Digital marketing has seen explosive growth in the recent years due to the high adoption of digital technologies. According to Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report 2018, people are increasing the amount of time they spend online. The Stats say that Adults spend 5.9 hours per day on digital media in 2017, up from 5.6 hours the year before. While the percent of ad append declined in print, radio, and TV, Meeker identified a whopping $7 billion opportunity in ad spend in mobile. This abundance of digital especially mobile has forced businesses to rethink their digital strategies and account for the new and innovative marketing automation tools that can reach customers in a more personalized way. This blog is a deep dive into Salesforce’s most powerful marketing automation tools – Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot and how they stack up against each other.
PARDOT – THE ULTIMATE B2B MARKETING AUTOMATION SOFTWARE
Pardot is an industry-leading marketing automation and lead management software that is primarily designed for B2B companies to define, execute and manage marketing campaigns to create awareness, nurture prospects, and leads, and boost bottom-line results. Pardot users say that marketing automation has boosted sales revenues by 34% on average. Only 23% of Sales professional say marketers consistently deliver Sales-ready leads, whereas Pardot users report a 32% increase in qualified leads. Pardot also syncs well with the Salesforce CRM, which offers a performance edge for those that already use the Salesforce CRM. Some of the leading Pardot features include
Multi-touch Email Campaigns
Pardot allows you to create highly personalized email campaigns faster with 36 customizable templates and lets you build your own branded templates with WYSIWYG editor. You can slickly personalize the buyer’s journey and tailor your email campaigns to prospects’ interests with dynamic content, and optimize email deliverability with SPAM analysis, email testing, and automated CAN-SPAM compliance.
Creating Reports and Tracking Performance
Pardot makes ROI reporting a cinch with Google Analytics Connector that helps sync visitor and prospect data between Pardot and your CRM. The Prospect Lifecycle report combines marketing and sales reports in one place to give you a complete view of your sales cycle’s health, and the Paid Search Reporting feature allows you to monitor the performance of your Paid Search Campaigns effectively.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
‘Search is a powerful tool for marketers who harness its abilities’, according to Zach Bailey, Vice President of Engineering at Salesforce. Pardot’s SEO tools do that by simplifying marketing for Pardot users. The Keyword monitoring tool in Pardot provides actionable insights into how well various keywords used in a marketer’s content are performing, and the SEO tools enable users to track their site’s ranking in Google and Bing for keywords that are important to businesses.
Sales Intelligence
According to Marketing Sherpa, Lead Scoring provides an ROI of 138% versus companies that don’t score leads. And Pardot’s Automated Lead scoring and grading help you do just that! It enables your sales team to find and focus on the hottest leads that are most likely to buy; it scores leads based on implicit buying signals, grades prospects on how well they match your ideal customer profile and automatically alerts your reps when leads are sales-ready.
Lead Management and Landing Page Marketing
“Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months” – Gartner Report
Pardot comes with automated Lead generation and management features that help you validate leads and close deals. The intuitive WYSIWYG interface in Pardot makes designing and launching of Landing pages and forms simple. You can create valid forms using Progressive Profiling that allows you to select the form fields that appear based on the information you already have about a lead. Progressive Profiling reduces friction in the form filling process and allows you to build relationships with your prospects more naturally. The Segmentation Wizard enables you to quickly create, add or remove prospects from lists and run more targeted campaigns.
Streamline your Social Media Marketing
Pardot gives you the absolute flexibility to schedule and post updates to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and company pages. You can save a huge amount of time by scheduling your social postings and gather insights on link clicks, replies, comments, retweets, and likes. See prospects who clicked a link in your post, which social media channels received the most clicks and how the consumer behaviour has changed over time. You can also post to multiple social media channels simultaneously, add Share buttons to your emails, blogs, and white papers to increase visibility, and track the success of your campaigns from a single platform.
Salesforce made some updates to the Summer ’18 Release Notes and there are 15 new updates related to Pardot in this release. Check out the Pardot specific release features here.
“Pardot has an array of cutting-edge features designed specifically for B2B marketing whereas the Salesforce Marketing Cloud serves as an end-to-end tool for B2C marketing”
SALESFORCE MARKETING CLOUD – THE EXCLUSIVE B2C MARKETING AUTOMATION TOOL
Branded as the only platform dedicated to the creation and management of customer journeys, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a plethora of benefits any company would want for B2C marketing. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can plan, personalize and optimize customer journeys and generate positive experiences for your customers as you build your customer journeys. Some of the core features of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud include
Journey Builder
It helps you understand your customers with intuitive data and harness your customer data from different sources based on attributes, browsing behaviors and purchase history to build personalized marketing messages and drive seamless customer experiences. And the recent Integration of Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Google Analytics 360 helps you gain better customer insights both online and offline to build more meaningful customer journeys.
Email Marketing
It is one of most powerful marketing tools as Email Marketing has an average ROI of 3800% according to Salesforce, firmly setting it apart as the single-most sound marketing-investment channel available. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is exclusively designed to help marketers deliver the right content to the right people at the right time and manage campaign development from end to end and get the best ROI from email. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to create mobile-optimized email templates that make all the email marketing communications mobile- friendly and prevents rendering issues on mobile devices.
Predictive Intelligence
Marketing Cloud Predictive Scoring allows companies to score customers according to their positive behaviour towards a brand – like downloading an app or making a purchase. Predictive Audiences feature allows companies to generate a list of customers with a certain score and then devise a tailored marketing plan to those specific audiences.
Mobile Marketing
The Salesforce Mobile Marketing features allow you to engage customers at the moment, send real-time alerts and create 1-to-1 customer journeys. You can execute automated mobile campaigns using Journey Builder and segment your prospects for personalized and highly relevant messages.
Advertising and Social Media Marketing
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows businesses to advertise on a 1-to-1 level. You can leverage email messaging across social, search and display ads including Twitter, Facebook and can personalize your marketing communications based on past purchase and email interaction. Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to acquire leads through Facebook’s Lead Gen ads and push contacts directly to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You can also create look-a-like models to find new customers that look like your best customers.
Customer Data Platform
This feature lets you capture customer behaviour across channels and create a unique user experience for every single customer. It enables you to create actionable insights and trigger customer journeys based on customer behaviour and segment customer data to create targeted subscriber lists. Predicting the best offer, product or content for each customer is done automatically and in real-time.
Website Tracking
Salesforce Marketing Cloud lets you turn simple static websites into dynamic, highly interactive and personalized customer experiences (CX). You can guide the customers through the process of finding the necessary info using interactive tools and trigger emails based on website behaviour to re-engage users long after they’ve left your site. It also allows you to build new websites and landing pages across any device slickly.
An effective Marketing automation tool highly simplifies your marketing efforts and improves productivity and efficiency of the sales and marketing teams. It saves time, helps you get more out of your CRM, enables personalization and improves the overall efficiency of your marketing efforts. However, it is critical that you make the right choice of Marketing tools specific to your business needs in order to optimize your digital marketing spend.
