Salesforce Maps is a product that’s interested me for some time, even since MapAnything was acquired by Salesforce back in Spring 2019. As a geography graduate, I suppose I have an appreciation for maps more than the average person? Salesforce Maps gives Salesforce users location data visualisation, live location tracking, and route optimisation. I saw a demo of Salesforce Maps at Dreamforce which focused on sales team use cases (optimising the route to sales meetings around a city) and my mind got whirring.
What’s more, I recently stumbled upon the “Salesforce Maps & Pardot Customer Webinar” – here are the key takeaways on how Pardot and Salesforce Maps work together, plus some of my own thoughts on location mapping for marketing use cases!
Salesforce Maps – Key Concepts
Before understanding how to use both Salesforce Maps and Pardot, let’s understand the key features and terminology of Salesforce Maps.
Layers
A Layer (aka. Marker Layers) is a collection of records that are plotted as location pins on the map. The locations plotted is based on the address information of a record.
The layers are based on a field, eg. Pardot score, and these fields can be grouped and filtered (eg. Show me only prospect scores over 100). You can toggle layers on and off of the map.
Examples of layers could include:
- Neglected accounts
- Leads by Pardot score
- Opportunities by Einstein score
- Customers by CSAT
Layers are created using the Marker Layer Builder. Below is an example of what this filtering interface looks like.
Source: Trailhead
Point of Interest Search (POI)
Search for a specific location that you can use as your reference point for filtering, eg. an event venue, your office etc.
Shape Layers and Boundaries
Enable you to draw a circle on the map that acts as the boundary – if the records are within the boundary, they are included, otherwise they are excluded. This is useful for setting a proximity in relation to a point of interest, eg. 5 km from the event venue. There are different ways to define your boundary, for example, you could filter depending on travel time, eg. Prospects within a 30 minute drive from the event venue.
Aggregate Data
Calculate the sum, average, min or max for the field data of records within your boundary, eg. the average score of prospects in that boundary.
Mass Actions
Include ‘Add to campaign’, ‘Add to route’, ‘Follow on Chatter’.
Marketing Use Cases for Salesforce Maps
Campaign Target Audience (+ ABM)
How do you build your target accounts lists? Is it by geo, such as a Zip code/Postal code? What if there are other factors such as industry or company size that are thrown into the mix? Plus, if your organisation transports physical goods, location becomes a factor in how you organise your targets to ease logistics.
If restrictions in a certain locality or region are lifted, this could be your green light, as a marketer, to kickstart product/service marketing campaigns. Where there’s a patchwork of ‘open’ and ‘locked down’ areas, mapping becomes a key tool.
Event Marketing – Invite Prospects Based on Proximity and Score
Although events have been put on hold for the foreseeable future for most of the world, there will come a time when smaller, local events will be able to go ahead. There may be conditions attached to who can attend, eg. only if they are located in a 5 km radius.
Take out the manual process of figuring out who should be invited (now, and in the ’next normal’).
The demo in the “Salesforce Maps & Pardot Customer Webinar”, hosted by Salesforce, showed how a ‘Leads by Pardot score’ layer could be linked to a Pardot Engagement Studio program.
Step 1: Marker Layer and Filters – ‘Leads by Pardot score’ layer was added to the map. Pardot score was grouped eg. 1 to 20, 21 to 40 etc. which the user leveraged to select and deselect filters to restrict which score ranges were displayed on the map, which updated in real-time.
Step 2: Point of Interest Search – by running a ‘point of interest’ search, the user set the event venue.
Step 3: Draw the Boundary – from there, they could set the boundary which would limit which records were included within the specified proximity of the venue. They chose to base the boundary on travel time (which opens up a range of options for other contextual information, such as date and time).
Step 4: Add to Campaign – opening the mass actions menu, they added all the records currently mapped on the map to a Salesforce campaign.
To get these records into a Pardot list, there are a couple of options.
- ‘Add to Pardot List’ and ‘Add to Engagement Studio Program’ buttons: click one of these buttons to add all the campaign members to a Pardot list,
- Create a dynamic list with the criteria ‘Prospect CRM campaign’
Which option you chose from the above will depend on whether you want your Engagement Studio program start list as a static list or dynamic list. My advice is to ask yourself: will this be a one-time add to campaign action, and a restricted invite to a specific audience? (use a static list with the first option) Or, will more records be added to the campaign, eg. by the sales team? (use a dynamic list with the second option).
Step 5: Create the Engagement Studio Program – use the (dynamic) Pardot list as the start list for an Engagement Studio program, like the one below:
In case you were wondering, the customer featured in this webinar was Modern Star, a leading supplier of education resources and toys to more than 40,000 childhood centres and schools in APAC.
Summary
I hope you’re enjoyed looking into the key takeaways on how Pardot and Salesforce Maps work together.
How you could use Salesforce Maps with your marketing campaigns will depend on your own business. While for many marketers, visualisation and location intelligence will be nice-to-haves and far down on their list – yet, for others, there may be potential value to unearth here. I think this would be especially useful for organisations that transport physical goods, or that have complex sales territories.