As a Digital Marketing Practice lead, I am often asked this question. The people I train have been provided with one of these Marketing tools by their employer, but may ask whether it is the correct one. It can be confusing as to which is the best fit for your business. So, how do we, as Marketeers, stakeholders, and other invested individuals of a new Digital Marketing solution, decide which tool to invest in?
Salesforce Pardot is all about creating the perfect list of leads to start selling to once our marketing has flagged them up as a potential customer. This is done though a collection of powerful tools within Pardot that will generate a Prospect Score (which indicates how much a Prospect is interested in our products or services) and Grade (which indicates if the Prospect meets our criteria, and that we would consider to be within ‘our target audience’). Someone once described it to me as:
“A tool that keeps that Marketing Director in a job if the sales are down. The Marketing Director can simply show all the wonderful quality leads that have been created by the team.”
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is all about the Customers and Subscribers experience with our brand. Through well-developed emails and other channel messages, and powerful automations that makes not only the process of building a campaign easier, but more personal for a Subscriber’s experience.
Another way of looking at these tools is to understand what kind of Marketing you as a team will be doing. Pardot is a business to business marketing tool focusing on a “Pipeline” based marketing effort, everything you do in Pardot leads to a sale. Marketing Cloud is a tool designed for communication and engagement with our audience.
Now let us look at the functional side of things.
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Marketing Cloud |
Pardot |
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Send Emails |
Yes |
Yes |
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Send Mobile messages |
Yes |
No, but will integrate to other applications |
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Send Social Posts |
Yes, with Social Studio |
Yes |
|
Segmentation |
Filter (simple Criteria Builder) or SQL for a more advanced level of Segmentation |
More simple than Filters, we have Segmented Lists (one-time Segment) and Dynamic Lists (Automated Segmentation) |
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Form Builder |
Yes, with Web Studio |
Yes, with more advanced functionality such as being able to able to setup Progressive profiling and being able to control with cookie capture in the form. |
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Automation of Daily tasks |
Marketing Cloud uses Automation Studio to do this, these tasks are mainly based on Data Management. |
Pardot has a collection of tools that automate various tasks, triggered by either Prospect or User interactions. |
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Automated Sending |
In Marketing Cloud, we have Journey Builder, a journey creates a seamless customer experience at any time. |
In Pardot, we have Engagement Studio. Designed more for lead nurturing through a series of engagements. |
If you have any questions about Marketing Cloud or Pardot, please contact us. You can also take a look at our wide range of Salesforce tutorial videos for hints, tips and advice.