Making Salesforce Marketing Cloud accessible to SMB's
Timeline
August 2024 - Dec 2024
Tools
Figma, Axure, Miro, SLDS Design System
Team
6 Designers, 2 PM
What I did
UX + Product Strategy, Research, Concept Testing
TLDR
Challenge
SFMC is powerful, but built for enterprise teams with in-house marketers.
Small businesses lack the time, structure, and expertise to use it effectively.
How might we help SMBs move from inspiration to execution using SFMC?
Solution
We used the current AI capabilities to help SMB's move from idea to execution through a highly tailored workflow
Impact
78% increase in idea-to-execution rate
Lower learning curve for SMBs
DOMAIN RESEARCH
What does the current SFMC ecosystem look like?
SFMC is a very complex ecosystem with multiple tools interacting to do ONE thing - execute marketing campaign. To target our efforts, we mapped out how SFMC currently executes campaigns, how the data flows and what dependencies occur within these workflows
How are the current users using SFMC?
This is how different enterprise teams collaborate to execute large scale marketing campaigns
USER RESEARCH
Why do SMB's struggle with this ecosystem
Unlike enterprise teams that work within structured office environments, SMB owners and small teams are constantly multitasking, handling operations, sales, and customer engagement while planning their marketing efforts.
What is their mental model? 🧠
SMBs don’t “do marketing” - they run a business. Campaign ideas come on the go: after a customer call, a good review, or a new product drop.
We asked: How can we meet users where they are - mentally and physically?
Their mindset is reactive, not strategic. Our goal was to flip that without forcing them into enterprise workflows.
EXPERIENCE STRATEGY ✨
We reimagined the flow to look something like this
SECONDARY RESEARCH
What I learned about human-AI workflow 🤖
AI driven automation can feel impersonal, and trust was a key factor. To build that trust, we established three guiding principles:
Augment human decision-making, not replace it
Clarify AI capabilities and limits
Build trust through transparent logic and feedback loops
DESIGN PROCESS 💬
Some insights that drove our ideation and feature prioritization
EVALUATIVE RESEARCH
10
iterations
and concept testings & critiques
WHY
To evaluate what could be automated within the workflow
How can the current ecosystem best support this?
WHAT WE DELIVERED
Campaign Planning
Users enter goals in their own words → Convert into campaign strategy
Why?
SMB's don't have to know marketing keywords or technical jargon
Inspiration to execution
Saw a billboard you love? See what makes a campaign click
Why?
Keeps users in the creative loop - guiding their decisions, not replacing them
Passive inspiration to active ideation
Shows users trending, successful examples with similar objectives to spark creativity
Why?
Gives users a centralized place to capture, revisit, and organize inspiration at any time
Automated task flow
Once an idea is saved, it is turned into a campaign with smart defaults for audience, channel, and objective. Users can tweak any field, but don’t have to start from scratch.
Why?
Translates intent into execution steps
Learning and growth
Finding the best solution involved learning a lot of new concepts and skills, getting guidance where needed, taking on tasks and going out of my comfort zone. The first phase of the project focused on understanding the main problem I was tackling. This meant going out of your way to learn more about the product itself and have a sense of their pain points and goals.
I learned how to be a better storyteller when presenting my work in team design critique sessions, in order to get as much valuable feedback as I could. After creating numerous iterations and an interactive prototype for the features, I validated and tested my assumptions.
Throughout the project, we followed an agile framework, cycling through research, design, testing, and iteration. Our biggest revelation was that agile is not just a process; it's a mindset. Rather than treating research, design, and testing as sequential steps, we learned to blend them fluidly, letting our findings continuously shape our decisions. From managing stakeholders and synthesizing research to presenting to leadership and receiving peer feedback, this project was pivotal in my growth as a designer.
Copyright 2024 by Priyanvada Darshankar