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Pardot Time to Value Guide

As a B2B marketer at a large company, you face a unique challenge. When your business grows, your marketing efforts need to grow with you. They need to scale — across all your regions and brands. Pardot, Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation solution, can help. But you might be curious about the time to value. How can you minimize the time between implementation and actually seeing results?

In this guide, we cover what proves the return on marketing investment, how you can achieve it fast, and why Pardot helps you see time to value.

Chapter 1: What Proves the Return on Marketing Investment?

Your company’s marketing ROI underscores the effectiveness of its investment in a marketing solution. So whenever your business invests in a new marketing platform, you need a way to measure the outcome.

The marketing return on investment (or MROI for short) is a catchall measurement of your marketing efforts. Your MROI data reveals how each of your marketing channels and campaigns performed, so you can make adjustments accordingly. Already identified your most effective and profitable channels? Focus your marketing spend on those to reach more customers.

But what about a marketing automation solution? How do you measure the MROI for automation? Our basics of marketing ROI guide offers a great primer, which can be summarized into these two takeaways:

Realize the extraordinary business value of marketing automation. A properly implemented and adopted marketing automation system gives your company a widespread efficiency boost across all of your internal operations — especially the ones involving sales, marketing, and service.

Businesses that have adopted marketing automation commonly report a quicker time to revenue, better insights into marketing performance, and better alignment of internal teams.

In other words, once your marketing automation system is up and running, expect great things.

Valuable MROI metrics for automation can be broken down into four categories:

Increased revenue
More high-quality sales leads
Less time spent on marketing busywork
More marketing dollars saved

To measure your MROI, you’ll need a solid measurement strategy. Start with the basics:

Set clear goals.
Identify costs.
Get the right technology, including marketing automation.
Create a formula for calculating MROI.

The basic formula is MROI = (Marketing Value - Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost.

You can also get a quick estimate of your MROI using this ROI calculator.

Keep in mind that MROI doesn’t always have to be financial in nature. Beyond the financial value of your marketing activities, you can include soft metrics into your marketing KPIs like webinar registrations, delivered mailers, social media and email engagement, and so on.

Ultimately, calculating MROI is about determining the best way to consistently deliver the best engagement to your customers. Hard numbers will give you clear insights into the messaging and channels that resonate the most with your customers. Then you can use that data to personalize their journeys and cultivate long-term customer relationships.

Chapters

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