Marketing software is a $121 billion dollar industry. The industry is growing and shows no signs of slowing down. Known as the Martech 5000, a supergraphic that identifies all of the Martech solutions currently available, this graphic, as of 2020, indicates there are up to 8,000 Martech solutions available to marketers. Back in 2011, there were approximately 150 solutions available. That’s a 5,233% increase in marketing solutions available. With over 8,000 Martech solutions fighting for the marketer’s attention, it’s no wonder why we, as marketers have questions about what’s the best solution for us?

In the Salesforce ecosystem, one of the most commonly asked questions, by marketers, is which marketing solution is right for me, Marketing Cloud or Pardot? So let’s break this down and start with goals. Once we can identify your goals we can correlate them to the right product to find the right solution.

What are your goals as a marketer, and what are the goals of the company? The clearest way to differentiate whether or not you should use Pardot, Marketing Cloud, or both is below.

Pardot is great for longer cycle sales and organizations with smaller databases. Whereas Marketing cloud can handle mass amounts of data and can drive revenue through 1-to-1 interactions.

Is Pardot Right for You?

Use Pardot when you’re:

• Focused on building brand awareness.
• Generating high-quality sales leads to fill the sales funnel.
• Aligning your sales and marketing teams.
• Nurturing leads with longer sales cycles.
• Working higher value deals.
• Your sales cycles are longer and can leverage nurtures
• Databases are smaller.

Pardot is a B2B Marketing automation tool by Salesforce, that allows marketers to find, qualify, and deliver leads to sales at the right moment, to close faster. It helps marketers generate leads through different channels such as webinars, content, social media, and events. Pardot applies rules and intelligence through scoring and grading to help pass highly qualified leads to sales in a timely manner. For those leads that aren’t ready for sales, they can be nurtured until they’re ready. Pardot allows us to evaluate leads that come through the funnel to see if they’re qualified. It helps us understand should we send leads to sales right away or do we add them to a nurture program. We can deliver tailored nurture programs to each prospect while helping marketing and sales are more aligned and delivering more pipeline to sales.

Pardot Benefits:

• Accelerate Pipeline
• Help Sales focus on the right leads
• Help marketers measure the impact on the bottom line
• Understand what leads did marketing source
• How much revenue did marketing influence
• Calculate Marketing ROI

Is Marketing Cloud Right for You?

Use Marketing Cloud when you’re:

• Building brand awareness through advertising.
• Driving revenue generation (direct revenue through customers).
• Increasing brand engagement – through social marketing.
• Creating 1:1 journeys for all customers.
  • Building a lifecycle Journey: create awareness, acquisition, move from acquisition to onboarding, finally, make them loyal advocates for life.
  • Creating 1:1 journeys using a variety of different channels.

With Marketing Cloud you can drive customer journeys through 1:1 engagement across many channels at a mass scale. Marketing Cloud can handle a massive number of users and automate their journeys through different channels. You can additionally bring in first and third-party data. So this can include anything that’s relevant such as past purchases, website browsing data, and what ads a user has seen, you can bring it into Marketing Cloud, and make it actionable. You can do it with drag and drop tools, you don’t need to know SOQL, so the marketer is independent and builds the journeys that include all touchpoints from advertising, to SMS, to email messaging to display ads.

One of the greatest differentiators between Marketing Cloud and Pardot is the Journey versus nurture. The journey is larger. Think about all touchpoints, starting from the earliest introductions such as advertising, then emails when the user is in the buying process, then onboarding, and then finally, making your customers into advocates of your brand. You can connect journeys back to Salesforce Sales Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and even Service Cloud. It goes beyond marketing. So you can do things like create triggers for journeys and write back to the journey. For instance, when a customer opens a support case you can suppress them from journeys. You can trigger journeys when a case is closed. Journeys are bigger than marketing and can be used on any channel, such as email, mobile, SMS, MMS, Push, Social Display, and Websites.

When You Should Use Marketing Cloud & Pardot

Why Implement More than One Product rather than finding one tool?
When you’re trying to address multiple styles of marketing, brand awareness, lead generation, driving to close, you need something to cover all of these tactics. Additionally, when you have global teams that are diverse, some are more advanced than others, or some are 1 man teams, you need to find the right tools for each team and each level of comfortability with working in these tools. Some teams will lend themselves to one tool or the other so having different options is helpful to meet the needs of different teams with different skill sets of different sizes.

An Example Using Marketing Cloud & Pardot

Apartments.com is a great example of a company that needs to meet the needs of multiple styles of marketing and has seen success in using both Marketing Cloud and Pardot. They need to be able to first reach out to building owners and property managers to get their inventory listed on their website. Then they need to be able to reach out to residents who are looking for properties. So they leverage Pardot, to stay in touch with property managers, to help get more listings on their site, while using Marketing Cloud to stay in touch with renters. They leverage Marketing Clouds third-party data, to create profiles and recommend places to rent based on their user profile.

It’s not necessarily that simple, there are certainly some challenges when using two Marketing tools for one organization. One of the largest challenges is to make sure the data is available globally. They’re not on the same data model, but they can cross the data back and forth through Sales Cloud, so making sure you’ve got your data syncing in a way that allows the marketer to leverage essential pieces of data to communicate relevantly will help you be successful.

If you’re a B2C organization and are evaluating ways and tactics to use Pardot for B2C, feel free to check out this article on tactics you can use. If you’ve just gone live with your Salesforce/Pardot implementation, there’s a helpful post on what you need to do after implementing Salesforce. If you still have some questions feel free to reach out to us.