Pardot vs Marketo, Marketing Automation Comparison

With its pride, Marketo is never trying to make itself any easier or even more affordable for its clients; nonetheless, its customer base is by no means shrinking or alienating towards any other solutions. Records have proved things are going the other way around, actually.

Pardot, with its respect for its dedicated fans, is showing all sides of collaboration and improvement based on its crowdsourcing tool and a solid base of loyal customers on forums & social media.

Both Marketo and Pardot support a vast number of businesses and industries, and rates show no signs of slowing down even in the presence of ferocious competitors on the market, such as Hubspot, Eloqua Activecampaign (which is claiming lots of praise recently).

Does Marketo have what justifies such unyielding pride? And what benefits Pardot has gained through good manners and utter humbleness with their clients?

If these two weren’t the real deal, we wouldn’t be sitting right here right now writing you this article to help you realize the complete truth behind the story of Marketo & Pardot. What makes these two names soaring so high in the sky of Marketing Automation Software?.

SEE ALSO: Best Marketo Alternatives for Marketing Automation

Just, as usual, we`ve set a few points to guide us to make the best out of this comparison.

Points of comparison (Pardot Vs Marketo)

1. Marketing Automation
2. Email marketing
3. Account-based marketing
4. Marketing Analytics
5. Content ^AI Versus Salesforce Engage
6. Customer support
7. Pricing

Point #1: Marketing Automation

Marketo

Marketo is following systemic steps through its marketing automation process. Such steps promise robust and enhanced customer relationships leading to a personalized experience across channels and improved overall marketing ROI.

 

1- Attracting prospects through personalizing content:

• Create landing pages with a drag & drop editor.
• Create multiple events with the ability to clone them for time-saving.
• Integrating with leading events & webinar providers such as (On24 – InXpo – ReadyTalk – Cisco – WebEx – Cvent – GotoWebinar)

2- Engaging prospects and building relationships:

• Create highly visual emails using Marketo templates library.
• Create personalized email campaigns using a word processor.
• Tracking different prospects’ activities across channels and linking them through CRM systems/ Targeting campaigns to most promising leads using Marketo Engagement Hub.
• Guide prospects using personalized Ads linked to own customer website through cross channeling audience on social platforms such as Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn.
• Nurturing leads through individual self- customized conversations at scale with time-sensitive adaptive capabilities to ensure the content is delivered at the right time.

3- Closing engages prospects with sales teams & representatives:

• Lead scoring based on demographics & behavioral criteria tailored specifically for each kind of business.
• Listing for qualified win-ready prospects and pipelining them through CRM systems.
• Robust integration with Salesforce CRM and Salesforce one mobile app. which enables sales teams to access hot leads and interact respectively on the go.

4- Marketing Analytics:

A glimpse of Marketo analysis & reporting system:

• Attributing touchpoints for measuring the most successful campaigns throughout the buyers’ journey. (Driving revenue).
• Knapping out the stages of the entire customer lifecycle to perform the accurate measuring of people progression. (Anonymous – known – engaged – qualified – opportunity – the customer – Up-sell/X-sell – Advocate).

Pardot

Same as Marketo, Pardot from Salesforce is a capable marketing automation platform that goes with evident and dynamic steps aiming at building intelligent data-driven programs for generating new leads and speeding up the sales cycle, visualizing assets & touchpoints throughout given marketing programs for better understanding of customer experience, & Improving insight over campaigns` performance allowing for quicker adaptation with opportunities created all the way in.

 

1- Streamlined lead management:

• Lead nurturing: sending emails based on various triggers such as time, interaction, or other costumed parameters. In addition to re-engaging dormant leads.
• Lead qualification: through identifying best prospects through scoring, objective grading, & prioritizing sales outreach.
• Segmentation & automation: Through Automation rules feature which allows for putting the most repetitive & time-consuming tasks such as first assignment or dynamic lists building on autopilot.
• Dynamic content: personalizing customer experience through relevant messaging based on data-driven behavior or actions & displayed through websites, forms, or landing pages.

