Marketing Cloud + Agentforce: What’s Your Strategy?

Perhaps the word ‘strategy’ is too overwhelming. After all, your plans for Agentforce - an autonomous Salesforce AI product released in 2024 - shouldn’t stand apart from your overall marketing strategy.

The better question is, how will you use Agentforce to improve and enhance your Marketing Cloud plans, in 2025 and beyond?

At MarCloud, we like to call this your Salesforce AI roadmap.

A roadmap for using Agentforce in Marketing Cloud will help you to:

• Understand which Agentforce features are most valuable to your business.

• Outline the marketing and business goals of using such features.

• Plan your Agentforce adoption so it’s manageable - with low risk of error.

• Understand where internal teams need to align or receive training.

• Unearth any tasks that need to happen before implementing Agentforce.

• Use Agentforce to reach your goals without confusion and overwhelm.

• Measure and report on AI-powered activities.

There are two ways to kick off your Marketing Cloud Agentforce planning.

1. You can review all the bottlenecks in your current marketing (and sales handover) processes. Perhaps you can’t launch new campaigns fast enough, or respond to enquiries immediately, due to limited resources. Maybe your scoring and grading is basic and doesn’t surface the marketing-qualified leads you need. Find the sticking points in your current strategy and make those the priorities to fix.

2. You can identify the areas of your marketing already working well and consider how to supercharge them so they work even more effectively. Getting incredible email open and engagement rates? Excellent. You have a proven approach. Now is the time to scale email campaigns with automated AI.

Of course, you really want to do both. But let’s be realistic. You can’t tackle all of the things at the same time, so assess which will have the biggest impact on your ability to deliver ROI - bottlenecks and process improvements, or doubling down on what you know is working.

Once you know your priorities, you can map out which Agentforce features can help and how.

Set clear goals for adopting those features. For example:

• Bring personalised lead response time to under five minutes with an Agentforce agent.

• Improve scoring and grading model to deliver 10% more MQLs.

• Drive 50% more case study downloads each month through nurture emails.

Setting these goals is important because it gives you something to measure performance against. It’s how you’ll know your AI adoption is working. You might also have internal goals such as:

• Reduce administrative tasks for the sales team by 20%.

• Launch marketing campaigns in half the time by automating AI segmentation.

As always, the more specific, measurable, and time-bound the goals are, the better.

Once you know where, why, and how you want to use Agentforce for Marketing Cloud, half the hard work is done. Before you leap straight into the tools though, you need to prepare your existing accounts as best you can.

Create a project timeline

Firstly, create a project timeline showing the phases of your Agentforce roadmap. This could be a simple calendar running the space of six months, that shows at a glance what your Agentforce focus will be and which goal(s) it aligns with.

Assign responsibilities

It should also designate responsibilities - who in your internal team needs to be involved and who is responsible for signing off on AI tactics before they go live? Depending on the size of your business, you might have a single person handling it all, or a team sharing the workload; writing campaign briefs and perfecting your brand guidelines. Either way, be clear about who is both involved and accountable.

Lay account foundations

Lastly, your adoption roadmap should list any pre-requisites for getting the most out of your new AI capabilities. For example, you can use Agentforce in Marketing Cloud without also using Data Cloud. However, the possibilities with Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud combined are huge, so it’s worthwhile looking into your data storage and management for better results.

When it comes to things like AI-powered lead scoring, you’ll want at least the foundations of scoring in place based on what you already know about your audience. Naturally, Agentforce will learn and provide insights on this scoring setup over time, working with you to improve.

Doing a roadmapping exercise can highlight additional tasks that will set you up for success, and these might seem like yet another to-do on your list. What you don’t want, is to completely stall Agentforce adoption and get left behind whilst your competitors reap the benefits.

That’s where a Salesforce Partner can help.

Having a Salesforce marketing automation specialist to bounce ideas off or handball tasks to, can speed up your learning curve and ability to implement Agentforce for Marketing Cloud. 

MarCloud partners with global brands to plan and roll out Agentforce for marketing teams, using our in-depth knowledge of Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Data Cloud. We can help you prepare for Agentforce, create effective marketing agents, and get up and running sooner. Learn more about our Agentforce services or request a call to discuss your goals.