What is Marketing Cloud in Salesforce? - Key Products, Benefits, AI Capabilities

Marketing Cloud by Salesforce is a digital marketing automation application for building and managing personalized customer experiences across multiple channels.¹ It includes a wide variety of tools for both small and global enterprises looking to streamline and automate marketing efforts across channels such as websites, email, SMS, and social media.¹ Its goal is simple: to increase customer engagement, provide personalized experiences, and improve customer satisfaction.

The Marketing Cloud started in 2000 as ExactTarget, an email marketing tool, and became a part of Salesforce in 2013.², 3 Today, it has evolved into a family of marketing products that works alongside the sales and service clouds, right from consumer campaigns at a huge scale to lead nurturing for B2B sales teams. Artificial intelligence (AI) has pushed the Marketing Cloud further in the last two years. It now builds audience segments from a plain-language request, assembles campaigns, and runs Agentforce agents that reply to customers on their own.⁴

This article provides a detailed overview of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, focusing on what it is, how it differs from Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, how it works, its key products, benefits for marketing and revenue teams, and AI capabilities.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the marketing platform of Salesforce, commonly known as SFMC. It is the place where a company plans, sends, and measures its customer communication.⁵

The platform is more than just an email tool. The same platform holds the audience data, builds the customer journeys, and reports the results. One can say that Sales Cloud manages the deal, whereas Marketing Cloud manages the conversation around it. Please note that Salesforce sold this family as Agentforce Marketing from October 2025, and its website returned to Marketing Cloud in September 2026.⁶, 7 The products underneath are the same.

In general, Salesforce issues the licenses, whereas a consulting partner mostly handles the setup. CRM-only consultancies like Vegacompass, an approved Salesforce Consulting Partner, sell no licenses, and our CRM marketing strategy work covers how a lead is synced, scored, and credited to its campaign.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Both names carry the words Marketing Cloud, and that is where the confusion starts. When people say SFMC, there is a high chance that they are talking about Marketing Cloud Engagement, the product that was once ExactTarget.⁵ It is built for business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, where a brand sends emails, SMS, and push notifications to a very large list.⁸ As such, it keeps its own contact data and connects with the CRM through a connector.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), on the other hand, is built for business-to-business (B2B) marketing. It keeps the buyers as prospects and syncs them with the leads and contacts of the CRM.⁹ It then scores their interest and hands the ready ones to a salesperson.⁴

The difference is simple: Engagement speaks to consumers in the millions, whereas Account Engagement prepares a smaller list of buyers for the sales team. As such, a company that sells to both may run both.

How Does Salesforce Marketing Cloud Work?

Marketing with Salesforce follows one simple loop, whichever product a company buys.

Below is how the loop usually runs:

• Collect the Data: The customer records arrive from the CRM, the website, the app, and the store. In Marketing Cloud Engagement, they sit in tables called data extensions, and Marketing Cloud Connect syncs the CRM objects into them.¹⁰
• Build the Audience: The marketer filters those records into segments.
• Design the Journey: Journey Builder maps what each person receives, on which channel, and what happens next.¹¹
• Send and Measure: The messages go out, and the opens, clicks, and replies come back to the same record.

Marketing Cloud Next runs the same loop directly on the core Salesforce platform, so it needs no connector.¹² Please note that every synced lead or contact counts as a contact, even if it never receives a message, and the contact count is a part of the bill.⁴, 10

Key Salesforce Marketing Cloud Products

Salesforce sells Marketing Cloud as a family of products and not as a single tool. Below are the four main products, followed by the add-ons.

1. Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly ExactTarget)

Marketing Cloud Engagement is the product for consumer marketing at scale. Its main goal is to run the email, SMS, and push campaigns of a brand from one place and to automate what follows each message.⁸

A typical setup mainly includes:

• Journey Builder for cross-channel journeys
• Content Builder for emails and templates
• Automation Studio for imports, queries, and scheduled sends
• Ideal for consumer brands that write to a large list, such as retail, travel, and e-commerce

2. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot)

Account Engagement is the B2B marketing automation product. It captures a lead, nurtures it with a series of emails, scores its interest, and alerts the salesperson at the right moment.⁹, 13

Such a setup mainly includes:

• Forms and landing pages
• Engagement Studio for nurture programs
• Lead scoring and B2B Marketing Analytics
• Ideal for companies with a long sales cycle and a sales team on Sales Cloud

For example, the published case study on Vegacompass for OSM Worldwide, partnered with Coresolute LLC, describes an Account Engagement setup for a global logistics firm, with automated lead management and custom marketing dashboards.

3. Marketing Cloud Next (Growth and Advanced Editions)

Marketing Cloud Next is the flagship next-generation product, announced in June 2025 and built natively on the core Salesforce platform.¹² It shares the data, the Flow automation, and the agents with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.

New customers buy it as the Growth or the Advanced edition. On the other hand, existing customers do not have to switch platforms; they unlock it alongside their current setup through the Engagement+ and Account Engagement+ editions.⁴, 5

It is best suited for teams that want marketing, sales, and service on one data model.

4. Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud)

Data 360 is the customer data platform (CDP) that sits under the marketing products. It joins the records from the CRM, the website, the store, and other systems into one real-time profile, and the segments built on it feed the journeys and the agents.⁵ One thing to note is that it is priced on usage, which is a separate budget line from the editions.

Below are the other products in the family:

• Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Interaction Studio) for real-time web and email personalization
• Marketing Cloud Intelligence (formerly Datorama) for cross-channel marketing analytics
• Loyalty Management for loyalty programs, offers, and promotions
• Contentful, the recently acquired headless content management system (CMS), for creating content once and using it on every channel⁵

Personalization and Intelligence came to Salesforce through the Evergage and Datorama acquisitions.⁹, 14

Benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud

You may be wondering: a simple email tool costs far less and takes a day to set up. So, a fair question arises: what does a company gain by doing its marketing with Salesforce?

