There are plenty of marketing automation tools to choose from when it comes to CRM. But how do you choose the right one for your business, and where do you even start?
To make everything clear, let’s compare HubSpot CRM and Pardot.
HubSpot is a comprehensive automation marketing platform that offers all the tools a company needs to handle its email marketing, blogging, social networking, website analytics, and more. The marketing automation feature of the platform helps users create automated workflows, identify, cultivate, and analyze leads. HubSpot helps marketers integrate their communication database with third-party CRM systems, allowing sales to take the lead.
Pardot is a B2B marketing automation tool that makes it easy for businesses to enhance online marketing performance and match sales and marketing team objectives. It integrates with Salesforce tools, allowing companies to easily define and manage valuable marketing data across an intuitive, unified framework. Pardot also allows users to check A/B email campaigns to decide what really resonates with communication to create the perfect message.
HubSpot vs. Pardot: Lead Generation
The goal of HubSpot is to generate leads through Inbound Methodology. HubSpot has an interconnected range of tools created to direct individuals to their buyers. Some of the tools offer hosting websites, a blogging platform, email features, landing pages, workflows, personalized content, lead scoring, and A/B testing.
The aim is to provide relevant, helpful content that will lead visitors to submit their contact information to get advanced content. Other conversion tools include chatbots, pop-ups, fields for blog subscriptions, and more.
These tools are easy to use for smaller companies. As a company grows, there are possibilities to customize your website pages, blogs, landing pages, and make simple changes, like copy and colors.
Pardot also supports lead generation with similar tools such as landing pages, email, workflows, and A/B testing. Due to the fact that Pardot doesn’t host your main website, these tools aren’t tightly incorporated with the rest of the online presence of the company.
The landing pages are hosted separately from your main website on a subdomain or other third party domain. Tracking across domains is possible but it’s not so perfect in the age when user experience is for both marketers and those they’re trying to reach. This isn’t so great for the SEO of your website, compared to all of your content on the same domain.
HubSpot vs. Pardot: Social Media Management
Both Pardot and HubSpot have Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook for social media sharing and tracking. HubSpot offers Instagram scheduling and more integrations, but Pardot is enough to manage a basic presence on social media. Both channels will benefit from the incorporation of third parties, such as Hootsuite, to offer a more comprehensive solution for big social media promotions.
HubSpot vs. Pardot: Reports and Analytics
It’s simply not enough to just record what the customer buys. You have to know what other products they are interested in, predict their future decisions, and why they choose to buy what they buy.
Pardot can identify anonymous visitors to a website by recording each visitor’s IP addresses, giving sales teams a deeper understanding of visitor demographics. Reporting on Pardot’s Engagement shows how participants engage with emails, tracking, how many emails were opened, scrolled, read, forwarded, or even printed. With this targeted system, marketers can focus on sales-ready leads.
The comprehensive reporting features of Pardot allow marketers to monitor campaign results, ROI, consumer life cycles, and email metrics, to decide what catches the most attention and where workflows are short. Pardot can also communicate with marketing platforms like webinars and live events, to see how individual clients engage with videos and social media.
HubSpot offers options for identifying visits and contacts from landing pages. HubSpot can identify the activities that leads are taking, and we’re not just talking click-through-rate. Users can boost their lead generation by obtaining targeted customer information rather than excess data that you will have to comb through afterward.
HubSpot vs. Pardot: Digital Marketing
New traffic creation, enhanced brand recognition, and meeting the target audience, are all factors of a successful digital marketing campaign. If you are comparing two approaches for marketing automation, you have to make sure they have features and options which will help boost your digital marketing efforts.
HubSpot vs. Pardot: Search Marketing
SEO is key to every marketing effort you make. Hubspot comes with an SEO Suggestions feature that can be used on your website to recognize SEO problems. You can also use this feature to optimize your web pages more effectively and increase organic traffic. This feature is only available for the HubSpot Professional and Enterprise plans. Additionally, HubSpot integrates data from Google Search Console, while Pardot does not.
The Marketing search capabilities of Pardot are pretty similar. Several tools are available which allow you to recognize SEO problems and improve page performance. In addition, you can monitor the success of the keywords and links on Google for your website. Nevertheless, the amount of keywords that you can track is limited to your plan. The Growth plan allows for monitoring up to 100 keywords, while the Advanced plan allows for monitoring up to 1,000 keywords.
HubSpot vs. Pardot: A/B Testing
A/B testing is vital for your marketing campaigns to identify the most effective elements. The Marketing Hub of HubSpot and Pardot both have A/B testing possibilities. In its Professional and Enterprise plans, the Marketing Hub provides an A/B test feature that allows you to check CTAs, landing pages, and emails. Pardot also makes A/B testing with its Plus and Advanced plans for landing pages and emails.
HubSpot recently introduced Adaptive Testing in the form of a new A/B testing feature. Adaptive testing enables users to take advantage of AI and machine learning to automate their A/B tests, thus saving valuable time while also helping to improve conversion rates. Starting in 2020.
Pardot now offers A/B Email Toggling, making it easy to choose the best-performing email to keep on by switching off other versions. The new functionality also gives you more flexibility when you’re copying an A/B exam.
HubSpot vs. Pardot: Email Marketing
Nowadays, one of the oldest types of online marketing remains one of the most successful. There’s no better way to generate your leads than email marketing, and performance features are a must. Use the differences between HubSpot and Pardot to identify if the email marketing features and tracking tools are enough for your business.
The Bottom Line
A marketing automation tool is a software that provides a platform for marketers to automate activities that contribute to the greater good of the efficiency and effectiveness of a campaign.
Both HubSpot and Pardot are functional and popular, but use this comparative analysis to evaluate which one is best for you.
To read about more variants of marketing automation platforms, click here.
