A few weeks removed and the lingering buzz of Dreamforce remains as a joyful cloud over the MarTech Trailblazing community. Reflecting on the event and the announcements from the event brings on four key takeaways for our customers. Read on if you want the 30,000-foot view, if you’re looking for something deeper, let’s talk the old-fashioned way – on a remote call with cameras on and verbal communication 😉
The Big Four from Dreamforce:
1. There’s a new era of Marketing Cloud here: Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition
2. Agentforce is the third generation of AI in Salesforce
3. Data & AI are central to success
4. Two-Way Communication is More Accessible: Unified Conversations for SMS
1. There’s a new era of Marketing Cloud here: Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition
Dreamforce had a lot of announcements, one of the biggest announcements was during the Marketing and Commerce keynote where Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition was unveiled. This is the newest season in the House of Marketing Clouds to borrow a turn of phrase from our Marketing Champion & Director of Strategic Consulting, Julie Marques.
Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition means a lot of things for marketers using Salesforce (or thinking about using Salesforce) – but we can boil it down into a few key takeaways.
1. Setup is being made easier with each release, MC Advanced follows this path with a built-in setup assistant. Marketer value add: quicker path to value
2. Auto-Magical Testing & Scoring Opportunities with MC Advanced
● You can test across up to 10 paths, randomize testing sets, and customize your distribution for tests for greater quality tests
● Engagement scoring and frequency gives the next likely action, insights on messages, and saturation barometers for your marketing communications
3. Increased Stakeholder Alignment
● Opportunity Influence dashboards (this is on both MC Growth & MC Advanced) and campaign performance summaries on co-polit make it easier to keep internal stakeholders aligned
● Campaign widget native to MC Advanced gives a holistic view of timing, performance, and next steps
If you want a deeper dive into MC Advanced, check out our full blog here.
2. Agentforce is the third generation of AI in Salesforce
Agentforce is what we see as the third wave of AI; the out-of-box agents make it easy to launch with clicks, not code. Every marketer reading this just squinted a bit “clicks not code,” something we’ve been seeing since the early 2000s with increased volume with each passing year. In this case, though, it’s spot on.
From a 30,000-foot view, Agentforce gives you the opportunity to do more:
1. Agentforce will create a brief, identify a target audience, create the audience segments, generate creative drafts (email & landing page), and curate a customer journey. This campaign kit from Agentforce will all be based on your branding guidelines and campaign goals. After your campaign launches, Agentforce will analyze your performance and recommend ways to improve.
2. Agentforce makes personalization and engagement more scalable. Agentforce personalization pairs content and channel(s) to each individual customer profile based on near-real-time engagement on the custom profile.
If you’re looking for more on Agentforce (look at you, scaling to be an AI savant) let us know in the comments and we’ll do a deep dive soon.
3. Data & AI are Central to Progress
This feels almost redundant to include in this blog, but at the same time, this feels like the elephant in the room. If we don’t have good data – say goodbye to personalized experience. Data is king, queen, bishop, and every pawn on the chessboard. IE – your marketing goals will suffer if you don’t prioritize data. Dreamforce furthered this sentiment with each session threading the requirement of quality data across all releases and announcements. Don’t fret though, this data requirement I’m speaking to isn’t a black-and-white fallacy, quality data means different things to each organization. A big step here to note between finding the magical yellow brick road to top-tier data and actualizing that value from data is activating with technology. One clear distinction I feel obligated to annotate is that machine learning, generative AI, and predictive AI all have very different roles to play while all tied together by that capacity to do more with data.
The bottom line is you need to have a clear view of your data and a map of your vision to gain a unified customer view. In the case of AI, it’s another case of mapping your path as a primary goal. Generative AI appears to be the key theme woven with data across all sessions, announcements, and key takeaways centered around AI. To quote a friend of mine, AI won’t replace marketers. Marketers who use AI will. For myself, this event is another proof point towards the MarTech tea leaves telling us the day to embrace AI was yesterday and the time to start being better day over day is today.
4. Two-Way Communication is More Accessible: Unified Conversations for SMS
The two-way communication model is something we somersault for over at ListEngage (doesn’t everyone do that though?) because we see the intuitive value of real-time and real empathy in marketing. This came as an announcement paired with MC Advanced as an expansion of capabilities. However, let’s take a step back at what this means from a conception point of view of marketing theory – not a full stop on software capabilities.
As an ecosystem, Unified Conversational SMS is furthering the somewhat universal alignment we see attempting to meet people on their “right channel at the right time with the right information” paradigm. This is another flag raised to all of us marketers treading the deep waters of customer engagement to up our ante on personalization communication with our target audiences. Relative to Dreamforce, this is another layer of access for channel activation increasing the options on the table to activate customers in a truly omnichannel fashion.
