Finding qualified leads is a challenge that all B2B marketers face. Passing only the warmest, most sales-ready leads on to your sales team is an even bigger challenge.

In today’s marketing arena, prospects can appear very early in the sales process, oftentimes when they are still in the research phase and nowhere near ready to make a purchase decision. Ignoring these leads means they could turn to your competitors, while passing them over to your sales team too early is a waste of time.

There are several things you can do to help grade your leads and segment them accordingly, ensuring that you hit them with the most targeted message at the most opportune time. Each segment should be set up with a drip campaign that caters to their specific wants and needs. Tailored messages focused on particular ‘personas’ in your sales cycle are a surefire way to improve your email response rates.

Defining the Perfect Lead

The first step to determining your grading strategy, is defining your perfect lead. You can define your most qualified leads in any number of ways – according to demographic, company size, job title, type of company, even company location. You probably already have an idea of what your perfect lead looks like, but officially defining it will help your organization align goals and expectations.

For the sake of this exercise, let’s think of an education analogy for 3 unique personas that are in different stages of the sales cycle:

The Freshman is brand new to your industry and product line. He or she may have found you through one of your marketing or lead gen campaigns, but isn’t quite sure what your product offers. The best messages to this persona would start with softer introductory emails that are informative but general — without being burdensome. Industry white papers, helpful blog posts, and articles are great content ideas for this level of interest.

The Junior is familiar with your company and industry but isn’t quite warm enough to get passed over to your sales team. He or she is experienced enough to know the right questions to ask, and is ready to be nudged in your product’s direction. This is a great time to separate yourself from your competitors and remind your prospect why you are the industry leader with powerful information about your product’s strengths (your client services response time, your latest features, ways your product can make their lives easier, etc.)

The Senior is ready to actually buy. Seniors have done their homework, are finished with exams and ready to graduate into a full-fledged customer. The best content for this segment is content that offers pricing information, free trials and demos and compares your product with what competitors offer. These are the leads that your sales team really want, and are most likely to close.

• Marketing metrics, ROI and KPI’s – what are they?
• Metrics all marketers should reference
• How marketing metrics can help improve your campaign efforts

Sign up now for the webinar:

Marketing Metrics – Making the Difference for Modern-Day Marketers [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, May 17, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EDT

Speaker:
Zach Bailey, Vice President of Products, Pardot

• Learn about the latest in Pardot features and functionality
• See how fellow users are implementing and using Pardot
• Participate in relevant round-table group discussions on audience-chosen topics

Looking forward to seeing you there!

If you use email in your marketing strategy, you put a great deal of effort into tweaking your emails to maximize open and click-through rates. You experiment, test, and retest adjustments to copy, content, subject line and a hundred other variables, just to see that uptick in your key metrics.

However, even the most finely tuned email may not get opened if it is sent at the wrong time.

While the ideal email send time changes based on a number of variables (industry, content, segment, etc.), the email genome project over at MailChimp has given us a much clearer picture of larger email trends. After analyzing over a billion emails, they’ve found a few trends you can safely act on:

Send in the Middle of the Week…
The highest volume of opens occurs on Thursdays, with Tuesday and Wednesday close behind. Sending your emails during the middle of the week rather than Monday or Friday should give you higher open rates on your emails.

…And in early afternoon
MailChimp’s analysis indicates that the best time to send an email may not be first thing in the morning as previously thought. Open rates are at their highest in early afternoon, around 1:30PM. Sending your emails right after lunch may produce higher open rates than emails sent first thing in the morning.

We’ve come a long way in understanding the nuances and variables of email open rates, but there still is no one-size fits all solution. The best way to optimize sending time is still through A/B testing of various send times.

Pardot provides full featured analytics that allow you to easily view campaign reports and compare open rates. Finding the times that work best for your segments will help you improve open rates and the overall effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

*Images courtesy of MailChimp

In a recent article on inc.com, Bill Murphy detailed the the strategy behind Facebook’s Washington lobbying operation. With its IPO on the horizon, the social network has been hedging its bets by making sure Washington will continue to stay off its back on issues like privacy and security.

Facebook has sunk considerable amounts of capital and resources into this political strategy, and while most companies may not have the means to attempt such an expensive endeavor,  this approach has some lessons for any company looking to increase the visibility of their brand and content online. The strategy of lobbying for political advantage can easily be applied to the process of seeking out your industry’s influencers and asking for coverage of your brand or content.

