It’s no secret that today’s buyer’s journey looks much different from years past. Buyers are in control, and they want all the information they need to make an informed purchase long before they sign on the dotted line. But they don’t want it from your sales rep. Not at first, anyway. Enter Pardot marketing automation.
Nurturing Leads With Marketing Automation
One of the signature features of a sophisticated marketing automation system is the ability to capture unknown website visitors, turn them into known Prospects (Leads), and then market to them using the information they provided on a form.
Having gated content on your website that speaks to Prospects at various stages in their journey will not only help your sales team identify when to reach out with a new Lead (more on that in the next section) but also identify the content to serve them next.
Drip nurturing done right requires strategic planning that goes beyond blast marketing. You need to make sure you’re asking Prospects the right questions on forms at the right time (don’t be shy). This helps you route Prospects down the right path with content that speaks to their specific challenge or “Buyer Persona.”
Businesses with well-established drip nurturing programs experience lower cost per lead, lower customer acquisition costs, substantially more email engagement, and increased sales. But again, taking the time to adequately plan a campaign and create content is crucial to your success. You’ll need resources upfront but it will be well worth the investment.
Sales Enablement
We said it in our last post, but the best marketing automation systems are in fact built for sales. The philosophy behind marketing automation systems is that with various tracking mechanisms and notification systems, you can help your sales team identify when to reach out and provide them with intelligence on the prospect’s possible interests.
You can also pre-qualify Leads using forms that ask key buyer information and even open-ended questions like, “what can we help with?”
Sales enablement is extended further by combining Salesforce Engage with Pardot marketing automation. With Sales Cloud CRM, Engage and Pardot, your marketing team can now build and get insights on 1-1 emails that sales reps send throughout the course of your customer’s journey with your business. Use the Gmail extension to keep your sales reps in their email client while giving them Pardot-tracked templates and the ability to add new Leads to Pardot from within their email interface.
Sales enablement tools have come a long way in a short time. The trick is knowing what features to use and when they can be helpful.
Closed-Loop Marketing and Sales Reporting
Want to know where you get the best bang for your buck when it comes to marketing expenditures? It has historically been difficult for many organizations to tie specific marketing campaigns to sales opportunities and actual revenue generated. Before marketing automation and CRM integration, marketers often made decisions based on assumptions or the little analytics they had, such as website visitors.
One of the key benefits of Salesforce and Pardot is that you can tie all marketing activities connected to Pardot (including PPC, inbound links from other websites, emails, and more) with Salesforce Campaigns to understand all campaigns that influenced your bottom line. You can then slice and dice the reports in many different ways using different Campaign types, dates, and filters.
With a more targeted marketing budget and focus, the opportunity to generate more business with less money gives you a tremendous advantage in the marketplace.
Customer Retention
Many marketers still think about their marketing automation systems in terms of Lead Generation but they can go much further than that. In the new customer economy, the effort to find, win, and KEEP customers has never been more important. Customers often have many choices and retention is obviously crucial to continued growth.
Marketing automation can provide a mechanism to communicate with existing customers about new products or services; customer appreciation events; and company announcements. Furthermore, with sales enablement features in place, your sales reps can be notified when existing customers are browsing new products on the website and more.
Winning With Pardot Marketing Automation
Marketing automation systems, especially Pardot integrated to Sales Cloud, are a game-changer when it comes to growing business and staying competitive. In fact, they have enabled many small businesses to grow market share competing against many larger brands when the above four concepts are leveraged.