 

2- Lead generation:

• Landing pages Builder: Easy to build with lots of visual capabilities and instant integration with marketing and sales workflows.
• Smart forms: Easy to use drag & drop editor with progressive profiling capability to collect data on interaction.
• Organic & paid search: The renowned Google AdWords integration for determining campaigns ROI, Revenue tracking, & keyword performance analysis.
• Social posting & profiling: The power of tracking prospects’ interaction on social media, scheduling & posting campaigns to multiple platforms instantly, and unlocking new insight with social profiling.

 

3- Sales alignment:

• Engage campaigns: empowering the role of sales reps by sending approved mini-campaigns to clients and direct lead nurturing through all stages of a campaign using CRM systems or the most acclaimed Salesforce1 application. In addition to tracking interaction with Gmail mailing.
• Real-time alerts: various ways of alerting on the action through email, desktop, or mobile app.
• Activity tracking: anonymous tracking for detailed prospect activity history, which creates more relevant conversations.
• CRM integration: seamless integration with Salesforce CRM, which boosts workflow and total revenue rates.

 

4- Intelligent reporting:

• ROI reporting: this feature ties individual closed leads back to marketing efforts, analyzes campaign success by channel & initiative, & connects marketing efforts to sales data.
• Life Cycle reporting: through this feature, you can check funnel health instantly, identify opportunities pathway, and adapt marketing efforts to close deals rapidly.
• Advanced email reporting: a complete overview of marketing and sales visually engaged with primary metrics available such as clicks & opens shows how customers are interacting with SPAM-free sent emails.
• Connecting favorite tools: Third-party tools and integrations such as Google AdWords, webinars, & event providers are easily tied and analyzed for accurate ROI value inspection.

 

Point #2: Email Marketing

Marketo

Marketo helps users send highly visual emails through 3 simple steps:

• Defining audience: Through importing lists or use known attributes on Marketo engagement hub.
• Creating customized Emails: Using drag & drop interface, Marketo templates library, & familiar text editors.
• Measuring email performance: Through visual dashboards using robust A/B testing capabilities & multi-variant test types.

 

Next is the protocol on which Marketo has built its Email Marketing service:

1- The Ability to send genuinely personalized emails:

• Leveraging tokens throughout emails as placeholders for names, locations, and more.
• The usage of audience segmentation to dynamically change content such as images or messages for each recipient.
• The use of artificial intelligence for more profound and more enhanced personalization (Content^AI).

 

2- Real-time active campaigns triggered by activity for individuals:

• Audience segmentation by tracking behavior through multiple channels, including multimedia platforms.
• More granular personalization through added in-filters such as past activity, demographic, or behavioral in-filters.
• The simple & complex campaign supporting through adding in way steps and additional touchpoints that enables a complete workflow

 

3- Intelligent nurturing:

• Creating individual conversations at scale with powerful capabilities to simplify nurturing is delivered intelligently to every person.
• Monitoring & testing emails before sending out to prevent issues before they arrive and make sure they reach the right audience.

 

4- Performance insight:

• Sending alerts with the most crucial email metrics based on changes compared to the previous period.
• Visualizing email performance over time & changing views with a variety of filters and metrics.
• Drill down for the performance of an individual email or campaign.
• Intelligently surfacing drivers that help to impact email performance.
• Using CRM systems to tie emails and contents to revenue successfully using Marketo marketing analytics.

 

Pardot

Pardot as well is promising its clients a powerful yet beautiful and widely customizable email marketing experience through its dedicated & straightforward features as follows:

1- Intuitive email builder:

• Responsive, out-of-the-box templates.
• Custom design capabilities.
• Fast formatting options and hosted content.

2- Powerfully automated engagements:

• Visual nurturing canvas with integrated testing and reporting.
• Scheduled email sending.
• Autoresponder for forms and landing pages.

 

3- Personalized messaging:

• Content that changes based on prospect engagement.
• Automatic segmentation so you can target the audience more effectively.
• Customized address and signature based on the assigned account manager.

4- Optimized sending:

• A/B testing to reveal what resonates.
• Rendering and SPAM filter check-ups.
• Industry-leading email infrastructure and deliverability.

Point 3: Account-Based Marketing

Marketo

Account-based marketing or ABM is all about aligning sales & marketing to focus on the most critical & revenue promising minds.

