely together to realise this project. This collaboration offers the customer an invaluable advantage. Thanks to our many years of experience in the marketing sector and in-depth knowledge of the industry, we were able to guarantee optimum coordination between the experts involved and thus generate the best possible output.

Thanks to our in-house expertise, we were able to successfully combine two marketing streams, namely existing customer marketing and target group retention via Salesforce and classic social media marketing, which are often operated independently of each other in many other companies. A major advantage of an agency is that it can flexibly adapt its resources and capacities to the needs of its customers in order to be able to react quickly to changes.

By connecting the Salesforce Service Cloud to the Marketing Cloud Engagement and integrating the social media platforms, target groups can now be easily created. These can then be used for various channels such as email, SMS and social media.

Our conclusion

By successfully implementing the project, we were able to realise a number of benefits for our customer. Not only a more efficient project realisation through shorter decision-making and coordination paths, but also concrete benefits:

• Centralised creation & storage of target groups

• Linking of existing customer and social media marketing

• Planning and execution of a multi-channel campaign in a centralised system

• Avoidance of manual data transfer between various system silos

• Centralised reporting of the marketing campaign

In addition, the centrally managed project implementation leads to lower costs for the customer and the technical implementation as well as the bundled content expertise of a single agency leads to more efficient project implementation.