As we dig deeper into Salesforce Marketing Cloud and what it can do for your business, you might be wondering how it compares to other marketing technologies out there. For companies evaluating a new marketing platform, Salesforce Marketing Cloud usually makes the shortlist alongside Marketo. With Adobe’s recent purchase of Marketo, the competition between the two products is even more heated, and your choice of one over the other may come down to a minimal feature or benefit.
We might be a little biased since we’re a Salesforce partner, but we wanted to provide you with all the information you’ll need when deciding between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Marketo. Let’s take a closer look at them both.
High-level Comparison
Both Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Marketo are marketing automation platforms (MAP’s) that allow marketers to customize, orchestrate, and automate marketing communications across channels and devices. They were each originally designed to serve a particular audience, Marketo for B2B and Marketing Cloud for B2C, however as time passes, the line between the audiences they work best for is blurring. You’ll need to consider your long-term marketing needs and strategy to determine which suits you better, regardless of your audience.
Generally speaking, Marketo is suitable for simpler marketing strategies and use cases that require quick set up and has a smaller support team. At the same time, the Marketing Cloud is the platform of choice for enterprise marketers with large data sets, complex omnichannel communication needs, and other Salesforce products (like CRM or Sales Cloud).
Feature Comparison
Here’s a closer look at a few of the specific features within each marketing automation platform.
Data Management
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is more data-driven than Marketo and can deal with complex data sets. It integrates with multiple external data sources and tables through filters or SQL. Marketers can create more complex use cases with it as it can handle more massive datasets at a time to meet segmentation needs, for example.
Marketo treats all data as “leads” and houses them in a single database table, which makes it easier to find data since it only has to look in one spot. Likewise, for basic segmentation, which is handled faster in a single database.
Campaign Management
Each platform handles multi-touch marketing campaign orchestration differently. Marketo uses engagement programs to set up “smart campaigns” that are triggered by activities, actions, or communication channels. They are useful from an automation perspective, and the Smart Campaign feature is flexible and easy enough to use without extra coding or help. However, it’s difficult to customize and visualize the overall customer journey as they don’t use a graphical UI that other platforms (like Marketing Cloud) use. Marketo is also heavily focused on email marketing channels, so if you want to add social or SMS channels, you must have a customized setup.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder feature is one of the best campaign planners out there because of its end-to-end journey visualization and sharing capabilities. You can also set up omnichannel marketing across a variety of channels (social, email, SMS, contact updates, and more) pretty easily, and track your progress against defined KPIs and other metrics without having to set up additional reports.
Content Management
Both platforms make it easy to manage content across all campaigns and channels, so you can re-use it whenever you need to. Tag and categorize content so it’s easily searchable and can be added to campaigns in a few clicks. They both offer WYSIWYG editors that meet every marketer’s needs for email and landing page creation, as well as a snippets feature where you can re-use HTML and dynamic content multiple times, reducing the need to recreate.
One area where Marketing Cloud excels is in the access to HTML or CSS code for emails and landing pages. Sometimes you just want to dig into the code to include all your branding and content as it’s faster for you. Marketo buries this ability a little further into their UI and often leads to extra clicks and work. Marketing Cloud, on the other hand, makes coding options more accessible, saving you time and effort if you prefer to look at the code.
User Experience
One area where the platforms are tied is in their user experience (UX). Both of them have interfaces that are a bit cumbersome to get used to, making it hard for new users to dive in and use the platforms. That said, both companies have been making significant investments in their UI and UX, which means they both should be getting easier to use as time goes on.
Marketo might have a slight advantage right now because it centralized all the features and functionality busy marketers need into a single area (“Marketing Activities”). In Marketing Cloud, these same features are scattered throughout the different modules and studios that make up the platform, increasing the time it takes to do the same work.
In Summary
Both marketing automation platforms, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Marketo, offer similar features that can help busy marketers manage their campaigns and strategies. Each one has pros and cons that make them good in specific situations, but until you take a hard look at your marketing needs and requirements, you won’t know which is best for you.
If you’re already a Salesforce customer or are curious about how Marketing Cloud can help your marketing team, reach out to us today. We’d love to chat with you to see how it could work for you.
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