Marketing Intelligence: The Missing Piece of Your Marketing Puzzle

Big news is coming out of Salesforce this week, and if you’re a data-driven marketer using (or thinking about using) Salesforce, you should be leaning all the way in here. Paid media channel optimization is about to get exponentially more efficient with Marketing Intelligence (MI). If your analytics consist of disparate reports or require significant manual effort to unify your data sources, MI offers a powerful solution to act on insights.

Why Should You Care About Marketing Intelligence?

MI unifies disparate marketing data into a single, unified view. The unified view may be the salt and pepper phrase of Salesforce these days, but hear me out when I tell you it’s more than a buzz phrase. The unified view means we are integrating data from all of the top paid ad channels to consolidate and standardize your analysis with out-of-the-box data models and pipeline connectors. For me, this means a lot of things. In one sense, I’ll no longer resonate with cynical memes on LinkedIn echoing the pain that comes with getting a data model that works for reporting, fewer late nights fixated on aligning data, and most of all – I have a multi-channel reporting mechanism that I can trust without arduous input on my part. 

Here’s the bottom line of how MI impacts marketers:

• 3 Click Quick Setup and Integration: You can ingest your data in just three clicks with prebuilt API connectors. Then you’ll use MI’s out-of-the-box data model to harmonize data. This comes standard with a pre-built connector library, universal AI connector, and semantic data model built uniquely for marketers. Slam dunk win: This reduces the time and effort needed to combine various sources, plus it’s made for marketers – look at the crafters of personalized experiences getting a personalized data model for our niche needs in marketing. Amazing.
• Data-Driven Decision-Making: You’ll gain a holistic view of your marketing ROI across multiple channels. The data decision making opportunity here is massive. The instant view on the home page comes ready-made for you to input campaign goals using KPIs specific to your business to quickly predict, react, and adjust your ad focus as needed to maximize return and lower budget losses.
• Streamlined Workflow: The consolidated dashboards and automation free you to focus on optimizing campaigns. It’s all in one place for you and your team with greater access to critical insights updating continuously based on performance across your channels. 

What are the key features of MI? 

What I’m calling the “three-click wonder” – MI takes a difficult process and flips it into a near-pain-free process. Instead of spending weeks (if not months) aligning data, in three clicks you’re done getting data ready for visualization. This might not be super saucy or make you want to somersault, but this is a real-deal problem for marketers around the world. This means we are shifting further into an era of the marketer’s enlightenment – less manual effort and more time towards creative thinking. Let’s talk through the features that take this prior walking on broken glass dance and shift it into a near sway and bob rhythm.  

• Aligned CRM Attribution: Brace yourself, marketers, attribution is now connected out of the box with CRM objects. If you start using MI, you’ll be able to track your performance from anonymous visitor to closed revenue with the first touch and last touch for standard objects. Bookmark this feature for everyone focused on providing the value of marketing by the numbers (so everyone reading this should bookmark this, right?)
• Agent Actions & Recommendations: You’ll have Agentforce continually analyzing your ad performance, and providing insights, but it won’t be a passive observer. Agentforce can autonomously act on the insights – have an ad underperforming? Agentforce can pause that. Unsure which ad to shift funds towards? Agentforce can help provide suggestions. 
• Data Enrichment & Deeper Analysis: MI is built on technology that enables AI to normalize and enrich your marketing data. The enrichment happens through customer and business data, deepening your analysis and unlocking richer insights about your marketing performance. The key win here is that again, you don’t need a data scientist or a technical producer to take action, you just need MI, brilliant marketing campaigns to analyze, and let it roll. 
• Instant Insights & OOTB Dashboards: The out-of-the-box dashboards give you a ready-made overview of your campaign performance. Plus you can drill in further as you see fit. The cross-channel campaign view is embedded with Tableau Next visualizations, AI campaign summaries, and goal tracking. As the marketer, the big win here is that you’ll have access to dashboards and reports that typically require extensive custom development with zero lift on your part. Talk about an OOTB party – the natural language summary is standard in all MI out-of-the-box home page dashboarding – you sign into MI, it’s waiting on you: it’s a marketers’ dream come true. 
• Marketing Intelligence’s (MI) Pre-Built Model: Tailored to marketing data, this model enables marketers to understand their analytics with a cohesive and streamlined view. This model is prebuilt to understand your marketing data and harmonize it and prepare it for analysis; plus, you won’t need a technical producer to bring in sources. 
• Data Pipelines: End users gain a single, unified view into several data sources, thanks to data pipelines with prebuilt mappings. This is another feature building on the narrative of three-clicks and done with lower technical LoE. If you’re thinking “Leia, what narrative on three-clicks?” I’m referencing the three click wonder I showed above. That’s all thanks to Data Pipelines, which help marketers seamlessly ingest and map their data sources into MI with a simple workflow. You can connect your data once and trust that it’s constantly being updated – bit impact here being that you don’t have to worry about managing multiple API connectors.

