I've heard a lot of people asking the same question, Marketing Cloud or Pardot? Pardot or Marketing Cloud? I totally understand the confusion. It isn't entirely clear. Some of my customers have even asked me "Why does Salesforce have two different Marketing Applications?"
Salesforce actually has 4 different Marketing Applications, Pardot being one of them. These 4 products together comprise the Marketing Cloud. Each of these products have their own strengths.
Exact Target
Salesforce.com acquired Exact Target back in 2013 to bolster it's marketing offerings. It is a complete Online Marketing Solution: Email, Web, and Mobile. You can map your customer's Journey step-by-step-by-step. Across channels, and devices. This is the definition of 1:1 Marketing. And while you can use it for B2B, it has the ability to reach 100,000 or 1,000,000 prospects, making it an ideal candidate for B2C. This tool can do it all. And because of that scale and complexity, it often requires a little extra help from an Agency to help get you off the ground.
Social Studio
You can't talk about Marketing these days without mentioning Social Media. Social Studio equips your marketing team with a series of tools to keep your company's social presence up to snuff. Features like social listening across multiple social networks, to know what everyone is saying about you. Manage content and schedule your postings. Analyze the effectiveness of your efforts, what's working, what's not.
Social.com
Don't let the name fool you. This isn't a repeat. Social.com is specifically designed to help with digital advertising on various social media sites. With most every social platform making a play to monetize their networks. Social Network Advertising is a great option for companies that want to tap into a particular network's user base and leverage the information and interests of its users for hyper targeted advertising. With social.com you can segment your market, manage your campaigns, track engagement, and ultimately your ROI.
Pardot
Now Pardot is a little bit of an anomaly in this product mix, in that it does a little bit of everything. It has the ability to send Emails. You can create Drip Programa. You can link several of the big social networks to be able to schedule posts and do basic engagement tracking. And You can track your Google Adwords campaigns within Pardot. But Pardot's sweet spot is marketing automation and is more adept at handling the marketing needs for B2B. Pardot is relatively straight forward and easy to use, with lots of knowledge articles and solid support. Most companies hire a consultant for a month or two to help with the learning curve and to handle the technical configuration and the integration with Salesforce. If you're company is just starting out with Marketing Automation, Pardot should be your first step into the Marketing Cloud.
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