On May 10th I attended Salesforce Connections 2016 in Atlanta Georgia. This event is Salesforce's conference dedicated to marketing, showcasing their Marketing Cloud offerings.
There were four main announcements:
- Marketing Cloud is updated with the new "Lightning UI". Read announcement here.
- New Marketing Cloud mobile app
- New Advertising Studio for targeting ads to the right customers
- Email Studio for those critical email marketing campaigns. Read announcement here.
My Summary
1.) With the updated look and navigation, the full range of features (delivered via a series of Studios and Builders), and the integration with the rest of Salesforce (ex: Sales and Service clouds) Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides an very powerful platform for marketing professionals to reach their audiences across email, social media and even places like car dashboards. They deliver personalized, 1:1 marketing whenever and where ever the customer needs it.
2) I was surprised by the overwhelming focus on email (they did not ignore social media, but it certainly took a backseat to email) and pushing offers (ads), as marketing is more than just pushing discounts at people, it's building relationships and providing them information and services they need.
3) While Marketing Cloud was updated with the "Lighting UI", it is still lacking the collaboration features that the Sales and Service clouds have. I look forward to seeing them add Chatter directly into the various Marketing Cloud studios so that marketing professionals can have conversations directly within the context of their campaigns.
Here is a short video recap of day 1:
Here are my tweets from day 1. You can scroll (down) through them, or click view as slideshow.