Unlocking the Power of Salesforce: How V5 Digital Can Help Your Business Grow

V5 Digital is an official Salesforce Partner

V5 Digital has been a proud Salesforce consulting partner since 2020, dedicated to helping companies in Africa and beyond unlock the full potential of their Salesforce investment. Our team is armed with the knowledge and experience to help businesses set up and optimize their use of Salesforce and in so doing, drive business growth.

In fact, bringing this world-leading customer relationship management solution to our clients has inspired so much customer success that we’re currently looking to expand the V5 Digital team with new Salesforce Interns and Salesforce Certified Consultants.

But what exactly is Salesforce and how can it benefit your business?

Are you a Vollblut Digital Marketer ready to make a difference and willing to learn from the best? If yes click here.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It is cloud-based software that can help your business manage its interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects. It provides tools for sales, customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and app development.

The idea behind Salesforce is to provide a single, centralized place for your company to manage all customer data and interactions, helping you improve your customer relationships and grow your business.

In 2008 12% of businesses used CRM software, today it has risen to 87% - Source: click here.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

This popular feature of the Salesforce suite is a marketing automation platform that helps increase customer engagement, provides a personalized experience, and improves customer satisfaction.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows for:

• Real-time customer engagement

• Social media engagement, listening and advertising

• Email and marketing automation

• SMS messaging and push notifications

• WhatsApp messaging and push notifications

• Customer marketing analytics

Maintaining customer relationships is essential for any enterprise, and V5 Digital can help companies manage this aspect of their business.

With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can create targeted email and mobile campaigns, track customer interactions and get insights on campaign performance. Additionally, it offers integrations with other Salesforce products and third-party platforms, which means you can streamline your marketing efforts and improve customer experiences.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud users span many industries and company sizes and while it is mainly considered an enterprise-level platform, its different editions make it flexible enough for any organization, including yours!

Become a Digital Trailblazer with Salesforce Software!

How can Salesforce benefit your business?

Other than the obvious benefit of getting a better ROI from your marketing efforts, the Salesforce platform is great for:

1. Increased productivity: Salesforce automates many manual processes, freeing up time for sales and customer service teams to focus on more high-value activities.

2. Better customer insights: Salesforce's centralized database provides a single view of customer interactions, enabling companies to make data-driven decisions.

3. Increased productivity: Salesforce automates many manual processes, freeing up time for sales and customer service teams to focus on more high-value activities.

4. Better customer insights: Salesforce's centralized database provides a single view of customer interactions, enabling companies to make data-driven decisions.

5. Improved collaboration: Salesforce facilitates communication and collaboration between departments, helping companies to work more efficiently.

6. Customization: Salesforce offers a wide range of customization options, allowing companies to tailor the platform to their specific business needs.

7. Scalability: Salesforce is designed to grow with a company, allowing businesses to add users, features, and customizations as needed.

8. Better Marketing Campaigns: Salesforce uses segmentation, lead scoring, personalization, automation, and analytics to create more effective campaigns with better targeting.

Create sophisticated, beautiful messages that excite your audience!

Which Salesforce features are popular in Africa?

Local businesses find Salesforce Email and SMS Studios particularly useful. These tools can help you create and manage email and text message campaigns designed to wow your audience. They allow you to communicate with customers using the channels they find most convenient and help you track the performance of your campaigns in real time.

Due to the popularity of the App, many African businesses love that Salesforce allows for the integration of WhatsApp. This partnership makes it easier than ever to send automated notifications, promote products and services and offer live support or after-sales services to your customers.

Salesforce makes it quick and easy for businesses to get up and running on WhatsApp

With Email, WhatsApp, and SMS Studios, you can:

• Build messages: Use pre-designed templates or create your own messages from scratch using a drag-and-drop editor.

• Manage lists: Import and manage email and text message lists, segment them based on specific criteria, and ensure that only the right people receive the right messages.

• Track results: Track opens, clicks, and conversions and use this information to make data-driven decisions about future campaigns.

• Automate messages: Automate the sending of messages based on specific triggers, such as a customer making a purchase or reaching a certain milestone.

