Business Units in Marketing Cloud Engagement+

How Business Units Work in Marketing Cloud Next

After you create business units in Marketing Cloud Next, admins can restrict access by specifying which Salesforce users have access to each business unit.

When you create a campaign or a content item, you select a business unit to associate it with. After you create a record and associate a business unit to it, only users with the necessary permissions can access it.

Specifying a business unit also helps make sure that the right content targets the right customers. When you create a campaign, you select a business unit to work in. You can’t change the business unit for a campaign after you create it. As you build out the campaign, you can access only related objects, such as segments and content items, that are associated with the selected business unit. This separation creates a barrier that helps marketers avoid intermixing customers and content intended for other business units.

Several areas of the user interface show a badge that indicates which business unit the user is working in. The business unit badge appears on the flows, campaigns, and content selection pages. If a user has access to multiple business units, this badge helps them maintain context, preventing accidental sends and changes.

Use Cases for Business Units

Business units help your enterprise create separate, dedicated spaces for different groups, departments, regions, and priorities. Consider using business units to meet these needs:

• Regional division and expansion: Regulations relating to the scope and retention period of customer data vary by country. At the same time, data and content that you use for customers in one region might not be relevant in other regions. Business units keep your customer data and campaigns separate from the data and campaigns in other business units, while making sure that local teams have the tools and data that they require.
• Brand-based marketing: Many enterprises operate separate brands, each with their own brand style, audience, and priorities. For example, an organization can have one brand that focuses on products for value-conscious customers, another brand for middle-of-the-road products, and a high-end luxury brand. Customers of the luxury brand shouldn’t receive the same messages as customers of the value-conscious brand. At the same time, each brand has its own voice, identity, and marketing priorities. By using separate business units, marketers can maintain distinct data, campaigns, and strategies for each brand.
• Audience separation: Business units can focus on specific customer segments that never cross over. For example, a healthcare organization can send messages to both healthcare providers and patients, but the content that they send to each audience is different and often highly regulated. In this scenario, it’s vital that a patient never receives a message intended for a provider and vice versa. Business units create a high wall between the data and content used to reach these two audiences.
• Line-of-Business separation: Different product lines within an organization often have their own groups of customers and their own marketing priorities. For example, an electronics manufacturer can have a line of consumer products and a line of industrial products. The product portfolios, customer profiles, supply chains, and marketing strategies vary greatly between these lines of business. Business units help these groups operate autonomously.
• Staging and testing: Because customer data is separated across business units, teams can use them as planning and playground environments without touching actual customer data. Unlike a development sandbox, a staging or testing business unit is part of a live production system. As a result, you can test new initiatives by using real system components before rolling them out to real customers.

Relationships Between Marketing Cloud Next Business Units

Business units in Marketing Cloud Next operate differently than business units in Engagement. Where Engagement enforces a hierarchy of parent and child business units, Marketing Cloud Next uses a more flexible approach.

When you turn on the business units feature, you create an initial business unit and at least one more business unit. Like every other business unit, the initial business unit has its own dedicated data space and CMS workspaces.

Each business unit has a 1:1 relationship with a data space. In other words, a data space is associated with only one business unit, and vice versa.

When you send messages to your customers, your account consumes Message Credits. All of your business units share these message credits. With the consumption cards in Digital Wallet, you can view message consumption metrics for individual business units or for your entire organization.