Learning Marketo after 4 years of Pardot

[Phil_Gamache]

In April 2017, I had the exciting opportunity of joining 7,000 digital marketers in San Francisco for the Marketing Nation Summit. This was my first time attending the Summit. It’s fascinating how much insight you can pull from a simple conversation when two people share strong commonalities with deep rooted pain points.

I’d previously been part of a competitor’s world: Pardot. Naturally, I dove into several Q&A type conversations after mentioning to fellow marketers that I had four years of Pardot experience before learning Marketo.

So I thought, Hey, if everyone I chatted with was interested in hearing some of the real comparisons between both tools, maybe I should write an article about it.

Go easy on me; I consider this my first real article: https://inbound.org/blog/marketo-vs-pardot-a-tactical-breakdown

[Gerard_Donnell4]

Hi Phil Gamache​,

Thanks for taking the time to write this article; it was a great read and just what I was looking for. Keep them coming...

Thanks,

Gerard

[Phil_Gamache]

Thanks Gerard!

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Fascinating Phil, great job. Sounds like Marketo is better

[Phil_Gamache]

Thanks for checking this out Darrell!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Nice work, Phil!  One correction: What are typically referred to as "Program tokens" are actually Program-level {{my.tokens}}.

So not

{{program.date of webinar}}, {{program.date of first email}}

but

     {{my.date of webinar}}, {{my.date of first email}}

True {{program.tokens}} are something else, system-managed tokens referring to Program metadata (such as {{program.id}}).

[Phil_Gamache]

Ooh nice catch Sanford, thanks!

[Brittany_Hokes]

This is a great post from a perspective of someone who was in Pardot initially for quite some time. Great read- thanks!

[Abaran]

Hi Phil

Great blog. Thanks for sharing.

In my last job 4 months ago, I did a full migration from Marketo to Pardot. Although Pardot has some nice little features, the overall conclusion is that from an automation perspective and flexibility, Marketo is clearly the best platform. Pardot relies heavily on SFDC but the integration is the same as with Marketo with SFDC, it is not native. No there is not advantage.

For a company that just wants to get started with Marketing Automation; Pardot is certainly a better option. For anything else, Marketo is the better choice.

One thing I would say about Pardot: it is NOT a marketing automation tool. It is Marketing tool that sends emails. There is too much manual intervention needed to get campaign put in place and then forget about it.

I am so happy I am back on Marketo.