Inside Salesforce Marketing Intelligence: An Expert’s Take

The problem of fragmented analytics is well-identified. 

But tools like Tableau and Marketing Cloud Intelligence have helped marketers make major strides in breaking down silos. 

Today, the challenge is to unlock “end-to-end attribution” because:

• The customer journey is rarely, if ever, linear.
  
• While tools integrate a lot, there might still be a lot of gaps in tracking certain interactions.
  
• Deciding how to assign credit is complex.
  
• Reliably linking a single user across devices and platforms is difficult without robust identity resolution.

These are what Agentforce-powered Marketing Intelligence aims to solve. 

We at Mavlers are excited to unlock what Marketing Intelligence can do for your business. So, let’s find out.

What is Salesforce Marketing Intelligence?
Agentforce Marketing Intelligence: Features
1. Unified data ingestion & harmonization
2. AI-powered data enrichment & insights
3. Agentic automation
4. Intuitive visualization & reporting
5. Native integration with Salesforce
Wrapping up

What is Salesforce Marketing Intelligence?

Marketing Intelligence (not to be confused with Marketing Cloud Intelligence) is Salesforce’s new, AI-powered marketing analytics solution. It’s designed to help marketers make data-driven decisions, optimize campaigns, and reduce wasted spend by providing a comprehensive and actionable view of their marketing performance. The core purpose of Marketing intelligence is to:

• Unify Fragmented Marketing Data: Marketers often deal with data scattered across numerous platforms. Marketing Intelligence aims to connect and harmonize all this data into a single, cohesive view.
  
• Automate Data Management: It automates the manual and time-consuming tasks of data collection, cleansing, and modeling.
  
• Deliver Actionable Insights: Instead of just providing reports, it uses AI to provide insights and recommendations that marketers can act upon in real-time.
  
• Optimize Campaign Performance: By understanding what’s working and what’s not, marketers can adjust campaigns on the fly to improve ROI.

Marketing Intelligence in Agentforce moves beyond traditional reporting to offer an “agentic” approach to marketing analytics, where AI agents proactively analyze data, provide insights, and even take autonomous actions to optimize marketing campaigns.

Key innovations in Salesforce Marketing Intelligence: 

– Marketer Homepage: Offers real-time alerts and enriched data feeds to support quick decision-making. AI-generated campaign summaries provide insights by channel, metric, and goal.

– AI-Powered Data Enrichment: Automatically adds new attributes to datasets, enhancing analytical depth and segmentation capabilities.

– TotalConnect: Enables seamless integration of flat file data sources (without APIs) into the Marketing Intelligence ecosystem.

– Paid Media Optimization: Agentforce leverages AI to autonomously pause underperforming ads, suggest improvements, and align metrics with automatically generated goals.

– Goal Management: Comes with ready-to-use dashboards and industry-specific KPIs, helping marketers track progress against custom-defined performance targets.

Source: IDC

Agentforce Marketing Intelligence: Features

Salesforce Marketing Intelligence marks a transition from a platform once centered around analyst-driven customization to one designed for broader accessibility and inclusivity. For experienced users, this may feel like a step back—diminishing some of the challenge and craftsmanship traditionally involved. But that’s just by way of an observational aside. 

Let’s look at the features in Salesforce Marketing Intelligence.

1. Unified data ingestion & harmonization

Marketing Intelligence offers a library of prebuilt API connectors for common third-party paid media sources. 

TotalConnect, an universal AI connector, enables connection and ingestion of data from virtually any source, including flat files or systems without direct API connections, using AI to automatically identify, prepare, and map new data. 

Marketing Intelligence uses a marketing-specific semantic data model that automatically normalizes and harmonizes data across different sources, ensuring consistency and accuracy.

2. AI-powered data enrichment & insights

Marketing Intelligence uses Einstein AI to automatically normalize, enrich, and extend your marketing data with any data residing in Data Cloud. Apart from that, Marketing Intelligence:

• Automatically detects and creates new data categories, attributes, and fields for deeper analysis.
  
