By Martin H. Morrissette, Sirocco CMO – Book time with me
When seeking the best marketing platform for your business, Salesforce frequently emerges as a leading contender. Renowned for its robust marketing technology, Salesforce offers a powerful toolkit. However, narrowing it down to the exact solution that aligns with your needs can feel overwhelming. With options like Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), MC Growth, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), each tailored for different objectives, it’s crucial to understand their unique capabilities and best-fit use cases. In this guide, we’ll break down what makes each of these Salesforce platforms stand out and help you navigate the decision-making process. We’ll compare their features, journey-building abilities, and core strengths to ensure you find the perfect fit for your goals. If you’d like some extra insight, we’re happy to set up a free consultation to discuss your specific needs and guide you through the possibilities. Ready to see which Salesforce solution is right for you? Let’s dive in.
Marketing Automation capabilities: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, and Advanced Edition
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot)
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has long been a popular choice for B2B companies prioritising lead generation and nurturing. Designed with B2B dynamics in mind, it allows marketers to build and automate multi-step email campaigns, score leads, and hand off qualified leads to sales. The Engagement Studio feature provides a straightforward yet effective platform for managing lead engagement and nurturing.
However, compared to its counterparts, Account Engagement has limited customisation options in journey mapping and decision branches. It works best for B2B companies with straightforward automation needs and a focus on email-based journeys rather than full cross-channel campaigns.
MC Growth: Mid-Market Automation and Personalisation
MC Growth caters to businesses looking for advanced automation that integrates deeply with Salesforce CRM. It supports flexible, multi-channel campaigns, enabling marketers to create personalised customer journeys using Salesforce’s Flow. Marketers can leverage Data Cloud to harness real-time audience insights, ensuring hyper-targeted messaging across various touchpoints, including email, SMS, WhatsApp, and social media, creating a seamless customer experience. Research indicates that 76% of consumers prefer to communicate with brands through messaging apps, making this feature essential for contemporary marketing strategies.
This practical solution is ideal for mid-sized businesses that need scalable marketing tools. It includes robust features for segmentation and automation, and while not as feature-rich as MC Advanced, it strikes a balance between functionality and ease of use, making it perfect for businesses focusing on lead nurturing, customer engagement, and growth-stage campaigns.
MC Advanced: The Enterprise-Grade Solution
Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition is Salesforce’s top-tier Marketing Cloud edition, tailored for enterprises with intricate, data-driven marketing requirements. Building upon the capabilities of MC Growth, it offers extensive add-ons that empower highly customizable customer journeys through Journey Builder and advanced segmentation powered by Einstein AI. MC Advanced excels in cross-channel orchestration, seamlessly integrating email, SMS, WhatsApp, mobile push notifications, social media, and ads, while leveraging Salesforce’s AI capabilities to elevate personalization.
With MC Advanced, businesses gain access to in-depth audience segmentation, predictive analytics, and even multi-level campaign attribution to assess performance across channels. This solution is ideally suited for enterprise clients managing complex, high-volume marketing operations with extensive customer journeys and a demand for in-depth data insights.
Choosing the right automation platform
When choosing the right automation platform, consider your business size, marketing needs, and team capabilities. Account Engagement is ideal for B2B-focused, email-driven marketing with simpler automation needs. MC Growth is perfect for mid-market companies requiring multi-channel capabilities, including SMS and messaging. For enterprises managing diverse, cross-channel campaigns at scale, MC Advanced offers unparalleled customisation and scalability.
Customer journey capabilities: Engagement Studio, MC Growth, and SFMC Journey Builder
When selecting a Salesforce solution, it’s crucial to consider its capacity to create and automate customer journeys. If you’re looking to nurture leads with straightforward, linear journeys, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s Engagement Studio might be the right fit. It’s particularly effective for B2B needs, allowing you to build focused, lead-nurturing journeys. However, it may not offer the dynamic capabilities required for more complex customer interactions. This solution is ideal for smaller teams with a primary focus on B2B marketing and a need for simplicity.
