'Net Features : pardot

ExactTarget Brings B2B Marketing Automation to Facebook

Allison Howen — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:50:00 GMT

Cross-channel digital marketing provider ExactTarget has extended its B2B marketing automation service, Pardot, to Facebook. By doing this, marketers will be able to acquire new prospects on Facebook for lead nurturing campaigns.

The update integrates Pardot’s technology into Facebook tabs that are built on ExactTarget’s SocialPages. This enables marketers to obtain new leads by providing prospects the opportunity to register for contests or special offers via Facebook.

“Acquiring and nurturing leads is the lifeblood of b-to-b marketing automation,” said Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget chairman and chief executive officer. “By extending Pardot to Facebook, we are bringing our expertise in B-to-C marketing automation to B-to-B, making it easier for marketers to create a true cross-channel experience that delights customers and prospects and ultimately accelerates sales.”

With this integration, marketers can drag and drop Pardot’s lead capture connector into their Facebook Page and publish it. Then, customers and prospects who register on the Facebook Page can be automatically placed into a lead nurturing program that is designed to not only deliver relevant content throughout the buying lifecycle, but also accelerate the sales process. It is also important to note that Parot’s integration with ExactTarget’s SocialPages works with native Pardot CRM integrations as well, including salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM and Netsuite.

In addition to Pardot’s integration with SocialPages, ExactTarget announced other updates for its social products, including

Country, Language and Age Targeting – This feature allows brands to manage their global Facebook presence by targeting tab content to specific countries, optimizing for language and segmenting for different age groups.

Device Optimization – This feature recognizes devices, which allows it to properly display content from Facebook Tabs to desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet devices.

Absolute Positioning Editor – This feature provides an expanded drag and drop interface for SocialPages that includes snap-to-grid capabilities.

Nurture or Acquisition in Email Marketing?

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 12:15:00 GMT

If you’re using email as a channel to acquire new customers, you’re apparently in the minority. A recent survey from marketing automation provider Pardot reveals that email is most effective today as a “nurturing” platform rather than as a means to add new prospects into the marketing funnel.

"Instead of using email, most marketers are using a variety of other lead generation tactics to get that initial prospect information into their systems," explains Adam Blitzer, co-founder and COO of Pardot. "Email marketing is then used to move new leads through the sales process or to re-engage dormant leads."

Make no mistake, email still plays a rather substantial role in the enterprise. More than 60 percent of B2B marketers are using email for “drip nurturing” and of those, 65 percent are using targeting messaging, by chaning which emails are sent based on how prospects respond.

"The fact that email is being used more for drip nurturing than lead generation isn't that surprising," said Blitzer. "We're moving into an age that places more emphasis on communicating through various channels. While companies are still using email, they're also using landing pages, forms, social media, paid search ads, and more to generate leads."

Prioritizing SEO with Pardot’s Keyword & Competitor Monitoring

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:40:00 GMT

Marketing automation software Pardot is offering up some new search engine optimization focused tools (modules) that are worth a look.

Pardot’s now includes a feature for monitoring keywords and competitors within the cloud-based system. Marketers can track site rankings in Google and Bing, see the ranking difficulty, the average cost per click and the approximate search volume for an exact query. Marketers can perform side-by-side comparisons of keywords (filtering by tag or by rank) and even have access to an audit of historical data to track performance over time.

The marketing automation solution is also offering up a competitor monitoring tool, to see how their SEO campaign performance measures up to that of competitors. Users can track a competitors PageRank, inbound links and indexed pages as well as view historical data to view trends over time.

"We're excited to provide our customers with this advanced technology," said Zach Bailey, vice president of products at Pardot."As inbound marketing becomes more competitive, the search marketing module will give Pardot clients the insight they need to gain an advantage."

B2B Metrics Aren't Measuring Up

Michael Garrity — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:30:00 GMT

A survey by marketing automation solution provider Pardot reveals that a significant number of business-to-business (B2B) marketers aren’t actively or accurately tracking the revenue that their campaigns generate, a non-practice that can lead to missed opportunities in establishing B2B marketing’s “essential role” in the growth of a business.

For the survey, Pardot talked with dozens of anonymous B2B marketers about their strategies and how they implement their programs, including what they choose to measure, how they do it and the standards they use for qualifying leads.

According to Pardot, as many as 37 percent of all marketers simply aren’t tracking the revenue they generate. By not measuring the results of their lead management programs, many B2B marketers are not accurately reporting their value to their organizations.

Of those marketers who aren’t tracking and reporting their results, approximately 40 percent said that it was because they lacked the time and/or resources necessary to create and analyze these sometimes complex reports.

The survey also found that 20 percent of marketers don’t measure marketing-sourced leads at all, 30 percent don’t track “advanced” metrics, like marketing-sourced opportunities, 35 percent don’t use lead nurturing for less qualified leads and almost 30 percent lack the tools needed to track leads through the sales cycle.

These are pretty dire numbers for the B2B marketing industry, which does, at least, understand that it needs to adapt its analytics approach to a more data-driven model; as many as 80 percent of the survey’s respondents said that they want to spend more time in the upcoming year focusing on marketing metrics, and 85 percent will be initiating plans that require leads to meet a given set of criteria before they're passed on to sales teams.

In addition, the survey found that one-third of respondents felt that marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are the most important metric for them to measure, while marketing-contributed opportunities came in second. Metrics that were less revenue-driven, like site traffic or page views, were considered the least important.

Big List of Marketing Automation Software

Administrator — Tue, 17 May 2011 18:35:00 GMT

Marketing automation software is here to stay. No longer an emerging trend or the domain of a select few savvy businesses, these software platforms streamline sales and marketing departments by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions. Sounds good, right? But what do these solutions really enable your organization to do, how can it benefit search marketing efforts and who are the real leaders in the space?

Users of marketing automation software platforms, typically those responsible for marketing a website or business (search, email, social, advertising), are able to specify criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes that are then interpreted, stored and executed by the software. While that undoubtedly sounds complex, the objectives are simply to increase efficiency and reduce human error. One possible cause for a lack of adoption in small and medium size businesses is that these solutions come in a variety of forms with a lot of feature cross-over. Before moving forward it is important to understand the various classifications of marketing software.

- Marketing intelligence software tracks behavior (what activity did the user engage in and where) for the purpose of understanding intent, enabling marketers to improve targeting based on interest and vertical market. Appropriate for any size organization.

- Marketing workflow focuses more on budgeting and planning, workflow and approvals, collaboration, asset creation and management internally within an organization. Marketing workflow solutions are typically designed for larger enterprises.

- Marketing automation software focuses on lead generation with marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in products/services. The best solutions on the market couple marketing technology with sales processes as delineated by a CRM program.

These are very broad definitions of the marketing software classifications that should help identify what type is appropriate for your business and in particular your search, social, email and advertising campaigns. Ultimately, any marketing software should aid in performing functions and tasks including analyzing marketing campaigns (and customer behaviors), managing those marketing campaigns, and organizing and storing customer data. So who are the best of the best in the marketing automation software business? WM has listed a few top tier vendors below.

'Net Features : pardot

ExactTarget Brings B2B Marketing Automation to Facebook

Nurture or Acquisition in Email Marketing?

Prioritizing SEO with Pardot’s Keyword & Competitor Monitoring

B2B Metrics Aren't Measuring Up

Big List of Marketing Automation Software

Eloqua

Marketo

Pardot

Optify

InfusionSoft

RightNow

Genius.com

NetSuite

Aprimo

Loopfuse

Silverpop

Unica