What Is the Difference Between Marketo Engage and Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Did you know selecting the right marketing automation platform can boost your leads by 34% and improve lead quality by 33%? In the competitive field of marketing, Marketo Engage and Salesforce Marketing Cloud shine with their distinct features and benefits. 

This article will compare the key differences between Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, their main functions, pricing, and integration abilities. By the end, you’ll know which platform can best help you boost your marketing results.

What’s Marketo Engage?

Marketo Engage (formerly known as just Marketo) is an marketing automation platform that is now part of Adobe’s Experience Cloud. Marketo Engage is a tool used by businesses to automate and manage various marketing tasks. Here’s a deeper dive into its key features.

• Marketing automation. This core feature lets you automate repetitive marketing tasks across various channels like email, social media, and web. You can create drip campaigns, nurture leads with targeted content, and personalize the customer journey.
• Lead management. Marketo helps you capture leads through landing pages and forms, then score and qualify them based on their behavior and interaction with your marketing content. This allows you to prioritize high-quality leads for your sales team.
• Email marketing. Design, send, and track email campaigns with ease. Marketo offers drag-and-drop email builders, A/B testing capabilities, and email marketing automation to deliver targeted messages to the right audience at the right time.

• Personalization. Deliver a unique experience to each customer by personalizing content, emails, and landing pages based on their interests and behavior. This increases engagement and conversion rates.
• Analytics and reporting. Track the performance of your marketing campaigns across various channels. Marketo provides detailed reports and analytics to measure ROI, identify what’s working, and optimize your marketing efforts.
• Account-based marketing (ABM). Focus marketing efforts on high-value target accounts. Marketo allows you to create targeted campaigns, identify key decision-makers, and personalize the buyer journey for each account.
• Integration. Marketo integrates with various CRM systems like Salesforce and marketing tools, allowing for a unified view of your marketing and sales data.

Discover more possibilities with Salesforce! Explore our article on the 15 types of Salesforce Clouds.

What’s Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive digital marketing platform that enables companies to create, automate, and personalize their customer journeys across multiple channels. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, businesses can leverage the power of customer data to deliver relevant and timely messages, driving engagement and loyalty.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an AI-powered tool within the Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem that has the following features.

• Cross-channel marketing. Engage with your audience through diverse mediums including email, mobile, social media, and digital advertising, all from a single integrated platform.
• Journey Builder. Employ this intuitive drag-and-drop interface to create automated customer pathways that respond to individual behaviors and preferences across multiple channels.
• Email Studio. Design, customize, and dispatch mass marketing emails with sophisticated segmentation and automation tools at your disposal.
• Data Management Platform (DMP). Consolidate data from multiple sources to achieve a unified view of your customers, enabling personalized interactions across different channels.
• Social Studio. Manage your social media presence, schedule posts, engage with followers, and measure social media performance.
• Mobile Studio. Connect with your audience via text messaging, push notifications on mobile devices, and messages within apps.
• Advertising Studio. Coordinate and monitor your advertising efforts across platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads, ensuring coherence in your digital marketing strategy.
• Interaction Studio. Customize the online experience for your site visitors by showcasing content and offers specifically targeted to their actions and interests.
• Real-time analytics and reporting. Evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts across various channels, extracting insights that can refine and enhance your marketing approaches.

Want to know more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Read our complete guide. 

Comparing Marketo Engage and Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are leading solutions in marketing automation, each equipped with powerful features to optimize marketing strategies and audience engagement for different business types. Understanding their distinct strengths is essential for selecting the platform that aligns with a company’s specific marketing goals.

Understanding the Target Market

• For B2B Companies. Marketo shines with its lead nurturing capabilities and the automation of intricate campaigns, making it perfect for businesses focused on detailed lead management and conversion.

• For B2C Companies. Salesforce Marketing Cloud excels in high-volume email marketing and complex customer segmentation. It’s designed to craft personalized customer experiences at scale, though it’s also a strong contender for B2B businesses.

Navigating Data Management

• Marketo’s Simplicity. Offers a straightforward data model centered around a lead database, ideal for smaller teams seeking ease in segmentation and data management without compromising on automation.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Flexibility. Boasts a sophisticated data model for greater customization and complex data handling, suited for organizations with the expertise to leverage detailed customer data.

Ease of Use

• Marketo’s Learning Curve. Features advanced customization and automation capabilities that may require a deeper learning investment but reward with significant marketing depth.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s User-Friendliness. Known for its accessible interface, it’s especially convenient for users familiar with Salesforce’s ecosystem, offering a seamless marketing automation experience.

Other Considerations

• Customization and Reporting with Marketo. Stands out for its extensive customization and powerful analytics, providing deep insights into campaign effectiveness and ROI.
• Integration Capabilities of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Integrates flawlessly with Salesforce’s suite, including CRM, to create a cohesive sales and marketing management platform, offering a substantial benefit to Salesforce-centric organizations.

Thinking about implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Reach out to our team for expert guidance and assistance.

Pricing Structure: Marketo Engage vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Understanding how Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud price their services is key for companies looking to invest in marketing automation. Both offer various pricing options to suit different business needs, but their pricing methods are distinct.

Marketo’s pricing is structured around different tiers, catering to the size and scope of a company’s marketing efforts. These tiers are designed to scale with your business, starting from basic packages suitable for smaller teams and extending to more advanced offerings that support extensive marketing operations with advanced automation and analytics capabilities. Marketo emphasizes flexibility in its pricing, aiming to provide options that grow with your company’s marketing maturity.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud, on the other hand, offers a customizable pricing model based on the specific features and capabilities each business requires. This means that the cost can vary significantly depending on the scale of your marketing campaigns and the depth of customization needed. Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s approach allows companies to tailor their package to their exact needs, potentially offering a more precise fit for businesses with specific requirements.

You might be also interested to look at the difference between Pardot and Marketing Cloud? Check it out in our recent article.

Choosing the Right Platform for Your Business

Let’s summarize everything and find out when one or another platform should be your fit:

When to choose Marketo:

• Your business prioritizes lead management and email marketing.
• You need advanced tools for campaign creation, automation, and personalization.
• You aim to streamline lead processes and align marketing with sales to boost revenue.
• Your marketing strategy is heavily centered around email communications.

When to Choose Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

• You want to integrate marketing activities with CRM data for a unified view.
• Personalized marketing and sales insights are crucial for your strategy.
• You seek advanced social media and analytics tools for engagement and data-driven decisions.
• Your goal is to blend marketing with sales data and leverage social media strategically.

Unlock the potential of AI in your CRM! Discover the best ways to use ChatGPT in Salesforce by reading our insightful article.

Final Thoughts on Marketo Engage vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Deciding on the right marketing automation tool is critical, with Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud being top contenders. Each platform offers distinct advantages; Marketo is celebrated for its intuitive use and effective lead management, while Salesforce Marketing Cloud is renowned for its integration capabilities within the Salesforce ecosystem, offering a holistic view of customer interactions.

Choosing between Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud involves more than comparing features; it’s about scalability, customization, and support. Through demos, trials, and consultations with experts, businesses can find a platform that not only meets their current needs but also supports future growth. 

Synebo, a Salesforce development partnert, offers customized Salesforce Marketing Cloud solutions to boost your marketing efforts. Contact us to see how we can help your business thrive.