Marketing has been witnessing a heated growth in recent years due to the adoption of digital technologies. Companies are leveraging various Marketing Automation tools in order to reach their target customers in a more personalized way. Marketing Clouds and Sales Clouds offer the means to reach potential customers, nurture and engage them, and ultimately convert them into paying customers. Their functions are not limited to this and extend to providing after-sales support too.
In order to understand the differences between a Marketing Cloud and a Sales Cloud, it is important to know what exactly they are.
What is a Marketing Cloud?
A Marketing Cloud is a CRM for marketers to help them create and manage Marketing relationships and campaigns with customers. It is a platform designed to deliver relevant and personalized customer journeys across multiple channels and devices. It helps marketers nurture a profitable relationship with buyers across all phases of the journey by helping them deliver the right messages at the right time.
A Marketing Cloud contains a variety of integrated solutions to manage numerous aspects of the customer journey including social media, email marketing, mobile marketing, advertising, data analysis, content creation, and management. Marketing Clouds guide customers across their journeys with brands, by covering and recording every interaction and engagement.
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What is a Sales Cloud?
A Sales Cloud is a platform that brings together all customer information under one hood. The integrated platform encompasses Business Analytics, Marketing, Lead Generation, Sales, Contracts, Campaigns, Customer Service, and a lot more. In addition, it has thousands of tools and apps for various Sales functions.
Sales Clouds help companies offer personalized buying experience to their customers and empower Sales reps to work faster and more efficiently. It is a CRM platform that supports Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support teams in both the B2B and B2C contexts.
How Do Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot Stack Up Against Each Other?
B2B or B2C?
While the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a platform on its own, Pardot is aligned with Sales Cloud and is available as an integration with the Marketing Cloud.
The major difference between the two is the type of businesses that use them. While Salesforce Marketing Cloud caters to and is best suited for B2C companies, Pardot is most suitable for B2B companies. B2B2C firms can use either or both, depending on their requirements. However, this is not a hard and fast rule and companies need to assess their requirements before selecting a solution.
Quite often, any one of these (or both of them together) can be a good fit for both B2B and B2C campaigns. However, on a regular day, a B2B company that sends out scheduled email campaigns and makes use of drip campaigns is a typical Pardot user. On the other hand, a B2C firm sending out scheduled email campaigns and using drip automation programs in addition to more specific email services such as triggered emails and transactional emails makes for an ideal Marketing Cloud client.
Features Available
Some of the features included in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud are Email Marketing, Journey Builder, CDP, Website Tracking, Predictive Intelligence, Advertising and Social Media Marketing, Mobile Marketing, etc.
Pardot packs in some solid tools in the form of Multi-touch Email campaigns, Sales Intelligence, Lead management, Prospect Lifecycle Report, Google Analytics Connector, SEO, SMM, etc.
While Pardot has a lower price point, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is relatively costlier with no public pricing.
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Some of the alternatives to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud are:
Some of the alternatives to the Salesforce Sales Cloud include:
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