Want to take your B2B marketing efforts to the next level? In this post, we highlight Pardot, a B2B marketing solution from Salesforce, and check out its top 4 features.
B2B marketing success is all about capturing and converting more quality leads. There's a lot of information coming at marketers today about the importance of automation and personalization, and it’s usually portrayed as an “either-or” proposition.
Pardot, an outstanding cloud-based B2B Marketing tool, changes all of that with an impressive list of features that enable B2B marketers to achieve both automation and personalization. It connects with your CRM, creating an environment for companies to produce superior results by bringing marketing and sales to the same table.
Pardot has a rare combination of highly impactful features. There are a lot of tools that have a mix of really useful features and interesting, but useless “hype” features, but that’s not the case with Pardot. It’s packed with heavyweight functionality and features, each powerful on their own, but absolutely game-changing when combined into one solution. The only thing more surprising than its advanced features is how user-friendly it is. Once implemented, it is easy to create content and run incredibly effective engagement campaigns with very little need for IT.
Here are just 4 of Pardot’s many features that should be on every B2B marketer's wish list:
1. Advanced Website Visitor Browsing Behavior Tracking - Look back in time at what your prospects did before they became a contact.
Imagine if you acquired a new lead from a form on your website today and the profile of activity for that prospect immediately populated pageview activity from your website for that prospect from the past few weeks! You no longer have to have a contact’s information or a record of any kind on a prospect before you can start tracking behavior. Pardot’s tracking code enables the platform to track and record visitor browsing activity and save it until those visitors fill out one of your website forms. Pardot captures and records the activity, then marries it to a contact record at whatever point that visitor converts. Even if it’s weeks between their initial visit to your site and the time they fill out one of your forms, you’ll see the details of their past activity.
2. Progressive Profiling - Forms that know to ask only for the information you don’t already have.
As marketers, we all know the double edge sword of asking for too much information on a form- which greatly decreases your odds of getting any- versus asking for very little information, just so you have something. So how are you supposed to serve more personalized and relevant content to your prospects if you don’t have much information about them? Pardot has a progressive profiling feature that addresses that challenge. Using the power of AI, Pardot varies the fields of information that it shows in landing page forms that are served to prospects, by analyzing what information you already have in their contact record against what information you want. This is a great way to build the information that you have on your prospects since every added field in a form decreases the % of form submits. Already have their email? Pardot can ask instead for their company name, title, industry, etc.
3. Lead Scoring and Grading Combined - The power of AI lets you know which prospects are ready and when.
In B2B marketing, the power of lead scoring cannot be understated as it helps to automate the identification of prospects that are most active. It's also true that just because a prospect interacts with your content, that doesn't necessarily ensure they're a good fit as a potential customer. Other factors come into play that need to be assessed in determining fit - company size, industry, company's revenue, etc. Pardot offers a next level grading system aimed at using AI to qualify your prospects using their score and more. Grades are applied based on the users’ unique criteria. Pardot analyzes both grade and score constantly and lets you know when you have a prospect that’s ready to connect.
4. Dynamic Content - Tailor any content to each prospect.
When we think of segmentation, we typically think of segmenting our prospect or lead lists. We know that blasting the same message to all of our contacts limits our ability to connect on a more personal level, making the messaging more general and much less effective. Here is where the Pardot feature set really starts to sizzle! The Dynamic Content feature gives users the power to segment content across assets so that every piece of content has greater potential to hit the target right between the eyes. The dynamic content feature can serve prospects different content, based on what would be most relevant to them! That can be in emails, forms, landing pages, and even your website. It can be used in the form of images, body text copy, colors, buttons, headlines and more. The specific content that is served can vary based on the prospect contact fields as well as other criteria - like score, for example. Prospects in different industries could see different headlines, different states different images, different scores can get differing offers - the possibilities are endless.
So before we summarize, take a quick glance back at the features and think about how much potential there is for each of these features to make the others work even better. They’re all like the rollers on the conveyor belt playing an important part in seamlessly moving a prospect further down the line.
Pardot reminds me of the type of conversations that take place whenever there is some type of revolutionary new technology or invention like drones, surveillance tech, social media, etc. History is full of exciting innovations that presented a paradox from the moment they came into existence. They could, and would, have both negative and positive impacts depending on their application of use.
At its worst, Pardot has the potential, if in the wrong hands, to simply automate and/or increase the volume of ineffective, spammy marketing that consumers are already wary of - automation and personalization without thoughtful discretion equals spam and could just serve to increase the consumer blindness and indifference, which is ironic because at its’ best, that is exactly what Pardot can remedy.
The automation and personalization Pardot offers can actually save marketers the precious time and resources they need to put into creating better, more useful, interesting, and relevant content.
Are you a Pardot user in need of help setting up your marketing automation program? If so, we would be happy to help. Contact us today.
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