Home > Marketing Automation Software > Marketo > Marketo vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Marketo vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Last Updated: November 18th, 2024

Our analysts compared Marketo vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Marketing Automation Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Overview Pricing Benefits & Features Analyst Ratings Comparison Charts User Ratings Analyst Summary Screenshots

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Product Basics

Marketo Engage offers a cloud-based marketing platform for companies to manage and monitor customer relationships. Its integrated modules include marketing automation, social marketing, email marketing, lead nurturing, budget management, analytics, sales insight and website personalization.

It’s designed to serve both B2B and B2C environments. There’s also an active marketers’ community named the Marketo Marketing Nation in which marketers around the globe share their knowledge, ideas and best practices.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive software platform designed to empower businesses in managing their marketing campaigns across various channels. It caters to businesses seeking to enhance their marketing efficiency and effectiveness, enabling them to expand their reach, monitor campaign performance, and evaluate return on investment. The platform offers a range of benefits, including streamlined email campaign creation and tracking, effective social media marketing management, and insightful website analytics. Key features encompass tools for multi-channel marketing management, customer communication, and data collection and analysis.

User experiences suggest that Salesforce Marketing Cloud excels in providing robust marketing automation capabilities, facilitating personalized customer journeys and targeted messaging. Pricing for Salesforce Marketing Cloud is based on a per-user model, with a starting price of $125 per user per month. While it may be perceived as a premium option compared to some alternatives, its extensive features and scalability make it a compelling choice for businesses with substantial marketing needs.

$895 Monthly

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$1,250 Monthly

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Tailored to your specific needs

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Product Assistance

Documentation

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Videos

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24/7 Live Support

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Product Insights

Web Forms: Generate complete customer profiles via social form fills and progressive forms that can recognize known website visitors. Also, ask new questions to visitors.
AI-Powered Content Suggestions: Automatically present relevant content across multiple channels using machine learning and predictive analytics, which identifies top-performing content. Choose content recommendations from the website assets such as videos, e-books, case studies and blog posts.
Marketo Sales Connect: Connect sales and marketing with a single workflow for automated and personalized inbound and outbound engagements.
Better Focus: Sales reps can prioritize and close deals by accessing real-time insights about customers from both sales and marketing touchpoints.
Team Coordination: Plan, coordinate and share marketing activities through a centralized calendar. This simplifies scheduling individual components of a single campaign or coordinating activities across teams.
Campaign Control: Build and modify marketing campaigns directly in the calendar with simple drag-and-drop functionality.
Data Tracking: Track goals and progress with calendar HD, using rotating calendar views and custom background images.
Customer Segmentation: The built-in Audience Hub tool automatically updates members in each segment as their behaviors or demographics change.
AI-Powered Account Profiling: Uses AI-based best-fit indicators for converting into ABM filters to personalize and deploy ABM campaigns by activating the target account list. Also provides predictive customer profile models, custom model tuning and recommendations based on predictive scoring.

Fit to Needs: Create and customize views, page layouts, fields and filters. Personalize mobile apps with custom menus, navigation bars, color schemes, branding and more.
Easily Share Data: Find new audiences and create partnerships using Data Studio. Manage data rights and monetize by exposing audiences to marketers.
Access Anywhere: Get data on the go with native mobile apps for Android and iOS. Visualize, track, and manage customer experiences in real time.
Optimize Mobile Marketing: Create geofenced messages to automatically send coupons or promotions to customers in a targeted area. Deliver closer proximity messages using Bluetooth low-energy beacon devices.
Do More With Apps: Access both free and paid apps with AppExchange to extend and enhance all the features offered.
Streamline Tasks: Execute complex marketing and data management activities with simple or multi-step automation. Automation Studio includes an overview page for automation status and error information to enable quick recovery.

Search Engine Optimization: Compares keyword rankings of competitors, provides recommendations for new keywords for higher ranking web pages, and discovers inbound link opportunities based on targeted keywords and competitors’ links.
CRM Integration: Offers native integrations for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications to provide a bi-directional data sync that auto-updates every five minutes. Also facilitates custom-configured integrations for various CRM platforms such as NetSuite, Oracle, SAP Sales Cloud and SugarCRM.
Lead Scoring: Rank customers by assigning positive and negative scores based on demographics or their likelihood to exhibit certain behaviors, such as making a new purchase, being open to cross-sell offers and more.
Email Marketing: Supports both batch and real-time triggered emails. Helps:

Create personalized campaigns for mobile, web, ads and more using a visual editor and responsive templates.
Personalize content based on inferred information from website visitors, such as company, country, zip code and city, helping segment and localize content.
Use browsing behavior to identify product interest for target accounts.

Mobile Marketing:

Helps connect with customers on the go, track inputs from different marketing channels and respond via mobile apps.
Sends push notifications and in-app messages, and incorporates beacon and geo-fencing technology to send location-relevant messages to customers.
Visual dashboards measure overall performance by opens, installs and session duration across multiple apps.

