Chapter 15
IN THIS CHAPTER
Building corporate web pages
Publishing on the web, in Facebook, and in mobile apps
Analyzing content performance
Without a web presence, your business might as well not exist to the potential clients who are looking for your products or services online. The days when you could count on prospects walking past your door are long gone; nowadays, even prospects just down the street want to be able to find you virtually. Today, your corporate website is as essential as your yellow pages listing was a generation ago.
About 10 years ago, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (then ExactTarget) introduced microsites — its tool for publishing web pages — to help online marketers be more responsive. Back then, the processes for getting pages published required a lot of time and deep technical knowledge. Without the microsites feature, even creating a single page to promote a limited-time-only event might take months of planning to negotiate the policies that made sure that the text was right, the visual design was on-brand, and the site was secure.
Corporate policies have become simpler and processes have become faster since that time, but the demand for web content keeps increasing. Most companies want to have a presence on social media in addition to a corporate website, and even your mobile marketing may require you to create web content.
Web Studio is the name of the category of web content apps in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It currently contains only one app: CloudPages. You use the CloudPages app to build content for the web, social media, or special pages you use with MobilePush, the Marketing Cloud app that you use to send customers messages in your business's mobile app. (See Chapter 12 for details on MobilePush.)
In this chapter, you learn how to use CloudPages to centralize and control the publishing of web pages, Facebook pages, and MobilePush pages. You also discover how to review analytics on how the content performs so you can make informed decisions about future publishing.
CloudPages provides the power of sophisticated website programming techniques through tools that non-programmers find intuitive and easy-to-use. You can use the tools in CloudPages to assemble, publish, and evaluate three kinds of content: web pages, social pages, and mobile pages.
The web content you create in CloudPages comprises landing pages, microsites, preference centers, and Google Ads. The following descriptions outline each type of content you can create in more detail:
When you publish the microsites and landing pages that you create in CloudPages, the system assigns each page a URL. By default, the URL is a Marketing Cloud URL, but you can set up your account to use your company's domain in the landing page URLs.
If you plan to include links to the landing pages in the emails, SMS, or other messages you send to individual subscribers, you can also set up your account to use personalized URLs, or PURLs. A PURL (pronounced “pearl”) includes a variable that the system replaces with a value specific to the particular subscriber so that when the subscriber clicks the link, the system knows whose particular content to populate in the page.
For example, you could use PURLs to include a link to a landing page with information about the subscriber's number of points in your rewards system. When the subscriber clicked the link, the system would go to a version of the landing page with the rewards information of that specific subscriber.
Setting up the system to use your company's private domain or PURLs requires advanced setup. Contact Marketing Cloud support for help.
As an example, Figure 15-1 shows a landing page created in CloudPages. The landing page contains a form where site visitors can enter to win a drawing.
You can create Facebook tabs, Facebook ads, Twitter posts, and LinkedIn blog entries in CloudPages. This is only one way that you can use Marketing Cloud for social media marketing, though. Read about the Social Studio app in Chapter 13.
The following list describes the kinds of social content you can create in CloudPages:
Figure 15-2 shows an example of CloudPages social content in a Facebook tab.
In addition to a corporate website and a social media presence, many companies have a mobile app that customers can install on their mobile phones or other devices. The Marketing Cloud MobilePush app integrates with your mobile app to send messages to app users. You use CloudPages to assemble the messages that you send with MobilePush. See Chapter 12 for details about MobilePush.
Figure 15-3 shows what a MobilePush message might look like.
The CloudPages tools let you easily manage your online marketing by yourself, without needing to take the time and effort to coordinate with technical experts. However, if you're an HTML or AMPscript whiz or have easy access to someone who is, you can also use your own sophisticated code in your CloudPages content.
The content you create in CloudPages remains visible only inside your account until you publish it for the world to see. Then, when your content is ready, you can publish it right away or schedule the system to publish the content automatically at a certain date and time.
To create any type of content in CloudPages, you start by defining a collection. A collection is just a wrapper that pulls all the words, images, and other content into a single place for you to manage. A collection is similar to a folder that you create on your computer's hard drive to contain related files.
After you have a collection, you choose the template type that you want to use. The templates that appear in your account depend on the functionality enabled in it. The list of possible template types follows:
Figure 15-4 shows an example of a landing page template.
When you have chosen and named the template you want to use, you can just drag content to the boxes on the template. Examples of the kinds of content you might add to a collection include the following:
The images and text that you create in Content Builder (see Chapter 7) are available to drag to your template. As described in the following sections, you can also create content directly in CloudPages by using the embedded Content Builder content editor.
