How to use Pardot from SalesForce for your Marketing Efforts

What we will cover:

Why Pardot rocks

I was given the task of assisting in setting up Pardot for a client and had no previous experience. For me, it was just yet another marketing tool that needed to be configured to help a company so I went into action. I felt the need to write this because I found a lot of use out of it and not being a Pardot specific blog it might give insight to some of my fellow digital marketers and web developers.

What is Pardot?

This is taken right from the Pardot website “Pardot, B2B marketing automation by Salesforce, offers a marketing automation solution supporting the needs of B2B organizations of every size.”, but for me, I needed a more broken down answer.

It can:

Track and automate actions based on your users
It is an email marketing tool on steroids
Provide a big or small business insight to potential leads
Is a tool that is from SalesForce….so yea
Works with any CMS, or software with ease

These are indeed just some things that I took away from using the tool, but the possibilities are endless. One big thing is though unless you are using SalesForce this is not for you. On that note, most large and even smaller companies use that software on an almost cult status so its good to know.

How you can use it in your business

A big area is in your marketing efforts and in return getting your sales team quality leads. I will say that having access to it means your company already is using SalesForce this is just a solid add on to automate so many emailing and user tracking on your website. For example, you have a WordPress site, and using Gravity forms connecting the two platforms is easy as making a form handler and setting up the Gravity form to map those fields.

A great resource on how to connect these two things can be found HERE

You Can:

Track user actions
Auto email upon certain completed actions
Score vistitors based on actions
Streamline quality leads to your sales team

A developers insight to using Pardot

As a developer knowing how to integrate what tool the team wants is the biggest hurdle. A good thing to know is most if not all aspects of Pardot is embedding code on a page for either your own site and even if you are in a co-marketing effort somewhere else. That means if a company hires you to assist in a marketing campaign you can embed the provided code on the page and get those needed insights. Also basically everything in Pardot can be done in two categories (campaigns and form handlers). That being said if you are a developer and are tasked with this integration it will be embedding a code or mapping fields on your form (my personal opinion).

Conclusion

I wanted to write about my experience using this new tool and not only for me but someone else who might end up with the same task. This is a salesforce product which means there is enough informaiton on how to use it in their trail blazer platform to learn from, but an outside view is nice sometimes. The biggest thing for me was this tool and how it helped on a large scale for companies that are using top notch sales platforms.

Pardot Rocks and Why