The Switch from Marketo to Pardot

March 31, 2021
Pardot Migration

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The Switch from Marketo to Pardot

To help fellow B2B marketers that are thinking of switching from Marketo to Pardot, weighing the benefits, know they are making the switch, or have recently made the switch and are feeling lost, I spoke to Erik Eaton, Senior Manager, Marketing Operations at Hinge Health on the Pardot Life Hacks podcast to get his insights.

Erik is a former Marketo power user and joined Hinge Health using Pardot right from the start. He shared the differences between the two platforms, some of his favorite Pardot features, and how the Hinge Health team is utilizing the native integration for their Account Based Marketing campaigns!

Differences Between Marketo and Pardot

Native Salesforce Integration. A big aspect of Pardot that Erik has leaned into is Pardot’s native integration with Salesforce. His team is able to see multi touch attribution on their marketing campaigns across the entire lead to revenue journey all within salesforce, eliminating data silos. As all of the data lives in Salesforce he expressed that, “even if [team members] are not in sales and marketing, the entire team, ops, service, and leadership can see all of the campaigns, all the assets, and all the touches happening along the customer journey.”

“We’re able to tie back every single one of our marketing campaigns into revenue, which is super awesome! You can slice and dice them anyway you want, which is probably my favorite feature.” – Erik Eaton

Compiling and sharing data with reports in Marketo, in Erik’s experience, was less streamlined as the ability to do so was easier for the power users on hand, but difficult for when other team members and even leadership needed real-time insights.

Revenue Cycle Modeler. This is one of the core Marketo features that models the stages of the entire funnel. Marketers can see how many leads are generated and converted each day, along with their time spent in each stage, and use this for velocity reporting.

Erik mentioned that not having this feature was a shock at first, however, since this same data can be captured in Pardot and synced to Salesforce, it is a huge advantage for the team to have everything living in one system, with one source of truth, so that all velocity and ROI reporting can be done within Salesforce, rather than looking at separate RCM reports in Marketo.

Custom Redirects. Custom Redirects are a Pardot feature that allows marketers to use Pardot tracked URL’s to link people to a destination URL. This is a feature that Marketo does not have. Erik’s favorite part about this feature is the ability to have multiple completion actions executed whenever a prospect clicks the custom redirect. He can add the prospect to a certain campaign, update their source, enter them into an email nurture campaign, etc, making sure that the marketing operations engine continues, even with assets that are used on third party sites.

A great way Erik’s team is leveraging this feature internally is to keep track of what content their sales and service teams are using. They have an internal content hub in which they have attached custom redirects to, so his team has an idea of what topics are popular and can use this to help inform them of future content to create to enable their internal teams for success!

Smart Campaigns. Smart Campaigns are a Marketo feature that uses Smart Lists, Flow, and Scheduling to execute an automated campaign based on a certain segmented list. Erik mentioned that he does this same act with Pardot using Dynamic Lists and Automation Rules.

Dynamic Lists allow teams to create a list of their prospects based on certain criteria that automatically updates based on the defined rules. Automation Rules fire certain actions that the marketer decides based on when prospects match the criteria defined in the rule. After learning about Flow and Scheduling in Marketo, I realized that this can also be achieved in conjunction with Engagement Studio in Pardot, using wait steps and split choices. This feature is often only seen as an email nurture tool, but as Ben LaMothe mentioned during my conversation with him on Pardot Life Hacks, it can be used for so much more than just sending emails.

Lead Qualification. In Pardot, leads are rated based on two metrics: their Grade, demographic profile, and their Score, engagement activity. Marketo combines these two metrics into one score.

Erik explained how having the metrics combined into one score can cause issues with the sales team when a prospect is sent over as a lead with a really high score and it ends up being a student or a job prospect. He shared that using BANT criteria, determined with the sales team, to form the grading model for his company allows the team to prioritize their efforts and determine if an account makes sense for their team to go after, making sure that time is well spent.

Honorable Mentions. Erik shared that Pardot’s WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) feature eliminates a lot of the development need. This is a skill that he has, but he noted that for marketing teams that may not have as much creative skill depth as they need, this setup for design is super helpful. He likes the fact that the design aspect is right within the Pardot platform. He drops in his code, checks for any errors, and then from right there, if he is building an email template, he can test to see how it renders across email clients such as Outlook.

He elaborated that design in Pardot is super on rails making the experience much less daunting for marketers that may have to make some design changes themselves without the help of a developer. In 30 minutes Erik was able to train his marketing team on how to build landing pages in Pardot and in that time, the team members were able to create their own landing pages, making asset creation for the department far more scalable.

Account Based Marketing with Pardot

Aside from sharing the difference between the two platforms, Erik gave some examples of how his team is using Pardot in conjunction with Salesforce to execute their Account Based Marketing approach. With the data gathered in the CRM, combined with the marketing campaign insights from Pardot, the team was able to analyze and determine their ideal account profile and the typical marketing journey that they take.

With the Dynamic Content feature in Pardot, the team was able to create custom landing pages to dynamically change whole paragraphs, images, videos, and CTA’s based on certain field criteria, so that when a top account came to a landing page, all of the content was customized to them, providing a personalized experience.

Making the switch from one marketing automation platform to another can seem daunting at first, but with Pardot as Erik shared, “It’s pretty painless, everything is very intuitive.” His biggest recommendation to others making the switch is to align Salesforce and Pardot, focusing on the Salesforce Integration and enabling Connected Campaigns. This centralizes all the data into one place and gives teams the ability to use Salesforce reporting functionality on marketing campaigns to display revenue influenced across the entire customer journey.

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The Switch from Marketo to Pardot