Nov. 24, 2022 ยท 6 minutes
Many digital marketers believed that Pardot would be incorporated and assimilated into Salesforce Marketing Cloud when Salesforce acquired Pardot in 2013, expanding their already robust marketing capabilities and capability. This wasn't the case, though, as Pardot continues to be a distinct offering while still being a part of the Salesforce family.
Some marketers who are not familiar with the tools may find this confusing. Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud appear to offer the same services and prospects on the surface. Even their own descriptions appear to be identical, and they both now have equal review scores and client satisfaction levels of 97% and 99%, respectively.
It's a good idea to first briefly explain what Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are. If you already know this information and just want to go to the differences, feel free to click here.
Pardot, a marketing automation software founded in 2006, enables you to find, nurture, and score your prospects based on how valuable they are to your company and how likely they are to make a purchase. Longer sales cycles are advantageous for both businesses and marketing agencies because this automates tedious but crucial phases in the nurturing process.
A platform for email marketing and automation, Salesforce Marketing Cloud also includes integrated solutions for social media, mobile, email, website advertising, and other platforms. Analytics and event-driven triggers that start marketing activity are both included in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
In essence, Salesforce Marketing Cloud consists of solutions that collaborate across several marketing channels. Along with marketing automation, these also comprise website, email, and social media marketing tools.
In order to help businesses "Exceed revenue goals, achieve sales & marketing team alignment, and gain efficient use of existing resources," Pardot is referred to as "B2B marketing automation by Salesforce, that offers a marketing automation solution supporting the needs of B2B organizations of every size." As a platform to "Create 1-to-1 customer experiences across email, mobile, advertisements, and the web," Salesforce Marketing Cloud is advertised. Connect your marketing efforts across all customer touchpoints, including sales, service, and commerce.
Confusion is only increased by the fact that Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are both integrated with Salesforce Sales Cloud.
No one blame you if your head is feeling a little foggy right now. Because of this, we've written this helpful blog post to explain how to distinguish between the two so you don't get sucked into a digital maelstrom of uncertainty.
After reading the two definitions above, you might be inclined to think that Pardot is a more straightforward alternative to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which is targeted at top-tier agencies and powerful marketing teams.
Pardot was primarily developed with B2B clients' unique demands in mind. As a marketing automation tool, it is largely focused on planned email campaigns, lead nurturing, and maintaining the company's brand awareness among the businesses it is being used to promote to.
Such a business has less complex requirements for social media marketing and website integrations and hardly ever needs to conduct SMS-based marketing campaigns. These businesses will profit from Pardot's lower price compared to Marketing Cloud and its need for less admin training. Pardot, however, offers no connectivity with external data sources and only limited integration with Salesforce.
Pardot, on the other hand, was created with marketers in mind more so. Without involving developers, it offers straightforward tools that let marketers build emails, forms, landing sites, and automation. Additionally, it offers thorough contact analytics that let marketers learn more about the intentions of certain customers.
To save money and time on training, you should continue with Pardot if you do not require the extra functions that Marketing Cloud offers, such as mobile, in-depth internet marketing, and social media.
Larger businesses will benefit from the additional features and capabilities that Marketing Cloud delivers, despite the fact that it may be more expensive and require more training.
To reach every customer, a typical B2C company would require extensive integrated marketing solutions. They would require triggered and transactional email services, and they might profit from reaching customers on their mobile devices.
A larger business using Salesforce Marketing Cloud will also discover that the sophisticated web development tools and integration are well-suited for the many profiles that visit their websites on a daily basis.
The idea that B2B is evolving to resemble the B2C market is not new, though. As more and more B2B marketing activities move online, more businesses are making the switch to the Salesforce Marketing cloud to take advantage of 360° marketing communications.
Although SFMC wasn't intended for B2B lead management, it doesn't require in-house programming skills to create critical features like lead scoring or website tracking. You can make lead management and lead prioritization a native feature of SFMC without writing any code by taking a look at Salesforce ISV partners like SalesWings.
It is crucial to remember that the more capabilities of the Marketing cloud will increase the cost of an investment. To fully utilize the 360° vision Marketing Cloud has to give, the customer will invest more money in lengthier training and expertise.
With Salesforce Pardot, you have complete control over the number of users you leave cookies for, the number of users who have been brought into the system by your marketing efforts, the number of users who are ready to be managed by sales, the number of users who have received an offer from the sales team, the number of opportunities that have been won, the number of opportunities that have even led to the creation of customer acquisition and loyalty journeys, etc.
This is made feasible by its excellent structure. We'll find Campaigns, Forms, Assign to, Opportunities associated to the prospect (Candidate or Salesforce contact), Completion Actions, Email Tracking, Automation Rules, Pardot API, Engagement, and more, much more after login in. Marketing professionals have access to a clear conversion and loyalty funnel that they can share with many departments as needed.
With the help of Pardot's renowned Marketing Automation, you can manage all aspects of your inbound marketing strategy with diverse teams, from lead generation to turning prospects into brand advocates.
An all-in-one platform for internet marketing is what Salesforce Pardot is intended to be. With the platform, marketers can easily put together unique landing pages and web forms to create leads and collect data about them. From there, marketers may use Pardot to track the path leads take through their website in order to better understand what goods, promotions, or pieces of knowledge might persuade them to convert.
Additionally, Pardot makes it simple to design and automate email campaigns. There are many templates on the platform's drag-and-drop email builder to help you get started. Pardot allows A/B testing to fine-tune your messaging to various groups and offers a variety of ways to segment your lead and customer datasets. Additionally, you can use customized form fields to ensure that your advertisements are effective.
Pardot also provides solutions for groups to enhance their search engine marketing initiatives. Marketing departments can easily identify the terms that are generating traffic from both paid and organic searches. To track cost per click, the software also connects with Google AdWords.
With its seamless integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Pardot offers a number of extra capabilities for sales teams. A thorough engagement history reveals every contact leads and clients have ever had with a company's digital assets in between sales calls. The history of new leads' interactions with the website or landing pages of their organization is also visible to the sales staff. Employees can then arrive at a sales call with the ideal pitch for that client.
Sending small-scale email marketing campaigns to the clients of a single sales representative is another feature that Pardot gives sales teams. An employee's email signature can be added to these marketing campaigns for customization. Additionally, all customer interactions with these campaigns are recorded in the engagement history, giving the next sales call extra information.
