Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next: What Changes and How to Get Started

For a long time, "Marketing Cloud" referred to several very different Salesforce products. With Marketing Cloud Next, Salesforce is bringing its marketing offering together on its core platform and Data 360. This article explains what that changes in practice, and how to tell whether it is the right choice for you.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next?

Marketing Cloud Next is Salesforce's marketing offering built natively on the Salesforce platform and on Data 360, and designed to bring AI agents into marketing teams' work. It follows on from the Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced editions launched on the core platform, and Salesforce is now concentrating most of its new marketing features there.

In practice, a marketing team finds the features expected of a marketing automation solution: emails, forms, landing pages, segments, automated journeys, consent management, performance tracking. The difference lies in the foundation: all of this runs on the same data model as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, unified by Data 360.

Salesforce's marketing product names, editions and scope change quickly; always check with Salesforce exactly what the edition you are offered includes.

Marketing Cloud Next vs Marketing Cloud Engagement vs Account Engagement (Pardot)

Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement remain in use by many customers. The point is not to migrate everything overnight, but to know which direction to take for a new project or a rebuild.

Why is Data 360 at the heart of Marketing Cloud Next?

Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) is the Salesforce data layer that ingests, harmonises and unifies customer data from Salesforce and other sources (website, e-commerce, ERP, product). For marketing, this changes three things:

• A unified profile: one customer, seen the same way by sales, service and marketing, instead of more-or-less synchronised copies.
• Richer segments: you target based on purchases, support cases, opportunities or product usage, not just email clicks.
• Better-informed agents: an agent that suggests an audience or drafts a campaign draws on this unified data.

That is also why a Marketing Cloud Next project starts with the data: which sources, which identity rules, which consents. Our quickstart includes setting up Data Cloud for Marketing Cloud.

What is agentic marketing?

"Agentic marketing" refers to using AI agents, based on Agentforce, to take on part of the marketing work under the team's control: proposing a campaign brief from an objective, suggesting a segment, drafting email variants, building a first journey, analysing results. The team approves and adjusts; the agent speeds up the repetitive steps.

As with any Agentforce project, the value depends on data quality and scoping. Our recommendations, drawn from our Agentforce projects:

• keep human approval on everything that goes out to customers;
• give the agent your editorial guidelines and examples of good campaigns;
• measure time saved and campaign performance, not just the volume produced.

Who is Marketing Cloud Next for?

• Companies already on Sales Cloud or Service Cloud that want marketing automation without a separate platform to maintain.
• B2B teams on Account Engagement that want to use more data (product usage, support, billing) in their targeting.
• Companies starting out with marketing automation that want to go straight to the current generation.
• Organisations investing in Data 360 and Agentforce that want marketing to benefit from the same foundation.

Conversely, a very high-volume B2C business with an expert Marketing Cloud Engagement team and extensive custom development should assess the functional scope carefully before considering a transition.

How does Meir IT get a Marketing Cloud project started?

Our Marketing Cloud quickstart (€4,000 excl. VAT, fixed price) aims to put a first real campaign into production, rather than a demo:

1. Configuration of Marketing Cloud in your org and of user permissions.
2. DNS and sending domain (domain authentication) for good deliverability.
3. Data Cloud for Marketing Cloud: data sources, basic unification, consent.
4. A complete campaign: 5 email templates, 3 journeys, 5 automations, 2 landing pages and 5 forms.
5. Training for your team so it can produce the next campaigns independently.

How do you move from Account Engagement (Pardot) to Marketing Cloud Next?

There is no automatic switchover: you rebuild the useful assets (templates, forms, journeys, scoring), using the opportunity to clean house. The usual steps:

• an inventory of the Pardot assets actually in use (many no longer are);
• migration of consents and communication preferences, to be handled first;
• rebuilding the main templates and journeys;
• a short coexistence period, then switching over the website forms.

If your project also touches the sales and billing cycle, read our Revenue Cloud guide: a unified customer in Data 360 benefits marketing as much as renewals.