Demystify Marketing Automation with Pardot

The number of players in the marketing automation tools’ market has been and still is increasing. There are several solutions to choose from, all of them claiming to help you automate tasks, personalize communication, get customer insights and, ultimately, generate more leads and close more deals. In this article, however, we will focus on a single yet powerful solution: Pardot, the Salesforce B2B marketing automation tool.

Pardot has been designed to assist you in your lead qualification and nurturing strategy, so as to help you measure the ROI of your marketing efforts. Demystify with us what marketing automation can actually do for you!

Tracking visitors and prospects

Nowadays, customers demand the more and more personalized content and messages, along with fast and automated responses. In order to give them what they want, you need to have information about your prospects. For that purpose, Pardot has made available to you an amazing tracking functionality.

Pardot has a tracking code that you can place in your marketing assets to track your prospect’s activity. You can use it in several contexts: when prospects are interacting with your website, landing pages, emails, videos, etc. As long as the tracking code is in the asset, you will be able to see, for example, which type of content your prospects like the most and which marketing initiatives drive the highest engagement.

Deliver a personalized experience with Dynamic Content

Who would not love to be like Amazon? Undoubtedly, Amazon rocks at facing a world in which consumers expect tailored digital experiences and challenge businesses ability to drive engagement. But how did Amazon make it? The answer lies on “dynamic content tools”. By analyzing the interaction between prospects and tracked marketing assets, you can develop great dynamic content.

By defining specific criteria, you can, in the same email, landing page, or website show a different message, image or CTA, depending on the information you have about the prospect. Interesting, relevant content is a top priority in nowadays communication standards. Pardot gives you a powerful head start on this.

Progressive profiling and marketing automation

But you might be wondering now… To personalize messages, I need to have some more information about my prospects. Where they click on or what they read in my marketing assets is no longer enough. So, marketers usually collect information with the help of forms. However, customers hate filling out huge forms each time they want to access gated content. Yet, keeping your forms short can be a challenge. So, what to do?

The way to solve this issue: Progressive profiling with Pardot forms, your prospects can complete their profile in baby steps. In fact, the short Pardot forms will only request information they haven’t filled out yet, until their profile is complete.

Nurture leads with drip marketing automated campaigns

When you have relevant information about your prospects’ interests, you want to send them personalize messages on that content. Yet, this can be quite hard! Unless, of course, you have a solid engagement program feature.

Now, you can prepare a set of content considering the content and frequency preferences of your leads, before contacting them. This way, you can also support them as they move along their own life cycle.

Depending on the actions or specific timelines, the drip campaigns are a smart way to interact with your prospects. These campaigns ensure your content stays relevant and your emails don’t end up in spam boxes.

A/B Email Testing with marketing automation

But, what if you have no idea about what your prospects enjoy or what drives more engagement? A/B testing allows you to run tests comparing Email A to Email B, Landing Page A to Landing Page B, Form A to Form B, or even images. A best practice is to test only one hypothesis at a time. This step by step approach allows you to get more accurate results on what improves your conversion rates and to which extent.

This feature is particularly used in Pardot emails, in which you can test anything, from subject lines, to different CTA’s, images, or even email content. Just formulate your hypothesis and test it!

Scoring and Grading with marketing automation

While you are delighting prospects with drip campaigns, make sure you take enough time to start identifying which leads are to be converted. Pardot Grading grades your prospects, according to their profile and to how good of a fit they are to your company. It also tells you how your offerings fit their needs. With this grading system, you start your prospects based on their their profile. Then, using scoring, you can score prospects based on their actions and engagement with your product offerings and marketing assets among digital channels.

Pardot scores your prospects based on different categories, allowing you to give a distinct score for each product or service you sell. For instance, you may use Pardot in order to understand which of your offer interests your prospects the most. This way, you can provide them with the solution that best suits their needs.

Automated Lead Assignment

Well, now you are equipped with all the tools you need to perfectly nurture your leads. So, what to do when they reach the end of the funnel with a great score and grade? Well, when that happens, is time for some sales team’s magic.

Providing ready to go leads to a sales person can be a complex and tedious task, subject to many errors. So, let’s overcome this issue.

Start by defining some solid criteria to segment leads (for example, by score, by region or product interest). After doing this, automation rules in Pardot will assign and notify sales representatives of incoming leads they should contact. Pardot assures you assign the right leads to the right sales representative. Finally, push it to the next level, and use a powerful CRM combined with Pardot. Coupling the two, your sales people will be given all the relevant data about the lead (coming from Pardot), so as to establish better connections with qualified leads.

Pardot Campaign Influence

Despite Pardot and Salesforce reporting tools, measuring the impact of your marketing campaigns is not always easy, especially when you try to personalize a bit more your attribution models. So, Pardot has come up with functionality to connect Pardot and Salesforce campaigns, allowing us to use Salesforce’s campaign influence model with Pardot campaign data.

This way, you can use Salesforce’s default attribution models, or even create your own model to credit revenue to your marketing campaigns, understand which campaigns had the highest impact in lead conversion and opportunity conversion. With this functionality, it’s easier to understand the multiple touch-points that influence conversion and the ROI of your marketing campaigns. The default models credit revenue to campaigns based on leads’ First Touch, Last Touch, and Even Distribution (all touches are considered equal), within the opportunity records in Salesforce.

You need to use Contact Roles in Opportunities to guarantee that Salesforce can track the contacts in an opportunity to the campaigns that impacted that same contact or a lead that has became that contact. At the end of the day, it helps you better understanding effectiveness across all campaign initiatives!
P.S.: Bare in mind that to have this functionality you must have “Connected campaigns” enabled and then activate the “campaign influence” module.

Reporting (B2B Marketing Analytics)

Reporting allows marketers to analyze results from the current strategy, validating marketing initiatives and campaigns, and understanding what generated the highest and lowest results. This task becomes particularly useful when you want to have the big picture and justify your ROI. It becomes even more important when you are searching for insights before taking the next steps to improve your results.

With Pardot B2B Marketing Analytics, you can customize your reports, so that they give you the information you need, the way you need it. Relying on Salesforce Einstein to support it, Pardot B2B Marketing Analytics presents you multi-attribution dashboards that show which channels and campaigns have the highest impact in performance, revenue generation and ROI. This ends up being quite important when it comes to allocating your budget through different channels and initiatives

Final Remarks on Marketing Automation with Pardot

Pardot is a rather strong tool. It helps leading and empowering marketers through their marketing automation journey. It becomes even stronger when integrated with Salesforce CRM and other connectors, such as Google Ads, Google Analytics or Social network connectors. In fact, through integration of the many, you will be able to unify all lead cycle from lead generation, to lead nurturing, to closing, and finally to customer delight. We will cover the integrations and their potential in future articles.

One thing marketers need to keep in mind is that marketing automation does not stand for all the digital tools needed to grow. Although they are a huge help, having a marketing automation software is usually stronger in the middle of the funnel, nurturing your leads. This means that you still need other tools to strengthen your marketing automation solution, to perform tasks such as: generating leads, following and closing opportunities, managing customer relationships, providing a remarkable service experience.