For those who plan to start Pardot Account Based Marketing, the AttributeApp team has compiled 8 Pardot-specific tactics that can take your efforts to the next level:
1. Use Pardot Grading Profiles to Establish your Target Buyer
A key consideration of B2B and account-based marketing is that even though you’re targeting businesses, you’re still selling to people. Use the demographic and firmographic data you have available to create Pardot grading profiles that will help guide your persona targeting. Consider separating your profiles based on their role in the process (i.e. – decision makers or influencers).
With your profiles established in Pardot, run analysis on your current customer database to evaluate the average grade of your customers. Are the contacts who have become a decision maker, who made a purchase, scoring at an “A” level? If not, the grading profile should be adjusted. This is the benchmark you’ll use to judge future prospects.
2. Reap the Rewards of Research
There’s no doubt that in your quest for Pardot ABM greatness, you’ll be doing a LOT of corporate research. The highly targeted nature of ABM requires vast amounts of data that make personalization possible. AttributeApp recommends using new custom fields in Salesforce and Pardot that house this information. Don’t let your research go to waste, make it sustainable and reportable by keeping the data at the account or contact level.
Ensure these data fields are mapped to Pardot — (hint: they can be used for personalization later)
3. Invest in Good Contact Sourcing
Once you have established the buyer profile that gives your company the best chance to break into a purchase consideration, and set up your required data set with custom fields, your next task is to gather the set of outbound prospects you’ll be targeting. This is a joint effort with your sales team. Each rep is sure to have a shortlist of his top accounts he wants to target. But to supplement this effort, consider investing in a strong and reputable source outbound contacts. (data.com, ZoomInfo, Insideview, Avention, Demandbase, etc)
We’re focusing on the term outbound here because it’s important to remember that most ABM prospects have not opted in to your marketing campaigns. Be sure to follow Pardot’s SPAM philosophies and guidelines.
4. Select an ABM Technology Partner
Once you have been testing ABM strategies and you know what’s working, you might be ready to select a technology partner. Most account-based marketing tools are a significant investment for marketing teams. We suggest that before you get into it, put in the time and thoughtful analysis required to make AMB a success.
Some tools offer buying “triggers” that analyze prospect behavior. It’s a good idea to integrate these triggers such that they can kick off various marketing campaigns such has lead nurturing, direct mail, or scheduling sales follow up. Here’s a full landscape of ABM vendors.
5. Track Manual Steps with Campaigns & Activities
Most ABM Programs incorporate tactics such as IP Address-targeted advertising, direct mail, or outbound calls and emails. Most of these touches can be recorded in your CRM automatically, but make sure that 100% of them are tracked if you want to do the best analysis of what is work and what is not. If your inside sales team performs a call blitz, or a field marketer invites a prospect to dinner, make sure these manual interventions are logged in the CRM as a task or campaign membership. This will allow AttributeApp to capture the action and include it in Multi-Touch Attribution analysis. As you may already know, this type of analysis is the key to choosing the correct order of specific tactics to nurture your ABM prospects.
6. Consider Account Engagement
Another way to capitalize on Pardot functionality to understand ABM and how it’s paying off, is to use the lead score Pardot provides. Even the default scoring functionality will show you which prospects are interacting with your ABM campaigns with a score increase. Be sure that you’re awarding extra points for conversions and important web page visits.
On top of typical scoring, make sure you are evaluating the score of an account overall. Since ABM is all about the account, it’s important to make sure that you understand if the right buyers at the target account are engaged. One prospect might have a high score, but if this person is not the buyer your efforts might be paying off in the wrong place.
Use this method to evaluate account scores. To make the report effective, look at the total score AND the average score of an account. You might choose to throw out scores over a certain threshold as well.
7. Use Pardot’s Dynamic Content for Hyper-Targeted Campaigns
As mentioned before, ABM is all about being highly customized and targeted in your outreach. What better way to achieve this than to use custom words and images in your marketing programs? Pardot’s dynamic content is a great way to achieve this level of personalization. Since each layer of dynamic content introduces additional time investments, we suggest starting off small and working with sales to identify the top 10 accounts who merit these special campaigns. Use your custom data points to fill in the blanks around what software the prospect already uses, the name of their company, the person’s job title or other facts about them; even the company logo.
8. Implement AttributeApp Multi-touch Attribution to measure Revenue Attribution at the Account Level
AttributeApp marries your Pardot marketing touch data to Salesforce rep activity and account/contacts/opportunities. Rather than relying on reps filling out “Opportunity Contact Roles” for analysis and reporting, AttributeApp looks at all of the contacts at an account level whether the rep has filled out that field accurately or not (hint – usually they haven’t).
With the data in one place and normalized, AttributeApp gives a clear view of all of sales and marketing’s actions from first touch to closed won deals (and beyond) that helped influence the sale. This is a true Pardot Account Based Marketing, Multi-touch attribution report. Adjustable weights and scores allow you to customize reports based on your sales cycle and processes to provide actionable ABM/ABS insights like:
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- Top conversion paths taken and commonalities for target ABM/ABS accounts
- Highlight what tactics/channels/campaigns have influenced top deals/accounts
- Top “First Touch”, Net New Lead generation tactics/campaigns/channels at the account level
- See all contacts at an account in one timeline view with their key marketing touches
By arming you with various Pardot tactics to assist in Account-Based Marketing, we have also made sure to incorporate the various layers of data required to evaluate the success of your campaigns. ABM is a big investment, and the winners of the game will rely on multi-touch analysis that will allow them to dial up tactics that work, and optimize those which need to improve.
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