Why this B2B marketer got Pardot-certified
I recently made a very uncharacteristic decision: to get my Pardot certification for marketing automation. Here’s why.
After spending more than a decade in various marketing roles, including my most recent one as Senior Director of Brand and Marketing Communications, I had spent the majority of my professional development time on brand strategy and leadship workshops. Let's just say that I took a pretty dramatic turn for the – shall we say - tactical.
But before I tell you why I decided to do it, let’s get a basic question behind us – what is Pardot? Also referred to as Salesforce.com’s B2B Marketing Cloud, Pardot is a marketing automation system that in essence, allows companies to deploy and measure digital marketing campaigns. It captures digital interactions – be it on your website, through your social media sites or email engagements – and then produces a score for interactions (email clicks, webpage visits, asset downloads, form completions, etc.) the person has engaged in. The higher the score, the more engaged a potential buyer is with your company, and the more likely they are to be a qualified lead. There are tons of marketing automation systems out there – including Marketo, Eloqua and Hubspot to name a few – but Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud has the benefit of being ‘native’ to Salesforce.com. This means that the linkage, or integration, between digital marketing campaigns and the eventual lead conversion to sales is built-in.
So why did I decide to get the Pardot certification? Well, besides the obvious reasons – like the growing prevalence of digital marketing and the credibility of Pardot being under the Salesforce.com umbrella – there were some not-so-obvious reasons.
First, I believe there is a talent gap in the market. There’s talent in the market made up of smart content marketers who endeavor to message to every stage in the buyer’s journey. But few of those content marketers are looking at digital interactions and adjusting what their buyer’s journey map to better reflect what happens. Even fewer of those smart content marketers are looking at measurable statistics to determine if their content is effective. They struggle to quickly answer the questions of:
Is my content even getting read? and
Of the content that is read, what are my buyers most interested in?
In short, companies need talent that will do all of these things – create smart content, assess the effectiveness of that content using modern systems, like marketing automation, and make calculated, measured decisions to adjust based on what they know. With my Pardot certification, I can now do just that for Sol clients.
Second, over the last several months, it has been eye-opening to witness what some of my clients have gone through to implement marketing automation. They need three different ‘specialized’ partners to help them with:
Campaign strategy and lead management process design
Technical implementation of the marketing automation platform
Content generation and deployment
The fragmented and disconnected nature of having four players ‘in the mix’ – the client plus three vendors – has been difficult to manage, especially coordinating and synchronizing all the inter-related deliverables to come together at the right times. I’m excited to say that I can now do all of that!
Finally, if this term hasn’t crossed your path yet, it will right now. It is: Revenue-based marketing. Simply put, it means you can tie your marketing investments to revenue generated. Now, there’s something your CEO will really care about. Marketing automation is a critical tool that helps create measurements associated with your marketing campaigns. Those measurements carry through to the sales pipeline and once those sales deals close, the revenue marketing generated becomes known.
Do you have unique opportunities and challenges with marketing automation? Let’s talk!