The answer is that marketing finally reads the same customer record as the sales and service teams. Below are the main benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

• Shared Customer Data: The marketing platform reads the accounts, the contacts, and the cases that the other teams update. As such, a customer with an open complaint does not receive a cheerful upsell email on the same day.
• Journeys in Place of One-Off Campaigns: A welcome series, an abandoned cart reminder, or a renewal nudge is built once and then runs on its own.¹¹ That's why the team spends its week on the next idea and not on resending the last one.
• All Channels from One Platform: Email, SMS, push notifications, WhatsApp, and advertising audiences are planned in one place.⁵, 8 The customer hears one voice, instead of five tools talking over each other.
• A Cleaner Handoff to Sales: The lead reaches the salesperson with its score and its engagement history attached.⁴ On the other hand, the score helps only when marketing and sales have agreed on what a qualified lead means.
• Reporting Tied to Revenue: The campaign dashboards and the attribution connect a campaign to the pipeline it created, so the marketing report and the sales report stop disagreeing.⁴
• AI on Top of the Same Data: Einstein picks the send time and the frequency for each contact, and the Agentforce agents draft the campaigns and answer the replies.⁵, 15 We discuss it in the next section.

One thing to note is that the license delivers only the tools. The results come from a clean contact list, a lead definition that both teams accept, and a named owner for the platform.

To learn more about the benefits of the CRM itself, please read our article: Benefits of Salesforce CRM for Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud and AI

AI works at two levels inside Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The first is Einstein, the built-in AI of Marketing Cloud Engagement. For example, Einstein Send Time Optimization picks the best send time for each contact, and Einstein Engagement Scoring predicts how likely each contact is to engage.¹⁵

The second is Agentforce, which acts instead of only predicting. The Campaign Agent builds a campaign from a goal and the brand guidelines, and Piper, the AI sales development representative (SDR) agent, engages and qualifies the inbound leads on the website and in the inbox.⁵ Every message can also become a two-way conversation.¹²

Please note that AI only repeats what the records tell it. As such, the order that works is process first, data second, and agents third. To learn more about Einstein and Agentforce, please read our article: What is Salesforce? - Key Products, Cloud Services, Benefits.

Vegacompass: Salesforce Consulting Partner for Marketing Cloud and Pardot

Vegacompass has been consulting on CRM and digital transformation for 12+ years. We want every client to reach the best version of itself, first through the CRM and then through AI. As an approved Salesforce Consulting Partner, we list Marketing Cloud and Pardot among our Salesforce service lines.

Every product this article covers ends at one point: the record that marketing hands to sales. That handoff is where our senior consultants work, from the sync and the scoring to the attribution. Recently, we also formed a dedicated AI team, which adds agents only after the lead process and the data are in order.

We offer the following CRM consulting services:

• CRM Strategy (Marketing, Sales and Customer Service)
• Revenue Operations Consulting
• CRM Audit & Technical Debt
• Salesforce Implementation and Migration
• CRM Migration
• CRM Data Cleanup
• AI CRM Consulting

Talk to a Salesforce consultant today to choose the right Marketing Cloud product for your lead flow, or to repair the handoff between the one you already own and your sales team.

References

1. (November 19, 2025). What is Marketing Cloud? A Comprehensive Guide. Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/marketing/cloud/
2. (2016). History of Salesforce in Indianapolis. Inside Indiana Business. https://www.insideindianabusiness.com/story/31903252/history-of-salesforce-in-indianapolis
3. (July 12, 2013). Salesforce.com Completes Acquisition of ExactTarget. Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2013/07/12/salesforce-com-completes-acquisition-of-exacttarget/
4. Jania, B. (September 10, 2025). Next-Gen Marketing Cloud: What You Need to Know About Product Details, Availability and Pricing. Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/blog/next-gen-marketing-cloud-details/
5. (2026). Marketing Software by Agentforce Marketing (formerly Salesforce Marketing Cloud). Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/marketing/
6. Pastore, M. (October 2025). Salesforce Marketing Cloud enters the agentic era. MarTech. https://martech.org/salesforce-marketing-cloud-enters-the-agentic-era/
7. (September 14, 2026). Salesforce drops 'Agentforce' from product names, The Information reports. The Next Web. https://thenextweb.com/news/salesforce-drops-agentforce-branding-product-names-dreamforce
8. (2026). B2C Marketing Platform. Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/marketing/engagement/
9. (2026). Discover Salesforce Marketing Solutions. Trailhead, Salesforce. https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/salesforce-marketing-cloud-quick-look/discover-salesforce-marketing-solutions
10. (2026). Explore Synchronized Data Sources. Trailhead, Salesforce. https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/marketing-cloud-contact-management/explore-synchronized-data-sources
11. (2026). Journeys and Automations in Marketing Cloud Engagement. Salesforce Help. https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?language=en_US&id=mktg.mc_journeys_and_automations.htm&type=5
12. (June 11, 2025). Salesforce Ends the Era of 'Do-Not-Reply' Marketing with Marketing Cloud Next. Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/marketing-cloud-next-announcement/
13. (2026). Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Pricing. Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/marketing/b2b-automation/pricing/
14. (July 21, 2021). Salesforce Acquisitions. Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/salesforce-acquisitions/
15. (2026). Einstein for Marketing Cloud Engagement Feature Overview and Requirements. Salesforce Help. https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?language=en_US&id=mktg.mc_ees_einstein_feature_overview.htm&type=5