What is Salesforce Pardot? A Complete Guide

This article delves into Salesforce Pardot, the premier marketing automation platform that is specifically crafted for B2B businesses to facilitate customer engagement, automate processes, and generate leads.

This article will talk about all of Pardot’s main features, benefits, best practices, and real-world uses, so you can use it to make your marketing plan better.

What Is Salesforce Pardot?

Salesforce Pardot is a marketing automation tool for companies that helps them find leads, keep in touch with them, and turn them into customers. It works perfectly with Salesforce CRM because it is part of the Salesforce platform.

This lets the sales and marketing teams work together by sharing real-time data. Pardot automates jobs that are done over and over again, like lead scoring, social media posting, and email campaigns.

That makes marketers focus on strategy. Features include landing pages, forms, and dynamic material that can be changed to fit different groups of people, making sure that each interaction is unique.

• Lead Scoring: Ranks prospects based on interactions like email clicks and website visits, helping sales teams identify high-potential leads.
• Advanced Analytics: Tracks campaign success, ROI, and customer journeys to support data-driven decision-making.
• Automation Workflows: Triggers actions such as follow-up emails or alerts for sales reps when leads reach certain engagement levels.
• Multi-Channel Campaigns: Enables marketing across email, social media, and paid ads while maintaining consistent messaging.
• Detailed Reporting: Monitors conversion rates and pipeline growth to align marketing efforts with revenue goals.
• Workflow Automation: Reduces manual tasks, accelerates sales cycles, and ensures timely, relevant content delivery.
• CRM Integration: Provides a unified view of customer interactions, helping businesses craft cohesive marketing and sales strategies.
• Scalability: Ideal for medium to large businesses, enabling seamless alignment between marketing and sales for sustainable growth.

What Is Pardot Salesforce Used For?

Email marketing: Single emails sent to groups of prospects, as well as automated email journeys. Email automation can be set up to happen based on certain actions, events, or times to “wait.” This works really well for lead development.

Forms: You can get information from new prospects or add to the records of current prospects. You can also ask for information to fill in blank fields on a prospect’s record.

Engagement History: Keep track of everything that leads do on your website, landing pages, and other online properties.

Segmentation: There are a number of ways to divide your prospect information into groups so that your marketing is more targeted.

Lead qualification: The Pardot score and grade together tell your sales team which leads to focus on.

Social media marketing: Post on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and then keep track of how many people interact with your posts. This will show up on a prospect’s engagement history if you know who they are and keep track of them in your Pardot database.

Search marketing: Track keywords, see SEO data for keywords, and keep an eye on how competitors are doing in SEO.

Marketing analytics:  Report on campaign performance and marketing influenced pipeline

Multi-channel marketing: Due to Salesforce’s large marketing product suite, it is possible to connect it to other products, such as digital ads (like Google Ads) and advanced website analytics.

What Is the Difference Between Pardot and Salesforce?

How Does Pardot Work With Salesforce? 

Salesforce and Pardot work together to make the most of all the info that each platform collects. You may have heard that “Pardot works closely with Salesforce.” Here are some examples:

• Bidirectional data sync: Pardot and Salesforce sync data both ways. Pardot sends new leads and engagement data to Salesforce, while Salesforce updates Pardot on lead status, sales progress, and purchases.

Most businesses neatly divide their funnels into three sections: the top, middle, and bottom.

• Top of funnel: Use strategies that get people to visit your website, like SEO, PPC, social media, and content marketing, to get leads.
• Middle of funnel: Use strategies that will get you the information you need to qualify prospects to connect, nurture, and qualify leads.
• Bottom of funnel: The opportunity lifecycle shows how a deal goes through different steps before it turns into a new customer.

Is Pardot Owned By Salesforce?

Yes, Salesforce owns Pardot. Pardot was bought by ExactTarget the year before Salesforce bought it as part of the $2.5B ExactTarget deal, which is now known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

All of Salesforce’s Pardot connections to other CRMs were shut down so that the Salesforce-Pardot connector could get even stronger.

Since it was bought by Salesforce, both Pardot and the Pardot Lightning App are now part of Salesforce.

Can Pardot Be Used For B2C?

Before Salesforce changed the name, Pardot was known as a B2B marketing automation tool for a long time. As I said in the last answer, Pardot works best for businesses with a “considered” sales cycle. This is usually the case for B2B sales, but it’s not always the case.

Yes, you can use Pardot for business-to-consumer marketing. B2C marketers will make money if they offer a valuable product or service and have a slow, careful sales cycle.

Is Pardot similar to MailChimp? 

At first glance, Pardot and MailChimp don’t seem to be very different from each other. But if you’ve used both, you know right away where each one does its best work.

MailChimp has always been used at The DRIP/Salesforceben.com, even when I was consulting for Pardot.

Is HubSpot Better Than Pardot? 

That’s a tough question! Each tool has its own strengths when it comes to HubSpot vs. Pardot. Both companies are coming up with new ideas quickly, so comparisons are useless after each release cycle. Of course, you can read views on sites like G2 and Capterra.

• HubSpot is known for being great at “top of funnel” marketing, especially when it comes to direct marketing.
• Pardot is all about making sales easier and tracking customers as they think about making a buy (i.e., ones that involve a sales rep).

Pardot doesn’t have a lot of built-in connections, but it does have some connectors. There are now Marketing App Extensions that can serve up integration-based activity data like any other activity data.

How Can I Learn Pardot?

There are many ways to learn Pardot, such as through self-directed study, training with a teacher, or official certifications that are accepted all over the world.

Options for free Pardot training include:

Trailhead:

This is where people who want to learn Salesforce should start. You can find Pardot Lightning App Basics, Pardot Email Sending, Pardot Email Marketing, Pardot Engagement Studio for Pardot Lightning App, and many more on the Pardot Trailhead!

Pardot Bootcamps:

Boot camps are events put together by the community where Pardot experts teach others what they know about a certain part of the certification test guide (Pardot Specialist, Pardot Consultant).
The people who teach at the boot camps share pieces of their own lives that will help your career in the long run.

Pardot blogs:

These websites can help you understand certain use cases or problems that your business might be having. There are lots more, like The DRIP and The Spot for Pardot.

Conclusion 

Pardot is a great choice for B2B marketing automation, especially if your sales teams use Salesforce CRM. It helps shorten sales cycles and improve lead conversion. The Salesforce CRM integration provides powerful features to boost efficiency and lead generation. However, for businesses with large databases (over 10K contacts), costs can be high.

In such cases, HubSpot Marketing Hub is a cost-effective alternative that integrates well with Salesforce CRM.

To maximize the benefits of these tools, consider Edureka’s Salesforce Training to enhance your team’s skills. If you’re exploring What is Salesforce, need a Salesforce Tutorial, or are preparing for Salesforce Interview Questions, investing in the right learning resources can help you get the most out of these platforms.

FAQs 

What is Pardot in Salesforce?

Pardot is Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation tool that helps businesses generate leads, nurture prospects, and align marketing with sales through automation, email campaigns, lead scoring, and analytics.

What is the difference between Salesforce and Salesforce Pardot?

Salesforce is a CRM platform for managing sales, customer data, and support, while Pardot is a marketing automation tool within Salesforce that focuses on lead generation, nurturing, and campaign automation.

What is Pardot called now?

Pardot is now called Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

How do Salesforce and Pardot work together?

Salesforce and Pardot work together by syncing lead and contact data, allowing marketing to generate and nurture leads while sales tracks and converts them within Salesforce CRM.