5+ Dreamforce ’24 Marketing Cloud Announcements

The Marketing Keynote at Dreamforce did not disappoint – although, I’m sure that most of us are reeling from the number and breadth of the announcements. We were treated to a smorgasbord of new products and features that bring us into the cutting-edge of marketing software.  

This session was split into four themes: “Data” (activate data from any source), “AI” (deploy campaigns faster), “Activation” (personalize content at scale) and “Trust”. This round-up won’t follow this order strictly – instead, I’ve ordered them according to which I believe to be most interesting and what’s broadly applicable to most Salesforce Marketers. 

1. Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition

GA Feb ‘25

Just announced is Marketing Cloud Advanced, the ‘big sister’ to Marketing Cloud Growth Edition. This includes Path Experiment for testing different content across channels, Unified Conversations with SMS for two-way conversations, Einstein Engagement Frequency, and Einstein Engagement Scoring. It also includes Rules-Based Dynamic Content, plus Opportunity Influence, the ‘smarter’ version of the classic Campaign Influence coming our way in the Winter ‘25 release. 

Marketing Cloud Growth Edition made a splash earlier this year, which we dubbed as “the first iteration of Marketing Cloud on core”. Technically speaking, both Growth and Advanced are products for Salesforce marketers built on top of Data Cloud, which has become the new underpinning across the Salesforce platform (essentially, what gets the data flowing between various Salesforce ‘clouds’). 

2. Campaign Agents (Agentforce)

GA Now

In basic terms, Agentforce allows organizations to build and manage autonomous agents for tasks across various business departments – in fact, there’s an “Agentforce in every app”. There’s the potential to build Campaign Agents, which take the marketing goal you define. 

The agent develops a campaign brief, which, when approved by you, creates a campaign record (and related records), utilizes the data in your Data Cloud instance, and adheres to your brand guidelines. 

This includes identifying and creating the target audience segments and also generating the first draft of our email. Work with the agent to refine the campaign at any stage, for example, select different content or recommend additional subject lines and body copy. Once launched, the agent monitors how campaigns are performing. 

3. Einstein Marketing Intelligence

GA Feb ‘25

As a single place to go to optimize spend or improve campaign performance, Einstein Marketing Intelligence is your one-stop shop for an overview of your campaigns. With the power of data and AI, you can automate the preparation of all your data and analytics.

Add KPIs in a few clicks, view campaign performance on one screen, and utilize Agentforce campaigns for recommendations. 

We will follow up with a deeper dive soon.

4. Sub-Second Real-Time Processing in Data Cloud

GA Sep ‘24

Now we focus on Salesforce’s “poster child”, Data Cloud. Data Cloud will be able to work incredibly fast across all of the processes it handles, from data ingestion to activation, all in sub-seconds. In my opinion, this is the most important of the three, reducing lags between these stages – you could say it can all happen faster than ‘a blink of the eye’. 

Data Graphs enable you to visualize the relationships between data model objects (DMOs), even going several layers deep. This helps you to investigate whether the correct data is available at the time of writing a prompt/instructing an Agentforce agent, which will be required to generate an optimal and accurate output. Real-time Data Graphs perform faster identity resolution, segmentation, and actions based on ingested data to ensure data is ready for Agentforce to work with. 

5. Unified Conversations for SMS

GA Nov ‘24

SMS is currently available in Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Edition takes SMS a step further. Rather than being solely reply-based (listen for replies, determine the follow-up action), Conversational SMS opens up a two-way dialogue between the customer/prospect and your internal teams.

Leveraging the functionality already available in Service Cloud, AI-powered chatbots, working based on keyword triggers, can handle the bulk of conversations until a human is required to intervene. This gives a seamless experience whereby the hand-off happens between service and marketing use cases without appearing disjointed to the customer/prospect. Note that a Digital Engagement license is required if you’d like to hand off to chatbots (otherwise, two-way messaging will be based on keywords).

Minor Noteworthy Announcements: 

Growth Edition: Regional Expansion

As most of us are aware, there’s been a regional roll-out of Marketing Cloud Growth/Advanced, available for AMER (US and Canada) customers, and with the arrival in the UK and Switzerland confirmed by the end of 2024. Plus, Account Engagement customers (formerly Pardot) gain access to Marketing Cloud Growth Edition features – for free. This is to get Account Engagement customers using, and advocating for, Marketing Cloud Growth.

Communication Capping

This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It gives marketers the ability to limit the frequency of communications so they avoid oversaturation – meaning your Agent can’t send too many messages. This helps ensure you go over your limits, but also that your customers don’t get bombarded. 

It will be Generally Available in December ‘24.

Meta Conversion API

This new announcement allows you to safely share your first-party data with Meta to better understand if your ads are converting. It will be Generally Available in February ‘25.

Summary

This year’s Marketing Keynote didn’t disappoint! What was your favorite announcement? Let us know in the comments…