What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next?

Product migrations are tricky at the best of times. Persuading your customers to migrate to the latest and greatest is a minefield which can doom your business. It's especially difficult if the product you're trying to sunset is an industry leading Marketing Cloud solution. Yet, that is exactly the situation that Salesforce finds itself in. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an old product, designed for a previous martech age, when complexity was king and open platforms were less of a priority. The only real surprise is that Salesforce took so long to replace it.

New Infrastructure

A couple of weeks ago, Salesforce announced a new edition of Marketing Cloud, which they called Marketing Cloud Next. Much of the reporting around the launch focused on the new AI features showed off at the keynote. However, those features are not the primary reason for the new product's existence. Marketing Cloud Next is primarily a back-end change, which enables the types of AI agents seen during the product demos as a side benefit. It's much more than an extension of the existing product. Instead, it's a ground up rewrite of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, built on top of the same Data Cloud foundations used by the rest of the Salesforce ecosystem. The new products finally break down the silo separating Salesforce's marketing solutions and their sales solutions.

To be fair, we are only in the very early stages of the long promised Marketing Cloud migration. They do look promising though, because they finally fix many of the inconsistencies and UX issues that have plagued Salesforce's marketing apps since they were acquired in 2013. Various modules have been switched out since then, such as new workflow engines and new asset editors. However, the fundamental limitations of the underlying data models still remained. The integrations between Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud have improved significantly over the years. However, there are still some areas where competing platforms such as Marketo integrate better with Sales Cloud than Salesforce's own marketing solutions.

New Product Editions

Despite repeated attempts to modernise the platform, very few marketers actually enjoy using either Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Account Engagement. Hence why Salesforce are so keen to replace them with a brand new product. Rather confusingly, there is no actual product called 'Marketing Cloud Next'. Instead, 'Marketing Cloud Next' is an umbrella term that covers several different Marketing Cloud editions built on the new platform. We currently know of three new products all built on the Marketing Cloud Next infrastructure.

• Marketing Cloud Growth, which is the Pardot replacement for B2B marketers. This was announced in Spring 2024 and is already available to all existing Pardot customers as part of their subscriptions.
• Marketing Cloud Advanced, which is a Pardot replacement for enterprise marketers. It's a more sophisticated version of Marketing Cloud Growth, which was made available to eligible Pardot customers at the end of 2024.
• Marketing Cloud+, which is the future of the B2C multi-channel solution formally known as ExactTarget. This is the actual new product announced a few weeks ago, and will be added to existing Marketing Cloud subscriptions in the autumn.

Many of the core modules and AI agents will be shared across the entire platform, enabling a much more seamless transition between B2B and B2C marketing than is the case currently. That will hopefully allow B2B marketers to deploy much more sophisticated account based nurture experiences than is possible through Pardot today. Many B2B marketers have long been attracted by marketing cloud's cross-channel functionality, only to become frustrated by the complex technical requirements and limited lead management capabilities. A single platform will close that gap, even if there are multiple product editions.

Get Started

We'll soon find out. Marketing Cloud Growth and Marketing Cloud Advanced are already in market. They certainly caught the attention when released last year, but they're not yet a business priority for either vendor or customers. These are new platforms built on top of the same data model as the rest of the Salesforce ecosystem. That's great for customers looking to integrate their marketing data into the wider business, or for marketers looking to use sales and service data in campaigns. However, the new products are far from feature complete. It will be a while before enterprises can fully move over to the new platforms.

In the interim, the different Marketing Cloud Next products are being made available to existing Marketing Cloud customers as part of their current subscriptions. That gives marketers a chance to experiment with the new capabilities, and perhaps use them where they offer some benefit. It will be a long time before anyone is forced to switch over to the new products, but that day will come. That said, it is definitely worth becoming familiar with the new platform. Taking action now will ease the transition when the time does come to migrate. It will also allow customers to shape the future of the Marketing Cloud ecosystem. It's still early days, but already the potential is obvious.

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