In today’s era of data-driven and increasingly automated B2B Marketing, it’s essential to have the capability to uncover unique customer insights and trends gained from data to improve your strategy and campaign effectiveness. The Salesforce Pardot marketing automation platform helps B2B marketers do just that with a number of tools fueled by artificial intelligence. Like working with all AI tools, the quality of your data matters (“garbage in, garbage out” is the truest of truisms), as does how you manage and integrate your customer data across your entire organization. Salesforce, of course, is the top CRM in the world -- and it’s been using that powerful position to develop better, more intelligent marketing automation tools (through Pardot) for B2B marketers.
Let’s look at a few of those AI-fueled Pardot tools, which were described in a recent Salesforce webinar, Power Your B2B Marketing with AI and Analytics (free to download with registration). But first, a little background on terminology to avoid any confusion. Salesforce Pardot uses Pardot Einstein as its foundational AI tool. Einstein monitors and analyzes data from Pardot and Salesforce and also uses data to prioritize work for sales and marketing teams. Data, of course, gets turned into algorithms, customer analytics, and predictive insights. With enough data, Einstein can reveal how prospects engage with your assets and transform your customer data into dynamic, accurate lead and behavior scoring, as well as campaign insights. So when you see the word “Einstein,” think AI.
Here are 4 of the key tools connected to Salesforce Pardot that leverage AI to help B2B marketers work smarter:
1. Einstein Analytics for B2B Marketing is a customer intelligence platform within Pardot driven by AI-powered features designed to improve marketing efficiency, accuracy and measurement.
In terms of measuring performance and mROI (marketing return on investment), Einstein Analytics integrates and analyzes data from Pardot and beyond to allow B2B marketers to:
- understand performance across all your channels and campaigns;
- attribute marketing impact;
- generate intelligent predictions about customer behavior;
- give you recommendations for next engagement steps tailored to your organization’s needs;
- and be fully applicable for ABM (account-based marketing) efforts.
2. The Einstein Behavioral Scoring Dashboard can easily be added to Einstein Analytics for B2B Marketing (the tool described above) to provide an instant picture into how your customers are engaging with and responding to your B2B messaging. The dashboard collects demographic, geographic, and even firmographic data and enables B2B marketers to see how their marketing actions are moving the needle on customer engagement. Armed with this customer intelligence, B2B marketers can make quick adjustments that improve engagement and CX.
3. Einstein Behavior Scoring (EBS), explains Salesforce, is an automated tool that “uses machine learning to uncover the most influential [customer] behavior signals across past and current prospect engagement. For each prospect, EBS considers all types of Pardot prospect engagement activities, and identifies positive and negative interactions. An evolving Einstein scoring model weights each activity and assigns a score from 0 through 100.” As with all things related to AI, the more data you collect over time, the more accurate EBS becomes.
4. Einstein Attribution (EA) uses AI to develop a data-driven model that attributes revenue share based on your actual customers, their engagement, and your revenues. Instead of choosing a marketing attribution model before you start measuring and reporting, B2B marketers can use Einstein Attribution as a “plug-and-play” attribution solution to analyze historical campaigns and identify emerging customer behavioral patterns. EA allocates conversion credit to multiple campaigns, so marketers can see which campaigns are most effective at generating revenue.
As Alon Shvo, Product Manager for Salesforce Pardot, explained during the Salesforce webinar, EA offers “a turnkey AI solution with minimal set up. You flip the switch and you’re up and running with accurate marketing attribution.”
An Einstein attribution success story
Jaime Lopez, General Manager of Marketing Operations and Digital Acceleration at shipping and energy giant Wärtsilä (19,000 employees and about $6 bn in revenue), spoke during the webinar about how EA “has transformed our marketing attribution from an art into a science.”
Prior to using EA, Wärtsilä had been doing attribution via a time-consuming, manually-intensive and imprecise approach. “We were unable to drill down to the campaign and channel level,” said Lopez,”and the manual processes and need for in-house expertise were taking limited resources away from our marketing team’s main function of engaging with our customers.” Using EA, Wärtsilä greatly reduced its manual processes and time related to marketing attribution. “EA was basically a plug-and-play platform,” said Lopez.
Even better, EA offered the B2B logistics company an unprecedented level of granularity in connecting marketing actions to revenues -- “it became easy to drill down to the campaign and channel levels,” said Lopez, “ and with EA we could explain 7X more revenue than the legacy attribution model we’d been using before.” Best of all, Lopez was able to use EA to boost marketing’s credibility with the company’s senior leadership team. “EA enabled marketing to show that we were returning 3.5 dollars in profit for every dollar invested in marketing,” said Lopez, “so we could accurately tell leadership how much profit we’d generated from the company’s investment.” That’s the definition of C-suite credibility: show them the money (or in this case, the mROI) and you can ask for more.
Salesforce Pardot continues to develop its AI and analytics tools to help its B2B users market better. Moving forward, we’ll continue to keep you updated on where Pardot is going next with its roadmap and capabilities.
Want to learn more about the Salesforce Pardot MAP and how it can help your B2B marketing? Please feel free to reach out to us here for more information.
