Nov. 14, 2022 ยท 5 minutes
Salesforce's platform (or "Cloud") for marketing automation and customer engagement is known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). It is a SaaS platform composed of four "basic versions," each with varying degrees of complexity, and numerous extra at-cost components that further enhance functionality.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a marketing platform with the ability to support a wide range of marketing activities, such as the execution of multi-channel campaigns, dynamic customer journeys, pre- and post-campaign analytics, audience building and segmentation, social media engagement and advertising, and a platform for data management. SFMC does this utilizing parts they refer to as "Studios" and "Builders:
A platform with many features and capabilities for the marketing industry is Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The following is included in this:
Some of the important functionalities stated above are illustrated through a customer journey that is available in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. To give your consumers a tailored, 1:1 customer experience, you may utilize SFMC's Journey Builder to construct automated multi-channel journeys employing many of the features listed above.
Data extensions (a table) that may be linked together to create a relational database supported by SQL are used in Marketing Cloud to manage data.
This gives SFMC an advantage over certain rival systems that provide a limited data model constrained by the data they can import and handle. It also helps that SFMC can store different types of data and let you construct your own unique data model.
This is significant because it enables more intricate audience segmentation and building within SFMC.
With its robust integration capabilities, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can offer data from a variety of sources (another factor in why the data management features are so valuable).
SFMC has a number of APIs, including a REST API and a SOAP API, in addition to the anticipated connectivity to Salesforce's Sales Cloud and Service Cloud (through Marketing Cloud Connect).
Enhancing your current contact information in SFMC, importing content, and starting triggered sends are a few typical use cases for these APIs.
A wide variety of third-party applications, including those from the Salesforce AppExchange, are available for Salesforce Marketing Cloud to expand its functionality and adapt it to your unique company objectives. Consider the SFMC AppExchange to be similar to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store (and other Salesforce Clouds).
SFMC can be enhanced in terms of functionality and value by a wide range of additional third-party solutions from Salesforce partners outside of the AppExchange.
Within SFMC, Salesforce's artificial intelligence technology, dubbed "Einstein," offers some intriguing uses, such as:
All of these work to give customers a more individualized experience while also raising consumer engagement with your business (and hopefully preventing disengagement).
Numerous sectors and business sizes make use of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Although Marketing Cloud is frequently considered an enterprise-level platform (and it may be), the numerous editions make it adaptable for businesses of all sizes.
Additionally, you may customize SFMC to your unique needs and it can adapt to your (and your customers') evolving needs thanks to the a-la-carte style selection of add-on features.
As was already noted, Salesforce Marketing Cloud was primarily created as a platform for business-to-consumer transactions, although B2B firms do utilize it as well. As consumers, particularly internal decision-makers, want to receive customer journeys similar to those of B2C customers, the use of SFMC in B2B is growing. Although SFMC is not the most affordable product in its category, it is an extensible platform that can grow together with your business and is not a resource that will become obsolete for your firm. This is a crucial factor to take into account for every tool in your technology stack.
You must take into account a variety of factors in addition to the platform's price, including its integrations, the data it will provide for analytics and reporting (as well as the effect on current metrics), its support for your enterprise data model, data migrations, the overall impact on your business (training, organizational structure, ROI), and its capacity to enhance customer experience while achieving your desired business outcomes.
Sales Cloud is made for sales teams, whereas Marketing Cloud is made for marketers (which is the obvious difference).
Sales Cloud includes things like leads, opportunities, orders, and more. It controls the lead-to-revenue cycle and more. Additionally to Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud controls marketing touchpoints throughout the whole customer lifecycle (eg. website analytics, service case data, advertising data).
The foundational CRM (customer database) technology on which Sales Cloud is based is Salesforce. Instead of being built on the core Salesforce platform, Salesforce Marketing Cloud makes use of connectors to sync data back and forth between the two. There are several explanations behind this, but to put it simply, Salesforce Sales Cloud was the original Salesforce product, but Salesforce Marketing Cloud was a product that Salesforce acquired (ExactTarget).
For "considered purchases" with lengthy sales cycles and various decision-makers, Pardot is employed. Transactional purchases across several marketing channels are best suited for Marketing Cloud.
As a result, you will frequently hear that Pardot is for B2B (business-to-business) marketing while Marketing Cloud is for B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing. This is a straightforward distinction, but it is not necessarily accurate.
Pricing for Marketing Cloud is more expensive than for Pardot.
Pardot changed its name to "Marketing Cloud Account Engagement" in April 2022. Despite having the same name, the two products (Marketing Cloud and Pardot) are nonetheless separate in terms of technological architecture and license. Additionally, Pardot needs to do more to support its new identity.
