Before the advent of Data Cloud and Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), businesses strived to integrate their data into their CRM to obtain a holistic view. If you’re considering another expansive platform, there’s an excellent interim solution to consider: the Campaign Audience Builder (CAB).
Where to get Campaign Audience Builder
The Campaign Audience Builder is a package on the Salesforce AppExchange developed by Lightblaze. Known for its user-friendly interface, CAB allows you to create audience segments using your Salesforce data, making it an efficient substitute or preliminary step towards a full-scale CDP solution.
Campaign Audience Builder Ease of Use
Campaign Audience Builder has a simple point-and-click interface that allows you to navigate and filter data related to the people you are trying to add to an audience. It simply gets installed alongside your data and has a very short implementation time (I was up and running in 10 minutes).
Once installed, it really is a 3-step process of getting your first audience created and usable:
- Define the Criteria: as a techie myself, this was really the fun part. Connecting data and filtering the right records feels natural and familiar.
- Generate the Audience: This is basically running the process based on all the work you did in the previous step to see who matches. As always, it’s a great idea to spot-check that some people you expected to appear were successfully matched!
- Populate the Campaign: you have your list of people, it is time to put them somewhere that you can act on. This is when you choose which Campaign to use, how often the audience should be evaluated, and if people should be removed should they no longer meet your criteria.
Unlike CDPs and other types of data platforms, which require accommodating complex data relationships and aren’t always user-friendly, CAB offers a seamless alternative.
Advanced Segmentation Features in Campaign Audience Builder
Looking for Contacts that have Closed Won Opportunities with Products in a certain Product Family? Yep, Campaign Audience Builder can do that.
Do you also want to ensure those same people don’t have a Case? Yep, you can do that too.
While not unlimited in its power, there’s no data scenario that you cannot segment with CAB (compared to report builder or segmentation in Account Engagement).
CAB allows you to select either a Lead or Contact as your audience driver and connect it with any related object. After defining your audience, you can populate a Campaign by creating CampaignMember records. CAB also provides controls on how frequently your audience should be evaluated and whether it should clean records that no longer meet your criteria.
With your audience defined, you can now use that information to populate a Campaign by creating CampaignMember records. You have some controls on how often CAB should be building your audience and if it should clean CampaignMember records that no longer meet the criteria.
Integration and Data Security
CAB stands out with its ability to directly publish the audience into Account Engagement (Pardot) into a static list. This feature eliminates the need to clumsily attach data to the Lead/Contact records for list population.
A key feature of CDPs is the ability to “act” on the new audience that you’ve created in downstream systems. While CAB doesn’t really integrate with a bunch of other third-party tools, it can call APEX/Flows (where you can do almost anything integration-wise).
Data security is paramount for Salesforce organizations. Moving data into other systems like data platforms or CDPs can potentially jeopardize these security controls. Since CAB operates within your Salesforce organization, it only accesses the data you can, thereby ensuring data security.
CAB may be the stepping stone you seek
In summary, the Campaign Audience Builder (CAB) offers a user-friendly, efficient, and secure way to handle your Salesforce data. It’s a practical stepping stone if you’re considering a more complex Customer Data Platform (CDP) solution.
With its easy setup, advanced features, and commitment to data security, CAB is a smart choice for businesses looking to maximize their data management and audience segmentation without taking on a full CDP solution just yet.
Thinking about implementing CAB in your org? Contact the team at Sercante to learn more about the tool and how it will work with your overall technology strategy.