So let’s take a look at how Facebook’s Washington shop would handle your content distribution strategy:

Build an Influential Network
Facebook has recruited some heavy hitters for its lobbying operation. Their roster boasts two former Chiefs of Staff and several other presidential staffers. This lends instant credibility to the social network in even the highest political circles.

Lobbying Lesson: When seeking out potential channels for your content, seek out your industry’s top influencers. Creating a relationship with these well-known names and sharing your content on their sites will elevate your credibility and increase the influence you wield in your industry. This will also increase your exposure on other sites and channels that may develop into additional opportunities for coverage.

Don’t Play Favorites
Like almost all lobbying operations, Facebook can’t afford to pick political sides. The organization has made contributions to President Barack Obama, presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney and congressman Ron Paul.

Lobbying Lesson: Just like a political lobbyist, you can’t risk putting all of your eggs into one basket. Don’t focus solely on your industry blogs to drive traffic to your content. Build relationships with influencers in related industries or blogs that focus on general industry trends (ex: Mashable).

Have something to offer
Facebook has the enviable lobbying position of being an indispensable service for a majority of the people it is lobbying. Could you imagine trying to run a political campaign without Facebook? The social network has deepened this dependence by hosting and broadcasting political events from its headquarters around the country. A valuable asset to any politician.

Lobbying Lesson: So your product or service is probably not going to become indispensable to those you are lobbying anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do your best to increase the value you can provide. Create content that other sites will want to share on their site. Don’t be afraid to write a blog post or create a graphic tailored to a specific site and their audience. Writers and influencers know their audience, so the more excited you can get those you are lobbying, the more they will promote, share and praise your content.

The expected quality of content continues to rise and the resources available to you for creating that content are improving each day. However, the quality of your content will never matter unless you have an audience to see it!

So put on your American flag pin, get out there and lobby like a pro!

As marketers, we work hard. There’s no doubt about it. We put in the long hours, do the work, and we love it. But once we leave the office, we need to relax.

Many of us have our own routines, but after we are finished with our evening run, playing with the kids or preparing dinner, most of us wind down in the same place — in front of the TV.

After a day spent writing, worrying, strategizing and planning, television is a welcome break. We can let the information and entertainment wash over us without having to actively engage. We are just passive participants in an incredibly diverse set of evening options.

However, this doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from our evening routines. There are several shows on the air now that not only play into our interests as marketers, but also have valuable lessons for us to learn. So sit back, relax and take a look at a few shows you may want to check out:

Mad Men

This is probably the most obvious pick for this list so I figured we should just get it out of the way. Despite being based in the 50’s and 60’s, Mad Men still exhibits many of the fundamentals of marketing that will never change. Don Draper and company are always striving to be original and create advertising that truly resonates with their audience. You should be doing the same everyday with your marketing.

The Pitch

If you could look inside some of the world’s most innovative agencies once a week and learn how they operate and generate breakthrough ideas, you would right? Well that’s what AMC offers with their show, The Pitch. In the new show, two agencies compete to win a new client by going head-to-head in a cut-throat, winner-takes-all showdown. It’s a surefire way to get your creative juices flowing and get excited to take your marketing to the next level.

TechStars

Created by Bloomberg, TechStars allows you to watch the grueling process of building a business from the ground up in an elite startup boot camp. Guided by top names in tech (Google, Microsoft, Twitter and more), startups are judged every step of the way. Even if you don’t work for a startup, the lessons learned by contestants and the wisdom imparted by the judges each week resonate with all marketers.

Shark Tank

ABC’s Shark Tank continues to grow in popularity as startups and entrepreneurs become the rockstars of the business world. The show focuses on entrepreneurs looking to attract venture capitalists and investors for equity in their company. It is a great way to tune into disruptive ideas, overcoming obstacles and marketing a product in the current market.

So next time you spend an evening relaxing in front of the TV, don’t feel guilty. You can learn valuable marketing lessons or find inspiration for that project you’ve been stuck on- you just need to watch the right shows.

Did we miss your favorite show? Something you think should be added to this list? Let us know! We’d love to hear about it (and watch it!).

When it comes to awards, there’s no doubt that this year’s been one for the books for Pardot. In January, Pardot was rated “Best Overall Value” among marketing automation vendors by respected industry analyst firm Gleanster; March found Pardot ranked among AlwaysOn’s list of OnDemand 100 Top Private Companies, and only a of couple weeks ago, Pardot made the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s List of Top 50 Fastest-Growing Companies in Atlanta.

