Marketing Automation, Starring Pardot by Salesforce
In 2017, The New York Times described it as “the art of telling stories so enthralling that people lose track of their wallets”. It is one of the primary components of business management and commerce: Marketing.
Marketing Automation is a technology that helps companies thrive by automating marketing operations, monitoring customer engagement, and providing customized customer experience through marketing, sales, and service.
Meet Pardot: Smarter marketing automation built on the world’s #1 CRM platform. Marketing automation, connected to a CRM, allows companies to monitor and respond to customer data in order to deliver automated engagements through the web, email, social, and sales channels, based on who the customer is and what they care about. This enables marketing staff to set up efficient campaigns to send the right message to the right person at the right time.
In this post we will cover:
- Basic marketing automation terminology.
- How marketing automation and Pardot can help your business.
- Describe how Pardot differs from other Salesforce marketing tools.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, website, social media, etc.) and automates repetitive routine tasks. Originally based on email marketing automation, marketing automation refers to a wide range of automation and analytic methods for marketing. Marketing automation is a platform used for marketers use to organize, arrange, execute and measure all of their marketing campaigns, both online and offline. It is also used along with a lifecycle marketing strategy to closely manage and nurture the leads produced, with the goal of turning leads into customers.
Marketing automation is a way to track your customers and what they are doing so that you can learn from that and deliver personalized experiences. This can include:
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Digital advertising
- Landing pages and forms
Why?
- To generate more and better leads
- Engage buyers on their terms with dynamic, personalized campaigns
What is Pardot?
Pardot is an industry-leading B2B marketing automation solution by Salesforce. If you’re a company that sells to other businesses, Pardot will automate your marketing efforts and get your marketing and sales teams together so that they can work better together.
Pardot provides you with a single place to handle your projects and report on their progress. Not just that, but it also tracks prospects when they interact with your company across all your marketing channels so you can customize your outreach. And Pardot is adjustable, so you can customize it to suit the needs of your company!
Pardot lets you move your visitors and prospects into a sales funnel. The funnel starts as you create marketing materials that generate interest in your products and finishes when qualified prospects are assigned to a sales representative.
Funnel Stages
Lead (or demand) generation: The act of raising awareness in your products or services through marketing efforts.
Visitor: An anonymous person who visits your website and can be tracked in Pardot.
Conversion: If a visitor sends you their contact details by submitting a landing page or form in Pardot, they will be converted to a prospect.
Prospect: An anonymous visitor that has converted and is now identified. This is also called a lead.
Lead nurturing: Delivering targeted messages at specific times based on a prospect’s behaviours and whether or not they have met certain qualifying requirements.
Lead qualification: Probably you have thousands (or maybe hundreds of thousands) of individuals engaging with your company. Your sales team can’t contact each of them, so as marketers it’s your job to help send them the best prospects. This method of finding a gold needle in the haystack of prospects is called lead qualification. You determine the threshold for when a prospect is ready to be referred to a salesperson for their follow-up.
Pardot uses two metrics for lead qualification: Score (how interested they are in your product or service, based on specific actions the prospect takes) and grade (how well a prospect fits the profile of your ideal prospect). Once your prospects are eligible, you can add your threshold requirements to your prospects to assign them to your sales staff.
Why use Pardot?
Pardot lets marketers and sales teams locate and retain leads, close more deals, optimize ROI — and more. Here’s why Pardot is different from other B2B marketing automation platforms:
1. Built on the World’s #1 CRM: Salesforce
Use all of the learning tools and help docs, Salesforce offers to learn more.
2. You can implement Pardot quickly to start generating more leads — and revenue — faster
An intuitive interface guides you as you build your best campaigns ever. Getting Started guides help you setup and more.
3. Generate leads
Lead generation is the process of collecting information about prospects (those who may be interested in buying your company’s products or services) and engaging them with relevant, useful marketing content, such as a step-by-step guide.
4. Manage leads
Generating leads is just the beginning; managing them is a crucial step to drive interested leads through the marketing funnel until they are ready to be passed off to sales teams. This step includes audience segmentation, lead qualification, and lead nurturing.
5. Align sales and marketing teams
Make their efforts more efficient and effective. Remove silos across organizations that lead to disjointed customer experiences.
6. Engage buyers on their terms with dynamic, personalized campaigns
You can build dynamic emails, use A/B testing to see which content works best, and set up triggers to automate email delivery at the right time.
7. Use B2B Marketing Analytics to organize and analyze all of your data across sales and marketing to make data-driven decisions
Understand each step from click to close, capturing true marketing ROI. Report on ROI.
Pardot Tour and Features
Take a look around Pardot. The guided tour will show you where to find all the tools you’ll fall in love with.
Resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_automation/
https://www.singlegrain.com/marketing-automation/what-is-marketing-automation-definition-benefits-uses/
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/
http://pages.mail.salesforce.com/gettingstarted/pardot/
https://www.pardot.com/
Reach your objectives faster by getting a free assessment with one of our Pardot experts here.
