The new Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: a first look

The Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is targeted for small and medium-sized B2B businesses (SMBs), offering a streamlined pathway to harness the capabilities of both the Data Cloud and Salesforce platform. This integration facilitates simple marketing use cases, presenting an appealing proposition for SMBs eager to explore marketing automation, data management and generative AI. The initial reaction is one of excitement and curiosity to delve deeper. Yet, this announcement also prompts us to ponder the implications for current users of Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement, as well as Salesforce’s strategy for expanding the Growth Edition’s reach beyond the SMB sector. At present, these questions remain open, with future developments eagerly anticipated.

Salesforce has consistently affirmed its commitment to the ongoing development of its existing Marketing Cloud offerings, promising to infuse existing products with continuous innovation and new features. The Marketing Cloud Growth Edition enriches the Marketing Cloud suite without replacing any existing products, indicating that Salesforce’s portfolio will now feature three distinct Marketing Cloud core products.

Each of these products caters to specific needs: Marketing Cloud Engagement for personalized multi-channel communication across B2C and B2B; Marketing Cloud Account Engagement focusing on B2B sales support and lead nurturing; and the newly introduced Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, initially rolling out in AMER with plans for EMEA later in the year.

Exploring Marketing Cloud Growth Edition

The Marketing Cloud Growth Edition empowers SMBs to embark on marketing automation journeys, leveraging the foundational strength of Data Cloud, Salesforce CMS, and core Salesforce objects like Campaigns and Flows. This edition seamlessly integrates marketing with sales, service, and commerce, powered by Salesforce’s Einstein 1 platform, which synergizes data, AI, and CRM capabilities.

User Experience

The user interface of Marketing Cloud Growth mirrors the intuitive Salesforce Lightning experience, residing on the Einstein 1 core platform. Navigation is familiar to users of Salesforce Sales or Service Cloud, with a marketing-centric twist in menu items. It employs core platform objects such as Campaigns, Leads, Contacts, and Accounts to maintain a cohesive user experience.

Data Management and Segmentation

With Data Cloud’s power, Marketing Cloud Growth offers robust data management features, allowing marketers to import data from various sources to build smarter target audiences for campaigns. Einstein further enhances data management with generative AI capabilities, streamlining the segmentation process.

Content Management

Included in the Marketing Cloud Growth is the Salesforce CMS, a versatile content management system that supports multi-channel content creation, from emails and SMS to landing pages and forms, through an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface.

Campaign Management

Campaign creation leverages the Salesforce campaign object, augmented with Marketing Cloud Growth-specific templates and processes. Templates are available for a range of campaigns, including AI-enhanced emails and sign-ups, with multi-step campaigns configured via Salesforce Flows.

Automated Multi-step Campaigns

Unlike Marketing Cloud Engagement’s Journey Builder and Account Engagement’s Engagement Studio, Marketing Cloud Growth utilizes Salesforce Flows for constructing automated multi-step journeys. This version of Flows is designed to be marketer-friendly, requiring no specialized technical skills.

Einstein and Generative AI

Residing within the Einstein 1 platform, Marketing Cloud Growth benefits from advanced generative AI functionalities, enhancing content creation and segment generation within Data Cloud.

As we await Marketing Cloud Growth’s debut in EMEA, its evolution and integration alongside Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement remain a focal point of interest.

For further information on Marketing Cloud Growth, visit Salesforce’s official pages, help documentation, and press releases.

Salesforce help documentation

Salesforce press release