My final post on the Marketing Cloud Consultant Prep series is about the Marketing Cloud Connector, which occupies a small but significant 6% of the exam.
Marketing Cloud Connect help you connect your Marketing Cloud application to your Sales and/or Service Cloud environments. The objective is simple – to leverage your CRM data to run marketing campaigns, and to enrich your customer profile sitting in CRM, based on the marketing interactions.
The older version of this connector was called Salesforce Connector v3, which has now been replaced by with the Marketing Cloud Connect (as of 30th Sept 2017). Familiarize yourself with the benefits of this upgrade.
Marketing Cloud Connect installation pre-requisites and setup – Read through the official Salesforce documentation on this topic to know about the dos and don’ts for setting up MC Connect. I would also suggest going through YouTube videos on this topic (there are quite a few) with step-by-step instructions.
Understand the different email send mechanisms in MC that will allow you to send emails to a Salesforce Contact, Lead, Campaign or Reports. Read about
- Email Send Flows
- Triggered Sends
- Guided Sends
Another important aspect of the MC Connect is the ability to bring over data from the connected Salesforce org, which can then be used further for segmentation and targeted marketing. This will bring you to the concept of Salesforce Data Extensions. Similar to the traditional data extensions available in MC, the Salesforce Data Extensions also makes use of the MC tools for segmentation and data filtering. Additionally, they also allow users to send tracking data back to the connected Salesforce org. Read more about Salesforce Data Extensions here
Familiarize yourself about Synchronized Data Sources. These are the ones that help you get access to your CRM data into the MC application for targeted marketing. Interestingly, any changes that occur to this data in CRM are also brought over into the connected MC org. Details can be found on this article from Salesforce Help
Web Analytics Connector – You will get a question or two on this topic. It mainly covers services like Google, WebTrends etc. that help you track web activity and interactions, related to your marketing efforts. Questions on this will primarily revolve around concepts like Link Level Data, Email Level Data etc. So make sure you don’t skip this topic. The Salesforce official documentation will help you prepare for this concept.
That’s a wrap for my Salesforce Marketing Cloud Consultant Prep series. I do hope that you guys have found these posts useful and that they are helping you in your MC Consultant prep journey. I plan to continue sharing more useful stuff around Marketing Cloud and other Salesforce offerings, as and when I get to learn anything new & exiting.
Till then, keep learning folks!
