From Salesforce comes two popular and mighty platforms that are leading the charge in marketing automation: Pardot and Marketing Cloud. Salesforce Pardot and Marketing Cloud can help you with nearly every facet of your company from marketing and sales to customer service and IT teams.
However, choosing between the 2 platforms can be tricky because both can level up your marketing efforts substantially. Knowing how they differ and how they can fit your business can be a game changer.
What is Pardot?
Pardot is a B2B email marketing automation platform that gives marketers the ability to track website visitor interactions using cookies. It also streamlines lead nurturing through highly personalized email campaigns to increase conversions.
With Pardot, you can find your best leads, track campaign engagement, and follow up with your prospects and customers. This esteemed tool makes getting leads a lot easier and keeps customers coming back.
What is Marketing Cloud?
Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing automation system that consolidates all of your channels — not just email. With this monster of a system, marketers can take their automation several steps further.
Marketing Cloud converts contacts to customers in a completely personalized way. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the customers are the ones defining the types of relationships they have with brands. A customer’s journey can expand across channels and devices, creating a unique one-to-one experience between prospect and brand.
Pardot vs. Marketing Cloud — Main Differences
The key difference between Pardot and Marketing Cloud is the buying cycle. One is not better than the other, they are both just for different audiences.
Another thing to note is that Pardot’s features and pricing can be tailored to different types of B2B businesses and works well with integrations; however, Marketing Cloud is designed for bigger B2C enterprises with large databases.
The best part about Marketing Cloud? Like Pardot, Marketing Cloud can also be tailored to your business needs, but there are a lot more options for customization. Depending on the needs of your business, you can add on more studios to expand the avenues of marketing you can go to.
Pricing for Marketing Cloud is not available until you try out a demo for your business to ensure that the tool is the right fit for your company. If not, a Salesforce Representative may recommend a Pardot edition for you.
Choosing which platform is best for your business needs depends on:
- Digital channels you want to use
- Size of your prospect/customer database
- What you want to achieve
Something to note is that both tools can be tricky to learn. With a tool as complex as Pardot or Marketing Cloud, you might even want to consider bringing in some outside expertise to help set it up. Our certified digital marketers provide administration and implementation services for both platforms if you need guidance.
In the end, it is important to ask yourself: do I want to focus on the audience I have or do I want to cast a broader net? What size is my business and what type of customer am I looking for?
Pardot: B2B Marketing Automation
Now that you have a general understanding of Salesforce’s marketing automation tools, let’s take a deeper look at Pardot and how it nurtures a prospect into a lead; this nurturing process really differentiates Pardot from Marketing Cloud.
The gap between the marketing and sales department often causes the company to lose potential customers. Pardot helps align marketing and sales — bridging the B2B gap between the two.
This is all solved through Pardot’s:
- Lead management
- Automated actions
- Marketing campaigns
Pardot Lead Nurturing
Pardot allows for an excellent nurturing process. Its lead management and long-term nurturing thrives in the following conditions:
- Long sales cycles
- Closing through a sales team (not transactional)
- High ASP (average selling price)
Pardot email automation has some advanced capabilities. By using website behavior and interactions as triggers — such as clicking on a referral link, typing in your URL, or downloading whitepapers — Pardot can track a prospect before they even convert using their unique tracking cookie.
Once a visitor has this cookie, Pardot can track their browsing behavior and determine if they are a qualified lead or not through lead rating.
To get a more in-depth view of Pardot’s database, email assignment, lead assignment, and more, we have an excellent (and free!) Beginner’s Guide to Pardot.
Our Salesforce Pardot services can also help you adopt and run your marketing automation on your behalf.
Beginner’s Guide to Pardot
Download our expert-created guide to begin your journey with Pardot.
Pardot Salesforce Integration
If you are worried about bringing over information from Salesforce to Pardot, there is no need to worry. Pardot securely syncs with Salesforce with the help of the Salesforce connector, ensuring that all your prospects, contacts, and leads are linked between both systems.
Once connected, a query is sent to Salesforce every 2-4 minutes for updated records. Pardot admins can also set sync behavior, controlling whether a field can be updated in either Pardot, Salesforce, or both. Prioritizing field values in Pardot can help you protect your data that you have gathered without worrying about Salesforce overriding it.
Marketing Cloud: B2C & Beyond
Marketing Cloud is great for a unique one-on-one customer journey that goes beyond just one channel and is all about finding out everything about the customer. With this beast of a marketing tool, you can dip into every digital avenue.
With its various modules, Marketing Cloud focuses more on B2C (though some B2B brands use the platform too) because of its compatibility with advertising platforms, social media, and SMS. Having transactional mobile and social messaging helps push the prospect further down the funnel in a way that feels natural and personal.
Marketing Cloud Studios
The studios in Marketing Cloud offer something for each area of marketing:
- Email Studio: Builds personalized email campaigns.
- Mobile Studio: Manages personalized interactions such as SMS, push notifications, and chat messages.
- Social Studio: Allows you to engage with customers across social media channels.
- Advertising Studio: Uses CRM data to target advertisements 1:1, acquire, and re-engage customers.
- Journey Builder: Build personalized 1:1 customer journeys that stretch across all channels.
- Datorama: An all-in-one marketing platform for your KPIs, data, and decisions.
- And more!
Due to the complex nature and number of tools and features in Marketing Cloud, having someone who is knowledgeable and trained in the product is essential for the success of any B2C business considering this system.
Marketing Cloud Salesforce Integration
With the help of Marketing Cloud Connect, integration with your Salesforce CRM is seamless. Marketing Cloud Connect syncs your Salesforce Sales, Service, Community Cloud, and reports in an instance — combining both systems for easier targeted campaigns.
Not only that, Marketing Cloud Connect fleshes out a 360° view of the customer by maintaining all of the contact records of email tracking history — enhancing individual customers’ profiles for an extraordinary marketing performance. This specific type of integration is only native to Marketing Cloud, not Pardot.
Choosing the Right System for You
Having a marketing automation tool is essential for the success of a business, as it allows marketing and sales to work together seamlessly. Deciding between different systems can be challenging, and there is a lot of information to digest. We hope that breaking it down makes it easier for you and your company to choose.
Fortunately, our EBQ consultants help all types of businesses get the most out of their marketing platforms — even the complex Marketing Cloud. If you need further assistance in navigating Salesforce marketing automation, reach out to our certified Pardot and Marketing Cloud experts.
