A detailed study of Salesforce Pardot vs Marketing Cloud along with Meaning, Features, Pros and Cons in simple words for your easy understanding:
When you research the marketing automation of the Salesforce platform, you have two options to choose from: Pardot and Marketing Cloud.
Salesforce Pardot is purchased as a portion of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It is important not to bother that much about the differences between the two but whether your marketing goals are achievable by using the features and flexibility of Marketing Cloud or whether Pardot is sufficient to serve the same purpose, which is itself a great tool.
Although Marketing Cloud and Pardot appear similar, they are quite distinct. It is quite a confusing matter at times.
Let us first find out what Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot are.
Table of Contents:
Salesforce Pardot Vs Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a Salesforce product for marketing automation and customer engagement. It is a customer data platform that enables you to understand and act on your customer data in an enhanced way.
However, it was not developed by Salesforce but was acquired due to the acquisition of ExactTarget in 2013. It is a marketing platform that helps to manage various aspects of marketing like the execution of multi-channel campaigns, engagement, and advertisement with social media, analytics based on pre and post-campaigns, and many more.
Here is a diagram on Marketing Cloud:
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Marketing Cloud is a leading automation software that enables your business to beat customers, engage efficiently, and create life-long trusted customer relationships.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps you achieve the following:
- Make use of a single source of truth to deliver data-driven interactions benefitting your customers.
- Meet customer needs with real-time data across various teams and channels.
- Save precious time with automated engagement across a variety of channels – web, mobile, email, etc.
- Obtain the much-needed insights and the results you want to achieve with unified analytics that is driven by AI.
- Work with your customer’s speed with real-time data and optimize performance levels with actionable insights.
What is Pardot
Pardot is the right product for Salesforce customers searching for a marketing automation tool for their B2B business. It is basically a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketing automation software from Salesforce.
It is a marketing automation solution to identify potential customers with a likelihood of conversion. Marketers can communicate with their prospects on time and in the right way.
Here is a diagram on Pardot:
It offers email automation, targeted email campaigns, and lead management for sales and marketing departments of B2B enterprises. It also provides lead management and email drip campaigns that involve lead nurturing, scoring, and campaign segmentation. This comes with analytics and ROI tracking.
You can do the following with Pardot:
- Track client behavior and website.
- Create Digital Marketing Campaigns.
- Perform email marketing to prospects and automated email journeys.
- Capture new prospects with Forms that are also used to enrich existing prospects.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Generate reports to reflect performance.
- Personalize the landing page for the existing viewer.
- Market-based Social Media
Pardot Vs Marketing Cloud: Differences
The broad differences between Marketing Cloud and Pardot are:
Marketing Cloud is an all-in-one Marketing Solution
In recent times, the marketing automation tools of Marketing Cloud have changed. CRM and its core functions are still there, but new features exist. If you want to build end-to-end marketing campaigns for many channels, Marketing Cloud offers all in the same place.
Some key features are:
#1) Email Studio
It helps to deliver captivating emails to build 1:1 customer relationships. Drag-and-drop functionality is also available to schedule your send-outs and reports so that you reach out to customers at their most likely engagement time.
It helps you automate journeys, segment audiences, make sure emails look attractive on all devices and many more. It helps you connect your social accounts to keep a watch on your brand presence and the competitors to connect with customers effectively. It helps in sentiment analysis and social listening across various social platforms.
You can design, schedule or promote your content using a single dashboard and then track these posts in the post-publication stage to find what works best for your audience.
Moreover, it can quickly connect you to service and sales reps when they seek feedback or generate new, qualified leads.
#2) Mobile Studio
It helps in targeted messaging based on SMS. You can use custom templates for messaging, mobile chats, and push notifications to send notifications to clients about business events, reminders, etc.
Moreover, it helps to send personalized messages based on preferences and locations to create a connected digital environment for managing operational or marketing messages from one point.
#3) Interaction Studio
It has made account-based marketing easier to operate than before, with AI-based insights and built-in analytics. It connects unknown users and those already providing information across all touchpoints.
Moreover, AI helps to recommend products or promotional campaigns based on customer wishes.
#4) Advertising Studio
It helps to orchestrate advertising campaigns across various social media channels. It uses lookalikes to attract new prospects or get connected again with existing prospects.
