Salesforce Marketing Cloud FAQ

When we meet new clients as Salesforce Marketing Cloud consultants, we’re often asked the same questions. So, I wrote this Salesforce Marketing Cloud FAQ, to answer some fundamental questions for you, before we meet. If after reviewing these, you have more questions, we’d love to hear from you and would be happy to work through these with you directly as well.

Q1: What is the Difference between Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud?

It’s easy to distinguish between Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud, as the Sales Cloud is a CRM, supporting the sales team. Marketing Cloud is a marketing platform, mostly supporting the marketing team. Salesforce also facilitates distributed marketing, with deep integration between Sales and Marketing Clouds.

Q2: Is Marketing Cloud a CRM?

Marketing Cloud is not a CRM. However, you can linked to Salesforce Sales Cloud (which is a CRM) via Marketing Cloud Connect.

Q3: What is included in Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

How does Salesforce Marketing Cloud work?

What can Marketing Cloud do? I often feel like answering with ‘what can’t it do’.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a premium marketing automation platform. At its core, it has enterprise-level ways of getting massive amounts of customer data in, multiple options to segment the data, and a superior journey builder and email template builder to create engaging 1:1 customer journeys at scale, omni-channel: via email, mobile texts or in app messages.

Beyond the core, it has many other features, such as Social Listening and Social Customer Service facilities in Social studio.

Lear more about all the builders & studios: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Overview

Q4: Is Social Studio part of Marketing Cloud?

The answer to this question is: it was. Social Studio was located within the Salesforce Marketing cloud stack. You can no longer purchase Social Studio, but those who have it are migrating to other alternatives. We partner with Sprout Social; we can help you to either migrate from Social Studio; or start with SproutSocial and Salesforce as an integrated set of tools.

Q5: Who uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

So, you have read the section ‘What is the difference between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot?’, you can understand that B2B companies mostly use Pardot; and B2C companies mostly use Marketing Cloud.

Many top brands use Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Examples are Eurostar, Aldo, WeddingWire, DonorsChoose.org , KLM and many others. Marketing Cloud is often used by companies with 50-200 employees and 10M-50M dollars in revenue.

Q6: How Much is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Marketing Cloud has about a dozen builders and studios – some of which are priced separately. There is a further pricing differentiation for the number of messages you wish to send. So the answer to how much is Salesforce Marketing Cloud depends on how you would like to use it. But, we can help you figure it out, so you can create a budget and business cases for your software purchase and implementation.

In a free initial consultation with us, we would be glad to discuss your plans and needs so you can get the answers you need.

Simply set up a chat now to discuss Marketing Cloud pricing in the context of your needs:

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Q7: How do I know if I have the Marketing Cloud?

You can ask your Salesforce Admin if your company has purchased Marketing Cloud. It’s not something that you can ‘look up’ in your Salesforce org as an ordinary users. When you buy Salesforce, you typically buy Salesforce Sales Cloud, or Service Cloud. Or maybe Communities. Marketing Cloud is purchased separately. There is a separate login for marketing cloud. And if your company has purchased Marketing Cloud and you did not know it, then either you are brand new to the business or surely something is amiss — as everyone should be aware of the amazing customer journeys set up in the system. If they don’t exist yet, we’d be very happy to help you and others in the team to create success with Marketing Cloud.

Q8: What is the difference between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot?

Pardot may have been renamed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (April 5, 2022), but it still is .. Pardot.

Marketing Cloud and Pardot are both marketing automation platforms, but are very different. People often think that Pardot is ‘simpler’. It is. But I also see that most companies are using just the bare minimum of Pardot, while there is so much more under the hood. Stay tuned for an upcoming course on Pardot on this website.

While Pardot supports the marketing for ‘considered sales’, such as in B2B scenarios, but also important, expensive consumer products and services. For example, houses and other real estate, university degrees, investments, certain kinds of insurance.

The process of learning about the product or service, with the decision to purchase, is done over a period of time. Prospects are tracked on the website, graded by desirability as a client and scored for their interest in your product or service. Prospect profiles are built carefully over time, in the various steps the prospect takes, interacting with your website, email and your team.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a platform for supporting the marketing and customer journeys for transactional sales, i.e. the time difference between learning and deciding to buy is much shorter. Think backpacks or computer gear. Marketing Cloud can handle mass audiences and send out millions of emails.

Learn more: Why Pardot

Q9: What channels can I use in Marketing Cloud?

There are 4 types of marketing channels: paid, free, digital and traditional marketing. Marketing helps you orchestrate all of these together. In today’s digital world, the word channel also have started to the relate to only the digital channels, with more granularity: social media platforms, Whatsapp, SMS, Facebook Messaging, website chat, forms communities, mobile apps, email and websites.

To create customer moments that matter, Marketing Cloud is designed to create and deliver content via all these channels. A consistent customer experience, spoken in one brand voice.

Learn more: Whatsapp messages in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Q10: How does Salesforce Connect to Marketing Cloud?

What does Salesforce Connect allow you to do? Salesforce Marketing Cloud Connect allows you to connect Salesforce Core, i.e. Sales Cloud or Service Cloud. Note that you can also connect Salesforce Communities, Commerce Cloud to Marketing Cloud.

Is Marketing Cloud Connect free?

Today, we’re on Marketing Cloud Connect v5. Marketing Cloud Connect used to be a separate product for which Salesforce charged an enabling fee. No longer.

How do I set up Marketing Cloud Connect?

But Marketing Cloud Connect is for Salesforce database integration. So, it relates to data modelling and some of the more technical aspects of Marketing Cloud. Therefore you should get an experienced, certified Salesforce Marketing Cloud consultant to set this up.

As this is not a DIY, ‘How do you set up a marketing cloud connector?’ is not the right question — finding the right Salesforce Marketing Cloud consulting firm, with experienced, certified Consultants or Developers, is. (Certifications and experience matters — i.e. someone with a Marketing Cloud Admin or Email Specialist certification is not the right person for this work.)

Q11. Do I need a Consultant to set up Marketing Cloud ?

Yes, you do. For many reasons:

Certain parts of Marketing Cloud functionality can be incredibly complex. There are 6 programming languages that come to play in Marketing Cloud. Your desired solution likely will use some of these. Typically, companies do not have this skillset in house. A Certified Marketing Cloud Consultant typically studied well over a year to become certified, and that is after several years of experience with the software.

2. Furthermore, your company must adhere to data regulations & laws in the world of email marketing. In addition, there are many best practices that can fast track your business results from your investment.

3. You will see that an experienced and certified Salesforce Marketing Cloud Consultant can offer you tremendous marketing and business value to:

Actually be able to implement the desired business case. Some seemingly innocent customer journeys can require magical massaging of different data sources and filtering. That is not something that someone who used MailChimp or Marketo before can handle.
Fast-track your project.
Adopt best practices and avoid pitfalls.
Train your staff.
Ensure that your Marketing Cloud will actually be used, and/or be used to a greater degree with more sophisticated marketing ideas, workflows and campaigns.

Don’t settle for just any marketing automation consultant. Go with experienced and certified Salesforce Marketing Cloud Consultants. Like CloudAnalysts.

That’s it for our Salesforce Marketing Cloud FAQ. If you have suggestions on other questions and topics to add here, let us know.

Interested to learn if Salesforce Marketing Cloud could be good for your business?

Feel free to contact us with any questions – big or small – re. Marketing Cloud.

We love to share what it can do and help you frame a bespoke marketing solution, leveraging as many builders and studios as you may need.

Interested in a chat?