08 Aug Marketing Cloud vs. Pardot – which one to choose? (Part 1)
So you’ve heard about Marketing Cloud and the magic it can do to your marketing automation efforts.
All you’ve heard is True.
But then you talk to a Saleforce Account Executive who suggests that Pardot is more suited to your needs. Or maybe the suggestion is to use Marketing Cloud for some products and Pardot for another Business Unit.
Confused? Of course you are.
Even Marketing Automation veterans who worked on other platforms (Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot) can be overwhelmed when migrating to Salesforce.
Before you commit to one license or another – let us demystify the differences.
B2B vs. B2C Marketing Automation
The Pardot advantage : Simplicity, Scoring, Grading & Alerts
On paper, Marketing Cloud is aimed at B2C, and Pardot at B2B.
The main difference is that B2B marketing automation lives around email, since each professional (eventual prospect) has a company email address – which marketers love – it’s a unique identifier and business data can be mined for lead qualification.
And so, Pardot, out of the box, is an email and drip campaign well-oiled machine that integrates with Salesforce thanks to a native connector.
However, while Pardot’s API lets you access Pardot Objects, you cannot use user actions (email opens, page visits, waiting time, etc.) to trigger API calls from Pardot (except for the ones to Salesforce / through native connectors).
So, one can say that for outgoing communication – Pardot is one-channel (email). True? almost.
With Pardot you can also control your enterprise social channels to post synchronized, tracked, posts on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Pardot tracks interactions with posts and links these interactions to prospects automatically.
Other personal favorites include the ability to connect and track your third-party ad campaigns and Webinars, Eventbrite events, Google Analytics, bit.ly links and more all through native connectors.
In the footer of this post we’ve included two links to the full list of available Pardot connectors.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t use Pardot for B2C scenarios. For example, we have seen education institutions happily use it for their clients (which are students).
Pardot’s usage simplicity, compared to Marketing Cloud, makes it a great choice for any business who would like to take his email automation efforts along with Ad tracking and campaign ROI calculations to the next level.
It was conceived to help a Sales team prioritize and pre-qualify leads, with real-time alerts to pursue a hot lead.
In addition, Pardot’s Scoring and Grading features are ready out-of-the-box and can include different Scoring Models and Grading Profiles for different Business Units or Products.
But what if you want to send an SMS from Pardot? Or a private Messenger message?
While it’s doable, you’d have to implement a workaround: Configure Pardot to update a custom field in Salesforce and configure Salesforce to trigger the send when the field changes. Use an App from the Salesforce AppExchange (like SMS Magic) to do it.
You understand this workaround should be an exception, and would be hard to scale.
Marketing Cloud is a whole different story.
It was conceived with APIs and integrations at heart.
Read all about Marketing Cloud in Part 2.
References:
Pardot Connectors – Official links:
https://www.pardot.com/blog/connectors/
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=pardot_connectors.htm&type=5