And Marketo ABM promises a complete view of ABM performance across named accounts so you can coordinate with sales & prioritize activities, all in a single application that saves time and hassle.

 

Marketo 3 essential capabilities of ABM:

1- Target the right accounts:

• Automatically map leads & CRM contacts to named accounts so campaigns may reach the right targets.
• Building account lists to target groups of similar criteria, connecting account lists, named accounts, & people with them all through Marketo ABM.

 

2- Engage accounts with powerful cross-channel capabilities:

• Creating an audience through drag & drop any combination of accounts or person-based filters to create lists.
• Adding a variety of triggers to initiate campaigns based on action (such as visiting specific pages or websites and so on).
• Planning a set of actions on initiating either simple or complex campaigns such as adding more touchpoints to the campaign like text messaging or direct mailing.
• Engaging sales reps with real-time alerts on activity within their accounts.

 

3- Measure the success of ABM efforts:

• Coordinating with sales through account list dashboards that show which accounts engaged & where a pipeline is found to ensure best ROI impacts.
• Fusing named accounts gives account teams critical insight into their engagement strategies, so they know who engaged & what`s working.
• Delivering accounts` intelligence weekly emails to the account teams’ inbox so they can follow up.

 

Pardot

Pardot offers a complete ABM solution powered by its version of AI and built on Salesforce CRM as considered one of the world’s most intelligent CRM platforms. Named as “EINSTEIN ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING.”

 

Einstein ABM built with four definitive functionalities:

1- Identify the right accounts:

• Using predictive lead scoring to get creative insights made on machine learning to discover which accounts are most likely to close.
• Using powerful deduplication rules to connect leads and contacts to the right account automatically.
• Developing and targeting lookalike accounts that are similar to best customers to reach new audiences at scale.

 

2- Improve customer engagement:

• Delivering personalized ads to target accounts by creating personalized campaigns to show the right ads with the right messaging to the proper accounts.
• Setting top accounts on targeted journeys are based on their interactions to receive the content that matters most to them.
• Using dynamic content to deliver personalized web experiences based on given data for each account.

 

3- Align sales & marketing:

• Equipping sales teams with more profound insights to keep them informed about business developments and trends that affect their key accounts.
• Make decisions based on real-time data to let the sales team know precisely when to reach out by acting on real-time alerts.
• Empower sales and service teams to send personalized 1-to-1 emails at scale built on marketing-provided templates.

 

4- Measure & optimize campaign performance:

• Track campaign performance to instantly know which campaigns and channels have been most successful in driving critical accounts pipeline.
• Optimize campaigns based on visual insights to realize how prospects are moving through your campaigns.
• Tracking how target accounts are moving through the sales funnel.

 

Point #4: Marketing Analytics

Marketo

Previously we`ve shown a few glimpses of what Marketo Marketing Analytics can do and how it can measure successful marketing strategies and their overall impact on revenue and total ROI cycle. The site gives a complete guide in 70 pages, which is downloadable for free. So here we are going to show what you can achieve using this application.

1. Focus investments where the most impact: Identify which channels and campaigns deliver the most revenue and highest marketing ROI.
2. Share progress with reports and dashboards: easily creating visual reports and dashboards using the intuitive, drag-and-drop interface or customize out-of-the-box reports.
3. Tie revenue to campaigns that created it: “which is one of the unique features of Marketo and the most heavily acclaimed.”  Tie revenue directly to the campaigns that generate it, proving the impact of marketing to management and other key decision-makers in a given organization.
4. Map & measure customer journey: through measuring key performance metrics across each stage. This may inform the overall marketing strategy and trigger the right messages at the right time as individuals show progress on each step.
5. Take marketing analytics on the go: By using the Market Moments mobile app.

With Pardot B2B marketing analytics, they introduce maximized marketing & sales effort that allows their clients to see marketing impact on revenue, easily explore data-driven from different strategies and tailored campaigns with their out-of-the-box customizable dashboards, & take direct actions on insight using a wide range of third-party connections as you can instantly share and have access to it on the go using their mobile app.

