Dreamforce 2017 takeaways on Pardot
The key message delivered to B2B marketers during Dreamforce 2017 is that Account Based Marketing is the new black. You would have seen ABM on most Pardot session, which of course stands for Account Based Marketing.
So what is all the fuss about? What is ABM? Well, Forbes defines ABM in an article as [read the article]:
Account-based marketing (ABM), also known as key account marketing, is a strategic approach to B2B marketing based on goals for specific target accounts. ABM helps organizations communicate with individual prospects or accounts as markets of one. You can think of ABM as a one-to-one approach instead of a one-to-many approach.
I attended the session “How Top B2B Marketers Combine Account Based Marketing with Pardot” and I loved how Talmadge Zipperer from RecruitMilitary explained their journey from marketing to ABM (see picture below).
Basically with Salesforce, Pardot and other available apps on the app exchange we are gathering tons of data. If we go through this data and selects the best companies we want to work with, we can better tailor the message, which gives a higher conversion rate. And with Advertising Studio we can take this message and deliver it to the right people hence the people we know, instead of dropping marketing bombs hoping someone will see it. So ABM allows B2B marketers to apply a more targeted approach.
Read this article if you want to understand why to adopt an ABM strategy.
The future of ABM
With the question of ABM answered what B2B marketing features were announced at Dreamforce? What trends are seen?
I definitely see that Pardot is listening to the Pardot peeps and making improvements to existing features where some of us have been wondering “why can I not do…”.
- Run an automation rule multiple times for a prospect. This is already generally available, which I wrote a blog on and I still love this improvement.
- Schedule when an engagement program should start and end. This is already generally available and believe it or not this is the top question I get in regards to engagement programs.
- Alignment of Salesforce and Pardot campaigns. This is now in pilot! For me, this is a big one and I am really keen to see how this has been solved. One thing I did pick up on is that in terms of analytics I saw campaign influence in Einstein Analytics showing first touch and last touch campaign.
During the roadmap session, it was clear that Pardot is being brought more into the Salesforce platform. This was demonstrated in several different ways:
- The Pardot UI is adapting more of a lightning look
- Chatter collaboration on engagement programs
- Account teams will be supported by Salesforce Engage. Alerts can be set up for a team.
- Engage emails can be sent from accounts and account lists.
- And again campaign alignment and one single truth to your campaigns. I had to mention this is again because that has been a huge gap for me.
If you have been working with the B2B marketing addition to Einstein Analytics, you can also look forward to a new dashboard.
What about Advertising Studio
For Advertising Studio the key message I got was to get more platforms included. I saw Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Snapchat up on the big screen. But also Google Advanced Match was a priority. All while staying true to GDPR. Another focus for Advertising Studio was to make it easy to get the message out by building your ad in a few steps or leverage the content builder of Marketing Cloud as well as see how your campaign is performing directly from Advertising Studio.
So while we wait for the new features, start thinking how you might adopt ABM in your company.
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