But the award that captured the most press attention and inspired COO Adam Blitzer to state that he is “more proud of this award than any other we’ve been given,” came when the Atlanta Journal Constitution named Pardot the number one small business to work for in Atlanta, as well as number one overall for best work-life balance. And we think that this award, recognizing our outstanding employee satisfaction and positive company culture, goes a long way towards explaining all the others: “We believe that the respect and appreciation felt by our team at Pardot translates into better service for our clients,” said Adam. “and directly contributes to the overall success of our business.”

On his blog, 10,000 Startup Hours, Pardot CEO David Cummings discusses some of the points he focused on when building Pardot around a unique company culture. We’ve highlighted a few Pardot secrets to success here, particularly focused on fostering an attitude of team unity amongst employees (although the perks and benefits Pardot offers employees individually don’t hurt either!):

Conduct checks in the hiring process. At Pardot, job candidates must pass a “culture check” to determine if the candidate has the positive, self-starting and supportive attitude that will thrive in an atmosphere like Pardot’s — and these qualities may carry more weight than a sky-high GPA or impressive, advanced skill set. As David explains, “we hire people that already fit our style and recognize that the way we operate isn’t for everyone.” By ensuring that each new employee is not just talented but a team player, Pardot is able to maintain an cooperative and amenable work environment that translates into outstanding customer service, and a general feeling of mutual respect and support among employees.

Communicate consistently. For a business to communicate effectively with their customers, the communication must be there internally as well. Pardot looks for any opportunity to get co-workers together to bounce around ideas. Whether it’s morning departmental check-ins, weekly company-wide meetings, cross-functional lunches or quarterly off-site team events, Pardot employees have plenty of opportunities to get to know one another, understand what other teams are up to and build friendships. They also have plenty of opportunities to communicate with leadership, and are able to submit anonymous questions to be answered at weekly company-wide meetings by David and Adam.

Celebrate success together. You got there as a team, so celebrate as a team. You know that moment when a sports team wins the championship game and gathers on the floor or field to hoist up their trophy, and suddenly all the training and practices seem worthwhile because they earned this moment as a team? It may sound corny, but that’s the feeling of team unity you want to capture in your employees — that’s the feeling that’s going to give your employees a vested interest not only in their personal success, but in the company’s success overall. So set aside some budget to do something fun — Pardot holds quarterly celebrations with the sole purpose of celebrating the company’s achievements and showing appreciation for the team’s hard work. And who says you can’t mix business with pleasure? As Adam says, “Life is short. You spend most of it working. Make sure you love what you do.”

We’re looking for Pardot client volunteers interested in having their current website content evaluated during our May 21st webinar, “B2B Marketing Clinic – Customer-Centric Content Development.” Speaker Nolin LeChasseur, founding partner of Brainrider, will be focusing on ways to engage prospects using the company’s subject matter expertise, as well as developing a customer-focused content strategy.

This is a great opportunity for clients who are:

• Considering an update of their website and looking for purposeful content feedback
• Interested in a general review of how well a company’s website and marketing content connect with that company’s need

If interested, please contact Teri Marks-Brunner at teri.marks-brunner@pardot.com.
Back by popular demand, this is an encore presentation from a webinar originally hosted in February, 2012.

Creating content on a consistent basis is tricky. Writers block can be a real problem. Trust me, I’ve been there. Coming up with compelling and fresh ideas can be just as tough and only gets harder over time. This endless search for ideas can frustrate marketers already under pressure to increase the relevance and volume of their marketing content.

But you may have an untapped resource right under your nose.

If you are using Pardot or another marketing automation product, you are sitting on a goldmine of potential content ideas. Here are six places to look in Pardot if you are struggling to come up with fresh content:

Natural Search Keywords
Spend a few minutes analyzing the natural search results in your Pardot account. This will show you where you are appearing in search results for potential customers. This will also give you an idea of what your target audience is searching for. You may find a keyword or phrase that is searched in conjunction with your industry that you haven’t created any content for.

Site Search
When visitors use the search box on your website, they’re telling you what topics interest them most on your site. What are the top site search terms being used? Do you have pages or content that match those terms? If you do not have adequate content to address your most-searched topics, this is definitely an area to focus on during content production.

Content Views
Monitoring the views and downloads of your larger content items like white papers and industry reports is another great source of ideas for smaller content items like blog posts. If your latest white paper was a hit, find ways to break it up into a blog post series.

