Unlocking Marketing Potential: Introducing Marketing Cloud Edition Built on the Core Platform

Salesforce have announced?Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, the first glimpse of what a marketing app built in alignment with Salesforce’s core platform looks like – and the potential for this to develop further in the future. This is the first iteration of Marketing Cloud on the ‘core’ Salesforce platform (known as the Einstein 1 platform).

Built on Data Cloud, this edition comes with new builders (built on Salesforce CMS), a data model that taps both into the same Salesforce objects that other teams use, and a whole arsenal of data management capabilities through Data Cloud and Einstein’s generative tools.

What’s important to note, is that Salesforce expressed multiple times that they will still be continuing to bring innovations to the existing Marketing Cloud products. Instead, this is entirely new functionality.

Why Marketing Cloud Growth Edition?

Two years ago, Salesforce made the decision to?rename?a number of their Marketing Cloud offerings. Marketing Cloud’s most popular modules for messaging and journeys go by Marketing Cloud Engagement. On the other side of the matter, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), caters to more B2B use cases. So which product is Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: Marketing Cloud Engagement or Marketing Cloud Account Engagement??

Being targeted at B2B, SMB (small-medium) organizations, you may be asking if this is the beginning of the end for Account Engagement. In short, this is not only a new edition, it’s a whole new world…

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Marketing Cloud ‘On Core’ (Einstein 1)

As mentioned, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is built on Data Cloud – in essence, this is the first iteration of Marketing Cloud on the ‘core’ Salesforce platform (known as the Einstein 1 platform).

Einstein 1 was unveiled at Dreamforce ‘23 as the re-engineered core Salesforce platform to handle generative-AI with speed. During the same event, we were teased with a roadmap that outlined many?AI-powered features for Marketing Cloud?to be built on Data Cloud.

Support from Data Cloud’s technology is something that Salesforce have been focusing on to add more power to their marketing products. Being a set of acquired technologies over the past decade plus, the idea is to bring the ‘juicy’ new technologies of Data Cloud and AI to the Marketing Cloud tech stack.

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Target Audience

Targeted at B2B, SMB (small-medium) organizations based on the functionality that will be available, now, at its launch. This includes lead capture, sending leads on journeys with email and SMS, automating notifications to sales and service teams, engagement scoring*, and reporting for engagement on assets (such as emails, SMS, landing pages and forms).

*A new type of scoring that combines what we have known as scoring (behavioral) and grading (demographic).

What struck me is the flexibility of the design, which has the potential to be used for B2C marketing use cases, too – that’s the advanced personalization, sending a large volume of customers through personalized cross-channel journeys, and reporting on these results.

It will be interesting to watch how the positioning of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition evolves over time.

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Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: Architecture Overview

To explain why Marketing Cloud Growth Edition indicates a significant move for Marketing Cloud, I attempted to map out how the parts involved with Marketing Cloud Growth Edition work in relation to the rest of the Einstein 1 (core) platform.

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