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Pardot vs. Marketo— Thoughts? Opinions?

  • 17 July 2020
  • 5 replies
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Maxwell Chen
Userlevel 2

Hey Ops Peeps, 

We’re on the cusp of implementing our marketing automation software and could use the advice of some marketing/sales ops peeps. 

What are your thoughts on Pardot vs. Marketo? We just completed our Salesforce implementation, so leaning towards Pardot because of the integration, etc. But I heard Marketo has a more personalized touch when it comes to email marketing, which is important to us. 

There are a ton of articles on the topic but I would rather hear straight from someone who has experience with either or both of these products. 

 

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Best answer by abeebe718 20 July 2020, 23:25

Admittedly, I’m a Pardot fanboy. But like Rory said above, if you’re already using Salesforce, especially Lightning, Pardot is kind of a no brainer to me. I think the UI is a more intuitive than Marketo and easier to pick up and manage for a new user. You mention personalization, I think Pardot has closed the gap to Marketo in the last few releases. Between dynamic content, progressive fields on forms, and email variable tags, you should be able to do just about whatever you want. Personally I find the scoring and grading to be a bit tedious to set up if you have complicated rules (particularly score degradation) , or rely on it for lead routing, but nothing that can’t be overcome with some good planning and documentation.

And, for whatever it may be worth, I’ve done multiple Marketo → Pardot migrations, but never the other way around. :upside_down:

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- Max

5 replies

Briana Okyere
Userlevel 3
Badge +2

Great question! Couple marketing ops peeps that might have an opinion on this: @abeebe718 @DuPree Potter 

Best, Briana
Daniel Moore
Userlevel 1

+1 interested to hear people’s thoughts on this!

Cheers, Dan
Rory O'Brien

If you’re already a Salesforce shop, I usually suggest to run with Pardot due to the deep integration (and continued effort by Salesforce to strengthen the relationship) between the two. Feature-set wise, especially if you’re just launching a MAP is not going to be wildly different between the two.

It usually comes down to the experience level of the people using the software. Were they Pardot/Hubspot/Marketo people in previous lives? Most are averse to change since all three of these UI’s are clunky in their own right and learning the nuances of a new one can be annoying. But at a high-level, they all pretty much do the same thing. I personally thing Engagement Studio on Pardot is the best for deeply custom nurturing sequences. Lead Scoring + Grading are pretty straightforward in Pardot as well if you decide to do that.

From a Sales/Marketing Ops perspective jumping between the UI’s of SFDC/Pardot (you actually barely need to do that now since Pardot Lightning has been improving so much these past few years) is much easier than a Marketo/Hubspot <> Salesforce jump.

A

Admittedly, I’m a Pardot fanboy. But like Rory said above, if you’re already using Salesforce, especially Lightning, Pardot is kind of a no brainer to me. I think the UI is a more intuitive than Marketo and easier to pick up and manage for a new user. You mention personalization, I think Pardot has closed the gap to Marketo in the last few releases. Between dynamic content, progressive fields on forms, and email variable tags, you should be able to do just about whatever you want. Personally I find the scoring and grading to be a bit tedious to set up if you have complicated rules (particularly score degradation) , or rely on it for lead routing, but nothing that can’t be overcome with some good planning and documentation.

And, for whatever it may be worth, I’ve done multiple Marketo → Pardot migrations, but never the other way around. :upside_down:

lkennedy

Hey @Maxwell Chen - thanks for starting this conversation! I’m a Marketing Automation Consultant & I’m currently helping one company migrate from Pardot to HubSpot and another migrate from Marketo to Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

One question that comes to mind is what does your typical business model focus on? Are you a quick purchase operation (B2C) or more of a considered purchase operation (B2B, large consumer purchase)?

If you’re working on more complicated data sets that integrate with more systems, a table-based model like Marketo may be beneficial to help you offer deep levels of personalization.

While Pardot has a more friendly UI, the levels of deep customization available in Marketo are not easily achieved.

However, if you’re willing to look outside of these two options, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SfMC) offers a table-based system that allows you to do deep personalization across multiple systems (similar to Marketo) but with an easier integration to Salesforce than Marketo. One consideration is that SfMC is a very large tool to manage and requires SQL, SSJS, etc knowledge to effectively use it while Pardot can be very easily managed by a ‘non-technical’ marketer.

Hope this helped. :) 

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