Email Opens and CTR
The performance of your email campaigns can be another key indicator of content that resonates with your audience. High open rates will show you which subject lines catch readers’ attention. High click-through rates indicate a genuine interest in the topic at hand and a desire for more information. Focus more future content on subjects with higher click-through rates.

Social Messages
Tracking social media is a great way to understand how your community interacts with your content. Analyzing the content that receives the most likes, clicks or shares can help you design your future content to receive maximum exposure from your social audience.

Competitive Analysis
Pardot also provides SEO and inbound link analysis for your competitors. Understanding where the competition is getting their traffic will allow you to tailor similar content and steal a portion of that traffic for yourself. Focus on the blog topics and other content generating the most interest for your competitors site. Do you have similar content available to your audience?

Pardot is designed to help marketers with a diverse set of tasks and responsibilities. Generating relevant and valuable content ideas is just another use for Pardot’s many features.

Do you know your return on investment for your last online campaign? Do you have a good understanding of how your marketing is generating leads and customers? If not, don’t feel bad. You are in the same boat as thousands of other marketers.

The dawn of the digital age brought new techniques and opportunities that have helped marketers dramatically extend their reach. The unintended externality of this new technology was an increased number of channels to manage, more complex customer interactions, and stretched resources. It became nearly impossible to get a clear picture of marketing performance.

All that is changing now, with the advent of solutions like marketing automation that help marketers to manage various channels and campaigns, track and value conversion points, and provide closed-loop reporting on marketing performance.

Marketers now have access to a previously unimaginable quantity of useful data. This ability to determine the true value of marketing efforts allows marketing departments to make informed decisions like never before. Here are three ways marketing automation data is helping marketers change the game.

Justify Marketing Budget
This advantage cannot be understated. Accurately tracking ROI has always been the holy grail for marketers and failing to do so has kept marketing on the sidelines of budgeting and strategy meetings for years. The closed-loop reporting provided by marketing automation solutions raises the accountability of the marketing department, better positioning the department to obtain a larger piece of the budget.

Create Most Effective Marketing Mix
The ability to track and value the channels that are driving your conversions will allow you to structure your marketing mix to maximize your lead generation. Marketing automation solutions go beyond the number of conversions generated by each channel and provide detailed information about the quality of those conversions. Know which channels are providing the highest quality leads and how to balance that channel in your marketing mix.

Understand the Sales Cycle
B2B Sales cycles tend to be longer and more complex than those of the B2C market. Customers may be considering multiple options, circling back to your company through numerous sources throughout the sales cycle. Basic web analytics will track these visits as separate events, but marketing automation solutions provide a complete story of how your customers interact with your company leading up to a sale, where their pain points are, and how to structure your marketing to better meet their needs.

The marketing ecosystem is getting more complex and harder to manage each day. You deserve a solution that will help you make sense of your marketing, better inform your decisions, and shake the old marketing paradigm of no accountability.

Inbound links are an important piece of any SEO strategy. Heck, apart from creating relevant content, it’s the most important piece of the SEO pie and central to improving your site’s organic ranking. At Pardot, we recognize this — and in response we’ve built a smart new feature that helps you compare your inbound links with your competitors. Here are 4 ways you can create more inbound marketing links:

Creating relevant and useful content is one of the best ways to build inbound links. Blog posts, white papers, eGuides and Tip Sheets are all easy ways to generate useful content. Just make sure that your content is targeted and focused around the topics that will be most useful to your prospects. If your content it great, it will get shared.

Using social sites like Twitter and Facebook is another great way to generate inbound links to your site. Use your own accounts to distribute new content, and be sure to include links to your site on your social media profiles as well. Search engines are quick to crawl sites like Facebook and Twitter. They also crawl sites like Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon, so consider utilizing these outlets as well.

Write guest posts for other blogs in your space. Are there industry blogs that you read? Chances are, your prospects read them too. Explore other blogs in your space, and offer to write a post (or posts) for the publisher in return for a link to your site.

Don’t forget forums. Every industry has forums where visitors go to search for data like product information, feedback, and customer reviews. Monitoring key forums and offering advice, thought leadership pieces and recommendations is a great way to stay top-of-mind with your prospects and build links to your site. At the end of a comment or post, try to include a link to a piece of relevant content on your site.

If you’d like to learn even more about successful inbound marketing, check out our free white paper (registration required).

