Salesforce.com has unveiled Marketing Cloud to enable marketers to better listen, engage with and respond to customer needs.
The new arrival makes use of technology acquired through the purchase of Buddy Media and Radian6 to create what salesforce.com claims is the industry's first unified marketing suite.
"With [Marketing Cloud] we all have the opportunity to do social marketing right," said Brett Queener executive vice president of Marketing Cloud at salesforce.com.
Analyst firm Gartner has predicted that CMOs will spend more on cloud services by 2017 than CIOs meaning the time is ripe for salesforce.com to start ensuring there is a supply of tools to satisfy that demand.
"It's a really exciting time. We've been working on something amazing that we think has potential to transform the way that we all market. To say marketing is social is such an understatement. It represents the biggest change to marketing in last 60 years," Queener added.
"We hear [from customers] We've been managing social with one or two people in the corner.' That is not going to work anymore. They tell us it's hard. It's really, really hard to transform the organisation at the speed that social demands.
The Commonwealth Bank Australia is one company taking advantage of the new tool to help drive its marketing decisions and ensure they add greater business value to the organisation.
"Banking has always been a social business. And for the first time we're able to wrap the cloud around fiscal services," said Andy Lark, the bank's CMO.
"Marketing has probably been the most underserved function in the enterprise for decades. Marketing has had all these little point solutions and that's hard to adopt. So thank you to salesforce.com for doing that. It's going to transform the way marketers work.
Finally we can sit at the table and have conversations about ROI."
Marketing Cloud is available from today, starting at $5,000 per month.
