Off the back of the “Three (and a half) Pardot things we learned this week” post over the Xmas week, we will now tackle some questions on the Pardot application itself.
To be fair I should have started there.
I do love Pardot, it’s a very easy application to get started. Salesforce differentiates it from its other marketing product as being the B2B version (with Marketing Cloud being B2C). **One could argue that at certain volumes you could use either/or, but that’s another story.**
Anyway, what I think Pardot does very well is to help out with 2 things that traditionally, in the marketing world, are – well – problems:
- Difficulty tracking Leads
- Difficulty demonstrating Return On Investment
It is the old tale of Correlation vs Causation
We tend to think that if we launch a campaign and sales go up, then the campaign is the driver of that uplift. But in reality there are many other factors, initiatives and even departments working towards the same common goal.
So let’s not get confused with Correlation vs Causation. Perhaps some definitions will help:
Correlation is “a statistical measure (expressed as a number) that describes the size and direction of a relationship between two or more variables.” While Causation “indicates that one event is the result of the occurrence of the other event; i.e. there is a causal relationship between the two events. This is also referred to as cause and effect.” – iperceptions
In the first edition of dreamOlé we had a very good session on this, where Omar showed us a rather funny example from tylervigen.com. There are many of these, but the below is one of my favourites:
(I do eat a lot of cheese, the stinkier the better – oops, perhaps I need to be more careful in bed)
Luckily, Pardot comes to the rescue on this by supporting your Web, Email & Social efforts. In a nutshell:
1) Web
- Thanks to tracking via tracking code, cookies and IP, you can start quantifying your visitors and their behaviour, and once you gather an email address for a visitor then it becomes a prospect (or what may be called a Lead in Salesforce)
- You do that with Forms (or Form Handlers if you already have an existing form published)
- Landing Pages allow you to create webpages to host your content, and your forms etc, and trigger actions off the back of it.
- You can even host your assets directly there (or use custom redirects), and similarly use that to trigger all kinds of quirky things off the back of it.
2) Email
Well it has all you could imagine as a decent email marketing tool: dynamic content, lists and multiple ways to generate these, mail outs & journeys (Engagement/Nurture), A/B tests, rendering tests, multivariable tests… It’s all here.
3) Social
More of an outbound effort here, where you can schedule and post updates to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts and company pages.
One of the other cool things with Pardot is that has the concept of Grading. Whilst a score can be generated by the behavioural interest on your company from a prospect, the grading allows you to define interest from your company to prospects. So that you can focus your efforts reducing noise and waste.
The connectors in Pardot are great, and make it relatively easily to add to the above other things like your webinars, paid search campaigns, videos, events, etc…
There’s also tons of automation you can do with the information you have on your prospects, their behaviours and your content.
In summary, Pardot helps with multiple items you do today as a marketer but it will also help you to do it better in the future, through Collaboration, Scaling, Insights, Process Flow Control…
If you want to learn more, there are quite a few new modules about Pardot on Trailhead and stay tuned for some more posts on it coming up!
And I’ll leave you with some good news from me, which is that just before the end of last year I managed to pull in an extra cert 🙂
And finally, taking “advantage” of the festive season to put some time a side & do the #Pardot Consultant exam & pass! 🍾 Now I’m officially one. That makes 9 #salesforce certifications 🎓 So happy to get this done b4 the end of the year 🥂 🍇 time to fully relax & celebrate 🥳 pic.twitter.com/o8ID83KiMM
— Ines Garcia ☁️ (@Inescapinezka) December 29, 2018