Webinar: Pardot Marketing Through the Customer Journey

Perfect. Now we're recording. So yeah, thanks everyone for coming. What we're going to focus on today is the full customer journey. So it's quite exciting because we're going to delve into Pardot, through to Sales cloud, through to B2BMA. So let's begin. We do have the forward looking statement, however, we're not going to be looking at forward looking features. I might mention one or two throughout the presentation. So this is just to cover me there. Perfect. So if you don't know who I am. I'm Tom. I'm a founder and co owner of Markleau Consulting. Been a Pardot consultant for around five years and have a lot of experience through different verticals. And I'll leave it there.

I'm Jake, director and co owner at Markow Consulting. I have a background in internal operations and also look after the development arm of the business here at barbcloud.

Perfect. So to kick things off, we want to use this funnel throughout the presentation and you might find that it's quite familiar. It's based on the Pardot Lifecycle report. But what we've done is we've extended this funnel because we want to get everyone thinking about the long term strategy that shouldn't just stop at a one deal. You can think about how this also goes towards brand evangelism, cross sell, upsell and how it can further support sales across the wider business. So focusing on the long term game when it comes to marketing automation is really helpful because you're starting with the end in mind. So this is how the funnel is going to look throughout the presentation. When it goes green, that's the bits that we're going to focus on. So just to start, we're going to be focusing on Pardot Sales Cloud Analytics Studio and see how the arrows integrate with, with each of them. But let's start with Pardot. So the structure of this webinar, I'm going to introduce the theory of what we're going to be talking about and then Jake's going to add some, some color onto what that theory looks like for an actual use case. Perfect. So looking at the top of funnel, so how can you use Pardot to attract attention? So Pardot is an inbound marketing tool and as a result you'll be wanting to use some of the key features in there. So firstly, responsive Pardot landing pages with multivariate testing. If you don't know what that is, that's essentially ABCD testing for landing pages. So you can really get a good idea of how Your landing pages convert best for each Persona type. So you're really sort of tailoring that analysis and then obviously lead generation through content and forms on the website. Obviously high quality content is the key and that drives a lot of the automation. Then there's social, Google Ads and everything else. So when you start to look at lead source, source campaign, UTM tracking, you want to have all of that top level source information because that's going to really help later on, especially when you want to track first touch attribution. And I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't mention the Mark cloud app. So we're pretty much the first company in the world to create a iOS and Android Pardot specific app for your phone. And it's going to innovate the way that we attend events and engage with prospects at events. But I have to leave it there. But that's coming soon.

Perfect. And just some practice based on that theory. So just to introduce the campaign itself, one of our clients just before lockdown and Covid launched a new business line. They're in cyber security and all the information we use today are part of an award entry which I'll tell you a little bit more about at the end. So yeah, just to get into it. Cybersecurity company pushing a new business line. The start of the story is late on last year they came to us with a question. It was can we pull a list of cold prospects data to re engage and send an email about our new service? Obviously from that with us being marketers and using Pardot and Salesforce Daily, we decided to take the approach of let's run an end to end campaign and use every feature we can to make sure that we maximize this opportunity. Be a marketer at heart. A small question can grow to that and I'm excited to show you a little bit more about what we did. First step was we built a responsive form template. As I mentioned before, we look after development. Ideally we'd have liked to have spent some time looking at landing pages and multivariate testing as Tom mentioned before. But the KP team already had an amazing website. So instead we worked with them together to create a nice form template that was completely on brand to catch submissions. When prospects were engaged enough, the next goal was obviously to drive traffic to that page. We also created an email template which would essentially send prospects to that form and catch the data. The final part to the infrastructure of this process was we had some completion actions on the form which would essentially push prospects straight to sales as soon as they submitted the data and that was the infrastructure final piece I just spoke about was the completion action. So yeah, that pushed the prospect data to sales. We let them do the rest.

Perfect. So continuing on this theme of top funnel, it's about creating attractive content. So it's an inbound marketing tool. We want to be able to attract attention obviously for using Google Ads and like I've mentioned, driving them to landing pages and forms and then capturing data. And there's a value exchange there where someone downloads the content and in turn you receive their email address and other information through progressive profiling and other means. We're going to touch on GDPR very slightly here. It's not going to come up again, I promise. But the idea is you'd use consent and, and permission based marketing as part of your approach.

So our example, as I mentioned a minute ago, we created some amazing content and here's an example of one of the emails that we actually built. So the call to actions in the template was super clear and we made it really crisp. And the idea was as soon as a prospect get engaged enough about remote services, they'd hit the cta, be driven to the remote services landing page with the opportunity to submit the form and therefore get them with a sales rep. One thing that we did want to shout out was we achieved a 44.9% overall red percentage and some amazing feedback from the client which is demonstrated on the screen here. And the biggest thing I guess which we've added in capitals is this was from cold data. So you know this is, it's not to be sniffed at. It was a big achievement. Perfect.