Abstract

If you are challenged with selling the benefits of marketing automation to your sales team, then this is one webinar you do not want to miss! Marketers benefit from marketing automation on a daily basis in many companies. Your sales team can benefit from using marketing automation, too! Join Kati Newburg, Pardot’s Training Coordinator, in this 1/2 hour webinar as she gives us valuable tips on ways in which a sales team can increase sales…with marketing automation. And last, but certainly not least, Kati gives us strategies to present the benefits and value of marketing automation to a sales team – that make both sides winners!

Speaker: Kati Newburg, Training Coordinator, Pardot

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The social media acquisitions continue this quarter as LinkedIn is set to purchase startup presentation sharing service Slideshare for a reported 118.75 million in cash and stock. This announcement comes shortly after LinkedIn posted Q1 revenue of $188.5 million, more than double the revenue of Q1 last year.

Unlike the recent Instagram acquisition by Facebook early last month, LinkedIn’s new investment offers telling insight into the development of both LinkedIn and B2B marketing. LinkedIn has emerged as the most successful network for B2B marketers to develop prospects and convert leads, so any major shift in focus or strategy should facilitate a shift in its user base.

In a statement yesterday, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner explained “Presentations are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their experiences and knowledge, which in turn helps shape their professional identity. These presentations also enable professionals to discover new connections and gain the insights they need to become more productive and successful in their careers, aligning perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission and helping us deliver even more value for our members. We’re very excited to welcome the SlideShare team to LinkedIn.”

Content is Key
With this acquisition, Mr. Weiner is acknowledging the growing importance of content to B2B marketing and provisioning for its continued growth. Slideshare has become a hub for companies to host and promote their content. SlideShare users have uploaded more than 9 million presentations, documents, PDFs, videos, and webinars. (Check out Pardot’s Slideshare!)

A partnership with LinkedIn will bring this content to the roughly 150 million LinkedIn users worldwide, broadening Slideshare’s reach and deepening LinkedIn’s focus on content. It is unclear yet how the two services will be combining functionalities, but expect to see opportunities to let your content take a more central role on your LinkedIn profile than what is currently available.

Are You Ready?
If you have started to focus your marketing resources more on content over the past few months, than you will be in good shape for this transition. As Slideshare is already integrated with LinkedIn for basic content sharing, we will likely see increased functionality and sharing as the acquisition progresses.

If you are still getting started with developing relevant content for your audience, Pardot’s new Content Creation Guide (registration required) is a great resource to help you start producing compelling content and hit the ground running!

What do you think of the Slideshare acquisition? How do you think it will improve the LinkedIn experience? Let us know! We love to hear from you.

In this one-hour webinar you will learn how it is possible to use your own historical data to determine which criteria matter for your lead scoring, and what weight each criteria should have. Similarly, you will learn how this same method can be used for sales funnel closing probabilities.

Sign up now for the webinar:

The Scoring Game – A Better Way to Qualify Leads [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, May 10, 2012
Time: 12:00 PM EDT

Speaker:
Christophe Cremault, Chief Services Officer, RPM Demand

How many times has the term “Big Data” appeared in one of the blogs or websites you read in the last couple months? Odds are that it has happened quite a few times.

The marketing industry is always looking for the next big thing and once they find it, brace yourself to see that term over and over again (“design thinking” anyone?). Big Data is certainly on its way to becoming one of these new trends.

The Age of Big Data
The concept of big data holds a great deal of promise for the business community. Utilizing the trail of innumerable data points consumers leave behind each day to make informed business decisions certainly signals a promising new era of highly targeted sales and marketing relationships. Retailers are already finding value (and some controversy) in big data while other industries struggle to catch up.

The Question
How can you incorporate this advanced business intelligence into your B2B marketing efforts? This is the question marketing managers and CMOs across the country are struggling to answer.

• Should you invest in more advanced analytics services?
• Should you hire a consulting firm to figure out how to use the data you have?
• Should your team have more analysts to help handle all your data?

All of these options are big steps and keep managers wary and unsure of which course to take. However, the most effective and affordable big data option is something you’ve probably already looked into: marketing automation.

Marketing Automation and Big Data Are Pals
By providing a single platform for collecting and storing data, closed-loop reporting, and dashboarding and analytics, marketing automation platforms are the most comprehensive solution for measuring marketing and predicting consumer behaviour on a small-business budget. Here are just a few of the ways marketing automation allows you to embrace big data:

ROI. The trove of new data and analytics collected by marketing automation platforms will allow you to be more visible with your marketing budget and ROI, a problem marketing has always struggled with. Comprehensive campaign tracking provides more transparency than ever before for the revenue contributions of marketing.