• Collaborate: Collaborate with team members on email and text message campaigns and get approval before sending messages to your customers.

Salesforce, SharpSpring, and Rocketseed are V5 Digital's global customer success leaders

How can V5 Digital help you use Salesforce to grow your business?

V5 Digital can help your business set up and maintain a Salesforce solution by providing expertise and resources to successfully implement, configure, and customize the suite of CRM products to meet your specific business needs.

We can either train your in-house team to implement the Salesforce software or do this for you by setting up your ideal digital and CRM ecosystem. After this, we can provide ongoing support to ensure the system is running smoothly, troubleshoot any issues, and provide updates to enhance the functionality of the platform.

With a focus on delivering value and exceptional customer experiences, V5 Digital is your trusted partner for all things Salesforce in Namibia and beyond.

Make this the year you do great things and allow V5 Digital to assist you by contacting us for a free, no-obligation consultation here.

Digital Marketing Trends for 2023: It’s about to get interesting…

Many businesses are already mapping out their digital marketing plans for 2023 and beyond

As technology rapidly advances, digital marketing trends are constantly changing. To stay ahead of the curve, it’s important to pay close attention to these trends so you can adapt your strategy accordingly. In this blog, we’ll be looking at what you can expect in the world of digital marketing in 2023.

Did you enjoy that intro? Did it sound like any other blog intro? What if I told you that a clever AI chatbot wrote that in a matter of seconds after being given a simple prompt? AI has properly arrived, and 2023 will be the year everything changes! So what can we expect?

V5 Digital can build the perfect AI Chatbot for your business

1. AI Content Creation

Graphic designers and copywriters are keeping a close eye on whether new programs like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion will help them generate ideas and create content more quickly and efficiently or replace them entirely. While the latter is unlikely there’s no denying that these powerful tools will transform how we create content in the coming year.

What can you do now? Algorithms already determine the social media posts you engage with, the search results you see, and even the ads displayed to you and in 2023 it might even create the content you like. It will be imperative to understand how the algorithms are impacting your results and optimize your content strategy to take advantage of this.

2. The Metaverse

The metaverse is one of the most talked-about trends in digital marketing. The metaverse is a broad term that describes a variety of immersive virtual experiences taking place online, usually with others. Starbucks, Nike and countless big brands have announced metaverse experiences. While there is a lot of excitement for the metaverse, most businesses don’t have practical use cases (or return on investment) just yet.

What can you do now? Start experimenting with the metaverse and immerse yourself personally. Look for emerging opportunities for your business to participate in and keep a close eye on others in your industry. The metaverse is still experimental for most businesses, so don’t worry about going all in yet.

3. Customer Experience

Most algorithms and AI in digital marketing optimize for the same thing—creating a better user experience, as this is what matters most. For example, search engine optimization (SEO) updates this year focused on providing the most helpful content to users. Beat the algorithms and delight your customers by focusing more on their experiences.

What can you do now? Help future-proof your digital marketing by focusing on the customer and optimizing their experience. All algorithms are based on improving the user experience—so this helps protect you from future algorithm updates.

Are you using TikTok for business? You should!

4. Short Videos

TikTok and Instagram Reels are taking over social media feeds—and consumer attention. There is no question that this format will only continue to grow. For businesses to stay relevant they need to appear in the channels and formats where their customers are. The good news is that short video formats are making their way into social media management tools and schedulers, so it will become easier for businesses to plan and post next year.

What can you do now? If you haven’t been active in these formats personally, now is the time. Start watching Reels and TikToks to gain an understanding of the format, content and appeal. Next, start posting and experimenting with short video content for your business. Test and learn your way to success in these powerful platforms that are earning so much time and attention.

5. Simple, Clear Messages

With short-form video taking over and attention spans constantly dropping, businesses have a bigger challenge than ever. Businesses must be able to communicate in short, quick soundbites to earn attention on mobile devices.

What can you do now? Spend more time crafting shorter, simpler messages. Take your marketing and brand priorities and sound-bite them into short sentences or quick ideas. Challenge yourself to copy popular short video formats and shorten your messages.

