There is no doubt that Salesforce has a very interesting Marketing Automation solution that stands out for its complete integration with Salesforce CRM. Now it remains to be seen if Pardot is a good fit for your project.
As a preview and before going into the depth of the analysis, you should know that Pardot becomes more efficient the further down you work in your conversion funnel and it is an especially useful tool in projects where you want to get the most out of the data (customer loyalty actions, reactivations, cross-selling, etc.).
What is Pardot?
Pardot is a Marketing Automation tool that is part of the Salesforce technology suite, a solution that is part of Sales Cloud, as it is focused on digitizing B2B business processes. Sometimes it is also offered within Marketing Cloud, both approaches are equally valid. At ShowerThinking we like to talk about Pardot as a plugin for Salesforce CRM .
Looking back a bit, Pardot was founded in 2007 in Atalanta and in its early days it allowed integration with a wide variety of CRMs, including Salesforce. In 2012, Exact Target bought Pardot, a company that months later was acquired for the whopping sum of 2.5 billion US dollars by Salesforce, Marc Benioff's company. Exact Target was renamed Marketing Cloud. Over the last few years Salesforce has invested heavily in improving Pardot, focusing on native integration with the lighting platform .
What has Salesforce done with Pardot since then?
I'll shorten the story by saying that:
By 2014, Pardot had become the fastest-growing Marketing Automation platform in the industry, tripling the customer acquisition figures of other providers such as Hubspot and Marketo, according to figures provided by Datanyze.
Not only does it integrate seamlessly with Salesforce, it's undergoing a redesign and optimization process , but its integration with Salesforce is making Pardot an even more powerful tool than it was before. I was at the annual Pardot event at Dreamforce last November. Danielle Grau and Nathan Maphet (Pardot's Senior Product Managers) spoke and made it very clear: They want to make Pardot the best Marketing Automation tool.
Pardot Salesforce Annual Event
Photo by Danielle Grau at Dreamforce 2018, San Francisco
Understanding Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a technology that automates, collects data and makes marketing and sales processes more efficient. They are advanced email marketing platforms that incorporate technologies for tracking web activity, creating digital assets, automating processes and communications. Marketing Automation began in 2005, but it was not until 2012 that it began to be quickly incorporated into the business world. There are currently dozens of solutions on the market. Below we show you how to select the best solution.
Main business objectives of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation tools focus on optimizing nepal phone number library conversion rates, expanding sales reach and improving customer knowledge.
conversion, expansion and knowledge
Conversion: Data enables personalization, and personalization improves conversion.
Sales expansion: Expand the reach of the sales force without increasing sales resources.
Customer Insights: Predicting Customer Behavior and Needs
Digital marketing strategies based on marketing automation
Marketing automation tools focus on working on 3 major strategic areas of digital marketing: inbound marketing, account-based marketing (ABM) and CRM Marketing.
marketing automation strategies
Inbound Marketing: the combination of content marketing, attraction marketing and marketing automation allows you to work on a methodology that focuses on attracting, converting, selling and making customers fall in love. Read more about inbound marketing.
Account Based Marketing (ABM): leveraging the potential of CRM, relational marketing and professional social networks like LinkedIn, ABM is the strategy that best adapts to B2B markets and where Pardot stands out from its competitors.
CRM Marketing: data is the “gold” of the 21st century and CRM is the customer “data lake”. Marketing automation allows you to exploit and get the most out of customer knowledge through cross-selling, up-selling, MGM (member get member), commercial reactivation, renewals or relational marketing actions.
Choosing a Marketing Automation Tool
What are the Marketing Automation tools that we can choose for a project? Marketo, Salesforce Pardot, Marketing Cloud, Hubspot, Eloqua, IBM, Adobe, Sharpspring are some of the ones available on the market. There are multiple possibilities as we can see in the following image from ChiefMartech. As you can see, not only is there a huge range of possibilities to choose from, but the number of tools increases every year.
