Attention B2B Marketers: Spring’18 is one for us. Get excited, this is a release with a bang!
Salesforce have made a number of key developments to Pardot and Sales Cloud, continuing their undying commitment to marry Sales and Marketing Teams.
The Spring ’18 release notes are hot off the press – all 437 pages of them. Luckily, I’ve cherry-picked the best 7 new features and enhancements for your benefit. These are:
- Campaign Object Alignment
- Engagement Metrics Component
- Customizable Campaign Influence Reporting
- Paths
- Matched Lead Component
- Salesforce Surveys
- Pardot Available in Japanese
Take a read of the future features outlined, then head off for the holiday season knowing that next year is going to be the best yet.
Campaign Object Alignment
Many Pardot users thought they would never see the day come, where Salesforce Campaigns and Pardot Campaigns will live in harmony! This is a highly anticipated new feature, due to the two differing in purpose, capabilities, and structure. Now, Salesforce have taken the more robust of the two (Salesforce Campaigns), and made it possible to track what Pardot Campaigns were related to (Prospects, Conversions, marketing assets etc.) from the Salesforce Campaign. This is a huge step in bringing Pardot into Salesforce as a native app – to leverage the powerful reporting and definite ease of use.
So, how will it work?
When the B2B Marketing app has been enabled inside Salesforce, you will create campaign records from the Salesforce Campaigns tab – you won’t be able to from Pardot any longer. Campaigns will appear in Pardot, but as read-only records. You can even selectively connect campaigns by specifying which record types are allowed to connect, or not. For existing campaigns, Salesforce offer to do this one-by-one or in bulk in Excel.
This is currently in Beta.
See: Connect Your Pardot Campaigns to Salesforce Campaigns (Beta), pp. 92.
Engagement Metrics Component
Now that Pardot Campaigns will merge into Salesforce Campaigns, we can following on nicely to Engagement Metrics. Prospect Engagement Data – opens, clicks, submissions – will also be able to pass seamlessly between the two tools. Think of it as an alignment between the Prospect record and the Campaign Member. It’s been a real missing piece, to see how Campaign Members are engaging with campaigns at a granular level, per marketing asset.
You can add the Engagement Metrics component to the campaign page layout, which will pulls key metrics into a snapshot, such as unique email opens, form submissions and views, and unique link clicks (seen as a grid in the picture). These are updated daily.
This is currently in Beta.
See How Prospects Are Engaging with Campaigns, pp. 94
Customizable Campaign Influence Reporting
I know there’s Analytical-minded marketers out there that will be sitting up in their seats. If you use Customizable Campaign Influence, or are planning to roll-out, listen close.
You can now report on the opportunity revenue that should be correctly attributed to each campaign with the new ‘Campaigns with Influenced Opportunities (Customizable Campaign Influence)’ standard report type. This molds together your opportunity data, related campaigns and chosen attribution model.
Report types are what assemble the correct relational objects for building reports; in this way, you see the correct fields in the Fields Pane (left sidebar). Customizable Campaign Influence was updated in Winter ’18, and now you can pull campaign influence reports much faster thanks to this, making the case for this feature very strong.
See: Report on Customizable Campaign Influence, pp. 92
Paths
We first saw paths on opportunities. Now, we can use these sharp chevrons on more objects.
Campaign Paths
Paths are the Progress bars you see at the top of record pages. They visualise where something is relatively in the process. They are perfect for campaign execution, which goes through a linear process, such as: Planned, In Progress, Completed, Cancelled – but this is entirely customisable! Salesforce say: “Use a path to coach your marketers how to move a campaign to the next stage”. It’s going to be a win for team coordination!
See: Use Path to Track Campaign Progress, pp. 91
Account Paths
Account-based Marketing (ABM) has been a talked-about topic for over a year. Now, it’s about to get clearer for some teams. ABM requires cross-team collaboration between Marketing and Sales, and for that, you need clarity, which is what Path delivers. Paths can be created based on any Account Picklist field – so it’s up to you to define your account life cycle.
See: Use Path to Build Relationships with Accounts, pp. 98
Matched Leads Component
On the topic of Account-based Marketing, Salesforce are aiming to bridge the gap between Leads and Accounts. With the Matched Leads Component, leads won’t be less isolated from the Account they should, and eventually will, belong to. This Lightning Component sits on the Account page, and displays Leads best match first, prime for conversion into contacts.
This is likely to increase Lead Conversion (great for your inbound marketing campaigns), and bulk up Account data (contributing to better account-based marketing campaigns). Another win for marketers!
See: Connect the Dots Between Leads and Accounts, pp. 99
Salesforce Surveys
There’s some surveys that are best done outside of the marketing automation tool. For these, you can leverage Salesforce Surveys at no additional cost or integration effort. Once your survey is built, you can embed it on Lightning Pages or in Communities, so that customers or the users themselves can input questionnaire data. You can then, of course, sync what’s relevant to Pardot via the contact/lead record. I see this having a valuable use case for trade shows, where you want to capture data, but don’t want to clog up your Pardot instance with one-off fields.
See: Gather Feedback with Salesforce Surveys, pp. 46
Pardot Available in Japanese
Japan is in 2nd place when it comes to business revenue created by the Salesforce Industry ($108 bil) – we can conclude that Japan is a Salesforce powerhouse! Pardot is available in Japanese for these B2B marketing users, so spread the word if your team operates globally.
Summary
This post has run through 7 key developments for B2B marketers that we’ll see in Spring ’18 – a release that marks an important milestone for the Pardot-Sales Cloud connection. The benefits covered have been related to a more seamless data model, stronger reporting, and usability.
The general release will take place on February 13th (Preview Instances first on 5th/6th January), and in the run-up there will be more content, including hearing from participants in the Pardot Edge pilot program. 2018 is going to be the promised land of B2B Marketing.
Get the Spring ’18 Preview release notes here.
Days until Spring ’18 General Release!
[wpdevart_countdown text_for_day=”Days” text_for_hour=”Hours” text_for_minut=”Minutes” text_for_second=”Seconds” countdown_end_type=”time” end_date=”17-01-2018 23:59″ start_time=”1516188273″ end_time=”27,5,0″ action_end_time=”hide” content_position=”center” top_ditance=”10″ bottom_distance=”10″ ]Spring ’18 has been released![/wpdevart_countdown]
More of a B2C Marketer? Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you. Stay tuned.