• Provides AI-generated summaries of campaign performance, offering quick overviews of program health and highlighting what’s working and what’s not.
  
• Delivers predictive insights to help marketers anticipate trends and make proactive decisions.
  
• Facilitates marketing attribution by connecting third-party campaign data with Salesforce CRM and Data Cloud, offering end-to-end visibility into customer touch points. 

3. Agentic automation  

Marketing Intelligence is powered by Agentforce, which enables it to offer:

• Real-time KPI Analysis: AI agents continuously monitor campaign performance against predefined KPIs. 

• Underperforming Campaign Identification: Automatically identifies campaigns or ads that are underperforming or contributing to wasted spend.
  
• Automated Optimization Actions: Automatically pauses low-performing ads and recommends other optimizations, acting like an autonomous campaign manager.
  
• Actionable Recommendations: Provides suggestions for improving campaign effectiveness and maximizing ROI.
  
• Campaign Creation Assistance: Generates campaign briefs, identifies target audiences, and suggests messaging.

4. Intuitive visualization & reporting 

Integrated with Tableau Next, Agentforce-powered Marketing Intelligence provides:

• Prebuilt, customizable dashboards tailored for marketers, offering a clear and comprehensive view of campaign performance across all channels.

• Allows marketers to set campaign goals and easily predict and monitor performance at various levels (by audience, campaign, channel, or goal).
  
• Supports prompting capabilities, allowing users to verbalize their requirements and have the platform generate dashboards and insights.

5. Native integration with Salesforce

Marketing Intelligence is natively integrated with the broader Salesforce ecosystem, including Data Cloud, CRM (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud), Marketing Cloud Engagement, and Commerce Cloud. The new solution leverages Data Cloud as the unified customer brain to bring together all first- and third-party data, providing a complete customer 360-degree view.

Marketing Intelligence also provides automated workflows that can trigger alerts via email, Slack, SMS, or Salesforce Action Center, transforming insights into immediate action.

Salesforce Marketing Intelligence Key Concerns:

– Marketing Intelligence follows a consumption-based pricing model. This raises valid concerns about cost-efficiency when processing large volumes of third-part data.

– Using Marketing Intelligence typically requires both a Data Cloud license and a Tableau Next license, making it a more substantial investment compared to a standalone Marketing Cloud Intelligence license.

– Current constraints in data ingestion—such as limited connectors and CSV-only support in Total Connect—may be a drawback for seasoned analysts familiar with the more versatile capabilities of legacy Marketing Cloud Intelligence.

– The shift to Tableau for visualization alters how much control analysts retain over custom visuals, necessitating a new skill set and potentially limiting flexibility.

– As far as we know, existing users of CRM Analytics or Marketing Cloud Intelligence won’t be affected immediately by the transition into Marketing Intelligence.

– Salesforce so far has not announced any end-of-sale or end-of-life for its existing analytics platforms.

But all that said, there’s no need to set aside your previous learning; your business context, problem-solving approach, and strategic thinking remain valuable as they transcend platforms. At the same time, consider pursuing certifications in Data Cloud and Tableau, with a focus on foundational Data Cloud credentials, to gain a solid grasp of the ecosystem and architecture that underpin Marketing Intelligence. 

Above all, embrace the new Marketing Intelligence solutions with a forward-looking mindset. It’s more than a change in technology; it’s a stepping stone toward richer analytical depth, enabling you to act faster, uncover deeper insights, and align more closely with business outcomes.

Wrapping up!

Marketing Intelligence is a leap toward autonomous, insight-driven marketing. By unifying fragmented data, enriching it with AI, and layering in proactive agentic capabilities, it closes the gap between data and action. In a landscape where every interaction counts and customer journeys grow more complex by the day, having such a tool in your corner can be transformative. 

Need help leveraging Marketing Intelligence? Book a call with one of our Salesforce experts today!