What the Next-Gen Marketing Cloud (and Naming) Means for You

I have one of the best jobs here at Salesforce. I lead our amazing teams that build and bring our innovations to you across Marketing and Commerce Cloud.

As we continue to innovate, data is at the forefront of putting the customer at the center of every marketing moment. As we make changes to meet the ever-changing marketing landscape, it’s very important that we share not just the what but also the why, so you can understand our product strategy and what it means for you.

At this week’s Salesforce World Tour in Sydney, we’re sharing our vision for the next-gen Marketing Cloud and introducing a new vocabulary to describe its capabilities.

Understanding the new Marketing Cloud vision and vocabulary

As a brand, your company forms customer relationships moment by moment. The competition to connect these moments and anticipate customers’ needs is intensifying.

The next generation of Marketing Cloud brings together data, teams, and technology to help you know your customers better. Using that knowledge—enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI)—you can personalize and continually improve each interaction at scale and in real time.

Here’s what the next-gen Marketing Cloud includes:

• Customer Data Platform, formerly known as Salesforce CDP, helps you create a single source of truth (SSOT) so you can get to know your customers and engage with relevance.
• Personalization, formerly known as Interaction Studio, helps you deliver hyper-relevant moments with real-time recommendations, offers, and experiences tailored to each customer and prospect.
• Engagement, made up of our email, mobile, advertising, and journey products, helps you connect with customers on their own terms and channel of choice with unified data and AI. (Note: Within Engagement, Advertising Studio is now called Advertising)
• Account Engagement, formerly known as Pardot, helps you align marketing and sales around leads, buyers, and accounts to close deals faster.
• Intelligence, formerly known as Datorama, helps you unify analytics and leverage AI insights to continually optimize outcomes that increase customer value and growth.

The “Why” behind the change

Eighty percent of consumers say the experience a company provides is now as important as its products or services. Marketers are taking notice, with top priorities including innovation, real-time interaction, cross-channel cohesiveness, ROI, and collaboration.

As you consider how to make the wow moments that build customer trust and loyalty, we know you’re focusing less on one channel or technology and more on the full experience. Our job is to deliver the how behind the wow. That’s why we’re evolving our solutions to connect data, personalization, engagement, and intelligence so you can get closer to your customers, and they can get closer to you.

These new solutions help you do just that and reflect three values at the core of our product vision:

1. Easy
   The Marketing Cloud portfolio is now more aligned with the language marketers already use, so the capabilities and value are easier to understand. For example, many marketers are looking for the capability and value of real-time Personalization, not an “Interaction Studio” solution.
2. Unified
   The new names are aligned with our strategy to continually integrate Marketing Cloud into one unified platform with a data-first strategy around your customers. For example, this past year we’ve released integrations that connect Customer Data Platform, Personalization, Engagement, and Intelligence while embedding Intelligence right into the Engagement experience.
3. Flexible
   Innovating across all of these areas helps to flexibly describe both capabilities that are available today and those coming in the future. For example, this past year we added WhatsApp and Snapchat as new ways to engage with customers, to complement email, push, SMS, and other forms of advertising.

Embracing change, even when it’s hard

Change can be hard, especially when changing product names that are used and loved by the most amazing community in the world. There’s a lot to consider in the process and a lot of work that follows. There are many impacts that require coordination and assistance. There are also different reactions, naturally.

We’re all one Marketing Cloud community. We’re in this together. Whether you fully welcome the new names right away or you take some time to get used to them, we hope to provide an understanding of how these changes fit into the bigger picture. A picture where Marketing Cloud innovations help you, our Trailblazers, carve out a marketing career path and find a dream marketing job.

As always, you are the most important part of realizing the Marketing Cloud vision of a connected relationship across every moment. And we’ll navigate these changes side by side.

When you’ll see the changes happen

You’ll first start to see the changes reflected on our website and in marketing and sales communications. Later this year, updates will then begin through the products, Help and Training, Customer Success, Support, and external certifications.

It’s important to know that there are no immediate changes to login access, URLs, or other infrastructure considerations you might have.

Our teams are carefully planning these changes with your experience in mind. We’ll share more information as we get closer to this next milestone.

What’s next for Marketing Cloud innovations?

Our product innovations will continue to focus on the new capabilities, integrations, and Salesforce Hyperforce infrastructure that aim to shape our solutions around your customers.

These include our recent releases at Connections and Dreamforce ’21, new Slack First Marketing apps, Digital Intelligence across marketing and commerce, and new personalized digital health experiences.

Today, we’re excited to announce three new Customer Data Platform innovations that enhance your SSOT with Streaming Insights and Data Actions, Advanced Identity Resolution, and Anonymous Profiles – and two new Intelligence innovations to continually increase customer value and growth.

In our next releases, we’re excited to share the new ways you’ll be able to unify and activate customer data, connect inbound and outbound moments in real-time, engage leads and accounts, and intelligently optimize the customer journey.

Thank you for joining us on this journey to more easily connect each moment in your customer relationships.