How to learn Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a variety of avenues for training and certification for marketers who want to learn more about Marketing Cloud.

The War for Talent rages on in the world of marketing technology, and platform skills and accreditation have never been more desirable. According to our recent State of Martech survey, only 24.5% of marketers are certified in their chosen martech platform, and as the world moves ever further into the digital, Marketing departments are starting to require different skills to what they did 10 years ago, this due to the reliance on marketing technology for nearly every aspect of their day to day jobs.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a variety of avenues for training and certification which a marketer can take to learn more:

1. Internal Resources
2. Online Resources
3. Bespoke, hands on training from a third party

Internal Resources:

Internal resources are an extremely helpful but ultimately scarce resource. Organisations with their own documentation written by their own staff, accompanied by accredited individuals which can help explain it, are in an ideal position.

However, as shown in our State of Martech survey, just over three quarters of organisations either do not have a certified professional in the business, or they have a very limited number of them. These individuals are in very high demand, and as a result they are unlikely to have the time to document all their processes, or help their co-workers in their own development. As well as this, these individuals are increasingly being poached from business to business, leaving little to no record of their processes, and as a result leave the business back at square one.

The one internal resource for Salesforce Marketing Cloud which can, and should, be used throughout a marketers training, is a sandbox account. This is an instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud that isn’t populated with any real time data, and so can be used to practice campaign creation, email sends, and more, all in an environment that won’t impact any real world work.

Online Resources:

Online resources are superb for gaining a general understanding of the platform. Trailhead, Salesforce’s online training portal, is free to use and provides a space for marketers to learn at their own pace, with refresher quizzes at the end of each module. Accompanied by videos and online tutorials on sites such as YouTube, the online resources for Salesforce Marketing Cloud are useful and extensive.

We highly recommend it for all marketers.

Bespoke, hands on training from a 3rd party:

Online resources fall short in some areas because Salesforce Marketing Cloud is so highly customisable, and Trailhead learning will not prepare you for the customised sections of your organisations specific platform.

Bespoke, third party training is a solution to this, and typically works in tandem with online resources such as Trailhead. The benefits of hands on training is that the partner you work with can tailor the training to your specific needs, as well as to the specifics of your customised Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance. Training can be divided into levels such as fundamentals, intermediate and advanced, which allows marketers to work at their own pace, while upskilling certain marketers quicker. It can also be created with a goal in mind, for example, training could be tailored specifically to get marketers certified, or how to use a specific element within Salesforce Marketing Cloud that your organisation may require.

What’s best for me?

In a perfect world, every organisation would have martech specialists on hand to guide and teach their peers, accompanied by in depth documentation written specifically for the uniquities of their platform. However, this is rarely the case for many organisations, and is unlikely to be so in the near future. Consequently, a combination of online resources and bespoke training is the answer for most, supplemented with extensive use of a sandbox account for practice.

Are you struggling with platform training? Is your organisation not making the most out of their investment in Salesforce Marketing Cloud? To maximise your opportunity, and demonstrate to the rest of your organisation the value of marketing, get in touch and see how a consultancy like Clevertouch can help with your training needs, and more.

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