Want a sneak peek of the Agentforce actions in ads? Me too. Check this out: 

The Power of Visualizations

I always feel somewhat silly using phrases like “the power of…” as if I’m embodying the energy of Heman battling Skeletor, but for this – it fits. I can’t tell you how excited I am for the visualizations that come with MI. Marketing Intelligence gives you the best out-of-box visualizations (without getting your hands deep into data modeling, code, etc.) but it’s not a one version for everyone dashboard. These dashboards are custom visualizations that fit your unique business goals and needs. This tool makes it faster to gain custom insights, with a lower level of effort and greater efficiency. You will be able to see campaign performance at a single glance and have interactive views that benefit reporting needs in a streamlined way.

Here’s a sample of what that homepage dashboard view looks like: 

How Does Marketing Intelligence Work With Data Cloud and Agentforce?

MI enables Agentforce to generate recommendations on high or low-performing advertisements. As a marketer, you know that by focusing marketing efforts on the best-performing advertisements, you can drive more success. Essentially, MI gives you the bandwidth of a large team analyzing data without increasing your headcount overhead. This is done through the overlay of Data Cloud, MI, and Agentforce.

• Data Cloud: Fully unlocking the power of MI requires Data Cloud. Provides a connected, single source of truth, ensuring the integrity and completeness of the information MI works with.
• Agentforce: Takes the insights generated by MI and drives real-time actions, such as automated campaign optimizations and informed lead nurturing.

We could think of these three as a peanut butter-butter-syrup sandwich. For those of you who don’t know what that is, message me on LinkedIn, I’d be overjoyed to introduce you to the better and far more delightful version of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. 

Marketing Intelligence: It’s a Natural Extension for Data Cloud

For those already leveraging Data Cloud, MI becomes a natural extension of your existing data ecosystem. It helps you visualize, optimize, and automate marketing campaigns. By plugging into Data Cloud’s unified data layer, MI unlocks endless use cases. My top pick use cases include using segments from Data Cloud for ad targeting, understanding the performance of ad segments in near real-time, optimizing with one login identity resolution, and bringing together my third-party and first-party data. The release of Marketing Intelligence is a leap forward for Data Cloud and Agentforce, making the Salesforce tech stack more applicable to marketers and data-driven reporting gurus. 

Honest Moment: Why wouldn’t you want Marketing Intelligence?

I’m not going to sit here and say MI is for everyone. Nothing is ever for everyone. Let’s talk about who would not be an ideal fit for MI (and why). 

The first checkbox is the number of sources and the desired level or reporting. If you run ads in a single source and don’t require robust reporting, MI might not be necessary. Also, if you prefer to stay on other platforms outside the Salesforce ecosystem that are already built out and tested for data integrity, you might not see as much value. 

The second checkbox to consider is that Data Cloud is a prerequisite for MI. Without Data Cloud, many of MI’s benefits are harder to realize. If you’re not ready or able to adopt Data Cloud, your immediate need for MI might be less pressing. If you don’t have Data Cloud, but you want to explore MI, my suggestion would be to work with a Salesforce partner who can help you map out your next steps and business value. There are a lot of gains to be had when you combine the power of Data Cloud and MI. 

Clicks Not Code: My Mantra for 2025 

Throwing a bow on all of this, Marketing Intelligence streamlines data connections and troubleshooting by having all the information on a single platform. Taking this a step further, this means marketers have an opportunity to optimize the cross-channel campaign game while reducing budget waste. Marketers (like myself and maybe you, too) have to invest a massive level of effort into unified cross-channel and multichannel reporting. MI is an opportunity to lower the LoE while increasing efficiency. Visualizations in MI can improve the user interface quality of life in Data Cloud, making data more digestible and building on the ‘clicks not code’ initiatives that started years ago. Clicks not code isn’t going anywhere, dare I say, it’s my mantra of 2025 and MI is the first shining example of how AI and unified data make it possible. In just three clicks, MI can ingest and harmonize data from cross-channel campaigns. I never thought it’d be so easy. Yet, here we are and I cannot wait for the next chapter of what MI brings. 

MI is a leap forward for Salesforce. In three clicks, we can ingest and harmonize data, something that creates a ripple of efficiency gains with use cases upon use cases adding value. By bundling the core capabilities of Data Cloud, Agentforce, and Tableau Next into a specialized marketing tool, Salesforce simplifies the setup of robust marketing analytics and decision engines. It’s a great time to be a marketer and it’s never been a better time to be a data-driven marketer.