Behavioral Targeting. New insights into how your customers are interacting with your brand’s touchpoints will help you deliver more relevant and timely marketing material and content to help ease a prospect through the sales cycle. Drip marketing campaigns allow you to structure lead nurturing campaigns based entirely of your user’s behavioral data to ensure your marketing nurtures prospects into warm leads.

Sales Integration. Tight integration with CRM services like salesforce.com means a coherent flow of prospect data between marketing and sales. Improvements in revenue tracking and reporting will also drive sales and marketing collaboration to determine lead generation goals, revenue targets, and KPIs.
With 2012 already looking like a big year for adoption of marketing automation, it may also be the year of big data strategies finding their place in marketing departments of all sizes and industries. With so much power and insight now available to the such a wide audience, marketing managers and CMOs should stop worrying about big data and start acting on the data marketing automation has already put at their fingertips.

For companies utilizing marketing automation solutions, drip marketing is one of the most invaluable tools in their arsenal. Drip campaigns are a powerful solution for freeing up your sales team to focus on the best opportunities without neglecting their leads and prospects. It allows your sales and marketing teams to be everywhere at once, dramatically increasing your effectiveness.

However, drip marketing tools have become so robust that they can be repurposed for other tasks and departments outside lead generation. Think of all the points in your customer relationships where you are reaching out to your customers via email. Is there a way to automate it with drip marketing? Odds are, there is! Here are just a few ways we’ve found to utilize drip campaigns to maximize efficiency and effectiveness:

Training Programs & Resources
There is a good chance that your implementation and training programs are fairly hands-on and comprehensive. You can never replace the effectiveness of your well-trained implementation and training experts, but there are a few ways you can make their lives easier.

The first thing your clients want to do after buying your product is to see it in action and start learning the ins and outs of their purchase. Sending them an automated email with some helpful links can help them get started. Based on the links they follow, you can provide additional links to relevant webinars, articles and resources. The customer’s activity will also give your implementation team a better idea of where to focus their training.

Contract Renewals
If you have a larger customer base, keeping track of renewal dates and reaching out to customers with reminders to renew can be a large part of your services department’s job. Setting up a drip campaign based on a client’s start date or end date is a great way of automating the renewal process for your clients — for example, you can schedule a reminder to be sent one month before a client’s contract expires. Based on their action you can send them an additional follow up or have your services department follow up with them directly.

Features Updates
Hopefully, you push out product updates a couple of times a year. Keeping your customers up to date with these changes can be a hassle, and any additional training that may be needed can be time- consuming. Drip campaigns can help streamline the process of notifying clients and providing detailed updates and training. If a customer shows interest in a particular update, you can automatically send them additional information, an invitation to a training webinar or have them referred to your services department for a follow-up call.

There are many additional ways for you to utilize your drip campaigns outside of lead nurturing; these ideas just scratch the surface. How are you utilizing drip campaigns? Have you found other applications for your drip marketing tools? Let us know!

Abstract

You are set and ready to go with a fantastic new marketing automation system to create great marketing campaigns. So, where do you begin? Which campaigns are some of the first you should run? Time is money, so which campaigns will bring you the best bang for your buck? Join Mathew Sweezey, Sales Manager at Pardot, as he steps through five campaigns that will give you a great running start to your marketing automation campaign efforts and quick wins for great results.

Speaker: Mathew Sweezey, Sales Manager, Pardot LLC
Mathew Sweezey is a leading expert in Marketing Automation, specifically lead flow analysis and nurturing execution. His primary focus is in Advanced Lead Nurturing Workflows. He has worked with numerous lead technology companies, helping them create and execute their lead flow and nurturing processes.

Encore presentation from January 2012.

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Ex: ‘markting automation’ and ‘marketing automation’ will all trigger the same paid search ad to be displayed if you activate that option in your campaigns.

Google updated their keyword match in an attempt to make keyword management easier and less time consuming. You will no longer be required to have separate campaigns and chase every possible misspelling and keyword phrase in your list. Instead, you can run cleaner, more streamlined campaigns. Google says that early tests have resulted in a 3% increase in click through rate (CTR) for their test group with “comparable CPCs”. It’s worth noting that Google has a vested interest in increasing CTRs as that can potentially drive up advertiser spend.

How to Update Your Settings
Head to your Campaigns Settings tab > Advanced settings > Keyword matching options > Exact and phrase match > Include plurals, misspellings, and other close variants.

