As we close out the year, the team at Forcery wants to extend our sincere thanks for your trust and collaboration. Whether we’ve worked together directly or you’ve been considering our AI-powered solutions for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we appreciate the opportunity to be part of your journey. Looking ahead to 2025, we’re excited for the possibilities that lie ahead and wish you continued success. If you’re looking to learn how to leverage enterprise value from enterprise technology, optimize your CRM or marketing automation org or just explore how the new Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced products can support your goals, we’re here to help. Wishing you a peaceful holiday season and a prosperous New Year!
Forcery’s 2024 in MarTech
As we look back at 2024, we are incredibly thankful for the incredible opportunity to work with Salesforce presenting Marketing Cloud around the world.
The first CairoDreamin’ 2024
In February, we traveled to Egypt helping launch the very first first CairoDreamin’ in our session Mastering Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Helping train and upskill Trailblazers across the world is an incredible honor, as Salesforce continues to drive revenue for businesses globally. Tigh Loughhead was asked again to speak in 2025 to speak about “Marketing Cloud Growth” and “Marketing Cloud Advanced in his session, From Acquisitions to Innovation: Exploring Salesforce’s New Marketing Cloud.
Trailhead Academy and helping launch “Agentforce”
We continued our work with Trailhead Academy throughout the year as a Certified Instructor for Trailhead Academy, teaching the Drive Sales with Account Engagement – PDX101class for Salesforce. In August, Tigh was asked to preview Marc Benioff’s Dreamforce keynote, providing feedback on marketing and brand positioning for the launch of “Agentforce” at Salesforce Tower in New York City.
Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced
The New York City Marketer’s Trailblazer Community was also active throughout the year, with our most recent presentation on Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced just this October at our last user group in Midtown before the World Tour. If you’re interested in learning more about Salesforce’s “New Marketing Cloud” check out our presentation below or don’t hesitate to reach out.
Inaugural DubaiDreamin’ 2024
In November, we were incredibly lucky to be asked for our thought leadership again, this time in the United Arab Emirates at the inaugural DubaiDreamin’ conference, in a session “Mastering Marketing Automation: A Beginners’ Guide to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.”The conference took place at the foot of the Burj Khalifa (the tallest building in the world), and brought Salesforce practitioners and learners from all throughout the Middle East.
The world of marketing technology is changing rapidly, and while there is uncertainty around the economy and automation in particular, one thing is clear: companies that leverage AI and marketing technology most effectively are poised to inherit the business success of the future. …and we could not be more excited to be part of that future.
Thank you for being part of Forcery’s MarTech magic and we look forward to collaborating and “making MarTech magic” in 2025!
In the past, businesses had limited channels of direct communication with customers, resulting in fragmented data and inconsistent customer experiences handled by different departments. However, the advent of information and communications technology brought about a multitude of channels, devices, and touchpoints, leading to an explosion of data. Marketers realized the need to harness this vital information to gain in-depth knowledge about their customers, sparking a paradigm shift in marketing strategies.
While data collection and management technologies had been in place since the 1990s, the evolving business landscape demanded a solution that could collect data from multiple sources, organize it, and centralize it into a single customer profile. This marked the emergence of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) in the early 2010’s, revolutionizing marketing practices by offering a comprehensive 360-degree view of the customer. By 2016, CDPs had solidified their position in the industry, transcending mere software to embody a new marketing mindset. Unified customer profiles enabled the transition from multichannel to omni-channel contact, allowing for hyper-personalized messaging tailored to individual customer behavior and preferences, resulting in a consistent and personalized customer experience.
Source: Raconteur
Looking ahead, data will continue to play an increasingly critical role. The World Economic Forum estimates that by 2025, a staggering 463 exabytes of data will be generated daily worldwide, dwarfing the cumulative information shared by humanity throughout its existence. Companies striving for survival must embrace data culture and enhance their competitive edge. CDPs have become an indispensable tool, and gaining a deeper understanding of their implementation is a crucial step forward.
What is Data Cloud (a CDP)?
CDP, short for Customer Data Platforms, has ushered in a new marketing paradigm centered around data and customer-centricity. Essentially, CDPs are packaged software solutions designed to gather and consolidate customer data from various sources, ultimately creating comprehensive and unified customer profiles.
