This week, we welcome a guest post from our Marketing Account Manager, Lea Howland.

Lea works with our clients to maximize their website and email strategy, guiding them on how to leverage digital technology to achieve their goals. She specializes in creating and implementing strategic roadmaps for client success – translating best-in-class digital tactics into actionable plans.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is a popular marketing automation software enabling marketers to target and track interactions using the powerful data capabilities of Salesforce.com (SFDC) CRM, right out of the box. Combining SFMC and SFDC ensures all leads receive the attention they need through targeted, automated marketing and your sales team—leading to a more efficient, effective, and aligned sales process.

Any tool that helps get sales and marketing alignment is a win in our book! In fact, Salesforce found that “62% of marketing leaders say individuals and teams in their departments are more aligned with each other than ever…and the more aligned they become, the better they perform.”

Today, we’re covering a few tips to help Salesforce Marketing Cloud users maximize tools within the platform to better support their sales team and marketing efforts, while growing ROI.

Shopping on social media just got a whole lot easier.

Last year, Instagram released shopping tags, enabling brands to create hybrid marketing and advertising content with tags that display product and price details directly on posts. But the much-loved social media platform has taken it to the next level.

Instagram announced that it began rolling out a new in-app checkout feature that makes it easy-breezy for ‘grammers to shop their feed and favorite brands.

This is a big move for Facebook, the parent company of the popular photo-sharing app, into becoming a full-fledged commerce business. Although direct checkout is currently in limited testing with 20-something top brands, Instagram plans to extend the feature to more businesses in the coming months.

Want to know how you can get in front of your brand’s biggest fans? Learn how the checkout feature works, how to get started, and what it means for your devoted followers.

The Gift and Home Industry is changing – what can you do to keep up? To stay competitive, buyers and vendors must transition their business from old world commerce to new world commerce – fast.

Meet Pharos – an affordable, mix-and-match product suite built to enable Gift and Home companies to amplify and personalize marketing efforts across channels, deliver proactive customer service, deepen customer relationships, and increase sales.

In today’s hyper-connected world, consumers are looking to top workout gurus, beauty vloggers, foodie fanatics, mom blogs, and everyone in between, for advice, stories, and product suggestions. The resurgence of word-of-mouth marketing in the form of digital “influencers” wields significant power, motivating consumer purchasing decisions and brand engagement.

According to MarketingProfs, 94% of marketers who use influencer marketing find it an effective practice, with results that generate up to 11 times the ROI of traditional advertising.

Social media mavens and digital superstars serve as an extended tribe for product recommendations, brand loyalty, and more authentic online interaction. As a result, these content creators—from celebrities and bloggers, to niche-market personalities—continue to be a driving force for exponentially increasing brand following and audience reach.

Marketers and technology giants alike are taking notice of the power-of-the-pack digital strategy. The world’s largest social network is staking its own claim on the world of influencer marketing. Facebook’s recently released Brand Collabs Manager is connecting brands and influencers, and redefining how brands conceptualize and create branded content on the popular platform.

Continue reading Facebook’s Brand Collabs Manager Platform Embraces Influencer Marketing →

Whether you’re looking to maintain relationships with existing customers or engage prospects throughout the sales cycle, it’s impossible for even the most talented sales rep to remember every customer interaction, so they can follow up at the right time with the right message.

As businesses strive to give a personal and genuine touch to every customer, tracking sales activity and follow up is critical. Yet, customers interact with businesses across multiple channels and at fleeting moments – how can a rep effectively monitor and keep track of it all? Including interactions with others, such as customer service.

Continue reading Getting the Most Out of Your CRM →

This year’s Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE 2018) in Chicago did not disappoint! We enjoyed awesome speakers, informative sessions, fun networking opportunities, and ate a ton of fresh popcorn at our booth.

The four-day conference featured two days of workshops and two days of general sessions, with an all-star cast of keynote speakers: Warby-Parker, Seth Godin, Houzz.com, and Eloquii. We had a great session in the B2B workshop on Friday speaking with our client Mud Pie, A Wholesaler’s Winning Formula for Year-After-Year E-commerce Growth. (Did you miss our B2B workshop session? Get our slides and the persona worksheet here.)

Continue reading 2018 IRCE Roundup →