The Evolution (and Ensuing Confusion) of Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Dreamforce ‘24 generated considerable excitement with the launch of Agentforce, positioned as the Third Wave of AI¹. There was also a lot of excitement as Salesforce announced a slew of upgrades to its existing products. 

However, as one voice on LinkedIn said, “What would Dreamforce be without the usual frustration over Salesforce’s new naming conventions?”

This was prompted by the announcement of the upcoming “Marketing Cloud Advanced,” which has created chaos since there are several existing products under the Marketing umbrella with similar sounding names:

• Marketing Cloud Engagement (originally ExactTarget), 
• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (originally Pardot), 
• Marketing Cloud Personalization (former Interaction Studio), 
• Marketing Cloud Intelligence (originally Datorama), and 
• Marketing Cloud Growth

Confused much? Don’t worry. We’re going to break it down for you! Let’s start with a quick introduction to each of these products.

Marketing Cloud Engagement: This platform allows you to create and manage marketing relationships and campaigns with customers across email, SMS, mobile, social, and online channels.
Marketing Cloud Personalization: This product was earlier called Interaction Studio. It can be accessed through Marketing Cloud Engagement and lets you create one-to-one personalized engagements by linking your customer’s online and offline activities and understanding their affinities and intent.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: Originally called Pardot and tailored for B2B marketing automation, this platform focuses on lead generation, nurturing, and scoring, helping businesses manage long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers.
Marketing Cloud Intelligence: This analytics platform gives insights into your complete marketing performance by connecting marketing data from various sources. You can also analyze the data at a granular level and take action with help from AI.
Marketing Cloud Growth: Marketing Cloud Growth, dubbed the first iteration of Marketing Cloud on core, is built on Data Cloud and natively integrates with Sales, Service, and Commerce Clouds. You can automate AI-powered campaigns and journeys by personalizing every step with data across all touch points.
Marketing Cloud Advanced: This product is the advanced edition on Marketing Cloud Growth. We’ll explore the additional features in detail later on in this blog.

For now, let’s delve deeper into the existing “Big Three” of Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Engagement, Account Engagement, and Growth. There’s a reason we’re calling these products the “Big Three.” These products focus on customer outreach, engagement, and overall growth strategies. They support broad, multi-channel marketing efforts to increase engagement and drive overall growth.

The other two products focus more on providing advanced personalization and data-driven insights. Seasoned marketers can use these tools to analyze their spends closely and deliver highly targeted and optimized experiences based on individual customer data.

Evolution of the Big Three Of Salesforce Marketing Cloud

While Salesforce intended this evolution to be “easy, unified, and flexible,” the similarity in the nomenclature can cause frustration even for those well-versed with the Marketing Cloud-verse.

A Quick Comparison of the Big Three Marketing Cloud Products

Enter Marketing Cloud Advanced

Marketing Cloud Advanced is positioned as the ‘big sister’ of Marketing Cloud Growth and will have a General Availability (GA) of November ‘24. 

While both products are built on Data Cloud and the Salesforce core platform, Marketing Cloud Advanced will carry the following additional features:

1. Path Experiment Feature To Test Your Journeys:

You can split your campaign path into two paths to test the outcomes of different types of content, duration, and channels. You can set the weights for the randomized split and get analytics like embedded dashboards and flow canvas metrics.

2. Unified Conversations for SMS

Use a single SMS number for your brand that your customers can use to have a two-way interaction across Marketing, Service, and Commerce. However, this feature will need the Digital Engagement SKU and SMS add-ons to function.

3. Einstein Engagement Frequency for Better Messaging:

The Einstein Engagement Frequency will help you identify and automatically remove customers who are getting too many messages. This feature will also help you add customers who need more outreach.

4. Einstein Engagement Scoring

Take the manual work out of lead scoring with Einstein Engagement Scoring, which uses predictive AI. This feature will easily help you identify which leads are ready to buy and which need to be nurtured more.

It was clear from the Dreamforce ‘24 Marketing Keynote address that Salesforce is committed to enhancing its marketing products with a focus on automation, data, and AI. Fingers crossed, they will also find a way to simplify their naming conventions. Perhaps AI can help?