Marketing Cloud Next, 8 Months On: What Salesforce Actually Built and How Australian Companies Can Use It to Grow

When Salesforce introduced Marketing Cloud Next last year, it was not a traditional product. There was no single edition to upgrade to, no one-click migration, and no clear “before vs after” moment.

Instead, Salesforce fundamentally re-architected how marketing works inside the Salesforce core platform, bringing together Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) and Agentforce AI as core building blocks rather than optional add-ons.

At its core, Marketing Cloud Next represents a strategic shift towards an agentic marketing model, one where marketing becomes more intelligent, connected, and, most importantly, more efficient.

Eight months on, the technology is established, available, and evolving rapidly. Yet many Australian organisations are still unclear about what Marketing Cloud Next actually means, how Marketing Cloud Growth and Growth Advanced fit into the picture, and how any of this translates into tangible business growth.

This article cuts through the noise and explains what Salesforce actually built, how the platform has evolved, and how Australian companies can use it today.

Marketing Cloud Next: Not a Product, but a Platform re-architecture

Let’s start with clarity.

Marketing Cloud Next is not a SKU (purchasable product or package). It’s also not an edition you buy, and not something you “upgrade to.”

Instead, Marketing Cloud Next is Salesforce’s umbrella architecture for what it calls Agentic Marketing. In this model, marketing is AI-assisted and increasingly autonomous, driven by real-time customer data, orchestrated across Sales, Service, Commerce, and Marketing, and continuously optimised rather than manually managed.

Under this umbrella sit the actual commercial products: Marketing Cloud Growth and Marketing Cloud Growth Advanced. These are supported by Data 360, Agentforce for Marketing, and native Salesforce Platform workflows and events.

Marketing Cloud Growth: The Foundation for Modern Marketing

Marketing Cloud Growth is the entry point into the Next architecture. It is designed for organisations that want to move beyond email-centric marketing without inheriting the heavy complexity of legacy implementations.

Built natively on the Salesforce Platform, Growth enables shared data across Sales, Service, and Commerce, allowing marketing to respond to real customer behaviour through event-driven journeys rather than static campaigns. Agentforce AI is embedded directly into the experience, helping teams accelerate content creation and execution, while messaging can be extended beyond email through channels such as SMS and WhatsApp.

For Australian organisations (particularly mid-market companies and those operating in regulated industries), Growth lowers the barrier to adoption. It supports Australian data residency requirements, simplifies governance, and enables faster time to value with leaner teams.

Marketing Cloud Growth Advanced: Where Intelligence and Optimisation Take Over

Marketing Cloud Growth Advanced builds on the same architecture and introduces deeper intelligence and optimisation capabilities. This is where marketing shifts from execution to decisioning.

Rather than designing static journeys, teams can use predictive engagement scoring, send-time and frequency optimisation, and real-time journey experimentation to adapt experiences dynamically. Two-way conversational messaging enables richer customer interactions, while higher automation limits and expanded AI usage support scale.

In practice, Growth Advanced allows marketing teams to stop asking “What campaign should we run next?” and start asking “What is the best next action for this customer, right now?”

Data 360: The Backbone of Marketing Cloud Next

None of the above works without Data 360.

Data 360 provides unified customer profiles, identity resolution, real-time data ingestion, and activation across Salesforce clouds. Salesforce has consistently reinforced (through release notes and enablement content), that AI, Agentforce, and Next-style orchestration only deliver value when data is unified and trusted.

For organisations with fragmented ecosystems, Data 360 is not optional. It is the foundation that enables personalisation, automation, and intelligent decision-making at scale.

How Marketing Cloud Next Drives Growth in Practice

When implemented intentionally, Marketing Cloud Next typically delivers measurable impact across conversion, retention, operational efficiency, execution speed, and ROI visibility.

The structural shift is simple but powerful: marketing moves from manual campaign management to intelligent, real-time orchestration that responds continuously to customer behaviour.

How FLO Can Help Australian Organisations Unlock This Value from Marketing Cloud Next

At FLO, we help organisations move beyond feature adoption and into outcomes.

We work with Australian and APAC organisations to assess Marketing Cloud maturity, determine whether Growth or Growth Advanced is the right fit, activate Data 360 strategically, enable Agentforce responsibly, and connect marketing more tightly with sales and service. Most importantly, we focus on continuous optimisation, ensuring advanced capabilities don’t just get switched on, but actually drive measurable business value.