Marketing Cloud and Pardot are both marketing automation software. Which one to choose? Marketing Cloud is one of the most popular cloud-based product from Salesforce but Pardot offers a marketing automation solution that closes higher number deals with intelligent lead nurturing by generating more sales pipeline and unites the marketing and sales team to work in a collaborative and a better way.

However, Pardot works for the B2B (business-to-business) segment, whereas, Marketing Cloud applies for the B2C (business-to-consumer) segment. Marketing Cloud applies more for the retail, travel and other industries but Pardot remains non-specific.

Pardot transforms the everyday marketers into some sort of superheroes as it is empowered with tools to create, deploy and manage online marketing campaigns, for revenue-generation. It can customize the marketing efforts for your organization and builds targeted engagements, marching the business requirements. Pardot offers a personalized experience.

On the other hand, Marketing Cloud integrates across the Customer Success Platform, working for your entire business. It delivers personalized engagement for the customers but is the only integrated customer engagement platform as it covers all channels – digital, email to web, social, advertising and many more, So, when the client can make a smarter marketing decision, with Marketing Cloud offers an up-to-date customer profile.

In this post, we will highlight some differentiating points on Salesforce Pardot Vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

How Different is Pardot from Marketing Cloud?

Here are some of the differences:

• Features
• Run Email Campaigns
• Nurture the Leads
• Manage Landing Pages
• Salesforce Integration
• Social Media
• Pricing

Features

Salesforce Pardot offers the following features:

• Email Marketing
• Lead Generation
• Lead Management
• Automated Engagements
• Personalized Messages
• Real-time alerts
• Activity Tracking
• CRM Integration
• ROI Reporting

On the contrary, Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers the following features:

• 1:1 Customer Journeys
• Email Studio
• Journey Builder
• Social Studio
• Interaction Studio
• Advertising Studio
• Mobile Studio
• Marketing Automation
• Data Studio
• Artificial Intelligence
• Predictive Recommendations

Run Email Campaigns

The modern-age organizations heavily rely on running email campaigns for fetching the ROI of your business. Both Pardot and Marketing Cloud allows to easily create emails.

Salesforce Pardot builds beautiful emails for you. It allows you to quickly create professional emails at scale with its visual editor for yielding results. Pardot can schedule your emails, sending them to the right persons, at the right time. Pardot offers automatic segmentation for targeted email campaigns. It delivers a personalized experience that has changed content based on prospect engagement.

However, Salesforce Marketing Cloud uses data across all departments and helps your organization to create smarter emails, starting right from the basic one up to the ones with 1:1 messages. Marketing Cloud builds sophisticated messages for higher engagement with clients. It offers a quickly optimized solution on mobile devices so that you can deliver messages – anywhere, anytime.

It builds a stronger customer relationship across all stages of the customer lifecycle. It has the ability to create segmentation based on profile data, for sending highly relevant messages. It helps you to automate so that your marketing team focusses on creating great emails.

Marketing Cloud allows you to preview all the messages, before sending them to the clients. It also offers high flexibility and scalability for building 1: 1 relationships with even up to a million enterprise clients.

Generate and Nurture the Leads

Pardot allows you to fill your sales funnel with high-quality leads. It connects the closed leads to specific marketing efforts and analyzes campaign success. Pardot uses templates to create excellent landing pages and offers customization. It helps in drip marketing with triggered messages and lead assignment. Marketing Cloud offers marketing-related activities only.

Manage Landing Pages

Pardot can build landing pages without a web developer. It helps you with automation based on whether a prospect has submitted the landing page or view the landing page. Pardot uses a custom layout template or uses a Pardot stock template. With Pardot it is easy to customize landing pages without any coding.

It generates leads with forms or landing pages for a seamless experience with your brand. On the other hand, Marketing Cloud can create landing pages but optimized for mobile devices but this is not possible with Pardot.

Salesforce Integration 

Pardot is better so far as integration with B2B companies is concerned. Pardot offers integration with Google Ads, Google Analytics, Twilio, and other social media platforms. Marketing Cloud offers integration with Sales Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Shopify, HubSpot Marketing Hub and others.

Social Media

Marketing Cloud comes with the more powerful Social Studio, It gathers market intelligence across sales, marketing and service functions by generating reports from social accounts on mobile devices or from your office, It offers a single platform for building social media engagement across your entire company. Unlike this Pardot connects with the social media platforms and offers a holistic view of prospects and provides insights on the content types that these prospects engage with. Pardot has just the ability to pass an update but not like what Marketing Cloud offers.

Pricing

The Marketing Cloud pricing is based on the company size, requirements and industry. Pardot is part of Marketing Cloud and Pardot it offers 4 plans, billed annually.

Conclusion 

Pardot blurs the line between sales and marketing. Pardot is part of Marketing Cloud but offers many advantages over Marketing Cloud. Marketing Cloud works for both B2C and B2B companies but Pardot works only for the B2B companies. Both Pardot and Marketing Cloud creates email campaigns but Marketing Cloud can optimize the messages on the mobile devices for delivering the messages at any place and anytime. Pardot helps to create landing pages without any help from the web developer but Marketing Cloud creates landing pages which are optimized for the mobile devices, which is not possible with Pardot. Pardot generates high-quality leads for the sales funnel, closing higher number of deals with lead nurturing but Marketing Cloud is directed towards marketing-related activities.

If you have any requirements, please connect with our Marketing Cloud or Pardot Specialists for a Salesforce solution from Anavcloud Software Solutions, one of the top certified Salesforce Partners.

References

https://www.salesforceben.com/the-drip/salesforce-pardot-vs-marketing-cloud-which-should-you-choose/

https://www.emizentech.com/blog/salesforce-pardot-vs-marketing-cloud-what-to-choose.html

https://www.algoworks.com/blog/salesforce-marketing-cloud-vs-pardot/

https://comparisons.financesonline.com/salesforce-marketing-cloud-vs-pardot

https://www.salesforce.com/in/products/marketing-cloud/email-marketing/

https://techilaservices.com/blog/pardot-vs-marketing-cloud

https://www.pardot.com/solutions/b2b-marketing-automation/powerful-email-marketing/

https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/best-practices/email-marketing-campaigns/