Illustration by Semenin Egor from Ouch!
Pardot is a marketing automation solution owned by Salesforce and developed for B2B marketers. Its goal is to boost sales by generating a more reliable pipeline and creating meaningful connections.
BUT FIRST: Hopefully this article is useful for you, but before we get into it we'd be grateful if you took a look at our product Markup Hero. Marketing professionals and Pardot clients find Markup Hero super useful for taking screenshots and annotating files. Here are the top benefits and use cases:
- Screenshot, Upload, Annotate & Share - Lightning fast screenshot and annotation tool that does all you need without the bloat. Made for Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome & Mobile Web.
- Work Where You Work - Annotation tools work great on any device, desktop or mobile. Desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux. Chrome, Slack, Google Drive integrations.
- Annotate Almost Anything - Flexible annotation tools like arrows, boxes, text, highlighter, blur, crop, colors, lines, image inserts and more for images, PDF's and URL's.
- Share Links, Copy to Clipboard & Download - Instantly share markups with permissioned links, paste image, download or export to PDF. See thumbnail previews in tons of popular tools like Slack, SMS, Discord and more.
- Always Editable and History - Never lose another markup, everything is saved in history and you can edit forever (no flattened images).
Markup Hero is forever free and you can try it instantly without even creating an account. We'd be grateful if you took a look after you finish reading this article. Thanks!
Now, let's talk about Pardot. You already know marketing is crucial to generate leads and drive sales. But what exactly is marketing automation about?
Marketing automation uses specialized tools to gather and utilize market and customer data to generate leads and segregate your market. You can then create personalized content for different segments of the target audience. The entire process can be automated, saving marketers a lot of time and making the process more effective.
Before getting more into Pardot’s features, let us take a moment to understand why marketing automation could be the key to your next big break.
Why Should You Use Marketing Automation?
Gathering data and analyzing them is not exclusive to marketing automation. Traditional marketing teams have divisions that are responsible for collecting data and deciphering them. They also use various data collecting tools to accomplish this task.
So, how is marketing automation better? Well, marketing automation streamlines the data collection, analysis, and utilization processes into a single pipeline. As a result, your marketing team does not need to rely on a data-collecting division.
Here is a quick run-down of things you can accomplish with marketing automation.
Keep track of visitors
You can use marketing automation to keep a log of the people who visit your website. Moreover, you can keep records of their IP address, the type of content they engage with, and their time on each page.
Receive sales alerts in real-time
Marketing automation tools can notify you when a prospective client is likely to generate a sale. As a result, you don’t have to monitor each prospect constantly.
Grade your leads
Not all of your prospective clients are equal. Some are more likely to generate sales than others. You can grade each lead based on criteria that will result in sales.
Use your time and resources efficiently
Because of the ability to grade leads, you can spend more time engaging with clients that are more likely to generate sales. Doing this results in more efficient use of time and resources.
Create forms and landing pages
Marketing automation allows you to create landing pages and forms without having any HTML skills.
Email marketing
Email marketing is an integral part of market automation. This feature is not just automatic email replies. It is a system that lets you customize your emails to fit your brand image and bypass spam filters.
Pardot Features
Getting back to Pardot, it is an exceptional marketing automation solution that offers everything you expect from a typical market automation package and much, much more.
Let us take a look at 5 of the most outstanding features Pardot offers.
1. Engagement Studio
Engagement Studio is one of Pardot’s most advanced features. It gives you the ability to visualize your email drip campaigns.
Typically when you start a drip campaign, you have to monitor the activities to keep track of it. Pardot Engagement Studio provides you with the tools needed to do so. You can add and remove tags, assign groups to users, notify users, and send automated emails.
By integrating Engagement Studio with a Salesforce connector, it is possible to design an effective and efficient email marketing automation. You can set various parameters for customized actions that Pardot will automatically execute.
You can set the various variables as triggers for actions. Triggers can include opened email, accessed link, downloaded file, viewing content, and so on. Besides these, you can add the client’s lead grade, score, status, etc., as deciders for specific actions in your drip campaign.
2. Connected Campaign
Connected Campaign is a relatively new feature that Pardot introduced in 2018. It is a convenient feature for keeping your campaigns organized between your B2B and B2C marketing divisions.
When you set up a Connected Campaign on Pardot, you gain the ability to combine your Pardot and Salesforce campaigns. As a result, you can drastically improve the efficiency of your campaign management. A more efficient management structure allows you to reduce clutter and make campaign reporting simpler.
Connected Campaign gives you access to Engagement History and Pardot Einstein Campaign Insights without having to leave Salesforce. This connectivity and seamless workflow have changed the way marketers manage their workflow.
3. B2B Marketing Analytics
B2B Marketing Analytics is an Einstein Analytics app, and many users consider it to be one of the best features of Pardot.
The marketing and sales divisions of any company complement each other. Both of them exist to maximize the revenue of the company. But it is often difficult to find accurate correlations between marketing campaigns and sales.
Companies use a metric known as ROI (return on investment) to determine the success of a marketing campaign. B2B Marketing Analytics combines marketing and sales data and gives you insight into your company’s performance. As a result, you can visualize the ROI of your marketing campaigns and prioritize projects accordingly.
With the insights obtained from B2B Marketing Analytics, you can allocate your budget to more successful campaigns aligned with your organizational goals.
4. Salesforce User Sync
Salesforce User Sync is an administration feature you can use to manage your Pardot and Salesforce accounts simultaneously.
Salesforce User Sync is an optional feature. You can only turn this on when you have a Pardot and Salesforce connector. Once opted in, you cannot turn this feature off.
The primary function of this feature is to create a synced user. It merges your Salesforce account and Pardot account to let them act as a single user. As a result, there is a significant change in how you use Pardot. The result is that you obtain better user management features, an improved user experience, and better security.
5. Dynamic Content
Dynamic Content is our favorite Pardot feature. It gives you the ability to personalize content for every market segment. In other words, you can create different variants of forms, landing pages, websites, emails, and anything else depending on a user’s engagement.
Dynamic Content is the perfect feature to maximize ROI. It maximizes the chance of a lead to generate sales by catering to their individual needs. By providing the best content for each market segment, your clients feel like you understand their needs better than everyone else. As a result, your conversion rates can drastically improve.
While you can customize forms, landing pages, websites, emails, and so on, you can create up to 25 variants. So, you have to be strategic about how many segments you create within the market. In cases where you have too many segments, you have to prioritize the segments that are more likely to generate sales.
Final Thoughts
Pardot is a powerful B2B marketing automation solution. It can offer you sophisticated tools and a lot of flexibility. But it is not rare to find that companies are unable to utilize Pardot properly.
If you want to maximize your output from Pardot, it is a good idea to hire an experienced Pardot administrator or consultant. You can also train your employees to use Pardot before implementing it into your workflow.
If appropriately used, Pardot can significantly improve the efficiency of your marketing division. It bridges the gap that often lies between marketing and sales. After all, marketing automation is the future. So, get on board while there is still time, or your competitors might just trample all over your game!
