New Year is a great opportunity to recalibrate your marketing – whether you love or hate resolutions. I’m a fan of resolutions, especially Pardot ones! The point is to lay out our new habits to adopt, marketing tactics to master and new technologies to trial in 2019.
The first few months will be key for Salesforce B2B Marketers, as new features make their way into the product. You only need to refer to the Spring ‘19 release highlights for B2B Marketers to see transformation on the horizon.
The resolutions here are covered high-level, but you’ll find links to more in-depth content throughout, with many more in the plan for over the next little while.
Let’s crack on.
In 2019, I will…
Enable Connected Campaigns
Connected Campaigns were made generally available in the Summer ’18 release, and have been on our radar ever since. Connected Campaigns forge a relationship between Pardot Campaigns and Salesforce Campaigns, therefore aligning two different types of campaigns across two tools.
In 2018, ‘start using Salesforce Campaigns’ came top of my resolutions list – and for good reason. Salesforce Campaigns become the master when using the Connected Campaigns feature, meaning that control over campaigns on Pardot is revoked.
2019 will bring a new urgency for getting to grips with Connected Campaigns. Stay tuned for more content on Connected Campaigns coming your way this month, including how to get started, extra features to consider, and why I’ve ranked this the top resolution!
Switch to Pardot Lightning
Pardot made the monumental move into the Salesforce Lightning interface in 2018. The Pardot Lightning App is slick, and a big win for users already embracing the Salesforce Lightning Experience.
Pardot’s move to Lightning made a statement about the direction future product development could take. As we saw with the Salesforce Lightning roll-out, new developments will focus on the Pardot Lightning interface, as Pardot Classic becomes legacy and fades out.
There have already been user interface improvements, which (hopefully) means a productivity boost and fewer navigation headaches. Not to mention, it will be easier to onboard new users into Pardot who are already familiar with the Lightning interface.
Keep my Mailing Lists Clean
This time last year, marketers faced preparing for the looming GDPR regulation, faced with the harsh truth of their situation: a marketing database of dirty, old data.
Permission Pass Campaigns became popular. These are emails ask for a prospect’s marketing consent, or to renew outdated consent. The blast campaign forced us to email prospects that hadn’t been touched for a long time (if ever!), and cleaned out the trash with each hard bounce that came back.
Doing a one-off Permission Pass is not enough to maintain clean mailing lists. The combination of corporate spam filters becoming evermore sophisticated and the nature of B2B email addresses (often changing), means you could easily get caught out.
Use an email verification tool to weed out invalid email addresses. Try out frequency & recency lists to optimise your send lists.
Enable Analytics
Pardot added B2B Marketing Analytics to the Pardot Plus and Advanced Editions in mid-2018, in a move to give the modern marketer the full-funnel insights businesses demand. The ability to also ‘slice and dice’ datasets moves marketing reporting beyond Salesforce Campaigns and Pardot out-of-the-box reporting – which has rapidly become an expectation for savvy marketers.
Above: Marketing Analytics as shown in the Dreamforce ’18 Pardot Keynote
Explore Sales Enablement
Marketers needs to step up to the plate when it comes to spearheading Sales Enablement within organisations. Sales Enablement is a term that groups the systems you put in place to help you capitalize on the leads in your pipeline and close more deals, through highly targeted content, delivered by the Sales people at the right time. Feedback on content success in the later stages of the Sales funnel will also help you claw your way out any content slump you’re reaching.
Stay on Top of Pardot Product Releases
Salesforce recently announced that there will be 6 Pardot releases per year. When we consider that there are 3 Salesforce releases a year, it signals that there will be many new Pardot features and enhancements going down the pipeline.
If the rest of the releases this year will be anything like the Pardot Spring ’19 release, then it’s essential we all stay on top of them!
You can always count on The DRIP to cover what you need to know about each release, so keep your eyes peeled on email, LinkedIn and Twitter to get the news fast.
Summary
New Year is a great opportunity to recalibrate your marketing, to lay out new habits to adopt, marketing tactics to master and new technologies to trial in 2019. This post has covered 6 resolutions, based on Pardot technology predictions, to get the most out of Pardot and Salesforce.
