HubSpot Vs. Marketo Vs. Pardot Vs. Eloqua – A Marketing Automation Platform Analysis

Marketing automation is more than just “guided email”. It’s a complicated system of lifecycle marketing assistance that brings together concepts such as keyword handling, lead generation, and email marketing customization to drive customers toward conversions. 

While you’ve heard enough about marketing automation technology, it’s about deciding which marketing automation platform to purchase when you have a plethora of choices available in the market.

It’s like you’re in a candy shop, and there are ten new flavors of your favorite candy, but you know only a handful can put a spin on your taste buds!

To help you get the right marketing automation platform for your business, here are our choices that make a good case as lifecycle marketing automation solutions.

HubSpot Marketing Automation

The HubSpot marketing automation platform is probably one of the most powerful and popular tools in terms of features and customer sentiment. 

The platform offers all its features and functions through a single system with CRM, sales, and customer service applications available as free add-ons. Their main product -- the Marketing Hub is available in four price tiers: Free, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise. 

Marketing automation with HubSpot is as easy as it can get--you get a number of pre-built integrations compatible with several business apps. And these integrations are not just limited to emails but also to the rest of the HubSpot digital marketing services like analytics, reporting, PPC, and more. 

Top HubSpot Features 

1. Targeted SEO Campaigns

The platform lets you craft specific SEO campaigns with full SEO optimization through keyword selection and analysis support. 

With a targeted outreach, you get attention from the right customers. 

2. Master Ads

Master Ads is a form of guided result to advertising, with color-coded tools to identify the most valuable parts of the marketing campaign. It also offers lead scoring that locates top prospects for salespeople.

3. Proprietary Marketing Database

HubSpot uses a proprietary marketing database that helps you to set up automated workflows and perform guided analytics. 

Plus, the platform automatically enriches your contact list with useful information such as location, industry, and company size, from a database of over 20 million companies.  

Marketo Marketing Automation

If HubSpot is more suitable for companies with basic marketing requirements, then Marketo is the right product for companies with more complex marketing requirements. 

The Marketo marketing automation solution offers diverse tools and resources to help you handle leads, SEO, analytics intake, and more.

Marketo’s system has five main modules: lead management, email marketing, consumer marketing, customer base marketing, and mobile marketing. All five modules can be purchased separately, bundled, or purchased together in the form of an integrated platform.

Top Marketo Features

1. Robust Mobile Tools

Successful marketers today require more than one device to access data, process analytics, and monitor marketing campaigns. 

Marketo Moments is a mobile application that provides access to performance updates on the go.

You can check the performance of your email campaigns and find the email versions best working for your business. 

2. Precise A/B Email Testing

Probably one of the strongest features of Marketo—A/B testing lets you test different parts of the outbound email. By experimenting with multiple subject lines, email-from addresses, and data & time of sending emails, you get to know which variant suits you the best. 

This will help you increase conversions and drive better results. 

Read More: How To Choose The Right Marketo Consulting Partner

3. Efficient Engagement Engine

The Engagement Engine can learn behaviors by analyzing what a prospect is doing on a particular stream. 

It enables you to move buyers across streams to better serve relevant content and increase the frequency of their engagement.

4. Marketo Certified Expert 

The Marketo Certified Expert program certifies a person to have the necessary skills to validate competency, expertise, and operational knowledge in the broad use of Marketo.

The Marketo expert certification serves as a key differentiator when choosing the right candidate to manage an automation campaign. While many may claim to have marketing automation or Marketo implementation experience, it’s the certification that separates the elite from the rest.

Pardot Marketing Automation

Pardot offers a deep CRM integration with various CRM’s; however, it’s most powerful when used with Salesforce.

When the two systems are used together, you can see Pardot data directly within the CRM and can add to Pardot Lists, and send marketing emails using Pardot templates.

With Salesforce Pardot marketing automation, you can increase the overall value and impact of your content along with improving the conversion rates associated with leads. 

To make your Pardot implementation a success, create a resource plan for your team to run operations and scale up when the right time comes. Remember, even if you expect the campaigns to run in an automated way, you still need to orchestrate the Pardot marketing automation process. 

Top Pardot Features

1. Easy Navigation

Pardot understands the importance of easy and seamless navigation and provides the capability to create a campaign, email form, list, and more directly from the folder. 

The Pardot email marketing tools are equipped with improved workflows that help you accomplish tasks in an easier and quicker way. 

2. Marketer-Friendly

Pardot is a great platform that gives you the ability to edit template drafts within the editor tab without looking at the HTML section.

If you don’t have any HTML or CSS experience, you can easily use the interface and customize your campaign.

3. Effective Reporting

Pardot has an immense amount of resources when it comes to marketing assets, connected apps, prospect lifecycle, and campaigns. 

For efficient email marketing with Pardot, you can use the List Email Reports to get a visual breakdown of the data related to your email marketing campaign. It helps you analyze how well your sent emails have been performing.

Eloqua

Eloqua is part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud product. 

Though it lacks some of the basic marketing automation features that make it a little less robust than HubSpot and Marketo, its connection with Oracle can make sense for your tech strategy.

Top Eloqua Features

1. Powerful Targeting and Segmentation Tools

Eloqua allows marketers to track the entire customer’s journey across multiple channels within the interface. 

By tracking all the customer touchpoints, you get a clearer picture of the target customer, which allows you to effectively personalize further marketing.

2. Dynamic Content Builders

With dynamic content builders, you can send personalized content to different segments all within a single send.

Even though many users love this feature, due to the lack of clickthrough tracking for dynamic emails, it’s only partially effective.

3. Visual Cross-Channel Workflows

Eloqua’s visual cross-channel workflows allow you to build comprehensive marketing campaigns without any knowledge of coding. 

You can easily pause and update your ongoing campaigns without altering the workflow. It also allows better segmentation and complete control of your campaign. 

HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Or Eloqua—The Takeaway

Companies prefer excellent user experience over extra features when it comes to choosing the right marketing automation platform.

Both HubSpot and Marketo are highly reviewed and rated with a proven track record, while Pardot and Eloqua provide powerful integration capability when used with Salesforce and Oracle, respectively.

To know more about marketing automation platforms, or to get comprehensive HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, or Pardot consulting services, connect with Growth Natives and turbo-charge your marketing efforts.