 

B2B marketing analytics features:

1. Customizable dashboards: out of the box customizable dashboards for full-funnel reviewing.
2. Custom views creation: granular data reviews and saved lenses.
3. Instant share for insight: synchronized sales & marketing for better selling opportunities.
4. Third-party data connection: unifying all data-driven into a single platform for more comfortable interaction.
5. Analytics mobile apps: faster access and sharing data on the go.
6. Multi-touch attribution dashboard: With first, even, and last-touch attribution, marketers gain insights into which channels drive awareness, perform across all buying stages and help drive deals to close.

 

Point #5: Content ^AI   Vs. Salesforce engage

Marketo content^AI:

By discovering buried assets across customers’ websites, Marketo uses its unique AI capabilities to recommend the right person’s right content.

Here is how you benefit from it:

• Know what content you have to recommend: through searching for assets on each website.
• Engage people with the right content: Using machine learning and predictive analytics.
• Boost results and ROI predictive recommendations: through learning which content works best for each person.
• Learn what is working and what is not: with audience insights and AI-powered content suggestions.

 

Salesforce Engage:

With Salesforce engage, you can feel the power of effortlessly building tailored campaigns with marketing-curated content, delivering a phenomenal buyer experience, & close deals faster. Salesforce engage promise you will be First, Be relevant, & be productive.

 

Let’s see how it does that:

• Engage campaigns: Marketing-approved templates and nurture tracks for enhanced message delivering.
• Engage reports: Monitor and control their campaign success, with faster deal closer trends.
• Engage for Gmail & outlook: sending 1-to-1 emails with automatic interaction logging in Pardot & Salesforce
• Engage Alerts: Real-time monitoring & alerts for prospects’ engagements.
• Engage for Salesforce Mobile: Fully capable & multi-functional mobile app.

 

Point #6: Customer support

Marketo is supported by its marketing Nation community with a group of helpful FAQs on its site to help newcomers get going process. It also provides new subscribers with demo tours and tutorial guidebooks that can be downloaded for free. Offered such facts, real user reviews have shown Customer support for Marketo is “not the best in the world!” The platform can be a bit quirky to use for first-timers as well, yet it sure shows its prowess as you go on and becoming more experienced around it.

 

Pardot was supported by the Trailblazer community and a helpful training program that was described by real users as being “more straightforward.” Other than that, Pardot makes the ultimate benefit from the broad base of salesforce dedicated clients and offers tutorials, blogs, & guiding tours, and webinars to train new customers to get a glimpse of the platform and take their first steps as they go through.  With ongoing online and phone support for extra fees.

 

Point #7: Pricing

Marketo does not offer any pricing plans on its website. Unfortunately, only a group of bundles, each with dedicated features, need to make contact with them to get better knowledge around the numbers.

 

Pardot, on the other hand, is offering a much clearer price plan which goes three ways as follows:

• Standard: $1000 per month/ Up to 10,000 contacts. Billed annually.
• Pro: $2000 per month/ Up to 10,000 contacts. Billed annually.
• Ultimate: $3000 per month/ Up to 10,000 contacts. Billed annually.

Pardot offers added services for additional pricing:

• B2B marketing analytics: $300 per month/ Up to 5 users. Billed annually.
• Salesforce Engage: $50 per month/ per user. Billed annually.

 

Conclusion:

Besides Merkato, theoretically offering added marketing solutions such as Consumer marketing, customer-based marketing, & mobile marketing, both platforms are quite similar in features and capabilities. Perhaps the most significant difference between these two will be the way they do their things.

Marketo depends on list-type automation, which can be a little more complicated than the more visually appealing branching-style automation for Pardot.

Marketo is using an Interactive calendar to keep things organized.

Both Marketo & Pardot offer a dominant marketing ecosystem through their unique integrations with a vast range of various partners & third-party integrations. The service Marketo calls Launch point ecosystem. At the same time, Pardot takes pride in seamless integration to Salesforce CRM as its main partner.

Things can go more in-depth as we try to trace every aspect of these two marketing automation giants. The dispute can only be settled by your awareness of your needs and budget limitations.  So it’s genuinely your call in the end.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you have found this article helpful & covering enough points to make your choice.