So where do you start? When you're given pardot, it's a blank canvas. There's so many different things that you can do. So it can be a little bit overwhelming if you don't know where to start. So straight away, first thing you need to do is plan what you're going to do. So we highly recommend a tool called LucidChart. That's what we use to just get an idea of what the journey might look like. So you're essentially mapping from data entry, which is when they become prospects, all the way through to mql, even SQL Marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead and then all of the stages which you can see in the funnel there. So the first step is to plan what you're going to do. So with anything like this, any campaign you're running, you want to focus on who you're targeting. So what data do you have? Is it cold Is it clients? Is it any engaged data? Who are you actually trying to target? You need to think about what you're going to send them. There's no point talking for the sake of it. You need to actually have useful content that you're actually going to share and there needs to be a purpose to this which we're going to touch on a little later throughout the presentation. Then there's the when. So obviously there's different time zones and so on, but this is where I touch on a new feature. There is an Einstein AI feature coming out where it's going to optimize send times based on data in the system. That's going to be an amazing feature, going to optimize open rates and that's one to look out for soon. Finally, it's the why. Why are you sending them XYZ piece of content? Is it because they just fell into the list and they received it, or is it actually a well thought out, structured process and you're trying to push them through a particular journey so that they can increase their score? You can learn a bit more about them through their grade. But the idea is there needs to be a reason for why you're doing what you're doing.

So how do we put this into practice? As Tom said, we use lucidchart here. I'm sure you guys use similar tools, if not the same. So first up, we mapped out the entire campaign. We made sure that was inclusive of all automation, all campaign elements and also the engagement studio itself. We highly recommend doing this because as we said, this all started with a question of can we put a list? So there's a lot to absorb and without this canvas it can become a little bit tricky. Wise can get crossed. The second part to this, which Tom knows I absolutely love, is we reverse engineered some potential journeys and I cannot stress enough how good this can be when looking at an end to end campaign. So a little bit about why we did it. You know, we wanted to add some science behind the assignment thresholds and assignment thresholds will come a little bit further on in the press, but you'll hear.

A little bit more.

So what I mean by that is, you know, a prospect goes into this campaign starts from email 1 We need to look at. Okay, if they open an email and say get a score of 2, they view a page and get a score of 1 and then click a link and get a score of 5. These things all relate to the remote services campaign. So based on that journey we know it's quite likely to happen. And that's a good amount of engagement for us to send to sales. So when we reverse engineered these journeys, we thought, okay, say 100 points is a good threshold. Let's see when prospects reach that. If we send them to sales, is that the right benchmark? And you can obviously adjust these goalposts throughout the campaign based on the amount of prospects that you're seeing. As to leads and sells.

Perfect. And heading back to the journeys. So again, where do you start? So one thing we always recommend is to look at your content, what you have, and to identify any gaps. I love this graphic because I share this quite often it's on the par blog. So here it kind of provides a bit of structure to your content. So stage one, stage two, stage three, you'd split your content into those stages. And as we know, when prospects convert on a pardot form, they could begin at any point in that journey. So this is a good place to start to work out what we have. You know, if someone's on stage three, you wouldn't necessarily then direct them to a generic blog because you know that they're already somewhat interested downloading detailed white papers and pricing guides. And I think the arrow is really important in this graphic primarily because it shows a direction of travel, it shows that the prospect is going from left to right. And you are then assigning them at the end of that process so you can tailor your engagement studio journeys and align them with these content stages. So you've actually got a little bit of structure behind what you're sending them and why.

And again, in practice. So what did we do for MQL generation for this campaign? So we set up the engagement studio, which controlled all email sends and also some tracking elements. Generally, people will start to go through the campaign. Have they opened an email, yes or no, go down a different journey? Did they click a link, yes or no, go down a different journey. And that kind of allows us to see the effectiveness of what we've just done. Another kind of quirk, if you will, to this campaign was we had some contacts that already existed and already existing customers, so they actually had to enter the campaign at a different point than fresh leads. Because of that, we'd set up two kind of arms, if you will, so the contacts and customers could go down from email 6 and then the fresh leads that were the cold data and parlor, so to speak, went down a different route. Another cool thing to revise at this point of your build is the campaign member statuses. This is going to be integral to reporting towards the End. So for this example, anybody that entered the campaign, entered at, joined, anybody that either submitted the form that we created and spoke about earlier and went to sales, they became an mql. Anybody that touched or met the score threshold that we spoke about in the lucidchart slide and met essentially the marketing qualified lead score threshold, went to sales, got a campaign member status update to MQL and then the final stage was, you know, if the sales rep had created an opportunity and related it to one of these leads or contacts, they become an SQL. And what that does is paints a really nice picture of how many prospects or leads or whatever you want to call it throughout each point of this campaign and where they are at that point of their journey. And then just a final piece to touch on about that split paths. These examples were existing clients already mailed and new prospects, which, you know, universally I'm sure everybody will come across at some point. And I'm very lucky that I got this slide because it's actually our slogan here at Markloud. But you know, as everybody knows, we want to be sending the right message to the right people at the right time.

