Microsoft have announced the content of its 2020 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Marketing.

This articles summaries some of the standout highlights from the many updates coming to Dynamics 365 Marketing. This is part 2 of 2 articles on the topic due to so many noteworthy highlights (access part 1 here).

Social media

Social channels are powerful tools to communicate with and influence prospects and customers. With release wave 2, users can easily create rich content for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They can now optimise when posts are delivered by scheduling them in advance for optimal times.

Improvements and updates include:

• A redesigned post creation experience, making it more engaging for marketing professionals to build and post rich content.
• Conveniently view all related social interactions and performance.
• A redesigned scheduling experience, helping users create consistent streams of content across multiple social channels.

With this update, Dynamics 365 Marketing users will be able to manage rich content across their organisation’s social media platforms. Scheduling of posts, although not a new feature, was previously only supplied in a basic form.

Marketing forms

When collecting information from forms, your data should not have to be tied to certain entities. With this release, Dynamics 365 Marketing now allows you to collect data under an entity other than a lead or contact, allowing you to trigger custom workflows and journeys based on this data.

Previously, forms had to be connected to a lead or a contact. With this release, marketers can collect form submissions and store them under another entity. Not mapping forms to contacts or leads allows marketing professionals to simplify and enhance the process of receiving data from customers. Dynamics 365 Marketing users can then create workflows to store the form submissions as any other entity.

This feature was a long time coming. Only being able to connect your marketing forms to leads or contacts was quite limited for Dynamics 365 Marketing users therefore this is a great enhancement to the solution!

Integrated Teams webinars

2020 has seen a mass shift to events being held virtual. With Dynamics 365 Marketing organisations can manage registrations, communications and reporting for webinars and interactive meetings hosted in Teams, directly from Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Microsoft Teams is widely deployed and offers a scalable and robust platform for phone and video conferencing. With the new release users will be able to:

• Create and host Live Events using Microsoft Teams as the webinar provider.
• Integrate Teams webinars directly into Marketing events.
• Set up a webinar event as either a Teams Live Event or a Teams meeting.

As an organisation who runs events regularly, this is a fantastic update. Users no longer need to jump between multiple systems to create meetings, get links and update content. This can now all be done from within one place – Dynamics 365 Marketing – and without the need for technical support. The time saved is going to help marketing professional host better events.

If you want to know more about the highlights outlined in this article and how they can enhance your marketing efforts, please get in touch to speak with one of our Dynamics 365 Marketing experts.