For those needing more flexibility and scalability, MC Growth leverages Salesforce Flow and Journey Builder to create dynamic journeys across multiple channels. This solution provides fundamental journey mapping and is suitable for growing businesses with mid-sized marketing teams. It allows for more sophisticated journey creation without requiring extensive technical expertise.
If your enterprise demands comprehensive, AI-driven journey management, MC Advanced and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) are excellent choices. MC Advanced offers in-depth customisation and automation, enabling you to personalise every customer touchpoint across various channels. This solution is best suited for larger teams with advanced marketing skills and the capacity to manage complex workflows.
SFMC’s Journey Builder takes it a step further by crafting complex, multi-step journeys with advanced decision splits, AI-driven triggers, and real-time personalisation. It’s ideal for brands aiming to create omni-channel experiences and leverage AI to optimise each journey based on customer data. This solution is perfect for large enterprises with dedicated marketing and IT teams capable of handling sophisticated, data-driven marketing strategies.
Which journey builder works best for you?
For lead nurturing and simpler journeys, Engagement Studio in Account Engagement is often sufficient. MC Growth provides flexible, scalable journey options, while MC Advanced and SFMC are ideal for enterprises needing comprehensive, AI-driven journey management across multiple channels. Consider your team size and skillset when choosing the right solution to ensure you can fully leverage its capabilities.
Feature highlights: Segmentation, Analytics, and Reporting
Each Salesforce solution offers unique strengths in marketing capabilities and reporting features.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement provides a solid foundation for B2B marketing with its out-of-the-box functionalities. It enables basic segmentation and straightforward engagement reporting, making it suitable for companies looking to nurture leads through automated email campaigns. However, as businesses grow and require more detailed insights, integrating additional tools like Data Cloud can enhance its reporting capabilities, providing a more nuanced view of customer behaviour and engagement.
MC Growth builds on this by offering advanced segmentation based on both custom and standard objects, allowing marketers to create highly targeted audiences. It includes improved reporting features that connect seamlessly with Salesforce CRM, ensuring that marketers have access to actionable data insights. The integration of Tableau can further enhance these capabilities, enabling dynamic visualisation and deeper analytics that support informed decision-making across marketing efforts.
MC Advanced and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) take it a step further, providing comprehensive, data-driven insights ideal for complex marketing operations. With AI-driven audience insights and in-depth journey analytics, these platforms excel in delivering predictive segmentation and multi-channel engagement reports. Integrating Data Cloud and Tableau can significantly amplify their reporting functionalities, allowing for sophisticated data analysis that tracks performance across all marketing channels and refines strategies based on real-time insights.
Key considerations for implementation & migration
Successfully implementing or migrating to any Salesforce marketing solution requires meticulous planning and execution. For mid-sized and enterprise-level businesses, transitioning to Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced involves several critical steps to ensure a seamless and effective migration. We’re happy to help.
Data Migration: One of the foremost tasks is the seamless transfer of data, including leads, contacts, and marketing assets. This process must be handled with precision to avoid data loss or corruption, ensuring that all valuable information is accurately migrated to the new platform.
Workflow Rebuilding: Existing workflows need to be reconfigured to align with Salesforce’s Flow, particularly if you are migrating from Pardot or another system. This step involves mapping out current processes and rebuilding them within the Salesforce environment to maintain operational continuity and efficiency.
User Training: It is essential to ensure that your team is fully trained on the new platform’s features and capabilities. Comprehensive training programs should be conducted to familiarize users with the new tools and functionalities, enabling them to leverage the platform effectively and maximize its potential.
Testing and Validation: Before going live, it is crucial to run comprehensive tests on all campaigns and automations. This step involves validating that all processes function correctly and that there are no disruptions in operations post-migration. Rigorous testing helps identify and resolve any issues, ensuring a smooth transition and uninterrupted marketing activities.
