Smaller Marketing teams can sometimes require marketers to wear many hats; these individuals are both the strategist and the coordinator/implementor. They may often find themselves reaching out to the sales team to understand which of their clients or consumers they should group together in a segment for campaign messaging, whether it be email, social media, or both. They may then need to manage the marketing budget for that fiscal year and report back on the product and brand performance whilst also forecasting for the next year.

Larger organisations tend to have Marketing Departments with teams dedicated to certain aspects of marketing, like Events Teams, Brand and Communications Team, Digital Analysts Team and so on. Each team has its own key goals and marketing activities, whilst all working towards the same objectives, which typically focus on the 4 Ps: Product, Price, Promotion and Place.

Promotional tasks such as viral advertising, targeted communications and event orchestration take time and planning and can often lead to tunnel vision rather than keeping in mind the bigger holistic view.

Dynamics 365 Marketing contains many solutions to support the different marketing functions whilst providing an easy-to-use interface, which automates many of the processes and works seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Sales to improve collaboration between different departments across the organisation.

The Marketing workload of Dynamics 365 supports the 4 Ps as follows:

Product

The application provides a holistic view of the customer with insights on their consumer behaviour like website visits, email opens, their subscription preferences and any notes that may be added from the Sales team. This allows the Marketing Team to have a better understanding of each Contact’s behaviour and what methods of communication will most likely lead to a product purchase.

Moreover, D365 Marketing also works well with Customer Insights to allow the marketing team to optimize the customer journey with cross-channel insights. Out-of-the-box machine learning templates quickly predict transactional churn and provide upsell/cross-sell and next-best-action recommendations.

Price

A consumer will form a perception about a product and its quality and relevance as soon as they see the price. A price below the perceived value can lead to both a loss in potential additional revenue and a target audience that judges the quality of the brand. If this price is raised later, the existing customers may feel like they are being unfairly burdened. For new products coming down the pipeline, it is possible for the Marketing Team to build surveys using Dynamics 365 Customer Voice and access them directly from Marketing components including the segment builder, the email designer, and the customer journey design, to conduct consumer research to gain insights about the perception of the product with the targeted audience to ensure the price is marketed correctly.

Promotion

There are many different solutions that Dynamics 365 Marketing provides for managing promotions. There is a dedicated area to manage and coordinate events, from invites to attendance to sponsorship relations to managing the rooms, building, and itinerary for the event. What’s more, they can also have full visibility of the Marketing Calendar Year to ensure there are no unintentional clashes throughout the year.

Dynamics Email Builders, in both outbound and real-time marketing, allow for the personalisation of email communication to show or hide different information based on specific contact data points. The introduction of Real-time Marketing has enabled this to be a low-code solution with the use of personalisation and variation sections.

Finally with the use of both Outbound and Real-time Journeys, Marketers can plan ahead for their promotional campaigns, and automate the communications that individuals will receive based on both profile and behavioural data

Place

Knowing what the customer would wish to buy is one thing, but conveniently providing more information about a product or service and communicating this through the correct channel to that customer can sometimes be trickier. The introduction of real-time marketing allows for A/B testing on email communications vs. SMS/Push notifications, with SMS third party providers such as Twilio being fairly quick and easy to install into the application. Marketers can be sure that their communications are being delivered with the best statistically significant result.