December 16, 2022

Pardot vs. Marketing Cloud: Overview, Similarities, and Differences

Marketing automation software is a tool that allows you to automate all of your marketing tasks, streamline workflows, and track campaign outcomes. They can serve as a central marketing database, allowing you to create personalized, segmented, and timely marketing experiences for your customers. A good marketing automation software can assist you in determining the success of an entire marketing campaign. There are many of them, but two powerful tools that

currently dominate the market are Salesforce Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Since 2013, Pardot and Marketing Cloud have been two of the leading Salesforce marketing automation tools. According to Infoclutch.com, by 2022, over 37,000 companies will have integrated Pardot with Salesforce, and over 22,000 businesses will have used or will use Marketing Cloud.

Many confuse these two are just duplicate copies of each other, which is entirely not true; both of these are indeed the children of Salesforce only, but they each have their own identity and functions, which makes them exceptional from the others. In this article, we compare Pardot vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud features to help you pick the solution that fits the needs of your business best.

What exactly is Pardot?
Pardot (now Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) is a marketing automation solution founded in 2007 by David Cummings and Adam Blitzer. ExactTarget purchased it in 2012, and then Salesforce purchased it in 2013.
“Pardot” means “to market or sell” in Latvian, which best describes its main purpose. It assists businesses in making meaningful connections, increasing pipelines, and empowering sales teams to close more deals.
Salesforce developed the Pardot Lightning App in 2018 to better align marketing and sales activities and to easily integrate Pardot with another Salesforce product, Sales Cloud.
Salesforce released another product version, Pardot Einstein, the same year. It has AI (Artificial Intelligence) features for comprehensive marketing insights, advanced audience segmentation, and more.

What exactly is the Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is also an email marketing and automation platform that includes integrated solutions for social media, mobile, email, website advertising, and other platforms.
It was formally established in 2013, following the acquisition of three powerful solutions:
• Radian6 is a platform for social listening.
• Buddy Media is a platform for social media marketing.
• ExactTarget is a platform for marketing automation.
Following that, in 2014, Salesforce merged Radian6 and Buddy Media to form Social Studio. Salesforce Marketing Cloud has evolved into a comprehensive suite of marketing automation solutions that includes Email, Studio, Mobile, Web Marketing Suite, Interaction Studio, Datorama, Advertising Studio, and Loyalty Management.

Similarities
While there are some significant differences that will influence your decision, the two tools are very similar.
• Both provide WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, which enable you to create sleek, stylized email content with declarative drag-and-drop tools rather than knowing HTML code.
• Both can use Salesforce data to drive customer engagements and nurture journeys.
• Both can include personalized content to ensure that your message is relevant and appropriate for the customer.
• Both are GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and other data privacy laws compliant, with public lists for opting into marketing campaigns and opt-out options.

Differences
While there are some similarities between the two tools, there are also significant differences between Pardot and Marketing Cloud. These distinctions include:

• Pardot is used for ‘considered purchases’ with long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers. That is why it is frequently referred to as a B2B marketing tool. While Marketing Cloud is best suited to transactional purchases across multiple marketing channels. That is why it is frequently referred to as a B2C marketing tool.

• Pardot does not target any specific industry, whereas the Marketing cloud is tailored to industries such as FMCG, health and beauty, retail, tourism, and leisure.

• The main functionalities of Pardot are lead scoring, lead automation, lead generation, sales enablement, content marketing, email nurture campaigns, webinar marketing, and account-based marketing. On the other hand, Marketing Cloud works on real-time messaging, cross-channel marketing, e-commerce, social media, mobile marketing, and display advertising.

• Pardot is aligned with Sales Cloud. This means that it ‘talks’ to many of the standard Salesforce objects (Leads, Contacts, Opportunities). Pardot took it a step further to now use the same Campaigns as you do in the Pardot app. Other marketing objects are now built on the core platform (eg. emails, landing pages). Some of your Pardot databases still exist off-platform. On the other hand, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is not built on the core Salesforce platform; instead, connectors are used to sync data bi-directionally between the two. Once you realize how much power SMFC wields, you can understand why it’s deserving of its platform.

• Lead capturing and generation and tracking individual sales activity is the focus of Pardot, a marketing tool. While Marketing Cloud vastly focuses on building, tracking, and analyzing the journey of multiple tasks.

• Marketing cloud possesses a quite complex pricing model as it works in a multifunctional way whereas, Pardot has a pretty straightforward pricing plan as it believes in working on limited sources compared to the Marketing Cloud.

• While Pardot focuses more on user experience and user-friendliness, Marketing Cloud speeds up its automation skills with a customized approach toward data analysis. The customized setup automation requires only a few settings and then voila you are good to go!

• With regards to licensing/add-on products, Pardot is comprehensive, however, some advanced features (analytics, AI-enabled features) are likely to be add-ons. Marketing Cloud is sold in modules. Check which marketing channels, capabilities, and reporting will be included in your account before you purchase.

Summary 
After going over the characteristics of these popular Marketing tools, I’d like to address the most common misconception that many people have about Pardot and the Marketing Cloud. Companies frequently believe that they have chosen between these two marketing tools because that is the norm. This is not the case in reality. Salesforce does not support this type of practice. You can use the insights and data from both tools at the same time. Working with either of the two is not limited in this way.
However, companies often have limited resources or talent pools that can work on both tools, so they mostly prefer working with any single one as per the nature and requirements of their business. So, if you’re a larger, B2C company and need the full slate of marketing technology and automation available to you, Marketing Cloud is a great choice. But if you’re a smaller team or already have tools in place for social media, advertising, and other marketing channels, Pardot might be a better choice to focus on email and demand generation.
In the end, considering all of the factors stated above, it is not hard to pick the right and most suitable marketing tool for your business to get more insightful details that can facilitate your long-term sales figures.

Written by Meshach Dimka

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