What is Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot)?

From lead to prospect to customer, conversions in the B2B space are built on trust and value. They require marketers and salespeople to engage customers in a targeted and personalised way, positioning their offerings as solutions rather than just products. Doing so takes considerable time and effort and, in a digital age, cannot be driven at scale by manual methods.

Enter B2B marketing automation.

Marketing automation uses workflows and triggers to automate time-consuming and repetitive marketing tasks. Not only does this improve operational efficiency, but it also frees up your employees to focus on more value-generating activities – such as deepening customer relationships and growing revenue. In today’s highly competitive world, B2B marketing automation technologies can give you an edge by helping you create relevant, timely, customer-centric engagement activities using rich data.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) is one such solution that can empower your marketing and sales teams to win more customers and keep them for life.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a B2B marketing automation solution that aligns marketing activities with sales goals to sell more effectively and build long-term customer relationships. It gives marketers and salespeople all the information and tools needed to find and win more customers. With rich customer insights at your fingertips, you can nurture human-to-human B2B connections that turn into fruitful relationships.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement helps you uncover leads most likely to convert, revitalise dormant leads, and quickly move them through the sales pipeline using personalised and targeted communication.

How can Marketing Cloud Account Engagement benefit your organisation?

The difference between winning and losing deals can be something as basic as engaging your audiences at the right time. For growing businesses, it is vital to build a seamless marketing and sales cadence that never lets the ball drop on great opportunities.

Here’s how your business can build and maintain a healthy sales funnel using different features:

• Generate high-quality leads

Marketing teams need to continuously attract and identify quality leads, so that sales teams can keep bringing in more business.

With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, you can use templates, drag-and-drop builders, and the powerful visual editor to easily create custom landing pages, forms, and offers that attract potential buyers. You can also attract more eyeballs from organic and paid searches by integrating SEM and SEO programmes into your campaigns.

When someone engages with your forms, the lead is auto captured, and you get notified. Leads are also automatically scored and graded, so that those most likely to convert can be prioritised. Your forms can also trigger changes in lead scores upon conversion.

• Stay in the loop on audience activity to convert faster

Do you wish you could know when a prospect moves closer to buying? Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can send you real-time alerts about prospect activity, and inform you about their progress between sales calls. Your salespeople can then respond proactively with a library of marketing-curated content that can be shared with one click.

As prospects move down the sales funnel, you can streamline the marketing to sales handover by setting up business rules, sales alerts, and assignment triggers. So, salespeople can contact and follow up with prospects at the most opportune moments.

• Build stronger connections with personalised outreach

To have more contextual conversations with customers, you need the right data. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers you in-depth information about prospect activity and interactions, so that you can deliver targeted sales pitches and personalised messages that convince prospects of the value you can add to their lives and businesses. Through Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, you can also build dynamic campaigns that adapt to each prospect’s buying signals, and display content that can move them through the pipeline faster.

• Launch tailored email campaigns that hit the mark

To run highly targeted email campaigns at scale, start by segmenting audiences. Use the intuitive email editor to craft beautiful emails, and develop seamless nurturing campaigns based on the latest customer information. Your email and linked website content can be set to dynamically change based on the recipient’s score, grade, industry, job title, and more.

Ensure your emails always hit the mark by mapping them against visual maps of your audience’s journey from prospect to advocate. Also, use spam analysis and A/B testing to ensure your emails land in the right inbox and resonate with the recipient. Then, save time and effort by automating email delivery based on triggers like time, prospect activity, and other custom parameters.

• Monitor and improve campaign performance

Evaluate the performance of your marketing and sales campaigns by measuring key engagement metrics. Track each closed deal back to specific marketing efforts and channels to know what works. With insights into campaign performance, marketing and sales teams can make more data-driven decisions, and work together to craft better campaigns.

Using AI to get predictive about customer engagement

AI can help marketers and salespeople get deeper insights into their leads, prospects, and customers and optimise communication based on changing scenarios. Einstein, Salesforce’s in-built AI engine, automatically generates scores and grades for leads as and when they engage with your brand. Scoring and grading indicate how close a lead is to buying based on their interactions with your brand. These insights help marketers and salespeople predict how leads and customers may respond to certain communications, and how to engage them with the aim of building long-lasting relationships.

Tips for optimal lead generation and personalised engagement

To get the most out of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement:

• Use the information gathered from lead capture forms to create hyper-personalised content for each prospect across assets—company website, landing pages, emails, and auto-responses.
• As you learn more about your prospects, progressively profile them to improve communication. Focus on understanding audience personas to create an optimised buyer journey for them.
• In evaluating your campaign’s success, go beyond conversion rates. Understand that every ‘first-time’ form (on the website, ad, or event) filled by a customer or prospect is a step towards a future sale.
• Leverage Pardot’s intelligence to take note of other prospect actions that indicate engagement – content downloads, clicks on tracked third-party links, landing page activity, and form submissions for webinars or e-books.
• If the lead does not convert immediately, do not alienate or ignore them. Instead, use relevant and compelling content to continuously engage and nurture them for future conversions.

To ensure no cracks develop in the customer journey, marketing and sales teams need to focus on engaging their audiences in a meaningful and timely manner. Comprehensive marketing automation solutions such as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can eliminate mundane marketing tasks, and give B2B marketing and sales teams the relevant information and tools needed to find quality leads, nurture, and convert them.