Marketing & Sales Automation Blog Articles

Five Ways Pardot Engagement Studio will Impact Your B2B Marketing

The launch of Salesforce’s Pardot Engagement Studio is here. As Salesforce explains, the Pardot Engagement Studio is “a B2B marketing team’s command center — a place to manage all touch points with prospects and customers,” with features “enabling B2B marketers with an entirely new way to build, visualize, test and measure 1-to-1 buyer journeys on one canvas.” This sounds good, but what is the real impact Engagement Studio will have on your business? Our team of lead and demand generation experts explains the new features and how they will influence your B2B marketing.

1. Now you can get granular with your nurtures by adding rules and triggers

Imagine complete control of every single automated aspect of your nurtures — the new Engagement Studio provides this. The old Drip Programs were limited to sixteen basic actions. Engagement Studio has taken those actions and added “triggers” and “rules” on top of them to give you the power of 34 pieces of logic to control your campaigns. Now you can build out complex, multi-path journeys by setting up simple decisions at each step within a nurture.

Before, you weren’t able to check within Drip Programs to see if a prospect had done any of these specific things. Now you can analyze which rules triggered which actions and during which step.

Business Impact: The level of control and how precisely you can now design a campaign in Engagement Studio allows you to take every aspect of your campaigns to the next level and create better experiences for your prospects.

2. Manage an entire campaign all in one spot

The old Drip Programs were very linear, and it was hard to visualize how all the aspects of a campaign would come together. Most of the time, numerous Drip Programs had to be built for a single campaign to meet the needs surrounding each element of the campaign. With Engagement Studio, instead of having numerous separate Drip Programs set up to meet these needs, all of the elements of a campaign and the tactics you want to execute can exist on one canvas. For example, if you decide you want to add an extra step or additional assets to your campaign, you can build, edit, and preview emails and landing pages right within Engagement Studio.

In addition to that, the testing and reporting capabilities exist right within the same canvas too, allowing marketers to identify areas where their campaign needs improvement. While other solutions are reactive, relying solely on the marketer to review all of the data and determine how to improve their campaigns, Engagement Studio is proactive, providing data-driven recommendations. For example, if an email’s open rate is too low, the system may suggest improvements such as shortening the subject line, etc.

Business Impact: As Salesforce explains, “Marketers now have the power to build all the marketing assets they need — from landing pages to email templates — in one place and without the need for IT support.” Plus, marketers will save time by being able to execute and analyze all of the complicated elements of a campaign right on one canvas without switching between windows.

3. Customize the buyer’s journey from end to end

By using customer data to create automated rules, actions, and triggers into nurtures, marketers can better deliver the personalized experience that buyers expect.

Not only can marketers visually plan out all campaign assets in one, central canvas for a complete view of the buyer’s journey, they can now also put themselves in the buyer’s shoes and truly test the buyer’s experience. Since Engagement Studio’s testing functionality allows you to follow the exact path to purchase that the buyer will travel, this gives marketers a simple way to identify any gaps they may have overlooked before they launch a campaign. This gives them the opportunity to fix any gaps before it’s too late, instead of having to wait until a campaign comes to a completion to figure out what went wrong.

Business Impact: Engagement Studio creates the ability to build and automate campaigns that will guide buyers towards desired outcomes, while still allowing them to drive their own path to purchase. Plus, marketers can easily find and fix any gaps in their program in advance of the campaign’s launch, ensuring the journeys they create will deliver real results.

4. Bridge the gap between agency and client, or between internal departments

As Salesforce explained, “In order to deliver on customer expectations, marketers today need a solution that is powerful enough to deliver unified experiences, yet simple enough for both their team and sales to use.” Not only does Engagement Studio offer a simplified solution that both sales and marketing will appreciate, but this translates to other departments within a company AND helps bridge the gap between agency and client.

With the new testing feature and overall user-friendly interface, even those with the most basic knowledge of Pardot (or any marketing automation tools in general) will be able to understand the campaigns marketers present to them. This is helpful before, during, and after a campaign is launched.

Business Impact: Not only does Engagement Studio make it easier for businesses and marketers to preview a nurture for another department or client, it also makes it easier to report on performance and prove value by offering complete visibility into real-time campaign performance and post-campaign results with a clear visualization of the data. Engagement Studio gives you specific and detailed insight into this data that is easy for anyone to follow. For example, the paths a prospect can take in Engagement Studio are colored green to illustrate the prospects moving forward in a campaign or converting, and paths that are red show prospects who stopped engaging.

5. Harness the full power of your marketing automation and CRM

When sales and marketing teams manage customers using different technology solutions, this results in gaps in information and lackluster performance. Engagement Studio helps bridge the gap between the tools used by sales and marketing. As Salesforce explains, “To turn a potential buyer into a paying customer, the sales team needs every insight they can get to have a competitive edge.” With a drastic increase in the data and insight available throughout these nurtures, it’s easier to report on the information your sales team needs in order to properly qualify leads, and ensure that this data is integrated with Salesforce where they can easily access it.

Business Impact: An overall improved marketing automation tool that integrates with Salesforce means that not only can marketing departments use these tools to improve on the leads to they give to their sales team, but it happens in a way that allows sales departments to be directly aligned with marketing departments throughout the buyer’s journey.

Conclusion

Engagement Studio is one of the most significant additions to Pardot (and marketing automation technology in general) in some time. The features and functionality that come with Engagement Studio take Drip Programs to the next level, allowing marketers to easily target prospects at every stage of the buyer’s journey with unique and individualized content.

Check out our 3-part vlog series where we walk through features and show you how to get the most out of Engagement Studio.