Streamlining marketing efforts can be an absolute pain. Many organizations leverage multiple marketing channels to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to sales teams. However, teams often struggle with how to bring sales and marketing together when trying to keep track of multiple marketing campaigns on multiple platforms.
On top of all that, manually managing necessary key performance indicators can be overwhelming. So how do you overcome the gap between sales and marketing?
Get The Marketing Automation of Your Dreams with a Pardot Implementation
Pardot is a breath of fresh air for organizations small and large. No more juggling a library of marketing solutions because Pardot brings all of your marketing together. Check out our list below with some of the top features we are loving from Pardot.
Lead Scoring
Did you just have a prospect download an eBook on your website and is now a part of a corresponding email campaign? Are you now left wondering when is the right time to engage with them? With Pardot’s lead scoring, you can assign values to behaviors your prospects take and configure your Salesforce ecosystem so that those values are visible to your sales team. This visibility into where leads are at in their customer journey helps sales teams know when it’s time to start engaging with them and bring them from the awareness and consideration stage to a decision. Lead scoring truly helps to ease the disconnect often felt between marketing and sales by providing concrete data on which behaviors have already taken place, how familiar the prospect is with your product or services, and when is the right time for sales to take the lead.
Lead Grading
Similar to lead scoring, lead grading also gives you insight into how well a prospect matches your ideal customer profile. For example, you can assign a grade to a prospect based on certain profile criteria you set such as location, job title, industry, and the size of the company. One use case you could see this with would be with a member of your sales team. They look up a prospect and can see it has been assigned a letter grade of an, “A”, and they have a high lead score; therefore, they should be spending their time on getting that lead to convert. The lead scoring and grading paired together helps display which prospects fit your ideal customer profile and are highly engaged with your product or service; giving sales the data they need to know when it’s time to create an opportunity and convince them to move forward with your team.
Email Automation
When most marketers think of marketing for a B2B business, one of the first things that come to mind is email marketing. Email marketing is a favorite channel for marketers because of its incredibly high return on investment. With a Pardot implementation, you can truly take email automation to the next level with robust lead nurturing through the Engagement Studio. The Engagement Studio allows you to craft highly personalized campaigns based on the actions your prospects take. This high level of customization helps you keep up with the demands of what it takes to bring an interested prospect into becoming a closed-won opportunity for you and your team.
Connectors
While Pardot brings all your marketing under one roof, there are some third-party platforms that aren’t native to Pardot itself such as Google Ads, but that is no problem for Pardot. With the connector, you can sync your data from Google Ads into Pardot so you can see your ROI still in one centralized location. Some of the most popular connections you can sync with Pardot are Google Ads, Google Analytics, and LinkedIn. There are two LinkedIn connectors, but the one that most organizations will find beneficial is the connector that allows you to pull up details on your prospect with their LinkedIn company profile information right inside of Pardot.
Analytics
Pardot has a great deal of analytics available including Einstein Campaign Insights to give a more in-depth view of your data. Ultimately, your marketing is going to always come back to your ROI. When you evaluate your KPIs, you will be able to easily back up what you’re doing or it will become apparent very quickly that strategies need to change. Without intelligent metrics, you will continue to shoot in the dark. That is why we love the robust analytics available inside of Pardot because it closes the gap between understanding the success of each of your campaigns and how it corresponds to closed-won opportunities.
Landing Pages
If you don’t have a web developer on the team, then the landing pages readily available inside of Pardot can be very advantageous for you as Pardot has a library of ready-to-go templates. Keep in mind tough that the templated landing page will need some level of customization if you need them to be mobile responsive. If you just need a desktop display for your landing page, which may be commonly used at tradeshows, the majority of the landing page is built for you and all you will need to do is drag and drop your content. Whether you build a landing page from scratch or customize it from a template, they can be used for a number of avenues including Google Ads, webinar sign-ups, and event check-ins, such as at a booth for a conference.
Forms
One of the most customizable and well-used features inside of Pardot is the Pardot forms. Pardot forms can be used throughout your website and landing pages. One of the great aspects of Pardot forms is that you have great security with built-in spam protection with Honeypots. The Honeypots built into the form uses code to create a hidden field and if the field is filled out, your form will know it’s a bot and it will not be submitted. Additionally, there are many automation rules you can set up every time you create a form, giving you the power to filter and segment what to do with the data once a form has been filled out or viewed. We also love that after a form is submitted you can create custom thank you content so if you want to reinforce the message that inspired the prospect to fill out the form, you can do so at that time or promote another piece of content your prospect may be interested in for a future sale.
Robust Segmentation
Pardot has two types of segmentation available - Static and Dynamic Lists. With Static Lists, you manually add or import contact information to a list. No additional prospects are added to the list unless you manually add them. However, Dynamic lists are always evolving. Dynamic Lists are living breathing lists that are constantly updating based on your automation rules. The best way to think of when to use the two is how you intend to interact with the prospect in each list. If you will seldom be reaching out to the prospect, then they are best in a Static List that fits their unique use case. However, when you set up Dynamic Lists, prospects will automatically filter into the list based on the automation rules you set up so there are no manual additions, rather the lists are constantly being created and growing in the background. Therefore, Dynamic Lists are ideal when you want prospects to be a part of a number of marketing campaigns versus seldom contact as you would typically have with a Static List.
With a Pardot implementation, you’re truly going to experience marketing automation like never before and will feel like your marketing and sales are not only streamlined, but your organization is more connected. Marketing systems will work more efficiently and insync, giving you time back to focus on content creation, campaign strategies, and engaging with your audience. Setting up Pardot can be a bit complex. Senior marketing leaders who have worked with other marketing automation platforms before may need some extra support to get Pardot se-t up, but once you have it customized and configured for your needs, you will start to see how much more you’re able to accomplish with your marketing. If you need help configuring Pardot, reach out to us and will listen to your goals and craft a marketing automation plan that’s right for your team with our Pardot experts.