I'm jealous I don't get to say that. So there are essentially two types of lead or MQL in my opinion. First one being an explicit lead. That's someone who holds a hand up, they fill in an inquiry form and they essentially say that they are ready to be spoken to by sales. So treat that as one lane. And then you have another type of lead or mql, those that are implicit and that could be someone who's been qualified via the scoring and the grading model. So as we know, scoring and grading is an objective metric or bi directional metric that we use to identify who's best for sales. Scoring is how interested they are in us, grading is how interested we should be in them. So those two things combined identify new leads and therefore sort of highlight any of the implicit leads that are in the system.

So again, what did we do for this campaign? So explicit leads, they essentially went to the page that we spoke about earlier and submitted that lovely eye catching form that we built. Essentially what that did was like, okay, my hands up, I want to speak to sales about this specific topic. Amazing. That's one side. The implicit ones are the ones that we added into the Engagement Studio. We nurtured them and what they did for us at this point was they accrued a score in a scoring category. And for those of you that don't know what scoring category is yet, it's essentially a way in pardot to silo a score based on one business offering or service line, whatever you want to call it. So for us, we attributed all of our marketing activity, you know, page views, email opens, link clicks, all to this one scoring category. When they met that threshold, those implicit leads went to sales. So explicit form submission, implicit benchmark met.

Great. So with any Pardot customer, and it's a nice customer experience.

And you can.

Use for say for example, an existing lead returns into the system, they fill in an inquiry form, they've previously been disqualified out. You can use lead status to then sort of revive that lead. They might be in rejected, they might be in cold. When they fill in the pardot form again, we can update that lead status syncs through to Salesforce quite nicely and then they back in as a new lead with all of the pre existing information because they have not been duplicated. And obviously that I'm giving a an overview here, but there will be complex challenges, but you can use automation in Salesforce to overcome different challenges. And I'm not saying this is an easy thing to do, but what I'm saying is there are plenty of different solutions to achieve the same thing without having to use duplicates. And this topic could genuinely be a whole webinar in itself. So I'm going to leave it there for now. One of my final notes is just because you can duplicate a lead, it doesn't mean that you should. And my last point is quite a nice one. It's the idea that you can actually assign tasks to groups, queues and multiple people. So this is the idea that the task comes in as the inquiry and it can be assigned to a queue. Therefore you have maybe a, you know, a different business unit within the organization that can pick up different tasks. So that's a way of managing it via tasks.

My brain is spiraling about what M. Toms could do for Markloud right now. Perfect. So an example of that. And I'll continue to use 100 points as a benchmark even though as everybody knows, it was slightly more complex than that for this campaign. So we created a task when a prospect met 100 points. So they were already in Salesforce, their leader of contact. So what we did was we created a task. It could have been something like remote services threshold met, please get in touch. That will ping to the sales rep that is assigned to that specific lead and they'll also have in front of them all of that rich information that the prospect and lead has gone through to get to them. So they know that they want to speak about remote services because that's why they got there. But they also know everything else they've done because we'd set up campaign engagement history recently. So that just kind of supports Tom's point on duplicates as well. If you are creating dupes then you lose all of that rich information at point of sale. And essentially that's what these efforts are for. Cool. So we added them to a suppression list at that point as well. So the task had fired sales talking to that lead and in Pardot the behavior is, and we spoke about this with the KP team added to a suppression list. So they're not receiving our marketing communications anymore. Reason being is the sales reps responsibility at this point and they don't want to cross message. So I think it was a really nice way to handle that approach. And again the campaign member statuses are crucial at this point and they changed based on the opportunity. So the, the sales rep would create that opportunity because they're talking to that lead and therefore they became an SQL. Great.

