Software Selection Considerations

Marketing automation software should ideally simplify business processes by capturing data through forms and landing pages, integrating with a CRM, identifying potential customers, delivering relevant content and nurturing communications between the brand and the customers. It should also connect marketing activity in a single place for ease of access, align sales and marketing teams, focus on increasing marketing ROI and more.

In order to make the most of the solution you choose, keep the following factors in mind:

1. User Interface

The first thing to consider is the dashboard. It is necessary that the software is easy to use and doesn’t become overwhelming for those who use it. An intuitive, easy-to-use interface will cut down on the learning curve and increase the turnaround time.

The main thing you want to look for is clear navigation. Free trials are a great way to check if basic functionalities such as creating an email or accessing analytics are easy to use or whether the dashboard makes these tasks difficult to complete.

Other factors to check include contextual information, easy transition between tasks, the number of processes included and relevant data.

2. Integrations

Every MA platform offers different integration, you just have to make sure the one you choose matches your business requirements.

Check if you have existing technology that needs to connect with an MA platform and if the software you’re considering integrates with what you already have. You might also want to check if the solution has an open API, in case you plan to create custom assets.

3. Customer Support

A new system will require all the help you can get to be familiar with it. It is safe to assume that users will come across issues when they are new or even if they have used the system for a while. In such a situation, having access to a responsive and effective support team will help.

While all companies provide some sort of customer support, the kind of support that they provide varies and is something you should look into.

Type of Customer Support:

• Some companies offer phone support, email and live chat at restricted timings, while others provide 24/7 support.
• Some include the option to submit tickets and follow progress via a dedicated ticketing system.
• Some offer community forums and others provide FAQ sections and documented solutions.

4. Resources and Training

Training can help users learn how to use software in a structured manner rather than investing time in learning it from scratch without any direction. This is especially important for complex systems that have a lot of features and settings.

Some platforms offer online training sessions while others offer self-training in the form of guides, how-to videos and even webinars that can be used to understand and learn about the software.

5. Pricing

Lastly, it is wise to decide how much you’re willing to invest in marketing automation software. Pricing structures differ from product to product, so some basic questions to ask while selecting one are:

• What’s the base price of the product against the contacts it offers?
• What’s its scalability and cost compared to the number of contacts the add-on would provide?
• What other benefits or features does the product provide within the price tier you’re considering?

While these are a few hand-picked factors to consider, it’s not an exhaustive list. For a complete breakdown of requirements, you should think about, you can get our full comparison report for a detailed comparison of Marketo, Pardot and dozens more solutions.
Compare Pardot and Marketo Against Your Needs

Features Comparison

Marketo and Pardot both entered the software arena in 2006, and both stand out as top-tier performers in the marketing automation industry. This Marketo vs Pardot comparison, based on our analysts’ research, identifies individual features and their functionality so you can understand which system best fits your needs.

Email Marketing

Pardot helps create email campaigns using email builders with responsive templates, schedule email campaigns and create personalized messages based on segmentation. You can drag and drop email components and also add styling. It also supports SPAM filter check-ups.

Marketo Engage offers ready and responsive email templates that allow adding a module through the drag-and-drop feature. It also provides email syntax that works in templates and individual emails, except for Rich Text tokens. A deliverability tool ensures messages reach the recipient’s inbox.

Winner: Pardot wins this feature by offering personalized messaging based on prospect engagement.

Email Templates

Pardot supports the creation of text and HTML email designs for engagement programs, autoresponders, one-to-one emails and list emails. It allows you to personalize emails for each recipient and includes several responsive layouts good for creating mobile-friendly emails. It also facilitates adding responsive CSS to layouts template using media queries, which you can test with a preview and resizing options.

Marketo Engage provides templates with combinations of elements, variables, modules and containers that you can save for later use. The email syntax capability only works in templates and individual emails. Additionally, it offers mobile-optimized email templates free of charge. Templates are viewable in mobile and desktop format, and the changes made to the template reflect in the live version.

Winner: Marketo Engage wins this feature, as it offers built-in templates, whereas Pardot only allows users to create one and save it for future use.

SMS Marketing

Pardot’s Magic of Pardot enables you to create configurations to send via mobile. You can do this by selecting an object and recipient type, and then choosing from several templates.

Pardot offers Android and iOS mobile device compatibility.

Marketo Engage integrates with Vibes to manage and send personalized texts.

Winner: Pardot wins this round of comparison as it provides configurable settings and offers mobile templates.

Compare Pardot and Marketo Against Your Needs

Forms

Pardot collects information about website and landing page visitors and creates dependent fields for progressive profiling. You can customize form fields, use HTML to customize forms at a deeper level and add post-submission actions such as “thank you” content, “thank you” code and completion actions. Form Handlers, an in-built tool, sends data and pre-existing forms to Pardot.

