Major upgrades were announced at Dreamforce this year for Marketing Cloud. It’s fascinating to see how the platform has advanced since the last Dreamforce. With the introduction of Einstein and Commerce Cloud, it’ll be awesome to see integrations with the Marketing Cloud to further business demands and reach customers on an entirely new intelligent level. Here’s what I found most interesting for Marketing Cloud at Dreamforce:
- Journey Builder is now enhanced with Lightning aligning it with the rest of Salesforce Lightning architect. It’s now easier than ever to manage the customer’s journey with integrated data, activities, triggers, and campaigns, so you can personalize your message and build your audience in a more advanced and user-friendly way.
- Marketing Cloud has been supercharged with predictions from Einstein! It now has predictive scoring and recommendations, send-time intelligence, and social image insights. Social image insights is definitely a feature to get excited about, similar to facial recognition, it analyzes your brand image and looks for it in social media without a hashtag or mention.
- Salesforce has acquired Krux, a data management organization, that has been integrated into the Marketing Cloud and can capture information from any source and device, uses artificial intelligence to find new audiences, and drive more relevant advertising on any channel or device.
- Another big announcement is Wave for B2B Marketing! You can now dive into your data to improve campaigns, make data drive decisions based on what’s driving revenue and engagement, and customize it the way that works best for your team.
These announcements are a huge step forward for Marketers everywhere!
During Dreamforce, we had a great time engaging with prospects and others in the ecosystem at our booth. We were able to give live demos and answer questions. One big question we were asked was to explain the difference between Marketing Cloud and Pardot, so I thought it would be best to share it here as well.
What’s the difference between Marketing Cloud and Pardot?
Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud and Pardot are two very different solutions. Pardot actually operates in conjunction with Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud exists on its own with Social.com, Social Studio, and ExactTarget. They can both work collectively with Sales Cloud but they function in two very different ways. Pardot is a nurturing tool that pushes your prospects and customers through a journey to get to an actionable point by using scoring methods. Marketing Cloud is vastly different, it is an engagement tool that is focused on customer relationships in a multitude of channels through a 1-to-1 journey. Each are extremely powerful depending on your goals but, if you utilize Pardot, Marketing Cloud, and Sales Cloud together you will become an unstoppable force of engagement!
Contact us today to discuss Marketing Cloud and how we can help you improve your customer’s 1-to-1 journey!
