In late February, Salesforce announced the release of a new version of Marketing Cloud, Marketing Cloud Growth. Built natively on the core Salesforce platform, this new release is capable of accessing data from the Data Cloud to help marketers more seamlessly drive business growth and create better customer experiences.
This release includes a new email service provider (ESP) directly within Salesforce, referred to as “marketing cloud on core”. This is exciting news for brands as Salesforce users will finally be able to segment audiences and execute nuanced messaging personalization in Marketing Cloud by directly connecting data from Data Cloud.
Why is this announcement so significant?
The addition further bolsters the view that a fundamental shift is happening at Salesforce. The market is demanding cross-channel experiences, but they recognize that to build a platform capable of orchestrating that kind of power, there needs to be an evolution in their underlying data architecture.
To understand where we are today, let’s rewind a bit. Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE), the email, SMS, and mobile app messaging elements of the Marketing Cloud, inherits its architecture from Salesforce’s 2013 acquisition of ExactTarget. Since then, MCE has largely relied on ExactTarget's architecture, but this increasingly outdated setup has its drawbacks. Integrating diverse data into MCE often leads to data silos, mainly because of limited native connections and data sharing between legacy ExactTarget and the broader Salesforce platform.
Ok, now back to present day. This new version of Marketing Cloud, having been rearchitected to operate on the same core platform as the Salesforce CRM and Data Cloud, will be able to natively access all the data in Data Cloud, leveraging it to orchestrate personalized, nuanced customer messaging. Gone are the days of leveraging connectors and integrating duplicate data into Marketing Cloud just to serve the needs of the marketing channel. Marketers will see less duplication and can spend more time on building out the experiences that matter most to their customers.
By aligning Data Cloud’s data model design with the Salesforce Core CRM‘s schemas and metadata, organizations can streamline their data management efforts, as all standard CRM data flows to become readily available in the Data Cloud without having to manage any custom data integration.
What does this signal for Salesforce?
Long term, this provides another glance into Salesforce’s bold vision for the future. They have been working tirelessly to build new data infrastructure to underpin its platform, allowing products to work better together, powering more informed customer experiences, and building the foundation for organizations to begin operationalizing artificial intelligence in their workstream.
This paradigm shift is reflected in the recently announced concept of “Einstein 1” - a timely rebranding of legacy Salesforce technologies, which Salesforce describes as a toolkit to “unify data, AI, CRM, development, and security into a single, comprehensive platform.”
With B2B Commerce and B2B Marketing Cloud now built on the core platform, one might expect the trend to continue as Salesforce moves closer to a centralized, “platform” approach for managing customer experiences across channels.
From our perspective, we look forward to Salesforce doubling down it’s commitment to enabling a real-time customer 360 view that can orchestrate customer experience across all customer touchpoints, powered by data and AI.
Who is this version of Marketing Cloud for? (hint: not everybody)
As it stands, Marketing Cloud Growth is designed specifically for B2B use cases, particularly small to medium (SMB) businesses.
What does this mean for everyone else?
Right now, this won’t impact many users, as most organizations will continue leveraging legacy Marketing Cloud and conducting business as usual. Longer term, we expect that eventually variations of “marketing cloud on core” will emerge, presenting opportunities to embrace this more connected way of working within Salesforce.
Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, recently stated that 2024 is the year of Data Cloud – we at Merkle share the same view. Get in touch with our experts to learn how Merkle can help you scale your marketing, CRM, analytics, data, and AI initiatives.