But how exactly does a CDP operate? It’s relatively straightforward. Nowadays, CDPs often employ Artificial Intelligence techniques, particularly machine learning, predictive models, statistics, sentiment analysis, frequent patterns, graphs, and more. These advanced methodologies enable marketers to execute highly effective marketing actions by leveraging insights derived from customer behavior trends.
Data Cloud represents a suite of comprehensive software solutions specifically designed to aggregate and merge customer data from diverse sources, thereby generating unified and in-depth customer profiles. With Salesforce CDP, businesses can fully leverage the capabilities of the software alongside the potential of the customer relationship management platform, resulting in enhanced connectivity and intelligent data processing. This powerful tool not only empowers marketing efforts but also benefits sales, support, and even executive decision-making, culminating in a seamless single source of information that facilitates the creation and implementation of hyper-personalized marketing campaigns and strategies, ultimately driving customer loyalty.
Why Salesforce CDP is better than the competition?
Salesforce CDP stands out from its numerous competitors, offering significant advantages and differentiating itself in the market.
With its dual capability as both an Insight and Engagement CDP, it eliminates unnecessary expenses by targeting customers who have already made the intended purchase, while enabling immediate delivery of personalized and flexible offers within the customer’s preferred price range. By adopting this approach, the probability of customer interaction with the offers increases by approximately fivefold. Additionally, Salesforce CDP enables efficient customer categorization, such as identifying “loyal high-spending customers” and “inactive customers,” allowing businesses to tailor their strategies accordingly.
Salesforce CDP seamlessly integrates and harmonizes the intricate online and offline behaviors of your customers, enabling the compilation of their activities and preferences into comprehensive profiles. This valuable data can be effortlessly analyzed and segmented based on real-time customer behavior, empowering targeted audience activation to enhance engagement among existing and prospective customers. Leveraging a set of customizable rules and the power of Einstein AI, Salesforce CDP unlocks the potential for personalized and impactful marketing initiatives.
By harnessing its robust capabilities, Salesforce CDP empowers your marketing team to isolate and analyze multidimensional KPIs derived from your data, providing invaluable insights of extraordinary value.
Salesforce CDP offers a robust segmentation capability that spans across four key areas:
Geographical: Recognizing the influence of climate on consumption patterns, including clothing and food preferences. Factors like location (rural or urban) drive significant variations in consumption habits, product preferences, and purchase frequency.
Demographic: Understanding the importance of personalizing offers based on age, gender, race, occupation, and other demographic attributes. This knowledge is essential for crafting targeted promotions, such as tailored offers for specific sports equipment based on the customer’s preferences and characteristics.
Psychographic: Considering the beliefs, values, and cultural sensitivities of potential customers. Taking into account these factors prevents the delivery of inappropriate offers that may clash with customers’ religious or cultural practices, ensuring respectful and relevant interactions.
Behavioral: Identifying the optimal timing and preferences for customer spending. Factors like holidays, tax benefits, and individual purchasing behaviors play a critical role in determining when and on which products customers are most likely to invest their money. This understanding enables businesses to tailor promotions and optimize marketing strategies accordingly.
Salesforce CDP ensures seamless compatibility with major systems and applications, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Interaction Studio, Commerce Cloud, Datorama, and Loyalty Management. These integrations are fully accessible from within Salesforce CDP, enabling effortless data flow and functionality. For existing users of Salesforce products, native connectors facilitate seamless integration with Salesforce CDP without the need for extensive pre-coding. Furthermore, Salesforce CDP offers integration with the AWS cloud (Amazon Web Services) and grants access to AppExchange with a range of available applications. It guarantees a robust connection with external applications, including ERP systems. Moreover, Salesforce CDP continually expands its API, empowering developers to integrate more freely and in real-time with the CDP platform.
With Salesforce CDP, updating your information becomes effortless, saving you valuable time. The platform enables easy editing of its data model objects (DMO), allowing you to swiftly make changes to your data structure. Additionally, Salesforce CDP offers the convenience of copying and transferring complete segments, including their descriptions, information, and filters, to new segments. This eliminates the need to meticulously review and re-enter the acquired information, streamlining the process and reducing effort.
Salesforce CDP simplifies data collection and communication in the cloud, leveraging the cloud information model (CIM). It allows you to seamlessly integrate data from various sources, even if they have different structures and formats. By standardizing data interoperability between cloud applications, the CIM ensures smooth data integration. The model organizes content into domains or subject areas, representing essential business concepts.
