The Pardot keynote at Dreamforce opened with ‘A marketer is the new quarterback’. For a non-American non-football watching Aussie, this doesn’t mean a great deal. So, after a quick google search, I now know what a quarter back is; I agree 100%. It truly is an amazing time to be a marketer!
Quarterbacks touch the ball on every offensive play during a football game. A quarterback’s job is to direct his team toward the end zone and score as many points as possible. With the introduction of Artificial Intelligence into a marketer’s arsenal, this is becoming truer every day.
During the keynote, we heard from the company Lyft. They discussed B2B marketing in the 4thIndustrial Revolution. They shared their challenges and how they are utilizing AI and Analytics to grow their pipeline and provided some thought-provoking insights.
Let’s jump straight into my top 5 Pardot Keynote take-aways;
Siloed data creates ineffective marketing
To succeed now and into the future, B2B companies need the following tools to be successful:
1. Analytics
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. Account Based Marketing
Traditionally we have siloed sales and marketing teams, the two teams work independently. Sales has one set of data, one set of metrics and one process. Marketing is working elsewhere with a different data set, different KPI’s and a completely different process within themselves.
This makes it very difficult, if not impossible to leverage analytics or have a 360-degree view of the customer. The power of artificial intelligence cannot be harnessed if your data is siloed. It also makes it very difficult to execute Account Based Marketing, which has become best practice for a B2B marketer today.
Customer Success Platform: Creating a 360-degree view
The Salesforce Customer Success Platform provides an incomparable 360-degree view of the customer. It presents a single source of truth across sales, marketing and services. This level of alignment has not been possible before and provides the tools to deliver an amazing experience to customers. It gives you the power to reach your customer at the right time, with the right message, at the right place, no matter where they are on the journey, with your company.
Pardot powered by Lightning
At Dreamforce, Salesforce announced Pardot in Lightning. With Lightning and Einstein Analytics, Salesforce have developed a single platform experience for marketing and sales teams to give them complete alignment.
The Lyft Business shared their Pardot use case, which demonstrates B2B marketing utopia. They use Pardot to drive customer awareness, engagement and adoption across their different industries, customer personas and segments. This gives them a complete 360 view of their customer which provides the vision to deliver the right messaging at the right time.
Adding Ad Studio and a Chat Bot into the mix
Lyft showed what is possible when you add Marketing Cloud Ad Studio and Chat Bot into the mix. This combination imparts the power to transform customer experience to new heights and shows the true ascendency of AI.
How does Lyft deliver a seamless, meaningful customer experience? The use case goes like this: The Ad drives the customer to a Pardot Landing Page and up pops a Chat Bot. With the power of Salesforce behind it, the customer receives a 100% personalised experience. The Chat Bot already knows their personal details; name, company, interests etc. Using progressive profiling, the customer selects an area of interest and business priorities. Finally, consent is requested for a follow-up via email and a Prospect is created. All this information is captured and fed back to the individuals CRM record.
The beautiful thing for a marketer is all this was created with clicks not code. Now, this is obviously tremendously abbreviated, so I recommend you watch the keynote video yourself to see it play out. It really is a thing of beauty!
Einstein: supercharges productivity
This is where it really gets exciting! At Dreamforce, Pardot announced that Einstein Analytics is available for B2B Marketers. Einstein has the power to search through all of Salesforce and provide insights that are important to the user.
What does this really mean?
- More insights to increase value of lead scoring. E.g. Can identify Prospects showing buying intent.
- Ability to quickly identify Campaign Insights, such as top performing campaigns
- Surfaces new target audiences that would have previously been missed
- Provides a single data source meaning sales and marketing share the same reporting
- With Einstein Voice on the horizon, you will soon have conversation with your data, saving valuable time. Ask for reports and campaign data in real time.
The future is looking bright for Pardot and B2B quarterbacks! These new developments will enable you to deliver killer content to the right customer, at the right time and grow your pipeline.
Digital transformation can be daunting for traditional marketers and although many organisations recognise the importance of digital transformation, they are yet to explore its strategic potential. As a platinum Salesforce Partner and the experience in cross-cloud transformations, Sqware Peg can guide the marketing team to ensure they fully harness the power of Pardot. Find out how.
Click here to see the keynote and get inspired.
