Eric Zenz: Marketers want to personalise but lack the data

Marketing Report is in San Francisco for Dreamforce. We talk to Eric Zenz of Salesforce.

Eric Zenz is Senior Vice President of Product Management for Marketing Cloud, the marketing software of Salesforce. Before joining Salesforce he held product management and engineering leadership roles at Microsoft, DocuSign and Celonis. Marketing Cloud was founded in 2000 as ExactTarget and acquired by Salesforce in 2013.

Agents with context

The main keynote of Dreamforce focused on making CRM data available to AI agents, both the agents Salesforce supplies and external models.

"The main stage keynote today laid out a new vision for how agents can help all employees as well as marketers be more productive with the Salesforce platform, bringing all that rich context that you have inside your CRM to agents for decisioning, whether they're out-of-the-box agents or Claude or any other LLM harness that you use."

Data before personalisation

Personalised communication is high on the wish list of marketers. Customer data is often the bottleneck.

"Problems that we hear from our customers commonly are that they want to produce personalised communication because they know it's going to have better engagement. They're just lacking the data to do it, or the data that they have at hand for personalisation is sometimes in conflict with other sources of data. So what they're looking for are tools to help them unify disparate systems of customer data and pull together a unified profile that they can market to as effectively as possible."

Marketers also want solutions that deliver results quickly and work in the tools they already use.

"We're all being asked to do more with less. This is not new for marketers. This has been a refrain for as long as I've been working with marketing."

Breadth of content

Even with the right data, producing enough variation remains a problem.

"Even if you do have the data that you need to personalise content, you spend a lot of time building a single asset. We're marketers who want to experiment, so you put all your effort into your A/B tests and your multivariate tests. They find challenges in generating a breadth of content, and a breadth of content that is actually resonant across channels as well."

Proof of value

Showing that marketing is an investment and not a cost is a recurring theme for CMOs.

"A marketer needs to be able to show their impact."

In a B2B context that means qualified and enriched leads that help sales close deals. For campaigns it means understanding the effect of owned media such as email, SMS and RCS as well as paid media.

"Being able to understand the impact of all of that, understand what's performing well and to be able to iterate on it or stop things that are underperforming. Marketers need to show their value to sales in a B2B context and they need to show their value to the business overall with their paid and owned media success."

At the Connections event in Chicago in June, Salesforce introduced two agents for this. Piper, developed by Qualified, identifies and qualifies website visitors. Hunter searches for new prospects.

Content canvas in October

Salesforce uses AI for the campaign structure, the orchestration, the brief and the plan. For the creative work, Marketing Cloud is getting a new workspace.

"On the creative side, we have what we call the content canvas as a part of our marketing campaign agent. It helps marketers generate content across channels, with multiple variations across those channels, all together in one canvas. That gives them options they can publish from and include in their marketing campaigns. You can be generating assets like text or images, or if you're a little more brand sensitive, you can be dynamically assembling those assets from a DAM or from a CMS."

"Those are launching imminently in Marketing Cloud. They will launch in October. That's not to say we're without agent capabilities today. We have a campaign agent today. It just doesn't have the richness of the content that I described."

In June Salesforce signed an agreement to acquire Contentful, the content platform founded in Germany that is used by more than 4800 brands. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of the Salesforce fiscal year, which ends in October.

"I think that's really what, for somebody in an agency role, might make their efficiency and their productivity for their customers a lot greater."

Brand defined centrally

In Marketing Cloud a company records the brand once, as a set of rules the AI works with.

"We define brands centrally as a part of our Marketing Cloud, and you can have multiple brands. The brand is your brand voice, your font, of course your typeface, all of the visual and voice aspects that are used in the creation and assembly of your campaign. So any of the generation or any of the AI-based assembly that we do is highly likely to have the content that you generate be on brand, amplifying and also defending that brand, keeping it consistent."

"In measuring the productivity of your now on-brand assets, you're able to see what's resonating with your customers, what is growing engagement and thereby what is growing your brand's presence."

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