Salesforce offers two powerful marketing automation platforms – Pardot and Marketing Cloud. Each platform serves distinct marketing needs, with Pardot focusing on B2B marketing and Marketing Cloud catering primarily to B2C scenarios. Understanding the differences between these two platforms is crucial for businesses aiming to optimize their marketing strategies.
Critical Distinctions Between Pardot and Marketing Cloud
Pardot: The B2B Specialist
Pardot, known for its alignment with B2B marketing, excels in managing ‘considered purchases.’ It’s designed for scenarios with long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers. Pardot’s core capabilities include lead generation, scoring, and nurturing through email campaigns, content marketing, and account-based marketing. It suits professional services and industries where detailed customer engagement is crucial. The platform’s WYSIWYG interface allows for easy management by certified Pardot specialists, even without extensive technical knowledge.
Marketing Cloud: The B2C Powerhouse
In contrast, Marketing Cloud is tailored for B2C marketing. It thrives in environments requiring transactional purchases and high-volume, cross-channel marketing. Marketing Cloud’s strengths lie in its ability to handle real-time messaging, mobile marketing, social media engagement, and e-commerce integration. It offers a wider range of marketing channels, including email, social media, SMS, and display advertising. This platform is ideal for industries like retail, FMCG, health & beauty, travel & leisure, and nonprofits. Marketing Cloud requires more technical expertise due to its complex data management and array of ‘Builders’ and ‘Studios’.
Integration and Compatibility
While Pardot and Marketing Cloud are distinct entities, both integrate with Salesforce’s ecosystem. Pardot has tighter integration with Salesforce CRM, especially with Sales Cloud, allowing for seamless data sync and campaign management. Marketing Cloud, however, uses connectors for data synchronization and offers a broader range of integration options with external systems.
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Addressing Common Misconceptions
- Pardot is not just an email marketing tool; it offers marketing automation capabilities.
- Small and large organizations can leverage Pardot effectively, depending on their marketing needs.
- Marketing Cloud, while more complex, can be managed comfortably by non-developers once correctly set up.
Utilizing Both Platforms
Organizations with the necessary budget can benefit from using both Pardot and Marketing Cloud in tandem, leveraging the strengths of each to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. This dual-platform approach is particularly beneficial for companies that engage in both B2B and B2C marketing.
Decision-Making Criteria
- For long sales cycles with multiple decision-makers: Pardot
- For high-volume, multi-channel transactional marketing: Marketing Cloud
- Consider the specific marketing needs and processes of your organization before deciding.
Functionality Breakdown
While both platforms offer email marketing, landing pages, and forms, their capabilities differ in transactional messaging, progressive profiling, and digital advertising. Pardot excels in engagement history tracking and lead nurturing, whereas Marketing Cloud offers more in web and mobile analytics, as well as server-side scripting.
Marketing Cloud vs Pardot breakdown
This table compares Pardot and Marketing Cloud, emphasizing their pitches, differentiating factors, channels, use cases, industry fits, technical requirements, product offerings, and integration with Salesforce.
| Pardot (Account Engagement) | Marketing Cloud | |
| One-line pitch: | “Powers your marketing and sales success by improving alignment between teams, driving and nurturing new leads” | “Grow relationships and revenue with seamless experiences from ad to account, email to e-commerce, social to service, and more” |
| Main differentiator: | Used for ‘considered purchases’ where there are long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers. That’s why Pardot is often referred to a B2B marketing tool. | Best suited to transactional purchases across multiple marketing channels. That’s why Marketing Cloud is often referred to as a B2C marketing tool. |
| Marketing channels: | Email, social media* | Email, social**, SMS, display advertising |
| Typical use cases/keywords: | Lead generation, lead scoring, lead assignment, email nurture campaigns, content marketing, webinar marketing, account-based marketing. | Real-time messaging, cross-channel marketing, mobile marketing, social media engagement**, display advertising, e-commerce. |
| Ideal industries: | Professional services (note: Pardot is not industry-specific providing the organization meets the ‘main differentiator’ criteria) | Retail, FMCG, health & beauty, travel & leisure, nonprofit etc. |
| Technical knowledge and skills required: | Designed as WYSIWG***. Can be managed by a certified Pardot Specialist (in a standard setup). | Has a range of ‘Builders’ and ‘Studios’, some of which require specialization. Data management in Marketing Cloud is more complex than in Pardot. |
| Licensing/add-on products: | Pardot is comprehensive, however, some advanced features (analytics, AI-enabled features) are likely to be add-ons. | Marketing Cloud is sold in modules. Check which marketing channels, capabilities, and reporting will be included in your account before you purchase. |
| Integration with the Salesforce platform: | Aligned with Sales Cloud. This means that Pardot ‘talks’ to many of the standard Salesforce objects (Leads, Contacts, Opportunities). Pardot took it a step further to now use the same Campaigns as you do in the Pardot app. Other marketing objects are now built on the core platform (eg. emails, landing pages). Some of your Pardot database still exists off-platform. | Salesforce Marketing Cloud is not built on the core Salesforce platform; instead, connectors are used to sync data bidirectionally between the two. Once you realize how much power SMFC wields, you can understand why it’s deserving of its own platform. |
| Price: | $ | $$$ |
The relationship between Pardot and Marketing Cloud can be understood in two contexts: structural and branding. Structurally, Pardot operates on a hybrid platform, partly independent and partly integrated with Salesforce’s core platform, whereas Marketing Cloud functions on its separate platform. Brand-wise, Pardot is marketed within the Marketing Cloud suite as “Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.”
Pardot is more than just an email marketing tool; it segments and targets prospects effectively, also offering functionalities for high-touch sales strategies and integration with Salesforce Opportunities, although with more limited tools for other channels compared to Marketing Cloud.
The notion that Pardot is solely for smaller budgets is misleading. Due to its scalability and cost-effectiveness, it’s utilized by a broad range of businesses, but choosing it solely for its lower initial cost can lead to higher long-term expenditures on customizations.
Pardot is user-friendly and suitable for teams without deep technical resources, yet maximizing its capabilities does require specialized knowledge. Conversely, Marketing Cloud demands a higher level of technical skill, but once set up, it’s accessible for non-developers to use efficiently.
Companies can indeed utilize both platforms if their budget allows, harmonizing their processes to take advantage of each system’s strengths. The decision to use one or both platforms should be based on your organization’s specific sales processes and marketing needs, not just on financial considerations.
Choosing between Pardot and Marketing Cloud depends on your organization’s specific marketing requirements. Understanding each platform’s strengths and how they align with your marketing strategy is key to leveraging Salesforce’s powerful automation tools effectively.