With Marketo Engage, you can house forms on landing pages and embed them on any web page to collect data. It lets you create, approve and preview the forms, as well as rearrange or delete fields, add them from a dropdown menu and set whether to show or hide them based on visibility rules. While themes are available, you can also edit appearance through a custom CSS editor and customize forms by adding tooltips, fieldsets and more. Other capabilities include location-based language settings, progressive profiling, auto-fill for social media prospects, for preview and redirects to a thank you page or an external URL.

Winner: Marketo Engage is the winner of this comparison, as it captures additional data through forms and delivers more form-related features.

Personalization

Pardot delivers personalization through segmentation and targeted email content. However, unlike automation rules, segmentation rules do not run continuously. This allows you to sort, organize and classify the database into smaller groups based on common characteristics and to target each group with personalized messages.

Marketo Engage allows customization of content in two ways: segmentation and snippets. Segmentation lets you group people into distinct profiles by splitting them into two mutually exclusive groups such as reporting and dynamic content. Snippets can be used as dynamic content blocks on emails and landing pages.

Marketo offers customized content templates.

Winner: Marketo Engage wins this round as it offers complete customization capabilities.

Multivariate Landing Page Testing

Pardot runs multivariate tests designed to measure the effectiveness of different landing pages over a period of time so you can determine the top performer.

Marketo Engage does not offer multivariate testing but instead provides A/B testing for landing pages and email campaigns.

Winner: Pardot wins this round as it provides the capability to run more complex tests.

Compare Pardot and Marketo Against Your Needs

Social Media

Pardot allows scheduling of posts for social media handles and company pages. It also gathers insights about link clicks, replies, comments, retweets and likes. You can create social connectors based on your requirements. While you can add connectors to specific social media pages, keep in mind it’s limited to 25 connectors on your company’s Facebook page.

Marketo Engage allows sharing content with professional networks, friends and family using built-in social media sharing buttons and shareable videos. It also generates behavioral data through Facebook’s audience hub, Google, LinkedIn and other ad platforms for more personalized messages based on customer interests, intent, overall engagement and more. With polls, sweepstakes, referrals programs and more, you can engage existing customers more effectively.

Winner: Marketo Engage wins this comparison as it offers engagement with multiple social media platforms.

Lead Management

Pardot’s lead management system is divided into branches for lead and prospect management, enabling more targeted efforts. It includes automated lead nurturing through emails based on triggers, lead qualification, lead scoring and grading. You can build segments by creating dynamic lists and personalize message content based on contact information, demographics, past behavior and preferences. Lead grading is based on various factors and is assigned a letter grade, while lead scoring is based on factors such as page views, site searches, downloads and email clicks. Prospect scoring is assigned to a prospect turned customer and it also allows merging two or more prospects manually.

View complete customer lifecycle on a single dashboard in Pardot.

Marketo Engage offers a lead management solution that helps attract buyers and nurture them with personalized campaigns for sales teams to take over when they are ready to engage. It helps attract top-of-funnel traffic with inbound and outbound programs and converts leads through landing pages and progressive forms. It assists in developing and qualifying potential buyers before passing them to sales with relevant, personalized nurturing campaigns and scoring capabilities. Additionally, it offers integrations with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics to prioritize conversions with the leads. It tracks all the activities throughout the funnel and allows generating reports based on attribution models. Automated campaigns and story delivery across channels promote engagement.

Winner: Pardot wins for its ability to elaborate on leads and prospects for better understanding and clarity.

Marketing Automation

Pardot helps create meaningful connections, generate more pipelines and empower sales to close more deals. It includes lead generation, lead management, email marketing, sales alignment, ROI reporting and AI-based lead scoring (Pardot Einstein), campaign insights and behavioral scoring.

Marketo Engage automates lead and account-based activities and covers capabilities such as lead generation, segmentation, lead nurturing and scoring, relationship marketing, cross-sell and upsell, retention, ROI measurement and ABM. You can create flow actions, cloned workflows and smart campaigns with automatic internal workflows based on factors such as buyers, sales and marketing activity. It enables your business to listen, adapt to and serve customers with intelligence-based scoring and qualification models, all in real time.

Marketo automates customer and prospect streamlining and nurturing.

Winner: Marketo Engage wins this comparison as it offers more scope for automating marketing efforts.

Compare Pardot and Marketo Against Your Needs

SEO

Pardot empowers businesses with SEO capabilities to help find, categorize and display content on search engine results pages (SERPs). It offers a closer look at the SEO landscape, Google’s Hummingbird updates, a checklist to prevent you from missing important SEO steps and a worksheet to help keep track of keywords, page titles and more. The main attributes are keywords, content, title and meta description, URL, images, internal links, anchor texts and inbound links.

