What is Pardot in Salesforce and Does Your Business Need it in 2024?

Many businesses consider marketing automation to be a must-have. According to the latest Salesforce State of Marketing Report, the average enterprise has 900 (!) different applications to enable data-driven marketing.

How often, though, does quantity lead to the quality of marketing processes? And what are the planned outcomes of the transformation?

No matter what tool or platform you are going to have, the results might not justify the investment if you don't prepare the ground for its implementation. Taking Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, also known as Pardot, as an example, we will discuss what companies expect vs what they really get with the help of martech tools.

In this article, we will be delving into what Pardot is, its practical advantages, recognized as a top B2B marketing platform in the Salesforce realm. We'll uncover the impact of this B2B marketing automation tool through real-world examples shared in Salesforce Pardot customer stories.

Additionally, we'll explore the significance of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement growth and highlight essential Pardot features that have solidified its role for B2B marketers.

First things first:

What is Pardot Account Engagement?

Account Engagement, formerly known as Pardot, is a widely-used marketing automation tool designed specifically for Salesforce customers. Originally introduced in 2007, Account Engagement initially operated independently from the core Salesforce platform.

However, in recent years, there has been a gradual migration of Pardot's features and functionalities into the core Salesforce platform, resulting in a more integrated and seamless experience for users.

The Role of Pardot Marketing Automation

However tempting to imagine it this way, the customer journey isn't straightforward. You don't just fill the pipeline with clients and then push them to obtain products with thousands of irrelevant messages. Each interaction needs to play a role in converting your customer into your partner.

This is especially true for B2B companies with considered purchases. So it's up to marketing teams to provide an engaging, powerful, and personalized experience for a customer from their first visit to the website to their making a purchase.

Salesforce Pardot Pipeline

Marketing automation software provides a central database for oiling these processes.

It automates repetitive tasks, such as email & ad campaigns, content distribution, handling contact forms, and social media planning. As a result, marketing operations are more optimized, and conversion rates increase.
You have access to analytics. Data and marketing are synonyms. Relevant information about your customer behaviour gives more opportunities to personalize messages, fine-tune campaigns, and prove marketing ROI.
It ensures a seamless experience. If integrated with the CRM, a unified platform harmonizes sales and marketing teams in their approach to customers.

What is Pardot and its benefits

Don't forget to check out: What is Pardot Dynamic Content in 2024?

What is Pardot and its Benefits?

However promising these benefits may sound, not every business needs marketing automation. There are two critical factors to consider before implementing it.

Growth Strategy

First of all, it's impossible to upgrade something that doesn't work. Consider the current marketing processes in your company. If you have an active multi-channel strategy, then automation will serve you best, as it provides an all-in-one automation tool. But if scaling isn't on the horizon, and an email channel, for example, is enough to keep you afloat, then it's worth taking your time.

Ecosystem

This point backs the first one. An ecosystem is a base for your growth. So think about the tools that would fit in properly in the current ecosystem and help you scale faster. For example, Pardot (MC Account Engagement) integration with Salesforce expands its functionality with minimum errors in data syncing plus gives more automation options.

Keeping these two factors in mind, let's see how exactly marketing automation works in the example of Pardot (MC Account Engagement).

What are the Benefits of Salesforce Pardot (MCAE)?

Why do businesses bother with adopting MCAE? The long-term advantages speak for themselves.

Improved time-to-revenue: Pardot facilitates a quicker time to revenue for businesses by streamlining and automating sales and marketing operations.
Streamlined processes: Pardot streamlines outdated sales and marketing processes, saving time and resources for businesses by automating routine tasks.
Increased revenue: marketing automation with Pardot contributes to increased revenue by identifying and focusing on the most effective and profitable marketing channels.
Quality lead generation: Pardot's lead scoring and grading features help businesses generate more high-quality sales leads, ensuring a more effective and targeted approach to lead nurturing.
Unified platform value: Pardot's integration capabilities ensure a unified platform for sales, service, and marketing teams, fostering collaboration and providing a complete 360-degree view of customer engagement.
Data-driven insights: Pardot offers data-driven insights, helping businesses make informed decisions and align marketing and sales efforts for improved overall impact.
Seamless integrations: Pardot seamlessly integrates with other key business tools, such as CRM, video platforms, and advertising tools, enhancing overall functionality and connectivity.
Easy collaboration: businesses using Pardot alongside Sales Cloud experience faster transitions from marketing to sales, fostering better collaboration and boosting conversion rates.
Cost-effective growth: As part of the Salesforce Platform, Pardot eliminates the need for complex integrations, saving time and money and making it easier for businesses to scale and add new functionalities.
Customer trust building: Pardot aids in building customer trust by enabling businesses to nurture leads, deliver relevant content, and personalize customer journeys, ultimately fostering long-term relationships.

