Likelihood to Recommend Metadata is well suited when you have a really large ad budget (>50k per month at least). This is because the power of metadata lies in the ability to quickly set up and run a large number of experiments (combinations of channel, audience, creative, and conversion assets). To evaluate these variations, all of them need a large number of impressions, clicks, and conversions to be statistically relevant. If your budget is smaller, you will either have a very small number of experiments (not fully utilizing the power of metadata), or your experiments will not have enough clicks to make informed decisions. We had expected a better explanation of this from metadata before signing up.
Read full review Salesforce Marketing Cloud does an excellent job at collecting and storing leads. Once the leads are qualified by workflows and automations established against your qualifiers, you can begin to segment, target, send communication, and track the efficacy of your campaigns. Being that Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an extension of Salesforce CRM, there is little work that needs to be done to ensure that your SQL are migrated to your CRM once they are ready to do so. The seamlessness between the two systems is paramount to the success of our organization.
Read full review Pros Best paid ops tool I've ever used (and I've used a lot): we can launch a new LinkedIn & Facebook campaign in minutes. Lead gen ops: no more dealing with broken zapier zaps, we are able to automate pushing native lead gen leads directly to our CRM. Attribution: see influenced & triggered opportunities/CW deals Multivariate testing: Metadata scales audience, ad, creative testing so you learn what performs much faster than manual process Read full review Filter relevant content so you can priorize those that are more relevant and resolve it first Measure the traffic in the different social networks, as well as the response rate, average response time and other relevant metrics Configure automation rules to order the work of those who must interact with the customer Read full review Cons If you don't have a large budget and audience it's hard to meaningfully optimize. If I have 4 ad creatives, to 2 audience groups on FB and LinkedIn, that creates 16 experiments, each of which needs an ample enough budget, say $40/day, that's now $640 per day or $19K per month. Limited ability to edit ads after they've been launched. You usually have to stop the ad, clone it, and launch a new campaign. Can't add new ads to existing campaigns which limits the ability to optimize. If I start an MD campaign with 4 ads, and in a few weeks we see that one is working well and the other 2 are not performing, I can pause those (or it can autopause by rules), but I can't add 2 more new creatives to the mix against the high performer. I'd have to either stop the high performer, and recreate it in a new campaign (losing likes and comments), OR - leave the high performer in the first campaign, and create. a second campaign with the new ones, which will only optimize against each other. Limited to a single conversion event on a landing page. I'm not able to choose either a Demo Request OR a Sign-Up conversion, I can only choose one. Google search ads are doable but aren't necessarily more feature-rich or easy-to use than native, so there's no value added to doing it through Metadata in my opinion aside from unifying ad reporting. Read full review The email builder does not offer any way to catch/check bugs across different email service providers Creating SQL is not as easy as drag-and-drop; a lot of technical knowledge is required Salesforce Marketing Cloud is sold as a marketing tool, but to be honest, you need a LOT of technical IT support to run the tool Einstein metrics are across the board; if you have multiple audiences in one instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud you can't segment the data. Read full review Likelihood to Renew As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our
Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch
Read full review Usability You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.
Read full review Performance Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.
Read full review Support Rating Metadata's customer support is a difference-maker! They really do care how well your campaigns perform and will help you improve them.
Andrew Racine Senior Director, Demand Generation and Digital Marketing
Read full review They're fast and knowledgeable. You will always know what's the status of your request and they usually follow up with phone calls to ask you questions or provide updates. Sometimes it takes them a couple of days to investigate, especially if you have custom "situations" like my company usually does but at least they are very good at managing time expectations.
Bogdan Enache Digital Marketing Lead & SalesForce Marketing Cloud Administrator
Read full review In-Person Training The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.
Read full review Online Training Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.
Read full review Implementation Rating From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We chose [Metadata.io] because it was a smaller company and could get more personalized attention. The price was better and they seemed more eager to support us. The feature set was what we were looking for and not more - it was exactly as robust as we needed it to be. Didn't want to pay for features we weren't going to use.
Read full review Salesforce Marketing Cloud stands out for its comprehensive features, scalability, and seamless integration capabilities. Compared to other platforms, its unified suite of tools for email, social media, mobile, and advertising enables streamlined cross-channel campaign management and personalized marketing at scale. We chose Marketing Cloud for its industry leadership, robust ecosystem, and tight integration with
Salesforce CRM, allowing us to deliver exceptional marketing solutions and drive measurable results for our clients efficiently.
Read full review Scalability Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps create profiles for each subscriber. The Contact Builder feature stores information about every subscriber, including whether they're an active customer, their purchase history from the last year, and their email engagement metrics. It also identifies the likelihood of a subscriber churning, aiding in creating personalized campaigns to boost company revenue.
Read full review Return on Investment Huge decrease in CPLs, CPMQL and Cost Per Opportunity Big improvement in MQL to SQL rates 90%+ of our leads from paid social now have valid business emails, before it was like 30% Saving us hundreds of hours over the course of the next year doing daily manual optimization and budget management tasks for us so we can focus on strategy and testing new things Read full review Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to more efficiently reach out to a higher number of prospects. Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to nimbly communicate important messages in a timely fashion to facilitate conversion. Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to track who is opening our messages so that we can stop sending to those not interested and focus on the most engaged audiences. Read full review ScreenShots Salesforce Marketing Cloud Screenshots