Are you planning on using Google’s new keyword match option? Let us know!

Sign up now for the webinar:

Presenting the Value – Marketing Automation and Your Sales Team [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, May 3, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EDT (US)

Speaker:
Kati Newburg, Training Coordinator, Pardot LLC

Enter the Pardot Content Creation Guide. Sitting down to fill out worksheets and map out a content marketing strategy may seem like the last thing you have time for, but in the long run, adding some concrete organization to your efforts can actually save your business significant time and money. Here’s a few ways that the Content Creation Guide can help you:

• Define Your Goals. Understanding how the content you are creating relates to your overall business goals can help you to rule out projects that aren’t going to be beneficial, ultimately saving your business invaluable resources.
• Focus Your Content.  Defining the needs of your customers ensures that your content emphasizes the points that will be most important to them, focusing your efforts on closing the deal.
• Get Organized. Planning a timeline for the distribution of your content ensures that your content is relevant and flows logically. It also allows you to establish cadence in publishing content.

Download

• Learn about the latest in Pardot features and functionality
• See how fellow users are implementing and using Pardot
• Participate in relevant round-table group discussions on audience-chosen topics

Lunch will be provided at the meeting (seats are limited); reserve your free ticket now and find out more details. Looking forward to seeing you there!

• Learn about the latest in Pardot features and functionality
• See how fellow users are implementing and using Pardot
• Participate in relevant round-table group discussions on audience-chosen topics

Lunch will be provided at the meeting (seats are limited), so reserve your free tickets now:

• Cupertino Users Group meeting – May 15th, 2012
• San Francisco Users Group meeting – May 16th, 2012

Looking forward to seeing you there!

According to a recent survey conducted by Forrester, 2012 could be a very big year for marketing automation.

The report, B2B Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2012, forecasts that as the marketing industry continues to focus on big data and advanced analytics, there will be an increase in the adoption of services that can generate and fully utilize data, like marketing automation.

Forrester reports that 20% of manufacturers, 20% of financial services and 18% of business and professional service companies plan to begin using marketing automation technologies this year.

What are the factors driving marketing automation to this tipping point? Let’s take a look:

Decline of Outbound Strategies
Much has been written lately about the end of “push” marketing strategies. The modern consumer does not want to have marketing messages forced on them. Customers need to develop a relationship with your company and be pulled into a sales-ready state. Drip marketing and other behavioral targeting strategies provided by automation solutions focus more on leading a prospect through the buying process.

Marketing Impact on Revenue Growth
A lack of transparency when it comes to ROI and revenue generation has plagued marketing departments for years. However, advanced reporting, dashboarding and analytics are changing that and allowing marketers to accurately show their contributions to the bottom line. As budgets get tighter, the ability to be more accountable for marketing investments will become crucial.

Ease of Use
Since marketing automation first arrived on the scene, the user interfaces of automation platforms have improved significantly. As the products become easier to use, they are being adopted by an audience with a wide range of technical skill. Drag and drop interfaces and intuitive design make automation solutions easy to learn and master.

Improved Lead Generation
In a down economy, lead generation is even more crucial to a company’s success. Marketing automation helps dramatically increase both the number of leads generated and the quality of those leads. This improvement in lead generation improves conversion rates, close rates, and ultimately revenue.

Are you planning to implement a marketing automation solution this year? Do you already have a marketing automation success story? We’d love to hear it!

We designed these tools to help you maximize your marketing campaigns, while simplifying your reporting and management efforts. The tools are flexible and customizable – simply upload the keywords you want to monitor, and we take it from there.

Along those lines, we created this simple glossary for you to review in case you want a refresher on all of the new metrics you see when you login to Pardot and start using our Search Marketing toolset. Below is a glossary of the most important SEM and SEO metrics you’ll see when you login. Feel free to download our glossary and share it with your team.

As a proud sponsor of Atlanta Startup Weekend, Pardot had front row seats to all the action, and now we want to share a few things we learned with aspiring start-ups. Zach, Raz and Stuart (our Pardot reps at the event) weigh in on what they observed over the course of the weekend. The general consensus? Developing an organized plan for your start-up is just as important as having a great idea. Here are five tips to make sure that your start-up is not only brilliant, but makes it off the ground:

1) Don’t get lost in tech talk. “When pitching your startup, focus 80% on the ‘what’ (problem) and the ‘why’ (validation) and 20% on the ‘how’ (tech/product),” Zach tweeted Sunday night.  Several teams in the competition delivered whiz-bang presentations that left the audience and judges wondering what exactly they were being pitched. Remember that your audience may not have in-depth technical knowledge, so focus more on the purpose behind your product than the technical details of building it.  “Why, then what, then how,” Stuart agreed. “The best pitchers are the best story tellers.”