Social Media Marketing: Facilitates running social polls, sweepstakes and referral campaigns with built-in social share buttons and shareable videos. Integrates social metrics into marketing reports to help measure the impact of social activity on conversions and revenue.
Digital Ad Campaigns: Connects with Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other advertising platforms, and targets customers with relevant ad campaigns.
Analytics and Reporting: Automatically connect data from different sources into a unified platform. Enables:

Mapping and measuring a customer journey at every stage through shareable, prebuilt dashboards and ad-hoc reporting tools.
Designing custom models with the help of AI.
Leveraging a suite of attribution models.

Audience Management: Utilizes data, machine learning and AI to provide deep insights into customer behavior and deliver personalized, relevant messages.
Customer Engagement: Capture, unify, segment and act on customer data across multiple teams, devices and systems. Also, manage dashboards and safe provisioning measures, as well as optimize live campaigns based on data.
Email Marketing: Engage audiences with marketing campaigns using tools such as:

Drag-and drop segmentation and built-in intelligence.
Test messages and automated emails with delivery schedules.
Campaign targeting to reach any number of customers.

Mobile Marketing: Automate and customize mobile campaigns seamlessly. Includes:

Personalized messaging based on preferences and time-sensitivity.
Geofenced messages for promotions.
Mobile reports on the app.
Alignment of mobile campaigns with other marketing channels.

Social Media Marketing: Manage and monitor content and conversations across social media platforms for insights. Machine learning and photo recognition drive marketing strategies and customizable dashboards help keep up with trends.
Datorama: Use one marketing dashboard of cross-channel analytics and built-in reporting for ROI, speed and growth. Gain insights from advertising efforts, events, email, social media channels, a website and a CRM database.
Pardot: Automates B2B marketing for connections and targeted sales pitches. Segmentation aids marketing tasks and email paths personalize the customer experience.
Google Marketing Platform: Access advanced marketing solutions with powerful tools for identifying insights. Conduct deep analysis of user engagement with content and boost marketing performance.
Advertising Studio: Gain new prospects like current high-value customers and reconnect with old customers. Coordinate advertising with email for more purchase intent and optimize spending by controlling advertising to current customers.
Data Studio: Find new audiences with advanced discovery tools, integrate into over 200 channels and create new partnerships with premium data providers.
Interaction Studio: Drive customer engagement by visualizing, tracking and managing customer experiences in real time. Control message frequency and connect online and offline interactions.

Product Ranking

#6

among all
Marketing Automation Software

#14

among all
Marketing Automation Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Marketo

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

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43%

57%

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63%

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User Sentiment Summary

81%

of users recommend this product

Marketo has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 81% when considering 4522 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

79%

of users recommend this product

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a 'good' User Satisfaction Rating of 79% when considering 1950 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

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5.0 (33)

4.1 (2125)

3.9 (1166)

4.2 (582)

4.1 (258)

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4.4 (102)

4.0 (1815)

3.8 (391)

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Lead Management: The ability to route and categorize leads based on requirements is helpful for staying on top of customers inputs, in the view of 60% of users talking about lead management.

Customizable: All reviews on this aspect agree that the system is highly customizable and offers email templates that can be created as per requirements.

Automation: Marketing and sales automation make it easy to use and eliminate manual entry, according to 83% of users who reviewed this feature.

Reporting: Provides custom reports that fit the user requirement and are insightful, say 75% of users referencing reporting.

Integrations: Integrations for websites, event platforms, survey platforms, mobile apps and more, along with two-way integration with CRM systems, aid functionality, according to 75% of users mentioning integrations.

Customer Support: The training is great and customer support is responsive, according to 66% of reviews on this topic.

Reporting: All users who mention reports and analytics indicated that the reporting capabilities are a key benefit.

Features: A robust set of features enable cross-channel marketing, according to 75% of users referencing capabilities.

Not User-Friendly: The functionality is cumbersome and pages take time to load, in the experience of 60% of users who reviewed the usability.

Dashboard: Campaign dashboards are outdated and the design needs an upgrade, according to 75% of users specifying this feature.

Cost: All reviews on this topic noted additional costs as a concern associated with using this product.

Complexity: About 95% of user feedback on this issue suggested that assistance is necessary for understanding of all features and functions.

Customer Support: The customer support is unhelpful and concerns might go unsolved for days, according to 88% of users who mention service.

As a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, Marketo Engage supports both demand and account-based marketing strategies that work in sync with marketing and sales. It offers a range of features that help businesses operations. Notable features that users call out include custom reports, automation tools and lead management. It’s highly customizable and can integrate with a wide range of business systems. Users also appreciate the robust customer service. Some limitations include an inconvenient mobile app, outdated user interface for campaign dashboards and cumbersome functionality. Overall, businesses looking to automate their sales and marketing efforts will find the system has a lot to offer.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be leveraged for its powerful set of features for effective cross-channel marketing, according to user feedback. Another common strength is its reporting features to analyze and plan marketing strategies. However, users raise concerns about the system’s complexity, which may require outside assistance at additional costs, especially due to unresponsive customer support. Another major drawback reviews agree on is the lack of cost-effectiveness due to additional costs and charges. Overall, the product can be a good pick for large companies looking to strategize and execute marketing effectively.

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FAQ

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