CRM

Guide to a successful Marketing Automation strategy (with Salesforce and Pardot)

The question may be simple, but creating an effective Marketing Automation strategy is not always easy. To get answers, and to understand how to create a successful Marketing Automation strategy with Salesforce and Pardot, let’s look at it separately. First, what is Marketing Automation all about?

As its name implies, Marketing Automation refers to the use of software to automate marketing processes. We often focus the efforts of marketing teams on email campaigns, social networking and ad campaign management. The idea behind this is right. These activities allow companies to deliver a more personalised service and experience to their customers. However, the process can be somewhat complex and time consuming, sidelining team efforts into operational rather than strategic work. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to help us to reduce the time spent on all the fundamental marketing activities at the same time as increasing the effectiveness of your campaigns.

In this paper we will explore two tools that can help our organisational structure and implement Marketing Automation campaigns.

Marketing Automation strategy with Salesforce

First, Salesforce. This is the most widely used CRM application in the world, delivering solutions that help companies and their customers to be completely connected, within a 360º vision.

The tool provides a wide variety of solutions, allowing the platform to be adapted to each of the companies, in order to implement their unique processes and simplify the daily lives of marketers and commercials. (Something we addressed in this content).

Salesforce builds a database of customer records, with all their contacts, and stores the information on the leads generated. After being nurtured and qualified in Pardot, the leads transfer back to Salesforce, in order to generate real business opportunities, giving the sales team a good working base to convert into sales.

Currently, the platform has over 10 million users worldwide.

B2B communication tool: Pardot

Pardot is a B2B marketing communication tool and part of the Salesforce CRM universe. It is an intuitive marketing automation platform that offers the ability to create, implement and manage segmented campaigns, where leads and Salesforce contacts (Prospects in the Pardot namesake) are distributed by several personas, in order to make the Prospects experience unique and differentiated. The reason we say unique and differentiated is because we can make campaigns ever more targeted using data feedback. That’s right, targeted at specific people!

Pardot is particularly useful in email marketing campaigns, offering the possibility to link directly to landing pages created in the tool itself – fast development even without technical knowhow, and with the choice of using or not using a form – or in social campaigns, where it is possible to validate how Prospects have been interacting with company activity on social networks, as well as making publications on several platforms at once, encouraging an increase in the quantity and quality of leads that will later fill through to the sales teams.

So we set out to answer our initial question: how do we create a successful Marketing Automation campaign using Salesforce and Pardot?

There are 4 main characteristics that enhance the strength of campaigns and are associated with both Pardot and Salesforce:

  1. Effective email marketing
  2. Lead generation
  3. Lead management
  4. Reports

1 – Effective email marketing: The most attractive email campaigns are those that are highly targeted to our target audience and get the message across in the best way, thus generating more business leads. With these two tools it is possible to create emails and pages faster and more efficiently, manage automation flows, taking into account the personalisation of recipients and segment leads, and ensure correct sending and consistent visualisation across devices.

2 – Lead generation: To keep the sales pipeline filled, you must constantly nurture the leads that reach companies. By building landing pages, forms using drag-and-drop tools, creating and measuring the actual ROI of the campaigns through interconnection with Google AdWords, and using A/B tests to track the performance of landing pages, it is possible to keep the pipeline fully supplied with a quality flow of leads.

3 – Lead management: means less time spent by the marketing and sales teams on repetitive tasks, to give way to greater concentration on acquiring and maintaining important leads. With this, it is possible to prioritize and qualify leads using automated scoring systems in Pardot.

4 – Reports: Both Salesforce and Pardot offer the possibility to extract complete reports, such as a log of  all the contact points with your customers, understanding their journey from their first click to the moment of conversion and the closing of the deal; reports showing the sales lifecycle, thus, knowing where potential customers are stagnating in the funnel; and search reports to understand how Google AdWords campaigns impact on the organisation’s results, among others.

We can then conclude that using Salesforce and Pardot we get the ability to take a 360º look at our customers; from marketing strategy to sales. This allows us to more effectively manage the acquisition and maintenance of lead quality, check opportunities and improve the results of ongoing marketing campaigns.

Here is an example of how to implement Marketing Automation:

I want to know more!
Pedro RosaGuide to a successful Marketing Automation strategy (with Salesforce and Pardot)

Read more in

CRM

Readers also checked out

Do you want to receive amazing news about the IT industry's hot topics and the best articles about state-of-the-art technology?
Subscribe to our newsletter and be the first one to receive information to keep you constantly on edge.