You can increase the advertising ROI with the help of audience segmentation so that your leads can only view the pertinent ads.
The primary benefit offered to you is to coordinate ad campaigns using email nurturing campaigns, sales activities and lead scoring to achieve the outcome of cross-selling and upselling.
#5) Pardot is a Targeted Email-centric Solution
Pardot is targeted more for emails, unlike Marketing Cloud. It comes embedded inside Marketing Cloud or offered as a standalone solution. It centers around the generation and nurturing of leads and email marketing.
There are some key features like
- Email Marketing: It helps you design branded email content, test it with A/B testing, preview emails across multiple platforms, and get advanced email reports.
- Lead Generation: The built-in Editor of Pardot helps enterprises build custom forms, landing pages, and social content using drag-and-drop features. It can track the ROI of campaigns and analyze keyword performance.
- Lead Nurturing: The enterprise can help in effectively nurturing leads with follow-ups that come with targeted information. Lead nurturing campaigns in Pardot can connect prospects with content and offers. The sales team saves time by not investing in prospects who are not sales-ready.
- Lead Scoring: Pardot can track all activities every time a customer, lead, or prospect engages in enterprise channels or websites. A score is attached to the tracked activities and the activity type decides the activity scoring.
- Align Sales and Marketing: Pardot drives a higher number of conversions as both your teams can work together on account of the integration of Pardot with other CRMs, including Salesforce.
Pardot Vs Marketing Cloud – When to Use
When to use Pardot?
- Your organization aims at primarily selling to other businesses (B2B Marketing),
- If you are using or planning to use, Sales Cloud or some other CRM,
- You must send emails to prospects for the sales reps.
- You have to qualify leads to pass over to the sales reps.
When to use Marketing Cloud?
- Your organization primarily sells to individual consumers (B2C Marketing).
- You have to send emails requiring transaction details.
- You operate with complex data and use cases.
- Your organization fetches revenue through 1-on-1 interactions, in huge volume.
- You must possess the ability to send SMS and display advertising.
B2B Vs B2C
Marketing Cloud is for B2C businesses and Pardot is for B2B businesses. But what matters more is your marketing team’s maturity and the personalization level you are working for.
Marketing Cloud is a powerful and flexible tool equipped with real-time journeys, data integrations, analytics, etc., to be as close to customers as possible. Here, the Journey Builder feature makes interconnected, personalized marketing possible.
Here is a diagram of Journey Builder:
However, Pardot helps in traditional B2B activities like CRM automation, nurturing of leads and scoring, and others. Pardot can handle journeys like driving leads through ebook and content marketing via forms or using sales and marketing functions on your website based on chats for a customer-centric B2B program for marketing.
The differences are all summarized in the table below:
| Marketing Cloud | Pardot | |
| Definition | Helps you to grow your relationships but also to increase revenue through a seamless experience. It ranges from email to e-commerce, social to service, etc. | Helps in the success of your sales and marketing teams with improvement in team alignment and nurturing and driving new leads. |
| Usage | It is meant for B2C marketing. It applies for transactional purchases conducted over multiple channels but not exclusively. | Pardot is for B2B marketing. Pardot ( Account Engagement )is for considered purchases for cases with elongated sales cycles and many decision-makers but not exclusively. |
| Key Features | • Workflows and Content Management • Social Listening and Analysis • Subscriber Preference Management • Digital Advertising Management | • Email Marketing • Lead Generation, Scoring, Grading, and Nurturing • Marketing Reporting • Campaigns Management |
| Marketing Channels | Email, SMS, display advertising, and social ( Social Studio of Marketing Cloud is about to retire. | Email and Social |
| Uses | Cross-channel marketing, real time messaging, mobile marketing, etc. | Generating leads and lead scoring, account-based marketing, email nurture campaigns, etc. |
| Skills and technical knowledge | Require specialization it comes with Studios and Builders. Data Management in Marketing Cloud is complex compared to Pardot. | Managed by a certified Pardot expert ( with a standard setup). |
| Add-ons or Licensing | It is available in modules. | It includes eveything but some of the advanced features, like AI-enabled features and analytics, appear as add-ons. |
| Integrations with Salesforce | It is not built on the. central Salesforce platform, but connectors are used for syncing data bi-directionally. | It has alignment with Sales Cloud. And that means it can speak with many of the standard Salesforce objects like contacts, leads, etc. Other marketing objects, like emails, landing pages, etc are built on the core platform. |
| Prices | Salesforce Marketing Cloud (Email, Mobile, and Web Marketing) Basic: Starts at $ 400 (org/USD/month) billed annually Pro: Starts at $ 1250 (org/USD/month) billed annually Corporate: Starts at $ 3750 (org/USD/month) billed annually | Salesforce Pardot Growth: $1250/month. Salesforce Pardot Plus: $2,500/month Salesforce Pardot Premium: $15,000/month Salesforce Pardot Advanced: $4,000/month |
Similarities – Salesforce Marketing Cloud Vs Pardot
Both are marketing automation solutions. Both enable you to create custom email campaigns. They work in the same way and simplify email creation.
