As more and more people are indulging in the digital sphere for every need starting from binge-watching to grocery shopping, the digital marketing world is now an integral part of any marketing strategy.
Marketers can monitor the core pain points of their target customers and capitalize on the dynamics of digital marketing with two major platforms- Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. Pardot.
The former focuses on B2C marketing practices while the latter on B2B marketing practices. Both these platforms are powerful automation tools that feature abilities to help improve your business’s ROI.
However, here comes the main question, how are Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot different, and which is better?
For a comprehensive knowledge of key differences between Marketing Cloud and Pardot, read this blog till the end.
Key Differences between Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. Pardot
The table below displays the crucial points that help differentiate Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. Pardot.
| Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Pardot |
|---|---|
| Marketing cloud services are best for large-scale businesses to assist with direct consumer engagement. | Pardot is fit for small and medium businesses to help with lead generation and nurturing of connections. |
| Good for B2C marketing practices. | Good for B2B marketing practices. |
| Seamlessly integrates with other Salesforce tools and offers basic lead scoring assistance. | Advanced lead-scoring perks and grading along with automated workflow practices. |
| Journey builder and complex automation provide highly customizable journeys with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. | This platform is easier to use with simple drip campaigns and engagement automation. |
| Offers advanced A/B testing that focuses on multiple variables. | Provides simple A/B testing that mainly focuses on emails. |
| Integrates several aspects of mobile marketing. | Comes with limited mobile marketing capabilities. |
| It has built-in AI features and uses Salesforce Einstein AI to offer predictive analytics and insights. | Pardot brings to the table limited AI-driven features as compared to the marketing cloud. |
| Landing pages and forms come with diverse customization and flexible features. | It comes with an easy-to-use builder to develop landing pages and forms. |
| Offers complete Salesforce integration that includes Service Cloud and Sales Cloud. | It offers tight and strong integration with Salesforce CRM for sales and marketing alignment. |
| Strongly integrates with social media for managing social posts and analytics. | Limited features for social media management. This platform is best for email marketing practices. |
| Marketing cloud features ensure omnichannel marketing practices. | The primary focus of this platform is lead generation, scoring, and managing the B2B customer journey. |
| Has a steeper learning curve and requires deep training to work with the advanced features of Marketing Cloud. | Offers an intuitive interface that makes Pardot an easy-to-use platform. |
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
To understand Salesforce Marketing vs. Pardot better, let’s delve into what is Salesforce Marketing Cloud and how is it important for your business.
Salesforce marketing cloud is a powerful marketing platform, that helps businesses in handling their marketing activities at different levels. This is specifically designed for marketers and is an essential part of CRM as it assists in building and nurturing customer relationships.
With marketing cloud services, you can manage marketing campaigns across multiple channels along with social media campaigns. Furthermore, this platform integrates well with Salesforce Einstein services to help you make a well-informed marketing strategy by providing data-driven predictive insights.
How can Salesforce Marketing Cloud Help Your Business?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud incorporates marketing automation strategies to help your business scale customer relationships efficiently. To know what makes Salesforce Marketing Cloud stand out between Salesforce and Pardot, take a look at the points below.
- AI tracking of customer journey.
- Initiation of digital ad campaigns.
- Social media management.
- Personalized content delivery via SMS, email, social media, and digital ads.
- Efficient setup for email campaigning.
- Content creation and distribution.
- Improved outcomes with customized template creation.
- Performance tracking and marketing analytics.
- Lead management optimization.
What is Salesforce Pardot?
Previously known as Salesforce Marketing Engagement, Pardot is a B2B marketing automation platform that assists your team in focusing on B2B marketing automation practices. Unlike Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. Pardot, the latter allows users to create digital marketing campaigns with minimal human effort.
By following the Pardot Implementation guide and integrating Pardot into your existing system, you can efficiently manage leads and nurture customer relationships. Furthermore, Pardot is the best solution for businesses to manage leads, develop long-term relationships, and maximize returns.
Additionally, integrating Pardot with CRM platforms such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics makes it easy to maintain customer databases.
What are the Key Features of Salesforce Pardot?
For a deeper knowledge of Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. Pardot, take a look at the key features of the latter that make it stand out from the marketing cloud.
Email Marketing
With Pardot, your team can automate repetitive email marketing functions like designing personalized emails. You can also schedule email campaigns to targeted audience segments with Pardot.
Analytics and Reporting
By integrating Pardot features with your existing system, you can access personalized dashboards and reports for advanced marketing strategies. It also comes with Einstein AI integration that helps you monitor target audiences’ performance and behavior to help make data-driven decisions and real-time analytics.
CRM Integration
To focus on sales growth while implementing marketing strategies, you can integrate Pardot with Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM. The integration process is simple, however, for any assistance related to this, you can connect with our dedicated support engineer anytime and resolve any query related to Pardot. Integration with CRM is also an essential step to streamlining sales and marketing alignment.
Deliver Tailored Content
With Pardot, you can craft email content with a personalized touch. This platform provides data-driven insights to tailor and automate sending emails depending on customer interest, activity, behavior, and demographics.
ROI Reporting
Pardot is also a crucial tool to help measure campaign effectiveness and track ROI with comprehensive analytics and reporting tools.
Lead Grading
Another feature that helps differentiate Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. Pardot is lead grading. This tool helps evaluate how well the leads feed your customer profile and prioritize high-potential prospects. If you subscribe advanced version of Pardot, Einstein AI can automate this lead segmentation and grading function.
Lead Scoring
With Salesforce Pardot, you can assign grades to leads based on their engagement and interaction activities. This can be done manually, wherein users can customize certain criteria to grade the leads.
Lead Nurturing
This is another feature that makes Pardot stand out from Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. Pardot. Through this platform, you can automate and customize personalized email campaigns and customer journeys to nurture leads that qualify for further steps of marketing.
Bottom Line
This is everything you must know to understand the differences between Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. Pardot.
Both Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud help businesses strategize, run, and execute marketing models and experiments to cater to ever-evolving audience groups. If we consider similarities, both have core features such as the ability to generate and nurture significant leads with the assistance of Einstein AI. Both these platforms are also helpful to monitor sales conversions. Therefore, marketers and sales executives can use them at their convenience.
You can access all the above features manually as well as automate these functions. However, you must have access to their advanced versions for automated Marketing Cloud and Pardot experience.
If you are wondering this is best for your business between Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs Pardot, talk to our experts.
Frequently Asked Questions
To help small businesses grow and cater to B2B customers, Pardot is a fitting choice for you. However, if your small business aims to target B2C audiences, you can opt for Marketing Cloud.
Yes, you can use Marketing Cloud and Pardot together to reap benefits from a completely automated marketing experience.
Between Marketing Cloud and Pardot, the former can be considered easier to use for both seasoned coders and newbie’s owing to its drag-and-drop functions.