These are two of my favorites.
- One is a reliable everyday sedan, and the other is an exotic sports car.
- One is In and Out, and the other is Le Burger Brasserie.
My take away was that they’re both great in different ways. To help summarize them, our team created the chart below.
Pardot
Primarily for B2B marketing and selling across multiple industries
Marketing Cloud
Primarily for B2C marketing in healthcare, financial services and retail
Pardot vs Marketing Cloud
- Lead Qualification
- Engagement Studio
- ROI Reporting
- Out-of-the-box responsive email templates
- Lead scoring and grading measures interest and quality
- Content Builder
- Journey Builder
- Out-of-the-box responsive email templates, and more robust content building features
- Mobile Studio
- Powerful 1:1 content personalization across multiple channels
Data Relationships
Mimics a salesperson to prospect relationship, and starts to slow down at around one million records.
Extraordinarily powerful as a database, handling tens of millions of data points without flinching.
Marketing Channels
Email and Social
Email, SMS, Social, and Display Networks
Key Focus
Easy-to-use, intuitive lead capture and qualification tools, including forms, landing pages, and more. This is the critical tool for sales, enabling them to track individual marketing activities
Journey Builder, a drag and drop interface for full multi-channel journey creation and tracking, is the focus.
Pardot vs Marketing Cloud Key Takeaways
- Pardot is very close to Sales Cloud and getting closer – it is both a marketing and sales enablement platform
- Pardot can calculate ROI…and it is getting better
- Pardot’s strongest suit is “lead qualification”…lead scoring, grading, and forms are world-class features
- Pardot configuration MUST be done in collaboration with your sales team or value will not be recognized
- Pardot’s “unknown-to-known” functionality tracks user behavior from the very first time they log onto your site
- Installing Marketing Cloud is not just a software change, it has to be a culture change – powerful capabilities force changes to processes, KPIs, and customer experience
- Marketing Cloud is a highly-technical platform, marketing collaboration with IT and/or consultants is likely
- “Data is King” in Marketing Cloud – clean, and thoughtfully-modeled data is vital
- Amp up your content game. The dynamic nature of Marketing Cloud requires higher volumes, quality, and types of content
- Focus on your customer’s journey and work backwards into the features you need in Marketing Cloud