Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a platform brought into the Salesforce ecosystem in 2013 when Salesforce acquired ExactTarget (a company that previously acquired Pardot). It can be considered a one-stop shop for all things digital marketing. That includes email marketing, social media, mobile marketing, website building, and more through various studios and builders.
When Salesforce made the announcement that Pardot was being brought under the Marketing Cloud umbrella and rebranded as “Account Engagement,” marketers throughout the ecosystem were shocked and confused.
We were always trained to view Marketing Cloud and Pardot are two separate entities that solved separate problems for companies, but the rebrand challenged that notion. I highly recommend checking out Andrea Tarrell’s post on the matter.
This article is going to give a “hi, how are you” the main tools on the platform previously called Marketing Cloud and now known as Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Before we do a deep dive into each Marketing Cloud Engagement product, it’s important to remind us of all of the recent Salesforce Marketing Cloud product rebrands. Check out the infographic below for a refresher.
Email Studio (Marketing Cloud Engagement)
Email Studio is the primary product in the Marketing Cloud suite and typically what most people think of when they hear “Marketing Cloud.”
This studio focuses on email marketing and is complemented by Content Builder (discussed below) in ensuring that your team can construct the perfect email template for sending. Marketers will use the product to preview, test, and send one-off emails that can be highly customized through template elements and Marketing Cloud’s scripting language: AMPscript.
Content Builder
As mentioned above, Content Builder complements Email Studio as it is the backbone of personalizing your email templates. Marketers not only work on building out their emails through Content Builder, but can also build out landing page templates, and text message content.
One great feature of this product is that you can build content blocks to use across all Marketing Cloud Studios that keep your brand consistent across all platforms.
Journey Builder (Marketing Cloud Engagement)
If you have ever used Pardot, then you know how powerful of a tool Engagement Studio is. Think of Journey Builder as a similar product that will help automate marketing campaigns across multiple channels.
Due to its powerful features and connection to Email Studio, the Marketing Cloud rebrand brought Journey Builder and Email Studio together as Marketing Cloud Engagement. The journeys that are built through this tool can contain multiple paths for customers, use Einstein features, and send tasks and data to Salesforce through Marketing Cloud Connect.
Advertising Studio (Marketing Cloud Advertising)
Advertising Studio works tremendously well with Journey Builder to help your organization connect with customers beyond email, text, and social messages.
The tool will give you access to produce ads across multiple digital platforms, including social media: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms such as Google and YouTube. Using your Salesforce data, along with lookalike data from Facebook and other audiences, you can target new prospects who are most likely to become a customer in the future.
Social Studio
Poor one out for Social Studio. Salesforce’s newest soon-to-be-retired product (November 2024) was my first introduction to Marketing Cloud and definitely one of my favorite tools to use – I started using it right when they retired the Marketing Cloud Social Specialist Certification and I’m so sad I never achieved it.
Previously known as radian6, Social Studio was focused on social listening, measurement, and engagement. Marketers could schedule social posts, monitor their social accounts, and listen for keywords and hashtags through the Social Studio platform. It was complemented with Social Studio Automate, a tool that would process and sort social media content in an automated fashion and could send data over to Salesforce.
Check out the following blog to learn more about other Social Listening products you can explore for your company: Social Studio Sails into the Sunset.
Mobile Studio
Similar to the other studios, Mobile Studio is a one-stop-shop for sending messages to a consumer’s Mobile Device. These messages can be crafted within Mobile Studio and can be delivered via SMS, MMS, or Push Notifications via an app.
You are even able to monitor opens and clicks on your SMS messages like you can do with your email messages. When considering this product it is best to start small with unidirectional messages before you implement a full-scale messaging channel that could offer support via mobile.
Web Studio
Web Studio is a lesser known studio within the Marketing Cloud suite, but it’s a great tool for building out your organization’s web experiences.
Using the CloudPages application, you are able to create dynamic web pages with personalized content and provide a seamless experience for your customers. Companies can collect data from website visits and form completion to further personalize the experiences provided to customers online.
Datorama (Marketing Cloud Intelligence)
Datorama is an amazing marketing analytics tool that unifies your company’s data from each marketing platform you use so you can report on all data at once.
Platforms that you can connect include Google, Instagram, Youtube, and various other platforms through out-of-the-box connections available on the Datorama platform. Using data from your Marketing Cloud instance, you can track ROI and growth across all of our email, social, advertising, web, and sales channels.
Do you consider yourself a Datorama expert? Sercante is expanding our team and looking for a Datorama Architect to join our analytics practice and implement Datorama across multiple clients and business needs.
Interaction Studio (Marketing Cloud Personalization)
Interaction Studio has many use cases, but as the new rebrand states, it is the perfect tool for providing an amazing level of personalization for your customers across your web experiences.
As your customers/prospects complete actions on your website, Interaction Studio will take this behavior to dynamically update messaging across web pages to tailor the experience to that individual customer. The tool will update their experience again to ensure messaging correlates with the new product interest — given that a customer’s behavior is the best indication they are interested in a new product.
Salesforce CDP (Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform)
Another product that’s been through the rebrand treatment is Salesforce CDP. It’s a tool that can compile every data point across multiple platforms for each customer in your database.
This tool compliments your other Marketing Cloud products as you can use this data from all of your platforms to create very specific segmentation lists. This enables companies to ensure the right prospects are being contacted at the right time about the perfect product/solution for them to help increase ROl across the business.
Pay attention to the big picture
Marketing Cloud can definitely seem like a daunting product if you don’t understand too much about the products/tools within it. It’s important to not overwhelm yourself with all of the features each product has to offer. Instead, focus on the tools that would benefit your organization if you decide to implement Marketing Cloud.
These are just basic overviews of the most popular Marketing Cloud topics so our team advises that you fully investigate and learn about a product before you make any purchasing decisions.
If you are looking to implement Marketing Cloud for your business and are looking for a partner to assist you with it, please reach out to us to find out more on how we can help you through the implementation process.
