Moving to a platform like Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be a game-changer for acquiring and retaining customers. It’s especially robust when it comes to creating personalized and targeted marketing campaigns across multiple channels. While helpful for B2B marketing, it’s particularly effective for B2C markets due to its ability to drive timely and highly personalized customer interactions.

With Marketing Cloud’s extensive functionality comes a level of complexity that often catches users by surprise. Although some elements of the platform offer user-friendly, drag-and-drop features, companies that want to harness the platform's real power—especially when integrating data from various sources and creating highly personalized messaging—need to invest in resources with technical skill sets. 

Great power necessitates great technical abilities. But it’s not just about knowing coding and scripting languages, although that’s critical. If you aim to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud to its full potential, it’s important to understand the types of roles you’ll need.

This article is designed to help you understand the resources needed, whether hiring in-house or partnering with BDO Digital to stand up, manage, and develop your Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance.

Essential Roles to Stand Up Your Salesforce Marketing Cloud Instance

Think of preparing for your Salesforce Marketing Cloud implementation like assembling an elite team of experts. Each role has a hand in ensuring that your instance is set up the right way the first time, which is important since a poorly executed instance can be both labor-intensive and costly to fix down the road. Here's an overview of the key players you'll need.

Strategists and Planners

These are the visionaries responsible for defining the overall goals and objectives, crafting a roadmap, and allocating necessary resources. While external consultants often act as analysts and advisors, internally, this role is typically filled by project managers and other key stakeholders, including a mix of senior management and operational experts.

Solution Architects

These platform and integration experts design the system architecture to meet your company’s unique needs, laying the foundation for your marketing operations. Their tasks include designing data models, developing automation workflows and connecting Salesforce with external systems like CRMs, data clouds, and data warehouses.

Marketing Cloud Admin, IT Team, and Business Intelligence Team

These roles often overlap but are integral for ongoing platform management. They liaise with other platform admins and are crucial for setting up, maintaining, and scaling your Salesforce Marketing Cloud environment. If these skills are unavailable in-house, it’s a good idea to bring in a team like BDO Digital to correctly configure your platform from the outset.

Developers

Developers play a critical role in tailoring Salesforce Marketing Cloud to match unique business needs and extending platform capabilities. Your developers are going to help with custom integrations, API expertise, scripting and automations, landing pages and microsites, and troubleshooting and debugging. Marketing Cloud Developers should have a fundamental understanding of AMPscript, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, and CSS. 

Implementation Architects

Once the strategy is in place and the architecture is designed, implementation architects bring it to life by configuring your instance and setting up your high-level customer journeys. They will work on segmentation strategies, dynamic content, and set up your emails and cloud pages. Once your high-level journeys are set up, they will perform all of the necessary testing and quality assurance. 

These roles are essential for standing up your instance and you’ll likely want to continue working with them on a project-by-project basis as your needs evolve. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Roles for Ongoing Platform Management

After the initial setup, the focus shifts from implementation to ongoing management and maintenance. And, while you may be able to draw on the team that helped stand up your instance, you’ll likely need some additional specialists. 

Platform Administrators

Platform Administrators manage user access, monitor system health, and troubleshoot or delegate issues as they arise. While they may have technical expertise, they typically have high-level tasks to maintain the cleanliness and accuracy of data and system architecture. If you didn’t have one when setting up your instance, you probably do by the time you begin marketing to your customers in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Project Managers

Project Managers may have varying roles or titles depending on the project scope and how your business uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud. They are responsible for tracking ongoing projects, engaging experts as needed, and orchestrating part-time, internal, or external development for new features to ensure the platform evolves with your needs.

Campaign Managers

Campaign Managers may overlap with Project Managers and typically focus on the operational aspects of ongoing marketing projects. Heavily involved in day-to-day marketing efforts, they manage requests from your marketing team and are less focused on feature development.

Campaign Specialists

Campaign Specialists are the boots-on-the-ground team members who make the strategic vision a reality. They execute strategies, build customer journeys, set up email sends and construct landing pages.

Data Analysts

Last but not least, Data Analysts scrutinize campaign metrics to identify areas for improvement and suggest optimizations. They play a pivotal role in making data-driven decisions, from implementing enhancements to improve campaign performance to spotting opportunities for cross-selling and prioritizing content strategies.

A Strong Salesforce Marketing Cloud Team Builds the Foundation for Success

The bottom line here is that your Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance is not a set-it-and-forget-it affair. Instead, long-term success requires a dedicated team with distinct roles and responsibilities. 

In fact, when I talk with clients considering the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, I often make the analogy that having the right team from the get-go is like having a strong foundation for your house. If you don’t consider the human element early on, you may have a shaky foundation leading to structural issues down the road. It’s far more expensive to fix these challenges than it is to prevent them in the first place.

We've outlined the most common roles, but your business goals should drive the actual configuration of your Salesforce Marketing Cloud team. 

If you’re looking at the list of roles concerned about your current team’s ability to handle the needs, know that it doesn’t have to be overwhelming or intimidating. Many organizations find that their existing staff can fill multiple roles or that they can spread roles across various platforms. 

To that end, outsourcing some of these roles to BDO Digital can be a strategic move to allow internal resources to focus on other priorities while helping you stand up and manage your Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance effectively. 

If you’re ready to find out how BDO Digital’s consultants and marketing professionals can help you tailor your Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance to your organization, contact us today.