What’s to come in the October Release for Dynamics 365 for Marketing

by Laura Brewer August 2, 2018

by Laura Brewer August 2, 2018 5 minutes read

Microsoft recently released an overview of the new features that will be available to Dynamics 365 for Marketing in October 2018. The new release reveals several capabilities to Marketing that will deliver inclusive proficiencies to generate leads for the sales team. The simplistic drag-and-drop design tools for creating and running multi-channel campaigns are designed to enhance marketing efforts.

As many business owners (small, medium or large) can attest, marketing is a major factor in their success for selling their products. In total, eight new features will be added to Dynamics 365 for Marketing that will deepen LinkedIn integration and strengthen account-based marketing. The intelligence that is integrated into the app will create a more personalized marketing experience for both users and prospects.

Account-Based Marketing

Business-to-business marketers will use the features the account-based marketing has to assist with increasing the incorporation and alignment between the sales and marketing department. Dynamics 365 for Marketing will enable both departments to close more deals by focusing on specific accounts that will generate the largest revenue. Account-based marketing will help blend the two departments by tracking marketing activity to account strategies, increase ROI by focusing on high-value accounts, increase account significance with personalized content and generate efficiency by identifying the specifics of contacts, companies and markets. The improvements will also assist in generating account-level leads and nurture them through the demand-generation funnel while continuously measuring account engagement and enhanced messaging.

Reusable Content Blocks

The reusable content blocks enable Marketing to store content marketing that is easy to add to emails and page designs. It also allows you to protect some or all of the blocks by restricting other users from editing content. This feature allows your team to protect the standard marketing materials and design elements for campaign, email and page use. Because you can be selective with aspects of your content, your organization’s compliance can improve through the brand identity and design standards. For example, each block can be as simple as designing a button or as complex as an event countdown timer. As they say, consistency is key in any organization.

Social Listening for Campaigns

Social media is a major aspect of modern day marketing to keep customers engaged. With social listening in Dynamics 365 marketers can create relevant social tags to customers journey and/or other entities within your organization. You will be able to view the social media response to your marketing initiatives. Social listening will add a social tab to every customer’s journey and event and a new dashboard for social insights. Modern marketers must focus on both traditional marketing and social media marketing. This feature will bring together insights from all marketing channels such as events, emails, landing pages and social listening data for social media platforms.

Marketing Calendar for Planning

The calendar for planning will make it easier for marketers to visualize a full overview of a variety of marketing activities with a start and end date. It enables all stakeholders to view the diverse elements of a marketing campaign on a single calendar, allowing for quicker decision making. The marketing calendar will provide mobile responses and allow users to view and/or create items on the calendar without leaving the page. The calendar overall will make it easier to view all aspects of each event and journey with a click or view sessions inside an event.

Deep LinkedIn Integration

Dynamics 365 for Marketing will provide companies with a deep LinkedIn integration for generating leads. This feature will let you run journeys specifically targeting on LinkedIn with professional networks and relationships. The integration will bring orchestration, scoring and segmentation through high-quality engagement within the account-based marketing. It will increase the marketing ROI and generate more high-qualified leads to be nurtured. Dynamics 365 for Marketing already syncs leads captured using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, but the capabilities will be expanded in October. You will now be able to integrate Dynamics 365 for Marketing sections with LinkedIn matched audiences, evaluate the success of your LinkedIn targeting with the engagement statistics, generate leads on account level when retrieving form submissions and nurturing leads through lead scoring based on form submission interactions.

What’s to come in the October Release for Dynamics 365 for Marketing

Account-Based Marketing

Reusable Content Blocks

Social Listening for Campaigns

Marketing Calendar for Planning

Deep LinkedIn Integration

Richer Segmentation Experience & Custom Analytics

Additional Languages and Geographies

Laura Brewer

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