Moreover, both tools do not require knowledge of HTML or other coding languages for using them. When sending emails, they enable you to customize options like creating subject lines based on dynamic content.
Furthermore, both allow you to create landing pages with templates. Finally, some level of social. sharing is allowed by both.
Pros & Cons – Pardot Vs Marketing Cloud
Pardot:
Pros:
- Easy to use.
- It offers a great lead-scoring capability to start with.
- Engagement components to get prospect engagement data in Sales Cloud.
- Implementation is done straight away when compared with other Marketing.
- Automation tools.
- Provides Dynamic Customer Journey Campaigns.
Cons:
- Has limitations in automation capabilities.
- Require future enhancements in the email and landing page builder capabilities.
- Require Improvements in API capabilities.
Marketing Cloud:
Pros:
- Use Marketing Cloud for purposes like automation, email, journey builder, etc.
- It helps you to work with a huge audience, send emails easily, and import your own templates.
- Get outstanding support and training from Salesforce.
- Promote your campaigns, reach customers at a faster pace, and work on various channels easily.
Cons:
- It is more of an email marketing platform rather than a marketing automation platform.
- It is costly for startups and small businesses.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Email Studio is difficult for beginners. It is time-consuming to pick all the features.
- Requires updates to make the software more user-friendly
Frequently Asked Questions
Q #1) Is Salesforce a marketing automation tool?
Answer: Yes, Salesforce is a marketing automation tool that helps automate marketing activities through email marketing, content management, digital advertising tools, and more.
Q #2) Is Pardot part and parcel of Marketing Cloud?
Answer: Yes, Pardot is part and parcel of the Salesforce product group that comprises Marketing Cloud, Social Studio, Mobile Studio, Advertising Studio, and many others.
Q #3) Is Pardot B2B or B2C?
Answer: Pardot is more for B2B marketing to align marketing, sales, lead management, and automated actions. However, B2C companies can also benefit from Pardot as their chosen marketing automation platform.
Q #4) Is Salesforce the owner of Pardot?
Answer: Pardot was purchased from Salesforce as part of ExactTarget in 2013. In the same year, Pardot was included in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Q #5) How do Pardot and Marketing Cloud differ?
Answer: Pardot is mainly for email marketing, but Marketing Cloud serves other functions as well, like Mobile and Advertising Studio. Pardot is meant for higher alignment between sales and marketing for B2B businesses. However, Salesforce Marketing Cloud excels more in 1:1 customer journeys with mixed communications channels.
Q #6) What is the new name for Pardot?
Answer: Another name for Pardot is Marketing Cloud Account Management.
Q #7) Is Pardot now called Marketing Cloud?
Answer: Yes, it is now renamed Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
Q #8) Is Salesforce retiring Pardot?
Answer: The Pardot Classic app was discontinued in 2022.
Conclusion
If you are a larger B2C company team, then choose Marketing Cloud as you entirely require automation and the marketing-related technology available to you.
However, organizations with smaller teams will opt for Pardot since they have tools in place for other marketing channels, social media, advertising, etc. This is because Pardot emphasizes email marketing and the generation of demand.
Pardot is for organizations with less budget and the time taken to learn Pardot is less than Marketing Cloud. Marketing Cloud is good to go with organizations with transactional purchases spread across multiple channels, but Pardot suits those organizations with considered purchases, long sales cycles, and many decision-makers.