Use the following steps to create a collection:
From the home screen in CloudPages, click the Create Collection button.
The Create Collection window appears.
Use the following steps to create a collection:
Pause your mouse pointer on the collection and click the Edit Content button that appears there.
The system opens the collection canvas.
Use these steps if you choose to add a landing page to your collection:
If you have the option, select Content Builder as the Editor.
At the time of this writing, a classic editor was still available, but Marketing Cloud was planning to remove it from the application.
From the Select Layout step in the wizard, choose the icon that best represents how you want your landing page to look, and then click Create.
The Content Builder editor appears for you to create your landing page with the template you chose. See Chapter 7 for full information about using Content Builder.
The content editor is not your only option for creating content. If you have programmatic content, you can add it as a code resource. This option lets you store web programming code that you created outside Marketing Cloud in a file that you can link to from CloudPages.
Later, when you're using the editor to edit content in your pages, you can insert a link and navigate to the code resource to which you want to link.
Use the following steps to add a code resource to your collection:
Click Next.
A simple text editor window appears.
When you create a microsite, you design a site map that organizes landing pages. CloudPages uses the page hierarchy that you set up as the basis for a navigation menu that website visitors can use to move around the site. You can also control the look and feel of the site navigation here. Figure 15-5 shows what the microsites editor looks like.
Use the following steps to add a microsite to your collection:
Click Create.
An editor workspace appears.
Click the Add Page button in the left panel.
The Add New Page window appears.
Type the name of the landing page, and then click Create.
A card appears on the workspace to represent the landing page.
Pause your mouse pointer on the card and click the Add Content button that appears.
The Create Content window appears.
Select the method you want to use to create landing page content.
Valid values follow:
Create or edit the landing pages in the microsite.
For complete information on using Content Editor, see Chapter 7.
Repeat Steps 6 through 10 to add the remaining landing pages to the microsite.
Each landing page you add to the microsite appears as a box in the left panel. Drag the boxes to change the order of the pages in the microsite navigation. To make a page a child of another page, position the child just under the parent and then drag it to the right.
To preview and edit the site navigation, click the Edit Navigation link.
The Navigation Editor appears and you can change the visuals aspects of the navigation bar, such as the background color, the font of the menu items, and whether arrows appear next to menu names to indicate that the user can click the name.
Use the following steps to add a MobilePush page to your collection:
Select the method you want to use to create landing page content.
Valid values follow:
Create or edit your MobilePush page.
For more information about creating MobilePush pages, see Chapter 12.
Use the following steps to add a Facebook tab to your collection:
Click Create.
The Create Content window appears.
Select the method you want to use to create landing page content.
Valid values follow:
Create or edit your Facebook tab.
For more information about creating Facebook tabs, see Chapter 13.
You can create content all day long, but until you publish it, no one outside your Marketing Cloud account can see what you've created. This is a good thing because you want the chance to make sure your content is ready before the world can see it.
When you are ready, you publish the content in your collection from the same screen where you created it. Simply click the Schedule/Publish button in the upper-right corner. Figure 15-6 shows the window that appears when you click the Schedule/Publish button.
From this window, you can do one last preview of the content for each device. You can choose to publish immediately or in the future. If you schedule a future date to publish, you choose the date, time, and time zone when you want the content to become live.
You can tell whether content is published on the Page Details screen, as follows:
From the CloudPages Overview screen, click Edit (pencil icon) on the card for the collection you want.
A list of items in the collection appears.
Click Page Properties (bullet list icon) on the card for the content you want.
The Page Details appear on the left.
From this screen, you can also find the URL where the content is or will be available for people to find.
If you decide to take down content that you've already published, either because there's a problem with it or just because it's outlived its usefulness, you can unpublish it.
The Unpublish button can be a little tricky to find. On the Page Details page, look for an Unpublish button right next to the Published status. Figure 15-7 shows where you can find the Unpublish button.
CloudPages keeps track of metrics that you can use to evaluate the success of the content you've published.
For each piece of content that you publish, CloudPages keeps track of the following activity:
This data is available on the Activity tab for the piece of content. Use the following steps to open the Activity tab:
From the CloudPages Overview screen, click Edit (pencil icon) on the card for the collection you want.
A list of items in the collection appears.
Click Page Properties (bullet list icon) on the card for the content you want.
The content appears on the right in the Content tab, which is open by default.
Click the Activity tab to view the metrics for the content.
You can change the time period that the graphs represent by using the Today, Last 7 Days, and Last 30 Days buttons.
Figure 15-8 shows the activity for a landing page.
The very highest performing piece of content in each channel (web, social, and mobile) appears in the Stats section of the Overview screen.