Grow ROI with Marketing Intelligence

Are you optimizing campaigns before it’s too late, or are you constantly playing catch-up, reacting to yesterday’s results? Can you truly prove your ROI, or are you relying on vague assumptions and gut feelings? If you’re struggling to turn data into dollars, to connect your marketing efforts to tangible revenue growth, you’re not alone. Many marketers face the same challenges: fragmented data, confusing visualizations, and a disconnect between insights and action. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Marketing Intelligence can help you.

Accessing and effectively visualizing marketing data is only the first hurdle. The real challenge is using that data to optimize campaigns when it matters most. Today’s customer journey spans social, email, and organic search, with the goal of leading to a purchase or booked meeting. But without clear insights, optimizing campaign spend and understanding channel effectiveness becomes impossible. So, what is Marketing Intelligence and how does it help? Here’s what you need to know.

What you’ll learn:

What is Marketing Intelligence?

Marketing Intelligence is Salesforce’s new solution that continuously ingests and transforms marketing data into timely insights so you can make trusted decisions that boost campaign performance and reduce wasted spend. It uses the power of unified data and Agentforce, always-on digital labor, to automate marketing data management and transform that data into actionable insights and recommendations — saving you time, reducing wasted spend, and improving your marketing ROI.

Marketing Intelligence brings our extensive marketing analytics expertise we’ve cultivated over the past decade with Marketing Cloud Intelligence onto our unified Salesforce platform. Data Cloud, Agentforce, AI, and Tableau Next are built into the platform, making Marketing Intelligence simple, fast, and easy to use. 

Let’s explore how Marketing Intelligence uniquely delivers its insights:

• Simple, unified customer experience: Connect and vizualize one data source with just three clicks. Easily manage ongoing performance with pre-built connectors, data models, and dashboards designed for marketing. Connect your data just once, and trust that it will be consistently and automatically updated without duplication or latency.
• One Salesforce platform: Go deeper into your data and unlock richer insights with connected data, AI enrichment, and embedded Tableau Next dashboards.
• Built with AI and Agentforce: Save time and improve campaign performance with automated data prep and autonomous paid media optimizations.

5 key innovations coming with Marketing Intelligence

Marketing Intelligence is designed to simplify yet maximize how you use your marketing data. Here are five key innovations, all seamlessly integrated into Salesforce.

1. Optimize paid media at scale 

Agentforce helps marketers optimize paid media by autonomously identifying and pausing low-performing ads, recommending optimizations, and adjusting metrics with auto-created goals. Agents analyze massive datasets of campaign performance behind the scenes, identifying patterns and correlations between various factors like audience demographics, ad creatives, and time of day. 

This allows them to predict future performance and make proactive adjustments. By constantly monitoring campaign data in the moment and automating repetitive tasks, agents continuously learn and adapt, making significant improvements in campaign ROI while freeing up marketers to focus on strategic initiatives.

2. See all your marketing performance in one view on the Marketer Homepage

Marketing Intelligence gives marketers a single place to get an at-a-glance view of their campaign performance, honing in on any level of granularity to support their needs. Focus on the campaigns that matter most with access to concise, AI-generated summaries that indicate if performance is on or off track, highlighting key marketing metrics that you’ve set in simple language.

Act on insights directly in the summary with one easy click, autonomously pausing low-performing ads and optimizing campaigns before it’s too late.

3. Refine and extend your data for deeper analysis

Automatically extend, clean, and enrich your data to make it even more powerful and useful with AI enrichment. This feature uses large language models (LLM) to organize and improve your data — adding valuable information and attributes to your data sources. For example, instead of simply listing data sources as “Meta” or “Reddit,” which can lead to a scattered and messy view, the LLM within Marketing Intelligence will recognize that these sources and other platforms are all “social channels.” 

It will then create a new attribute or category for them and ensure consistent naming conventions across all sources. This simplifies data analysis and provides a clearer understanding of your marketing performance, allowing you to create more targeted and effective campaigns.

4. Simplify data integration in three clicks using Data Pipelines 

Simplify marketing data ingestion, transformation, and mapping from third-party sources with just three clicks. Easily connect common data sources using pre-built connectors (with additions in every release this year) or import simpler formats, like non-API files or flat files, with Total Connect. Each pipeline includes an instant, out-of-the-box dashboard for real-time connection insights. 

Our marketing-specific data model intelligently harmonizes this raw data, understanding which fields to extract and prepare for analysis. This standardization allows you to analyze data in a marketing-relevant context, creating a consistent and accurate foundation for insightful decisions.

5. Track performance from anonymous visitor to closed revenue

Easily prove marketing impact with built-in first and last-touch attribution modeling and reporting.  Connect third-party campaign data directly to Salesforce CRM through Web and Mobile SDK integrations to see how your ads engage customers at every stage, giving you end-to-end visibility into how your spend contributes to revenue. 

Marketing Intelligence in action: A day in the life of an MI user

Let’s put these five innovations into action and visualize a seamless user journey. We’ll use a fictional sustainable gardening and home goods retailer, “Your Garden Place (YGP)” to illustrate how marketing data can flow effortlessly from source to insight to action with Marketing Intelligence.

Prepare data  

The journey begins with data ingestion. Amar, a digital marketer at YGP, used Marketing Connectors to pull in data from YGP’s Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and their own Shopify store, finally seeing all their customer interactions in one unified dashboard. This eliminated the need to jump between multiple platforms and allowed Amar to trust that YGP’s data was continuously and accurately updating across sources.

However, YGP’s product names were inconsistent across their ad platforms and website analytics. Marketing Intelligence standardized product names, ensuring accurate reporting on product performance and campaign effectiveness. But, the data enrichment capabilities went beyond just product names. 

Using AI, Amar also cleaned and enriched YGP’s customer data, adding valuable information and attributes. AI recognized that customer interactions on “Instagram,” “Pinterest,” and “Organic Gardening Forum” all fell under the broader category of “Sustainable Lifestyle Channels.” By using AI to automatically create this unified category and standardize naming conventions, Amar gained a clearer picture of customer engagement across all platforms.

This allowed him to identify that customers engaging on these channels were particularly interested in YGP’s eco-friendly gardening products. With this insight, Amar was able to launch highly targeted campaigns, featuring relevant content and promotions across these preferred platforms.

Understand data

Amar then used the pre-built dashboards to see that YGP’s Instagram video ads were driving significantly more website traffic than their static Facebook image ads. He quickly adjusted the budget allocation to focus on the higher-performing video content on Instagram.

Act on data

Accessing campaign performance directly from the Marketer Homepage, Amar noticed his campaign for indoor herbs was not performing like he hoped. Using Agentforce in one click, he automatically paused a low-performing keyword campaign and increased bids on keywords related to “indoor gardening” and “herb kits.” 

A few weeks later when preparing for a meeting with his boss, Amar was able to pull an accurate attribution report to show performance and impact of the campaign.

Traditional methods for marketing analytics often fall short, leaving marketers with incomplete and misleading data. Don’t waste time sifting through data from various sources to piece together a fragmented picture of your campaign performance — only to report on performance when it’s too late to make adjustments. We’re here to help. These new features are just the start when it comes to the innovations we are building out in Marketing Intelligence.