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Pardot vs. Marketing Cloud: Differences and FAQs [Infographics]
• Date: September 2022 •
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Should I choose Pardot (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) or Salesforce Marketing Cloud to automate marketing campaigns in Salesforce? Is there any difference? Is Pardot a "simpler" version of Salesforce Marketing Cloud? That's what we hear most often from our clients at the initial project stages.
In fact, both Pardot and Marketing Cloud focus on marketing automation. Yet, it doesn't mean that they automate the same processes. The core difference lies in your audience of focus, marketing goals and the tech stack you use to reach them.
Choosing the right platform means less extra customization costs and higher marketing ROI. The right tool also eases the processes instead of overcomplicating them. So, choose wisely.
Here's a breakdown of the main use cases to put you on the right track.
What does Pardot (MC Account Engagement) do?
In a nutshell, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (aka Pardot) deals with visitors and prospects to help you identify MQLs (marketing qualified leads).
Pardot uses cookies to track your website visitors' interaction with the content to automatically segment the database based on their behavior. This way, you can automate your engagement with prospects and leads to reach them at the right time with the right message.
Pardot in Sales Pipeline
Pardot aligns your marketing and sales teams. How? By nurturing and qualifying leads to provide your sales teams with the hottest ones.
Areas of focus:
- Lead generation, qualification, and conversion
- Progressive profiling and content personalization
- Competitive analysis
- Account-based marketing
- Email engagement campaigns
More about Pardot functionality
What does Salesforce Marketing Cloud do?
Marketing Cloud offers applications (studios/builders) to help marketers orchestrate marketing campaigns across all touchpoints in one place and in real time.
With Marketing Cloud, you manage the whole customer journey across all channels: ads, social media, push notifications, POS, etc.
A high level of personalization results in more transactional purchases.
Areas of focus:
- Real-time updated contact database from various systems
- Personalized customer journey, including ad and email campaigns
- Re-engagement for more cross-sell and upselling opportunities
- Social media management
- Audience segmentation and marketing ROI analytics
More about Marketing Cloud functionality
Which tool works best for your business?
Marketing Cloud vs Pardot (MC Account Engagement)
Pardot vs. Marketing Cloud FAQs
Even though Pardot comes as one of the offerings of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the platforms work independently.
Pardot offers powerful email automation functionality, including custom design capabilities, scheduled email sending for drip campaigns, A/B testing and in-depth statistics. But the real value of Pardot is its scoring system and lead nurturing through content, distributed through different channels, email as well.
While Pardot comes cheaper in the long run, it doesn't mean that you should replace Marketing Cloud with Pardot based only on the pricing factor. As mentioned, each platform suits specific business cases and strategies.
This can be done in a set of different ways, however, the healthiest one is to let Pardot data be synchronized with Sales Cloud and then pushed to MC automatically as soon as new prospects and their data appear in Sales Cloud. This will allow keeping a proper record identifier generation process and will make sure that your sales pipeline works in the designed and sequential way.
When such a sync is built, you can extend your MC instance with any additional studios which will be able to consume this data and synchronize the processing results back to SC and Pardot.
When such a sync is built, you can extend your MC instance with any additional studios which will be able to consume this data and synchronize the processing results back to SC and Pardot.
In comparison, Marketing Cloud has better integration capabilities. Pardot has an API for data export from ad campaigns. Marketing Cloud, in its turn, offers custom apps, and integrations in terms of SMS, push notifications, discounts, ETL, etc.
Marketing Cloud has advanced options for managing letters and messages sent from the system. Moreover, if you want to track the users of your mobile application, the best way is to implement MC SDK within your app and exchange the user data with the cloud in real-time mode.
Yes, you can track this data using MC collect.js code, which can be easily embedded into your web pages and forms. The data will appear in MC immediately and will be automatically managed by embedded AI processes to generate product recommendations and expose the history of visitor activity to reveal their interests.
In theory, yes. However, the success of any marketing automation depends not only on technical preparation, but also strategic planning.
Before choosing a platform or a combination of solutions for your company, we recommend turning to a Salesforce consultant to audit your specific business processes, evaluate your team capacity and set the plan for your implementation.
Before choosing a platform or a combination of solutions for your company, we recommend turning to a Salesforce consultant to audit your specific business processes, evaluate your team capacity and set the plan for your implementation.
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