“A trusted referral is the holy grail of advertising.” - Mark Zuckerberg

6. Influencers

Influencers are hot. As the advertising landscape becomes more and more cluttered, businesses need to find new ways to get in front of their target audiences. Increasingly, businesses can find opportunities to break through the noise with organic-seeming content via influencers. Influencer marketing has been on the rise for years, and this trend will only continue as influencers build up larger and larger audiences that are ripe for the picking for marketers.

What can you do now? Research opportunities to integrate influencers into your marketing plan for next year. Examine how your competitors or other industries are harnessing influencers to grow results.

7. Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy is about getting your team or employees talking and sharing on behalf of the business. More and more businesses are realizing the power of their employees. Employee personal profiles and assets are often more effective at reaching more people more authentically than business accounts and assets. Harnessing this power is an untapped opportunity—especially in business-to-business (B2B) marketing.

What can you do now? Evaluate the opportunity for employees to contribute to your marketing efforts and build a plan to engage them. An engagement plan usually includes training, tools and resources to motivate and excite employees to speak on behalf of the business.

8. LinkedIn As A B2B Powerhouse

LinkedIn has been around for many years but recently has posted record growth and engagement. It is expected to account for 25% of B2B advertising in two years. There is a growing opportunity for businesses to use the platform for growth. Yet very few businesses take advantage of this. My guess is that LinkedIn will only continue to grow and the opportunity will only get bigger. Jump in early to disproportionately win.

What can you do now? Build LinkedIn into your plans strategically. Optimize your content. Grow your audience and look for new features and opportunities to accelerate your success.

9. A Focus On Foundations

While it is easy to get distracted by the metaverse, Web 3.0, NFTs and AI, the reality of digital marketing is that the foundations of digital marketing still make up the bulk of results for most businesses. Foundations like your website, SEO, email, social media, digital ads, community management and reputation management will disproportionately contribute to your results.

What can you do now? Get a competitive edge by growing your results in these key areas. Have a plan to optimize and get better results faster from your existing efforts.

This article was written by Krista Neher for Forbes and adapted for the V5 Digital audience.

V5 Digital: A successful year in review

It’s often said, “don't stop until you’re proud”…Well, the V5 Digital Team could not be more proud of the projects we crafted and the success we created over the last year.

We love bringing new technology to our southern shores and this year was no different. We introduced the Linkin-Bio solution to Namibia Health Plan, allowing them to effortlessly promote their services, competitions, and urgent updates from one, always-relevant, Instagram link.

Building a sophisticated chatbot for Pupkewitz Megabuild enhanced their ability to engage with their customers in a prompt, smooth, and automated way. Now if someone’s favourite hammer needs restocking, all they have to do is scan a QR code and let an intuitive bot know.

The customer-friendly user experience we designed for the Value Added Service, Mobi 4 U, helped Namibians make digital payments easily and safely.

While our innovative email marketing campaigns empowered clients like NamPost and Nedbank to convert more with personalized, clickable emails that track opens, bounces, deliveries, and overall success all the way to bottom-line ROI.

We are privileged to work with true Digital Trailblazers

Being digital by name, and digital by nature means we like to make our clients stand out on the internet with enticing Search and Display Ads for beloved brands like Cymot and attention-grabbing GIFs for Nedbank.

It was a year of inspiration with the V5 Africa Webinar series hosting incredible talent who levelled up how we use WhatsApp, Email Automation, Social Media Marketing, Psychology, and Digital Transformation to give us an edge and accelerate business growth.

Are you even in Digital Marketing if you don’t enjoy making a splash on Social Media? This year we infused Shell and Vivo Energy content with a relatable local flavour. We also assisted PostFin, NHP, and many more to reach and tempt a bigger audience with exciting new posts.

While busy, we did not forget our Pledge 1% promise to support local nonprofits. We had a great time helping the Blumfelde Farmers Association uplift Namibian farmers and loved creating and sponsoring marketing material for CATS and the Auasblick neighbourhood watch.

V5 Digital might be proud, but with a true passion for all things digital and 2023 hinting at even more success, we have no desire to stop helping businesses reach their full potential!

If you’re not already on this incredible client list, add your name by contacting us: here.