Marketing automation tools are vital for today’s savvy marketer. Often asked, if Marketing Automation is really necessary. Marketing automation is for marketers what Salesforce is for sales team. CRM systems help organize sales teams making them more efficient while marketing automation increases the efficiency with which leads are generated thus increasing sales and revenue. Last year Regalix polled B2B marketers using marketing automation; and 86% reported increase in lead management and nurturing. Leading edge marketing teams use marketing automation to create targeted campaigns, to hand off better leads to sales, and to achieve greater ROI.

There are many Marketing Automation platforms – some are suited for smaller to mid-sized business, and while others for enterprise level. We hope to assist our Salesforce customers in making an informed decision when it comes to choosing between Pardot versus Marketo. Read on for a quick overview of each.

Pardot – Powerful and Easy to Use

Smaller to mid-sized B2B organizations will find that Pardot, a Salesforce company, is well rounded and easy-to-use marketing automation tool. Pardot’s platform features seamless CRM integration, batch email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and grading, social marketing, and ROI reporting to help marketing and sales teams work together. Lead scoring with Pardot is particularly effective and also integrates well with Google Analytics.

The enterprise edition offers a dedicated IP address and increased customizable options. Pardot’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integrates with Salesforce as well as Microsoft CRM, SugarCRM, Netsuite, and RelateIQ. Most of its functionality is accessible via intuitive wizard workflows, which reduce time-to-results and make it easier for users to pick up. But that also means that it can be harder to implement functionality that has not already been built into the product. A major strength that Pardot is praised for by its users is its outstanding service and support team in addition to it being acquired and managed by Salesforce.com as part of its CRM capabilities.

Marketo – A Marketing Automation Pioneer

Marketo has established itself as a standard for marketing automation. Marketo offers marketing automation to serve any size company in maintaining customer engagement, but their price-point makes them particularly suited to mid- to enterprise-size organizations. The Marketo suite features tightly integrated applications deliver a broad range of capabilities including marketing automation, social marketing, lead nurturing, budget management, analytics, sales insight, and website personalization. Like Pardot, Marketo natively integrates with Salesforce, and also with Microsoft CRM, SugarCRM, Netsuite, and Oracle.

Marketo has great flexibility to accomplish your marketing objectives. If you have a marketing process, campaign, or multi-tier program that you want to implement, there are typically several ways to do achieve your goal. The downside, of course, with such a rich-feature set is complexity; you will need a dedicated team of people with Marketo expertise, or have to factor in extensive training-time before you roll out your first campaigns.

Privatization of Marketo in May 2016, will put the company focus on streamlining costs and restructuring personnel instead of enhancing of product features or adding new features to the current product.

For a detailed comparison please contact us at info@westcoastconsulting.com.

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