Automation is the next big change in marketing. The basic jobs to be performed by a marketer is often repetitive and do not require innovative brain power. This is an excess overflow for the company and this is where automation is preferred in full swing.
Automation will subsequently increase your reach to the target audience and will require a fraction of money to be invested in the software as compared to the salaries that need to be paid to marketing executives. But with the advent of such technology, a myriad of such software have emerged. A comparison can be drawn to distinguish between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot. Once you have an informed list of pros and cons for each marketing platform, you can make the vital decision of choosing one such platform.
Keep in mind that the fate of the company partly depends on the way it is marketed to the people. Both these marketing platforms are very powerful and also help in escalating the whole process. Though these platforms have a single point of genesis, they serve different purposes and thus, you will have to evaluate both to know which one suits your requirements.
What are the Pardot and Marketing cloud?
Pardot is an excellent marketing automation system that enables you to access potential clients using a varied number of ways like paid marketing and social media. They cater to B2B companies for executing and managing their marketing campaigns. If a marketing event is taken as an example, Pardot enables you to integrate the invitees into the platform and stay connected to them even after the event is over.
Marketing cloud, on the other hand, is a CRM system that provides analytical software and digital marketing automation and other services. These include mobile messaging, webinars, conferences or phone calls along with social media marketing.
Let’s break it down:
Let’s check out the main factors of both Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Pardot which differentiate both of these services and also provide a clear understanding of the speciality of each of these services –
1. Landing pages
Landing pages can capture the information and data that is required for your marketing process to develop a lead. Both Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot allow you to start email campaigns from the nascent stage or creating landing pages using predetermined templates. There are a lot of options made available by both but Pardot offers fewer options. Where flexibility is concerned, marketing cloud has an upper hand. They provide landing pages that are mobile optimized while Pardot will require you to create a unique CSS styling to enable mobile optimization.
2. Lead nurturing
Marketing cloud concentrates on providing a plethora of marketing related activities which ensures customer engagements. On the other hand, Pardot essentially focuses on activities such as email drip campaigns, landing pages, forms and search campaigns that are created to guide prospects through sales cycles.
3. Creating email campaigns
Email is one of the top priorities of marketing managers. It has the maximum ROI. Thus it is customary that both the platforms can grant access for creating custom campaigns through email. You do not need to know any programming language to operate Pardot or Marketing cloud although it is advised to know some basics to make some changes in the program.
The main difference arises when preview of the email campaign is seen. Marketing cloud enables you to travel between live desktop preview and mobile preview while creating the campaign. On the other hand, Pardot needs more time to use and Litmus is used for previewing the visuals of the email on mobile devices. This obviously takes more time. Marketing cloud gives more flexibility in the overall experience when compared with Pardot.
4. Excessively integrating with Salesforce
Pardot is superior when Salesforce integration is concerned. It effortlessly integrates with Salesforce and thereby depicts that all the data is in sync. Also, when the user aims at creating forms, emails and landing pages, Salesforce records are taken to create custom fields.
5. Social sharing
The platforms, marketing cloud and Pardot are known to allow social sharing to an extent. Pardot provides a few options that are limited to sharing basic posts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Market cloud on the other hand uses its social studio tool that can engage and launch campaign updates on all the platforms. Pardot gives all the basic facilities of a social media updater, but Marketing cloud goes one step ahead and acts as a social media manager.
What are the benefits of Salesforce Marketing cloud?
- Sends scheduled emails like triggered emails and transactional emails.
- Preferred by B2C companies
- Advanced website integrations
- Complex integration with Salesforce platform
- Larger social media spread
- Help in communicating with a huge number of customers on a daily basis.
- Several extra features come along making the extra cost not noticeable
What are the benefits of Salesforce Pardot?
- Preferred by B2B companies
- Sending scheduled messages
- Automation of strategies like drip campaigns and thereby generating more leads
- Less duration of admin training is required
- Smaller companies will benefit largely
Salesforce is a relatively new concept for companies. Their inevitability will soon be understood by every business since adapting to such revolutionary changes can ensure the longevity of the company. These tools make life easier for entrepreneurs who do not wish to give away a considerable amount of money every month while a marketing platform can do the same work more efficiently with an exact fraction of the same sum. But care should be taken that you do not become completely dependent on the software.
You should know the basics of marketing automation so that you can make the best use of it to enhance your marketing skills. For further information, you can attend the annual conference that is conceptualized by Salesforce.com. Scores of industry professionals attend this event and online sessions are uploaded as well. It is vital to understand that each company has a unique idea for marketing their products. You should weigh in all the points mentioned above in the article and make an informed decision.
A proper marketing backbone is required for any company to reach its target audience and designated goal using Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Pardot. Both are awesome tools but it depends on the nature of your service and marketing campaign.