By carefully considering these key aspects and incorporating the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology, businesses can ensure a structured and efficient approach to implementation and migration. SAFe provides a robust framework for managing complex projects, promoting collaboration, and delivering value incrementally. This methodology supports continuous improvement and adaptability, making it an ideal choice for organisations looking to enhance their marketing capabilities and achieve their strategic objectives.
Embracing emerging trends in Marketing Technology
The role of Agentforce
Agentforce is a developing story in itself, but from what we understand so far, it is set to become a versatile tool in the marketing context, offering capabilities beyond just integrating with Marketing Cloud. It automates the creation and management of marketing campaigns, utilising artificial intelligence to continuously analyse metrics and suggest optimisations. This ensures that campaigns are not only efficiently managed but also dynamically improved over time. Marketers can leverage Agentforce to identify and segment target audiences with precision, drawing on data from the Data Cloud to ensure that campaigns reach the most relevant individuals.
In addition to these features, Agentforce assists in the drafting and refinement of marketing content. It can generate initial drafts of emails and other materials, and even suggest alternative subject lines and body copy to enhance the effectiveness of campaigns. The tool’s real-time performance monitoring capabilities allow it to adjust strategies on the fly, such as optimising email send times based on past engagement data to maximise open and click rates.
Agentforce’s seamless integration with other Salesforce tools, including Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, provides a unified experience across different business functions, enhancing overall efficiency. It also excels in creating personalised customer journeys, dynamically adjusting content and interactions based on individual customer behaviour and preferences. This level of personalisation helps to foster deeper customer engagement and loyalty. Furthermore, Agentforce offers real-time insights and detailed reporting on campaign performance, empowering marketers to make informed, data-driven decisions. These comprehensive capabilities make Agentforce an invaluable asset for enhancing marketing efforts, driving engagement, and improving the overall effectiveness of campaigns.
As you consider your marketing technology choices, it’s essential to stay attuned to the emerging trends shaping the landscape. The rise of artificial intelligence is transforming how marketers engage with customers, enabling deeper insights and automation that streamline processes. Salesforce’s Agentforce not only automates tasks but also uncovers actionable insights, allowing you to focus on strategy rather than execution. Moreover, automation has become a cornerstone of effective marketing strategies. Tools like Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and MC Growth leverage automation to enhance customer interactions and nurture leads seamlessly. This not only saves time but also ensures that you can engage customers at the right moment, maximising impact. Finally, the demand for personalised experiences continues to grow, with customers expecting tailored interactions across all touchpoints. Salesforce’s solutions enable hyper-targeted messaging and audience segmentation, ensuring that each customer receives content that resonates with their preferences and behaviours. By integrating these trends into your marketing strategies, you can position your business for success. As you explore the various Salesforce marketing solutions, consider how they align with your ambitions, whether you’re starting out with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, scaling with MC Growth, or diving deep into customisation with MC Advanced.
Choosing the right solution
By carefully evaluating your unique needs and the strengths of each platform, you will be well-equipped to select the solution that aligns best with your marketing goals. While all options share similar features, the best solution is ultimately the one you can leverage to its fullest extent. For businesses just starting their B2B marketing journey, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement remains a reliable choice. If you’re a mid-sized company looking to expand with multi-channel capabilities targeting a more B2C audience, MC Growth could be an excellent fit, as it also supports B2B marketing initiatives. For enterprises managing complex marketing operations that require advanced customisation and in-depth insights, MC Advanced or SFMC is the way to go.
If you’re considering a partner to guide implementation, strategy, or data alignment, Sirocco offers expertise in helping companies like yours maximise their Salesforce investment. We understand the intricacies of Salesforce’s offerings and can support you in enhancing your marketing effectiveness. Ready to Discuss Your Options? Join us for a free workshop, where we’ll assess your marketing needs and help you explore the Salesforce solution that’s the perfect fit for your business.
