Your experience with Marketing cloud or Pardot?

[Huihsing_Kiang3]

Hi all,

A couple of branches of the same parent company is planning for the SFDC integration. Of course, we'll also need to come out one Marketing automation solution.

Currently, there are Marketing Cloud, Pardot, and Marketo on the table. Each of my counterpart favors their own solution - just like I love Marketo. I did some researches and also have evaluated some other marketing automation tools before. I believe Marketo excels when talking about lead scoring, trigger campaign, ABM, editors, and cloning, etc.

I'd like to come out a good strategy to make the Marketo the final contestant. If you have the experience to use Pardot or Marketing cloud before. I'll highly appreciate it if you can share your experience and your thoughts.

Thanks a lot!

[Chris_Johnston · Accepted solution]

We work with all platforms and are engaged with an organization right now deciding to go with Marketo or Marketing Cloud. It really depends on the individual organization. For instance, typically Marketing Cloud would be considered a B2C tool and Pardot the B2B tool of Salesforce. So if you are selling B2B, Marketing Cloud might not make the most sense.

Marketo is natively integrated into Salesforce, and while the Marketing Cloud v5 connector does a great job of pushing it close, it is not at parity quite yet, and requires a lot more setup to connect.

You mention ABM in your evaluations, is that something your organization requires? If so, it is a definite advantage for Marketo.

Depending on the team's skillset in HTML and CSS, the email editor could go either way. Personally I think Marketo gives more advantages, but less skilled individuals would likely think Marketing Cloud is easier for them. ie. More Custom becomes more effort but sticking with what is prebuilt, Marketing Cloud has more.

Even things like pricing, where Marketo does per contact and Marketing Cloud does per email pricing is something to consider.

There is a whole bunch of things to consider and I haven't mentioned anything yet about Pardot. Given that your organization is going to be making a huge investment, I'd recommend hiring a consultant to help understand your system designed needs to match you with the right automation platform. It's a large investment and choosing it based on what you have used in the past and understand, isn't necessarily the best way to choose.