Here's a success story that illustrates how Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) can shift the marketing trajectory for a small business:

Gexcon, a world-leading safety and risk management company in the field, faced a challenge in streamlining marketing activities across departments. Gexcon, having a history with Salesforce, opted for MCAE (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) as a single source of truth to avoid data duplication and consolidate information.
Gexcon initiated a project with Twistellar to audit their system and align lead generation, qualification, and assignment processes in MCAE with best practices. The project prioritized marketing migration, lasting two months, covering migration, training, and support.
The key outcome was the successful implementation of MCAE, migrating the database and assets from HubSpot, and customizing MCAE and Sales Cloud to meet specific requirements. This included MCAE setup, content migration, database cleansing, custom preference center, and integration with Zoom. The implementation facilitated the synchronization of marketing and sales teams, aided by new assignment rules and custom Web2Case solutions in forms.

What is Pardot Used for?

Pardot (MC Account Engagement) oversees the upper layer of the sales funnel. It means you can build your customer journey and organize lead nurturing processes.

What is Pardot used for?

Track visitors and convert them into prospect
Use criteria-based automation tools to perform actions on prospects
Score and grade prospects to prioritize activities within your team
Engage them with adaptable email & social campaigns
Analyze how they interact with content
Segment effectively
Push high-quality leads to sales

As a result, anonymous website visitors get converted into qualified leads. Sounds impressive, and Pardot sticks to its promise. However, a tool is not enough to achieve success.

Pardot (MCAE) Common Misconceptions

To create a realistic perspective on its capabilities, you need to give the boot to misleading expectations. Let's dig into the most common of them.

Pardot will Drive Revenue Growth and Replace my Marketing Team

Several surveys outline two key barriers to marketing automation success: lack of strategy and good-quality content.

Automation won't do marketing for you – it can only streamline your operations. So, if your existing marketing processes are chaotic or close to absent, Pardot won't help you save the day. However, with a costly, complex, and time-consuming strategy, it fits the bill.

The most salient benefit of Pardot is cutting down on mundane tasks: you can set up automation rules based on criteria, such as a prospect's grade, a landing page view, or email opening, schedule email campaigns and autoresponders, enable A/B testing, and analyze SEO, all on one platform

Nonetheless, the success of email campaigns relies on the personalization and relevance of your messages. Content here again comes to the fore. For that, Pardot offers opportunities to keep one step ahead in customer engagement with the help of various channels, like socials and ads.

Pardot is Self-sufficient

Let's not forget the goal of marketing automation - warm leads. Leads that turn into paying customers. To make it real, sales and marketing teams need to join forces. That's why Pardot gets integrated with a CRM system, such as Salesforce.

With this combination, you can deliver warm leads to your sales team, and they will know how to break the ice using the information about their previous interactions.

Pardot is an Out-of-the-box Solution

Business automation implies upscale. The tool you choose has to be flexible enough to align with your growth. Flexibility is usually the other side of complexity.

The main barriers to marketing automation adoption include integrating data from sources and systems (56%) and lack of resources, staff, or skills for setting up rules, lead scoring, and sequences (49%).

For these reasons, hiring an outsource consultant allows you to set up all the processes quickly and benefit from specialized expertise. Thus, you can ensure a stable growth path aligned with your business needs.

One might come to the conclusion that marketing automation is a bad idea. Not at all! It spans operations and narrows your work down to really impactful tasks. However, the success of marketing automation is a matter of right expectations and strategic planning.

How to use Pardot to Bring Tangible Results?

Using Pardot efficiently allows you to maximize your resources, save time, improve lead management, gain valuable insights, and deliver more effective and personalized marketing campaigns, ultimately driving better results for your business.

There are a few tips seasoned Pardot (Account Engagement) experts share:

Utilize the recycling bin feature to reduce data usage limits while retaining contact information for future reference. Prioritize placing hard bounces, unsubscribes, soft bounces, and inactive contacts into the recycling bin.
Use custom redirects for email/landing page links within Pardot to track traffic and perform actions on contacts based on link clicks. This simplifies the process compared to using engagement studios and allows for easier reporting.
Instead of relying on automation rules, consider using completion actions or page actions for simpler actions. Reserve automation rules for more complex actions to avoid reaching the limit quickly.
Review and customize the default scoring settings to align with the value you assign to different contact activities. Additionally, utilize grading to track contacts' demographic information and identify ideal customers.
Implement scoring categories to track activity based on different content or topics. This allows for more targeted scoring and evaluation of campaign performance.

Check out another amazing blog by Twistellar here: Salesforce Accessibility Overview 2024: Features and Tips

To Wrap Up

Before you spend months and thousands of dollars on a system with quite vast capabilities, let's overview some precautions that software salespeople might omit.

Not every business needs automation: Think about current processes and your scaling plan
First comes the strategy, then the tool: Content and skilled people matter
Talk to your team first: Analyze the channels you use as well as your sales cycle
Generate a steady flow of leads: Pardot will help to capture and nurture them
Integrate it properly: Consider the existing ecosystem and other tools you might need in the future
Outsource to save time: An experienced consultant will highlight the pitfalls to be avoided, save budget and time with its implementation