In summary, Salesforce CDP has emerged as a powerful tool for marketers and organizations at large. Customer Data Platform offers a comprehensive 360-degree view of all customers within a single, easily manageable, and intelligently segmented space.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has become a critical strategy for modern B2B marketers, allowing them to effectively target and engage high-value accounts. To achieve success with ABM, it’s crucial to have a well-optimized martech stack that supports your efforts. In this article, we’ll highlight the essential components and best practices for building a world-class ABM martech stack in 2023
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Key Components of a World-Class ABM Martech Stack
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System: A robust CRM system is the foundation of any successful ABM strategy. It provides a centralized repository for account and contact information, allowing you to track your interactions and progress with target accounts. We recommend checking out popular solutions like Salesforce CRM or Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Marketing Automation Platform (MAP): A MAP is a critical tool for executing ABM campaigns and automating routine tasks, such as email campaigns, lead scoring, and lead nurturing. Leading MAP options include Pardot, Marketo, and Eloqua.
Data Management Platform (DMP): A DMP allows you to centralize and manage your data, including customer information, analytics, and performance metrics. This data can then be used to inform ABM efforts and make data-driven decisions. Explore solutions such as Tealium or Segment.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML): AI and ML can be leveraged to personalize ABM campaigns, providing a more relevant and engaging experience for target accounts. Check out providers such as Salesforce Einstein and Marketo Engage.
Web Analytics Platform: A web analytics platform is essential for measuring the impact of ABM campaigns and tracking the behavior of target accounts on your website. Consider tools such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics.
Best Practices for Building a World-Class ABM Martech Stack
Assess Your Current Stack: Take a thorough inventory of the tools and platforms you’re currently using and determine their effectiveness in supporting your ABM efforts.
Define Your ABM Goals: Clearly define your ABM goals and determine how each component of your martech stack can help you achieve them.
Evaluate New Technologies: Stay up-to-date with the latest ABM technologies and consider incorporating new tools and platforms into your stack to enhance your efforts.
Integrate Your Tools: Ensure seamless integration between your tools and platforms to streamline data management and improve the customer experience.
Continuously Optimize: Regularly review and optimize your ABM martech stack to ensure it’s meeting your goals and delivering the results you need.
The Ups and Downs of Third-Party Cookies and Benefits of Pardot First-Party Tracking
As we near 2023, many marketers are aware that Google’s Chrome browser will no longer support third-party cookies. This decision was made with the intention of protecting users’ privacy and preventing unauthorized tracking across the web. However, the loss of third-party cookies also presents a challenge, as they were previously instrumental in providing valuable insights into users’ journeys on the internet. This requires marketers and customers to adapt and find new ways to gather this information. To address this challenge, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) has created a first-party tracking solution, allowing customers to continue providing personal experiences based on users’ journeys and delivering relevant content at the right time.
What exactly is a “third-party cookie?”
The fundamental purpose of a web cookie is to store information within a user’s internet browser that can later be accessed by websites or web services during future visits. For instance, an e-commerce site may use a cookie to recognize a user and preserve their shopping cart between visits.
Third-party cookies, on the other hand, are set by a service provider that operates on a separate domain from the website. For example, consider the scenario where a video player service (videoexample.com) is embedded in a website (example.com) and stores the time watched, allowing the user to resume their viewing session on subsequent visits. In this case, the cookie set by the video service would be considered a third-party cookie since it does not share the same domain as the website.
Why are browsers killing third-party cookies?
Third-party cookies are commonly used to improve customer experiences, but they also bring significant privacy concerns. For example, they allow ads to follow you from website to website. Additionally, they can make users perform unwanted actions in web applications. In an effort to prioritize privacy, major web browsers are phasing out their support for third-party cookies. While Safari and Firefox have already discontinued use, the most significant change will occur when Chrome stops supporting them in 2023.
How will this effect tracking in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot)?
In a post-cookie era, first-party tracking can help you gather the information you need directly from your customers, allowing you to maintain the level of personalized marketing they’ve come to expect. However, shifting from third-party tracking to first-party tracking will bring about several changes to how Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) tracks engagement.
