What Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Means for Consultancies

I’m writing this blog as a farewell to Pardot and to recognise that a global movement has changed course. In other words, it’s a somewhat historic moment in the tech and automation space right now. I might sound like I’m exaggerating but there’s a lot of people who would agree with me on this.

Pardot has changed its name to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’. 

Whilst I normally write about technical features, strategy and how you can use Pardot in your own business, this blog is focused on the seemingly kneejerk name change and how it impacts the consultancies and freelancers among us! 

Forgive me, as I will shamelessly be using Pardot and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement interchangeably and probably sometimes referring to MCAE in different ways. They all mean Pardot and I’ll explain why at the end.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement doesn’t have a ring to it

Beyonce is right. If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it.

Pardot was a cool name and subsequently, lots of consultants and consultancies aligned with this name. They purchased domain names that had Pardot’ in the domain name, Twitter handles included Pardot, and some consultants have entire websites focused around the word Pardot *cough* MarCloud *cough*. Even one of our friends in the US has a well known blog that rhymes with Pardot. 

What I’m saying is, this change impacts a lot.

Today onwards, it’s Marketing Cloud Account Engagement which everyone will agree is not catchy. I don’t even know what rhymes with this?!

I have a list of synonyms and other ways to say it, pick your favourite: 

• MCAE
• MarCloud Account Engagement 
• MarCloud AE (although, this is actually a job title in Salesforce)
• MarCloud Acc-Engage
• MC Account Engagement
• Account Engagement

I enjoy the MarCloud ones. Am I biased? Maybe. Maybe not. It does sound better on the ears, you must admit… 

Say goodbye to short SEO titles

The brand keyword has gotten longer, which isn’t completely bad because it could help to weed out those annoying instances of people calling it Salesforce Pardot Cloud’ or Pardot Marketing Automation’. However, fitting the full name in an  SEO title is now a lot trickier!

Look at this, it’s so long. I CAN’T BE CLEVER WITH THIS!

Google Ads is about to get more competitive

MarCloud already gets hammered with PPC ads from our competitors (I name no names, I’ve learnt my lesson) because apparently, Marketing Cloud sounds like MarCloud… I like to think our competitors are looking at us like this right now:

If you search for MarCloud Consulting, I wish your fingers good luck because you will need to scroll down past ads for a while. 

My point is, in terms of Google Ads the brand term pardot’ has always been moderately competitive but with all agencies and consultants now bidding on the same marketing cloud’ terms for all products, we could be spending more overall.

Certifications will be updated, eventually

This is quite an important one because a lot of people’s livelihoods could be impacted. For example, if you are a certified Pardot consultant (like I am) you will now be referred to as a Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Consultant. 

That’s some title. And it’s not one that’s instantly recognisable to users - at least, not for some time yet.

On top of this, Pardot and Marketing Cloud are quite different. Someone who knows Pardot, doesn't necessarily know Marketing Cloud and vice versa. I'm certified in both but it was actually quite hard for me to become a Marketing Cloud consultant, the exam is really tough. Recruiters now have a harder time because they're looking for someone who knows ‘Marketing Cloud' but which one? If they get a Marketing Cloud Account Engagement consultant who doesn't know Marketing Cloud Engagement, someone is going to look silly…

It’s why blogs like these are quite important because they help to educate clients in the fact that Pardot hasn’t changed, it just has a new skin right now. That skin is Account Engagement. 

Predicting where it’s all going to go

There’s no announcement on this currently but I do have an idea. Here’s my logic.

Pardot already got the Pardot-in-Lightning app which brought the platform closer to Sales Cloud CRM. There’s loads going on here especially around optimising Business Unit functionality and architecture. So, it makes no technical sense to change this and move Pardot as a module in Marketing Cloud.

Which leads me to believe that Marketing Cloud as a platform will take the same direction and become more closely aligned with Sales Cloud CRM. After all, this really would make it easier to see a single view of the customer and ultimately becomes a unified system.

I really think there will be a point where you have one single login which an admin can easily provide to grant access to MCAE, Engagement, certain areas of Sales Cloud, Advertising and so on. 

To clarify, I think Pardot / Marketing Cloud Account Engagement will sit under Marketing Cloud as a product but the two will become separate apps within Sales Cloud CRM. 

It’s not a particularly wild prediction if I’m honest and you might read this and think thanks for pointing out the obvious Tom’. 

A little MarCloud fun fact

Did you know that I almost called MarCloud Brickroad Consulting’? I paid a freelancer £20 to come up with a bunch of names because I assumed I wasn’t creative enough to think of any. 

I wish I kept the list because some of the options were so bad. Brickroad was the best of a bad bunch and when I told my parents it went like this: 

Tom: I’ve got a name for my consultancy at last! 

Parents: What is it?

Tom: Brickroad Consulting

Parents: … Why?

Tom: umm… because of the yellow brick road and I help clients get to their end goal.

Parents:

Parents:

Parents: *laugh out loud* You can’t call it that. 

Tom: Yeah, good point. 

I sat back down and because I had a bit of experience working in fintech (financial technology) I had this lightning bolt moment… Marketing Cloud… Mar… Cloud… MarCloud! 

That’s genuinely how it happened. And now I am very happy with that decision. Thank you parents. They’re SEO geniuses.

Summary

The purpose of this blog is not to be negative about the new Marketing Cloud Account Engagement name. I absolutely understand the reasons Salesforce have made the change and I do hope that it will achieve their goals and help users in the long-run. It’s just that from a consultancy point of view, the change presents many challenges we need to be aware of and act on, as best we can!

For example, after years of publishing content targeted at pardot’ search terms, we’re pivoting to target account engagement’ and similar terms as a priority. Did I write this very blog to help with ranking for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement keywords? 

Yes, I did. And I do not apologise. 

While we scramble to update our website structure and page content to reflect the update, get in touch if you need a hand with any of the Marketing Cloud products, we do it all.

That sounds so much smoother, right? We are simply a Marketing Cloud Consultancy now. Every cloud has a silver lining.