Salesforce Marketing Cloud explained: choosing the right platform for your business

If you’re trying to make sense of Salesforce’s ever-evolving marketing platforms, you’re not alone. With three separate marketing automation tools under the ‘Marketing Cloud’ banner, it’s easy to feel lost. Salesforce has been active in developing the marketing platform offering and adjusting the names of the different tools, which might have left many a bit confused about what's what in the ecosystem.

In this article, we’ll explain how these different marketing automation tools differ from each other, how they relate to the Salesforce CRM platform and which one might be the best pick for your business.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud today?

Salesforce currently has three separate marketing automation tools under the name Marketing Cloud. The release of the newest Marketing Cloud on core with Growth and Advanced editions has meant a shift in marketing platform naming conventions. Initially, the term "Marketing Cloud" referred to the platform originally acquired as ExactTarget, but was renamed as Marketing Cloud Engagement to differentiate it from the new Marketing Cloud. So, Salesforce seems to have reserved the name just for the new product, but considering the history behind it, just using the term "Marketing Cloud" might be a bit vague these days.

Apart from the naming, the newest release has also marked a fundamental leap towards AI-assisted marketing. Salesforce has clearly embraced AI in the heart of its strategy with the release of Agentforce in the fall of 2024 and is now rolling the era of AI into the marketing offering. The new Marketing Cloud holds robust AI features that will change the way marketers operate in the future.

So what falls under the umbrella name “Marketing Cloud” today and which solution fits best your company’s needs? To clarify the complex situation and relations between the three main systems, let’s take a look at the simplified graph below. 

The new Marketing Cloud (also referred to as Marketing Cloud on core and Marketing Cloud on Data Cloud) is natively built on Data Cloud (more about this later) and lies in Salesforce's core platform. The two older ones, Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly known as ExactTarget) and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly known as Pardot), are acquired as separate tools and connected to the main platform via a connector.

Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement: a brief history and positioning

Before Salesforce developed its own comprehensive marketing automation platform, Marketing Cloud Engagement and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement emerged as acquired solutions in 2013 (known as ExactTarget and Pardot back then), each designed to cater to specific marketing needs.

Key features and ideal use cases

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, formerly known as Pardot, has established its position as the go-to solution for B2B enterprises. Its strengths lie in effective sales-marketing alignment: lead generation, lead nurturing, and strong enabler for account-based marketing (ABM). Marketing Cloud Engagement is primarily tailored for B2C companies, excelling in meeting multichannel marketing needs. Although it can adapt to B2B use cases, it's worth noting that MC Engagement lacks native website tracking and lead scoring capabilities without adding the costly Personalisation add-on.

MC Account Engagement boasts a user interface (UI) consistent with Salesforce's Lightning Experience, conveniently accessible from the App Launcher. However, MC Engagement is a completely independent application with its own UI, login page, and user management. Both will require connector installation to facilitate seamless data exchange between the marketing platform and Salesforce CRM.

And when it comes to AI, neither of the previous solutions have been left behind. Both come with handy and easy-to-use AI tools to help with segmentation, personalisation and on-time messaging, but lack advanced, out-of-the-box generative AI tools that are at the core of the new Marketing Cloud. Curious about how these AI features are already shaping real-world projects? Take a deeper dive into our blog on early Agentforce adopters and see what's possible in practice.

Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced: shifting towards a unified and data-driven marketing future

Now, Salesforce’s marketing automation offering is at a crossroads. In 2024, they released their first natively built tool, the new Marketing Cloud, with the name Marketing Cloud Growth, and later, a second edition of it called Marketing Cloud Advanced. This caused some waves in the Salesforce community: why release a third one, and how does it differ from existing tools?

Unified experience built on Data Cloud

Salesforce's strategy seems to be moving from separate marketing applications that have their own data schemas and integrations to a unified marketing experience. This will improve scalability and speed up innovation, particularly in AI and data-driven applications. This sounds understandable and clear course of action strategy-wise, but might trigger concerns with clients using the previous Marketing Cloud platforms.

In essence, the new Marketing Cloud differs from the two previous ones in 1) offering one platform to be used in all teams, 2) advanced AI capabilities with Agentforce for time-saving and 3) better personalisation and automation across the platform. The new Marketing Cloud is entirely built on powerful Data Cloud, which offers robust tools for data ingestion, harmonisation and segmentation and can offer marketers a significant advantage in comprehensive data utilisation. 

Two other systems can also be integrated with Data Cloud via a connector (see graph at the beginning). Still, they are not natively utilising Data Cloud’s extensive data infrastructure and segmentation tools as the new Marketing Cloud does. It might sound like splitting hairs, but this is quite a significant difference. 

There’s also some differentiation licensing-wise, but in the end, the full Data Cloud license will eventually be needed to fully utilise the new Marketing Cloud.

What is the right pick for you and your company?

Unfortunately, there’s no general answer as to which tool would be best for your company. However, at Columbia Road, we advise our clients to consider three aspects when choosing the right pick:

• What are your use cases?

• B2C or B2B, multi-channel approach, ABM campaigns, or maybe wishing to centralise all of your customer messaging into one platform?

• What is your target state and objectives in the short and long run?

• Are you aiming for quick wins and ROI or building towards a future-proof martech stack with profound AI capabilities? 

• What does your way of working and processes look like?

• Company structure (business units and confidentiality walls, for example), marketing teams' internal competence, cooperation with sales, roles and responsibilities. Think through how you’d like to work around marketing automation or customer engagement with your teams.

Rather than just listing the common features almost any marketing automation tool has, we recommend revising your answers to the questions above and checking the simplified view of what Salesforce’s marketing platform might best support your needs.

What is the right pick for you and your company?

In summary, there's currently no need to worry for current MC Engagement or MC Account Engagement users. All three tools will coexist in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud landscape, at least for a while, but there are certainly signals, like a free trial for MC Account Engagement customers, that the new Marketing Cloud will probably replace Account Engagement at some time in the future. MC Engagement might see the same faith, but it will take many years before the new Marketing Cloud covers all the same functionalities the robust system holds, and currently, there’s no sign this is in Salesforce’s short-term plans. 

The direction of Salesforce Marketing Cloud

The future of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is anyway looking dynamic and promising. While change is inevitable, Salesforce really seems committed to evolving its marketing automation toolset to fit client needs and enhancing end-customer experience. The course is clearly set towards agentic AI with a strong focus on Agentforce, and shifting how marketers operate on a daily basis in campaign and content creation.

However promising the new Marketing Cloud seems with its AI features and advanced data management features, it is still an MVP product with somewhat limited tools and functionalities. It is not ready to fully replace either MC Engagement or MC Account Engagement for enterprise customers yet, but at least current MC AE clients could take the first steps in testing its features to see if that might be the direction to head in the future. Salesforce will likely invest in developing the new Marketing Cloud rapidly, and in a couple of years, the replacement of MC Account Engagement might be a reality. 

Final thoughts: define your strategy before choosing a tool

Overall, the future of Marketing Cloud seems interesting, at least, and exciting, at best. Like with all technology, only the change is persistent. The key thing to keep in mind is that it’s not just looking into the system’s fancy features or license prices, but defining the use cases according to your marketing and business strategy that will power your team to get that competitive edge in meeting the objectives and automating customer journeys. 

Not sure where to start? Our Marketing Automation Toolkit helps you map out the best platform for your goals. Download now or book a meeting with us.