Cheat sheet: Learning Marketo after Pardot, or vice-versa

My first set of marketing automation keys 🔑

A friend asked me the other day what was so special about marketing as an industry and what I loved the most. Without much thought, my answer was quite simply the speed of innovation.

Your first marketing gig fresh out of school is quite truthfully spent learning new tools that are usually several years ahead of the tech presented in most curriculums. Like many of you marketers, I was thrusted into learning a new software early in my career and was expected to train other people on it, deploy it, integrate it and extract real business value out of it.

For me, that new technology was marketing automation.

My mandate was:

“We are spending a lot of money on Pardot and we need to use it properly.”

At first, I wasn't a huge fan of Pardot. Mostly because I didn’t know anything about marketing automation or how to use Pardot. So I had to learn both, and quickly.

Challenge #1: Learning Pardot

In the early stages there were a few consultants who came and went with contradicting best practices. So much of my time was spent reading, watching videos and attending webinars.

The cool thing about any digital problem these days is that, if you’re having it, chances are someone else out there is struggling with a similar problem. My advice here is simple: check out communities for the popular tools in your martech stack. It’s the best way to find answers to your questions (and answers to questions you may not have even thought of asking).

In my case, both Marketo and Pardot have lively communities of passionate and helpful digital marketers who are creative and eager to share.

Over time, I slowly began to fall in love with Pardot and the general idea of marketing automation. I’d spend hours playing around with different ideas and workflows and eventually learned some of the more advanced functionalities.

I’m proud to say that when I left that company, the system was in much better shape. We had turned what we initially used as a batch-and-blast email tool into the company’s core engine for generating and nurturing leads.

Challenge #2: Learning Marketo

I joined Klipfolio’s industry-leading digital marketing team earlier this year to take ownership of their marketing automation system. The challenge for me was learning Pardot’s competitor and arch rival: Marketo.

Spoiler alert: I knew Marketo and Pardot were very comparable tools in terms of capabilities and workflows, but I had no idea how different they were in terms of UI.

Cheat sheet: Learning Marketo after Pardot, or vice-versa

I set out to build a cheat sheet for anyone looking to make the switch from either side. My article was published as an original piece on Inbound.org last week. The feedback so far has been amazing. Whether you are faced with the prospect of switching jobs or switching vendors, the real differences are broken down in my article on inbound here:

https://inbound.org/blog/marketo-vs-pardot-a-tactical-breakdown

🙌🏼 Big shout out to my boss Jonathan Taylor for inspiring me to write this, Cameron Conaway for being our world class editor and getting me published on inbound, Ahmed El-Zhein for the slick boxing illustration, my former boss Christie Thompson for her awesome feedback on my first draft and the 20+ marketing automation experts who donated their time to providing feedback.