Marketo Engage uses a mix of strategies and techniques to increase site traffic by obtaining a high-ranking placement in SERP. It has an Optimization Score tool that measures every page on your site on a scale of 1 to 100, based on a compilation of dozens of best practices. A score of 70 or higher indicates a site that is well-optimized. You can also import keywords from a CSV file for SEO and to visualize keyword performance.

Winner: Marketo Engage wins this comparison as its attributes for SEO are non-distinguishable. Additionally, Marketo offers visualization of keyword performance.

BI Analytics

Pardot’s marketing analytics include visualization of data, dashboards, reporting and predictive models. Customizable dashboards and custom views make it easy to spot and share insights and streamline reporting through a single dashboard. Mobile apps let you access and share data on the go. Besides basic analytics capabilities, Pardot offers AI-driven marketing insights and attributes through a multi-touch attribution dashboard.

Marketo offers advanced analytics to analyze and visualize data, along with BI analytics for automated program data, ad-hoc reporting and visualizations, and sharing. It also allows the creation of custom, flexible ad-hoc reports and dashboards across every Marketo Engage program, account and person. You can create, export and share basic or advanced reports with infinite data dimensions and custom visualizations using a drag-and-drop pivot table. The system also includes a user interface and native data storage.

Winner: Marketo Engage wins this feature, as it shares reports and insights in various formats and provides advanced business analytics.

ROI Analytics

Pardot measures and tracks campaign performance and draws insights based on data to improve campaigns and increase marketing ROI, as well as provides a report of campaign ROI. You can choose and measure the metrics that are important to your business, as well as analyze trends and patterns in the data and apply them in campaigns. ROI reports can show the number of responses, the number of opportunities for a campaign, the number of won opportunities, the campaign cost, campaign ROI and the average cost per customer.

Marketo Engage tracks campaign performance, channel performance and business impacts to keep metrics revenue-focused and prioritize ROI. Email, social posts, metrics open rates, social interactions, sales lift, average order value and cost per action are among the things you can measure to gauge campaign performance. Channel performance is based on new acquisition counts, website conversions and non-performing channels that include channel optimization based on metrics such as incremental sales conversions, brand awareness and channel reach. Combining campaign and channel performance lets you determine business impact. The short and long-term impacts of the campaign are revenue growth, shareholder value and customer lifetime value.

Winner: Marketo Engage wins this round as it facilitates detailed campaign insights for better ROI.

Compare Pardot and Marketo Against Your Needs

Marketing Calendar

Pardot grants access to a consolidated marketing calendar that shows updates for scheduled emails, events via Eventbrite, social media posts and webinars that can be hosted through various platforms such as GoToWebinar, ReadyTalk or WebEx. You can choose an icon and background color to use for marketers, administrators and any custom added roles. The hovering option provides event details such as tickets sold, email click-through rate, webinar attendance and more. From there, you can click on the detailed screen of items or get reports.

With Marketo Engage, you can view and create entries in the marketing calendar with an overview of certain assets during a given time. Types of entries include basic, custom, email programs and smart campaigns, created directly in the calendar by using the program focus mode. It uses a presentation to project the team’s calendar views and goals on an HDTV.

Winner: Marketo Engage wins here by letting you create and view calendar entries, while Pardot allows only viewing.

Integrations

Pardot provides a suite of tools that help marketers and sales professionals create connections, generate pipelines and close more deals. It also offers bidirectional sync with connectors.

Marketo Engage uses its Connect Bridge platform to integrate with business partners. It also offers live and bidirectional sync, along with migration of data, documents and processes.

Winner: Pardot wins this comparison as Marketo uses a third-party platform Connect Bridge for integrating with other partners..

Who Wins?

Marketo Engage is the winner of the overall comparison. It hits a lot of key marketing automation areas and packs robust functionality into its package. Here’s the breakdown of features that stand out for each software:

Marketo Engage: email templates, forms, personalization, social media, marketing automation, SEO, BI analytics, ROI analytics and marketing calendar.

Pardot: email marketing, SMS marketing, multivariate landing page testing, lead management and integrations.

This Marketo vs Pardot comparison is an attempt to help you understand which software would better serve your business growth. However, just because Marketo won doesn’t necessarily make it the best choice for your company, and Pardot certainly has a lot to offer. Our marketing automation comparison report will give you deeper insight into dozens of solutions so you can see which software will be the right fit for your business. You can also get our price guide for an analysis of cost.

What are your thoughts about this Pardot vs Marketo comparison, and which platform do you think stands out? We’d be happy to know your thoughts in the comments section below.

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