Last week, Salesforce.com unveiled its ‘marketing cloud’ Dreamforce. Analysts and other industry watchers have suspected the move following its purchase of social marketing businesses like Radian6 and Buddy Media over the past couple of years. Jesse Noyes, Managing Editor at Eloqua, looks at what this means for the cloud business and marketing spaces.
Really, salesforce is combining the features and functions of Radian6 and Buddy Media to create a social marketing cloud where social media monitoring, content and advertising are integrated with salesforce’s CRM product.
The concept is not that there’s a dileneation between marketing and social marketing, but that all marketing is becoming social marketing.
Modern marketing is becoming both more technologically savvy and social. Enterprises want to engage more buyers through social channels and then measure precisely how that engagement infuences buyer behavior.
That means greater need for products that can size up market sentiment at the top level and tie that back into an organization’s specific sales and marketing funnel.
This is good news for marketing automation customers. Marketers who use both Eloqua and salesforce.com will be able to enjoy an enhanced version of the social marketing cloud.
The integration of marketing automation and tools like social sign-on with salesforce’s CRM and Data.com means marketers can cull the insights from the marketing cloud to append the profiles of individual leads and customers within their pipeline.
By Jesse Noyes
Managing Editor
Eloqua