Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs Pardot
Tags: salesforce, marketingcloud, salesforcepardot, informationtechnology
Published: 2021-04-09 09:48:01

#**Introduction**

Salesforce is the world's best Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform and is further widely used by businesses of all sizes. It aims to offer a unique, new, and simpler way for marketers to connect with the customers. However, it provides a wide range of services that might bring quite many doubts in one's mind while choosing the best one that could further match all of the business needs. 
In this blog, we will be discussing two such superior and popularly used Salesforce platforms. These two highly efficient marketing platforms are- Pardot and Marketing Cloud. Both of them are extremely powerful and hold the ability to boost up one's marketing efforts. But, they are designed for different purposes, and one needs to evaluate efficiently over which one of them will be required for the business. 
Before moving forward with the points that make them different, let's discuss their basic definition.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a popular CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform formerly known as Exact Target. The Search Customer Experiences defines Salesforce Marketing Cloud as a customer relationship management (CRM) platform for marketers to create and manage marketing relationships and campaigns with customers.

Pardot is a known marketing automation solution that helps businesses create meaningful connections, generate more pipelines, and empower sales to close more deals. It enables enterprises to track and measure their communication effectiveness while gaining insights into user's behavior and personalizing content across campaigns based on any number of specific criteria.

Now, let's move on and discuss the difference between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot in brief.

#**Pardot vs Marketing Cloud: What's the difference?**
The main points of difference between Pardot and Marketing Cloud are as follows:

**Platforms:**
By Platforms, we mean the eCommerce platforms over which both these Salesforce tools work on. There are two major types of eCommerce platforms- B2B and B2C. The business-to-consumer (B2C) setup is the one wherein the consumer is the target who will buy the products or services directly from the business. On the other side, the business-to-business (B2B) setup is the one wherein one business sells to another, which is sold to the consumers. The other business models in eCommerce platforms include C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer), C2B (Consumer-to-Business), B2G (Business-to-Government), G2B (Government-to-Business), etc.
But, when discussing the Salesforce tools, only two platforms are widely discussed - B2B and B2C.
Salesforce Pardot is the most common tool used by business-to-business (B2B) organizations. Simultaneously, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the most commonly used tool by business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations. 


**Buying Cycle:**
The buying cycle (also termed as a purchase cycle) is known to be the process that a customer needs to go through while purchasing a product or service. Customers further move through a series of these purchasing stages in this cycle as they learn by themselves and move a bit closer to making a final purchasing decision.
The main difference among both the Salesforce tools, i.e., Pardot and Marketing Cloud, is their buying cycle. One important thing to mention here is that the buying cycle also depends on the databases' size that a tool is working upon.
Through Salesforce Pardot, smaller databases accompanied with higher value sales would be better targeted. On the other hand, Salesforce Marketing Cloud works better for more extensive databases than more minor value sales.

**Marketing Mix:**
"Marketing mix" is a general phrase used to represent the different kinds of choices that the organizations need to make in the whole process of upbringing a product or any service to the market. The 4Ps is one way that is probably the best way known of further defining the marketing mix. These 4Ps include - Product, Place, Price, and Promotion.
Now let's discuss the marketing mix involved in these Salesforce tools. Salesforce Pardot is primarily used for e-mail marketing but encompasses a variety of tools and further integrations. These are further used for execution and track the lead generation efforts. Examples for the same include- landing pages and forms, default integrations for social media, live chat, etc. At the same time, Salesforce Marketing Cloud works towards bringing all the digital channels together through a cumulation of Studios like E-mail Studio, Social Studio, etc.

**Sales Process:**
A Sales Process is a term given to the set of repeatable steps that a salesperson is required to take a prospective buyer from its early stage of awareness till it can be termed as a closed sale. Typically, any sales process will consist of 5-7 steps: Prospecting, Preparation, Approach, Presentation, Handling objections, Closing, and Follow-up.
Salesforce indeed has a lot of the necessary tools which is essential to implement a simple Sales Process. Even, majority of Salesforce's standard objects are related to this sales stage. 
Let's now talk about the two mentioned Salesforce tools and how they work towards the sales process.
Salesforce Pardot works reasonably for buyers who further require nurturing over time. Moreover, one can track the interest and pass the leads to the sales team once they are qualified. On the other hand, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a specific tool for the same process: ' Journey Builder'. With this tool's help, a highly personalized one-to-one proper guide to a particular customer journey can be built up in the sales process. 

#**Conclusion**
While keeping the differences mentioned above in mind, it can be concluded that Salesforce Marketing Cloud would be the best choice if one's business requires a platform to be more easily engaged with its customers across multiple channels and further assist in their respective customer's journey. Moreover, those in the retail or FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) industries are more likely to see great benefits from Salesforce Marketing Cloud features.

On the other hand, Salesforce Pardot is the right option if one's sales process requires long-term nurture, and the gap between the sales and marketing teams needs a bridge to work through. Also, Pardot will be the most beneficial among the two Salesforce products as discussed for those with products of high-sales value or with long sales cycles.

If you want to know more [Salesforce Marketing Cloud](https://cyntexa.com/salesforce-marketing-cloud-implementation/) and [Salesforce Pardot](https://cyntexa.com/salesforce-pardot-implementation/), you can visit our [website](https://cyntexa.com/).