One major impact is that Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) customers will no longer be able to follow their visitors anonymously across different domains. This will be the case for all users of first-party tracking, whether they’re using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) or a different platform. It means that:
When a customer visits firstbrand.com and then secondbrand.com, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) will create two separate visitors. The customer will have to fill out a form on both domains for their information to be linked. The second impact is that Pardot customers will need to align their domains for all their campaign assets in order to accurately track the customer’s journey. Domain alignment will be crucial in maximizing engagement data in a cookie-free world.
Align all engagement tracking with web domains
To accurately track the progress of a typical marketing campaign, all links and assets must be aligned with the same root domain as the tracking domain. For instance, if the campaign website is located at forcery.com, then the root of the tracking domain must also be forcery.com. This is crucial in ensuring that the complete journey of the campaign can be monitored and analyzed effectively. Any discrepancies in domain alignment could result in incomplete activity insights.
First party cookie implementation
In preparation for a transition to first-party tracking, careful planning can help ensure a smoother process. To get started, consider taking the following steps:
Conduct a thorough evaluation of your web assets to determine if any tracker domains are missing and need to be added.
Identify the websites you currently track and determine where you will need to update the Pardot tracking code.
Examine your content hosted by Pardot and make sure it is aligned with the appropriate domains. Once first-party tracking is activated, Pardot-hosted content will automatically use this method.
Configuring Marketing Cloud Account Engagement first party cookie
To switch to first-party tracking, simply navigate to the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) Settings page or Account Settings in classic Pardot. From there, activate the “Use First-Party Tracking” option. By default, the “Use Third-Party Cookies with First-Party Tracking” setting will also be enabled to ensure a smooth transition and to preserve existing visitor data. The “Use Third-Party Tracking” setting manages the previous tracking functionality, and it’s recommended to turn it off after fully transitioning to first-party tracking to eliminate any potential confusion.
The process of creating tracker domains remains largely unchanged, with just a couple of differences to be aware of. Firstly, you’ll need to set a default campaign, which acts as a primary campaign for your tracker domain and allows you to change the campaign without changing the tracking code.
To do this, go to the Domain Management page and click “Edit” for each tracker domain.
Secondly, the tracking code generator is now located on the Domain Management page, directly below the “Tracker Domains” configurations. Simply choose the tracker domain and the platform will automatically generate the appropriate tracker code for you to place on your website. It’s important to select a tracker domain that matches your website’s domain to ensure activity is properly tracked.
Small businesses face unique challenges in marketing, including limited resources and the need to compete with larger companies. To stay ahead of the competition, it’s crucial for small businesses to optimize their marketing technology (martech) stack. In this article, we’ll highlight why small business optimization of their martech stack is important and provide tips on how to achieve it effectively.
Why Martech Optimization is Critical for Small Businesses
Increased Efficiency: A streamlined martech stack enables small businesses to automate routine tasks, saving time and allowing them to focus on high-impact activities.
Better Data Management: Optimizing the martech stack allows small businesses to manage their data effectively, including customer information, analytics, and marketing performance metrics. This leads to informed decision making and improved outcomes.
Enhanced Customer Experience: By providing personalized, relevant content and interactions, small businesses can improve the customer experience through an optimized martech stack. This helps to build trust and loyalty with customers, critical to long-term success.
Competitive Advantage: Optimizing their martech stack allows small businesses to level the playing field with larger companies and gain a competitive advantage. This includes reaching new customers, improving online presence, and enhancing overall marketing efforts.
Tips for Streamlining Your Martech Stack
Current Stack Assessment: Take stock of the tools and platforms you currently use and evaluate their performance. Identify duplicates, under-utilized tools, and areas where you need further support.
Goal Definition: Clearly define your marketing goals and determine how each tool in your stack can help achieve them.
New Tool Evaluation: Consider incorporating new tools into your stack that will support your goals and improve marketing performance.
Tool Integration: Integrate tools to create a seamless experience for customers and improve data management.
Continuous Optimization: Continuously review and optimize your martech stack to make sure it’s meeting your goals and delivering results.
In conclusion, optimizing the martech stack is crucial for small businesses to compete in the marketing arena. By streamlining their tools and platforms, small businesses can increase efficiency, better manage data, enhance the customer experience, and gain a competitive edge.
The world of marketing technology is changing rapidly, and while there is uncertainty around the economy and automation in particular, one thing is clear: companies that leverage AI and marketing technology most effectively are poised to inherit the business success of the future. …and we could not be more excited to be part of that future.
