Salesforce AI Marketing
This case study outlines the design and development of Brainforce, a mobile app tailored for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) to revolutionize their marketing strategy creation. Built as an intelligent assistant, Brainforce enables marketers to effortlessly generate ideas, plan campaigns, and manage workflows through AI-powered insights and user-friendly tools.
Date
Aug - Dec 2024
Role
Designer, Researcher
Sponsor
Salesforce
TL;DR
As a designer, I led ideation sessions and created prototypes to bring Brainforce's key features to life. I focused on intuitive interfaces for capturing inspiration and transforming ideas into actionable campaign plans, tailored for SMB marketers' unique needs.
Our team conducted extensive user research to identify SMB pain points in marketing. We developed Brainforce, an AI-powered mobile app that streamlines campaign planning and idea management. Through iterative testing, we refined the app to empower SMB marketers with limited resources.ShareRewrite
Defining Goals
Let's scope out a little bit to see what we are dealing with
Why does marketing work?
Capture users' attention
Encourages them to engage with the brand on a deeper level
A marketing campaign has basically four phases:
We as a team decided to focus on 'Planning' but why?
Why Planning?
To start a good and successful marketing campaign you need a great idea. A great idea comes from an inspiration but how do you get inspiration? You can draw inspiration from anywhere, it could be from
Planning drives success. A well-thought-out campaign ensures:
Focused goals
Targeted messaging
Agility in execution
Especially when it comes to SMBs, planning is important because
Lack of expertise and resources in the current market space and state of technology available
Limited budgets can lead them to bleed funds in unnecessary areas
Building a strong foundation in the community they want
because it the most crucial phase that determines how your entire campaign will look like.
Why did we wanna focus on SMBs?
We wanted to focus on them because the United States has approximately 33.2 million SMBs, accounting for 99% of all businesses.
When it comes to large enterprises
But when you look at SMBs
We reimagined this flow as something like this
Let me introduce you to James
James owns a local ice cream store called Friendly's. Now that he has a store, he wants to expand his business and increase his brand awareness.
James's store falls under SMBs (Small to medium-scale businesses).
He faces a lot of struggles:
Doesn't have marketing expertise
Overwhelmed by complex marketing tools
No dedicated marketing team
Lack of resources and budgets
Hard to connect with business goals
This brought us to our problem statement which is
How can we help SMBs capture inspirations and convert them into a successful campaign?
This is where our proposed solution BRAINFORCE comes in.
Our proposed marketing app integrates into the current Salesforce Marketing app ecosystem. He uses the app to generate this email:
You can see multiple elements combine to get this marketing email:
Here's how he got it using Brainforce
All this research informed our sketches
These decisions defined our sketches:
Identifying the best ways to integrate AI effectively
Designing with a mobile-first mindset for seamless accessibility
Prioritizing quick and effortless note-taking anytime, anywhere
Creating campaigns through AI and human collaboration
Concept Testing and Feedback
We conducted multiple rounds of feedback sessions with stakeholders throughout the project that helped us refine our features, ensuring the app effectively meets startup needs and enhances campaign planning. This iterative process was to fine-tune the features and make the app more user-focused and effective, meeting SMB requirements.
Future Scope
Enable campaign creation expanding from planning (for example: deploying the campaign, analyzing the metrics, and reiterating based on them, etc)
Enhance collaboration with team integration features
Add desktop compatibility for in-depth edits
Reflection
I deeply immersed myself in the world of small businesses, striving to see marketing through their eyes. Understanding their struggles, especially for newcomers, was eye-opening. Working closely with Salesforce experts helped me design solutions that truly matter. While it’s a strong start, there’s so much potential to refine marketing workflows further. This experience reinforced how vital teamwork, critique, and feedback are—especially in design.