Watch out Adobe, Salesforce just flexed its marketing cloud muscles.
Salesforce used its Dreamforce conference to officially demo the full range and power of its new, consolidated suite of marketing products, the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud.
Previously, Salesforce’s marketing suite was simply known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but since it acquired Indiana-based marketing analytics firm ExactTarget, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has placed the entire marketing suite under its name and asked its CEO Scott Dorsey to head the entire division.
“The ExactTarget Marketing Cloud is the customer platform for 1:1 marketing, connecting companies with their customers in a whole new way,” says Dorsey. “Marketing should have a voice in how to create these new connected experiences. It’s about connecting with customers at every touch point.
Dorsey will be overseeing the integration with Salesforce’s array of marketing acquisitions, including Buddy Media, Radian6 and Social.com to serve all aspects of a company’s marketing strategy.
Each app serves a different part of the digital marketing strategy. The flagship platform ExactTarget is a massive data analytics operation. It gathers data on consumer buying habits, browsing behavior, social media presence and it serves as the base through which all the other apps work. “Through our data analytics, we can create a single view of the customer,” says Scott McCorkle, ExactTarget’s president of technology and strategy. “The uniqueness of our data comes from the feature where any conceivable source of data can be integrated into the marketing cloud.” This means that in addition to pulling its own data, ExactTarget seamlessly integrates with the brand’s own proprietary customer data set, giving it access to rich, historical data.
Previously ExactTarget’s marketing strategy relied most only engagement through email and SMS marketing, but with the cloud integration, it now deploys the other apps for specific activities.
Radian6 is responsible for social media listening, identifying trending topics, conversations and buzz surrounding products, ads or PR campaigns. To act on Radian6’s analytics, the suite has Buddy Media, which is a content marketing and publishing platform, and Social.com, which is a social advertising tool. By offering such a comprehensive set of engagement apps, Salesforce aims to be the single software suite a company uses not only for its sales, but also its marketing.
“This is a new way to build, personalize and automate engagement with customers,” said Dorsey. “We can engage them in a number of different ways now, like sending them discount through SMS when they’re near your store, follow up emails to an abandoned online shopping cart, or even an advertise on Twitter.
While companies are encouraged to use the entire marketing suite, they will have the option of using any of the available apps as a standalone product. And the entire marketing cloud will also integrate with Salesforce1, (the other big reveal from the conference) which is the new Salesforce platform for mobile.
