The Marketing Dilemna. Pardot or Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Many organizations have asked this question, which app is best to meet my marketing needs? Pardot or Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

At Brick Lane we have implemented both apps following two different approaches. However, we have found that one approach has best results in improving customer experience and ROI.

1. Pardot stand alone

Pardot implemented on its own can provide great nurturing leads capabilities via its visitor/prospect conversion, audience identification, leads engagement builder and leads qualification (Score/grade). Nevertheless; it has limitations with the email builder and landing page builder which are not marketer friendly. Additionally, its reporting capabilities are quite constrained.

2. Marketing Cloud stand alone

The variety of products that come from the marketing cloud are vast and robust. Stand alone implementation of the journey builder engagement automation functionality, email studio and Datorama reporting and analytics, can provide great value to Marketers. However, they lack what Pardot has which is a good structure to nurture leads.

3. Integrated approach

An integrated implementation of both tool sets (Pardot and Marketing cloud) can give you the best of both worlds, whilst at the same time a structure to be able to implement marketing tools in a staged manner. A good example of this would be to implement Pardot first and ease the user adoption process, as you start gaining ROI. In a second implementation stage an organization could progress its marketing capabilities by adding Marketing cloud to the mix and combine both sets of products to get the best results, by following a sequence of marketing growth capability steps.

Robert Stephens is a Co-Founder at Brick Lane, a Healthcare & Manufacturing specialist Salesforce partner.