So a little bit more on marketing and sales alignment. So there's other things you can do in Pardot and Salesforce. One of them being one to one email templates for sales. So what we can do is we can have pre approved content from marketing that we can set up as one to one email templates to support sales teams. And this is ideal for those organizations who have high value, low volume sales journeys where perhaps the sales team like to have a little bit more control over what material and messaging is going out to their sales list. For example, we often come across companies who have sales teams with personal relationships with the people they're selling to. And in this case these one to one email templates are invaluable because it's acting as a support to sales rather than being marketing led and sort of dictating the play and saying we're sending this on this time. For those types of companies and businesses this is a nice approach to still support the sales team. And again having that feedback mechanism into your processes is super important. So if a lead's rejected, marketing need to know why. The idea being is that there's this continuous feedback from sales to marketing so that marketing can now improve the implicit leads. So now you can say we're going to tweak the scoring and grading model because we've had X amount of spam leads come through from this channel. So therefore we're going to make it that little bit harder for those from LinkedIn to actually get through to the system because we know historically the leads tend to be quite bad. We're just making data driven decisions. That's essentially what we're trying to do. Accrue data, make it objective or as objective as we can to then make better decisions. And then as we've mentioned in one of the previous slides, being able to add directly to an engagement studio is so key streamlines who needs to go where and again adds that extra layer of support for sales.

What that looks like for us. In this campaign we established that feedback loop using campaign member statuses. So realistically a sales rep was trying to work this lead and it went to close lost. What that would do is that would trigger to push that prospect back into pardot and and into a list for potential re engagement. For example, you have to remember at this point these leads have gone through quite a lot to reach sales about this specific category. So remote services in this case. So they're obviously quite engaged with us as a company. What we did with that was we attached this re engagement potential list and we added them into a more long term nurture just to try and engage them with KP as a brand versus remote services. Specifically that separate engagement studio like Tom spoke about a minute ago would have its own category of scoring and assignment logic and you know, it'll be based on a longer term journey. So this prospect, just because they didn't win, you know, they closed lost on this remote services campaign. Hope's not gone, you know, but we're still trying to nurture them in the back end and that's part of that closed loop process that we always recommend building. And because of that, sales will get their lead back and it just improves marketing and sales alignment tenfold.

Sink and swim, sink and swim before we move on. So a quick shout out to connected campaigns. So for those that don't have connected campaigns turned on, I recommend that you do. For those that do have it turned on, I really recommend reviewing your campaign hierarchy. So in this first screenshot that you can see here, you can see that we've got a structure in place that enables us to do better reporting. And that's the key thing to remember. The hierarchy can be designed by you in such a way that aligns with your core marketing objectives and goals when it comes to reporting. So I'll add a bit of information on that in a bit. But the idea being is you want to be able to chop and change the data and view things in a way that you need to.

So it needs to Enable you.

This second screenshot is an amazing feature. It's called engagement History. This in particular is an engagement history dashboard. And we know that this can be added to lead contact opportunity account objects. But when we specifically look at the campaign itself, we get all kinds of metrics so we get the level of engagement, what was engaged with and we can start to have this campaign or account based marketing approach so we can identify key accounts when it comes to these, these reports. So again, another reason why you need the hierarchy to be in place because then you will identify things that you might not otherwise. And then the last thing on here is about influence opportunities, in other words, campaign influence. So what we're saying here is how do we measure the indirect revenue off the back of a webinar that you ran? So, you know, loads of businesses run webinars, often sales don't understand why you're running webinars, which is quite funny. But marketers know that there's an indirect benefit to hosting those webinars. It's about thought leadership. You might not have a sale the next day after the webinar, but there may have been a big impact off the back of it. And this is where campaign influence really comes into its own. So really, really focus on thematic touch points.

Yeah, I won't go on too much about connected campaigns after Tom's wonderful brief just then, but you know, it was important to touch on it. We set that up. We had to. If we didn't for this campaign, we'd have lost all of that reporting opportunity. We had, you know, been able to tie back roi, really track each touch point of our campaign. So it was absolutely essential for us. So yeah, this is just to demonstrate and show off really. We set this off, set this up as a part of the campaign that we're talking about.

Amazing. So now we're looking at B2BMA and you can see the whole funnel is green here, mainly because it gives a lot of visibility on all stages across the journey. You're given default dashboards, but you can create custom ones. And that's where things get really interesting, especially for organizations who use custom objects and not opportunities. That's a really interesting one. But overall, B2BMA is your go to tool for any form of detailed reporting. And the way we see it is it's like shining a light in a dark room. So using BTBMA really pulls everything together, not just from a parent salesforce sense, but if you've got advanced or premium, you can start. Or premium, sorry, you can start to look at integrating other things like SAP, Amazon, essentially third party analytics platforms. So it's really, really key, really key tool for pulling everything together and visualizing and interacting with it, because it interacts in pretty much real time. And again, back to campaigns, they're so important because this is where it highlights all of the activity with different campaigns. So as you can see in the screenshot, you can see X amount of revenue off the back of the webinar example that I gave. So you can see, based on different influence models, how or where the revenue is coming from. And essentially you're tracking ROI across thematic touchpoints and you're answering tricky questions with data. So to give you an example, you might have a number of search.