2) Practice, practice practice!  Many teams seemed to be unaware of the time limit for pitches. Come prepared! Having an organized and professional presentation can make a big difference in the audience’s impression of your product. One or two dry runs of your presentation can ensure that you’re able to get all your key points across in the allotted time.

3) Do your research.  Again and again, the judges would ask a presenting team to explain how their product/service was different from something similar that already exists on the market. It was uncanny how familiar the judges were with what’s already out there. Make sure you have conducted sufficient market research and can differentiate your product from others out there (hint: “market research” requires more than a quick Google search).

4) Show them the money.  Okay, not a requirement for Atlanta Startup Weekend, but having a well thought through monetization plan is a sign that you’ve thought through the complications that might arise and are prepared to deal with obstacles. That being said, don’t be afraid to pitch an idea that’s more about benefitting society than monetary gain. The QuitFor team pitched an idea to help people stop smoking, and the judges rewarded the social conscience of the group with third place.

5) Most importantly, have fun!  At the end of the weekend, the room was all smiles because those who participated met some new people and had fun. One of the greatest things about start-ups (and one of our greatest points of pride here at Pardot) is the energetic, innovative atmosphere that surrounds a team that’s truly excited about their product. So make sure that you’re developing something you’re passionate about — and having fun while you’re at it!

Abstract

Hosting webinars and creating video content can be overwhelming. From topic selection and scheduling to recording and sharing, lots of time and activities go into creating a successful webinar. Dive into the wonderful world of webinars with Rob Dyson, Technical Project Manager at Pardot and webinar production process guru, for an in-depth look at webinar process best practices and the latest tips and tricks. Whether you’re new to creating webinar and video content, or you’re a process pro, this presentation will help you take your own webinar efforts to the next level.

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However, this rapid pace of change can be overwhelming. It can be difficult to even know if your marketing is outdated. To help you know where you stand, we’ve put together a list of 10 red flags that may indicate your marketing needs a re-vamp.

10 Signs Your Marketing Needs a Makeover:

You can’t articulate your strategy
Keeping your team on the same page can be a challenge. A comprehensive strategy should be constantly updated and embraced at all levels.

You are cold calling (and only cold calling)
If your sales team is being forced to make cold calls on a daily basis, you are in trouble. Your marketing should be generating and nurturing warm leads that can then be handed off to sales.

You’re being pressured by Sales
If there is tension between your sales and marketing teams, this is a good sign that something is amiss. You should be able to monitor your marketing results well enough to demonstrate your value to sales and the organization at large.

You are using Direct Mail
It’s time to give it up and save the paper. Direct mailing is an inefficient strategy for most businesses. Use drip marketing for greater targeting abilities to make your message more relevant.

You don’t care about SEO
No matter your industry, potential clients are looking for you online. Optimizing your web presence to make yourself easy to find is crucial.

You don’t know your ROI
The age where marketing was not responsible for knowing their ROI is over. You should be utilizing analytics to effectively track your success in all channels.

You aren’t producing content
In the age of new media, content is king. Large brands like Nike and Coke have already shifted to more content based strategies.

Your social media is not a dialogue
You are already using social media, but you may not be utilizing it correctly. Social media channels are not used simply to broadcast your brand. You should be creating a conversation with your customers.

You aren’t developing relationships
If you aren’t producing content or creating dialogues with your customers, you aren’t developing relationships that lead to loyalty and advocacy.

You aren’t focused on retention
Focusing on closing sales is great, but you can’t ignore the customers you already have. Developing engaging material for your existing clients will help prevent turnover.

Does your marketing pass the test? What improvements are you making in 2012? We’d love to hear from you!

If you happened to catch Sunday’s edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, you know why. The results of the AJC’s annual “Top 100 Workplaces” contest were released yesterday, and Pardot claimed the number one spot in the small business division its first year in the running. At last Thursday’s Top 100 banquet, Pardot also took home the award for “Best Work-Life Balance” over all Top 100 companies.

So what’s an average day like at the number one small business to work for in Atlanta? AJC writer Matt Tierney spent a day in our offices and took in all the quirky perks — from our scooters to our “Pundies” — that make Pardot a fun, innovative and energetic work environment. You can check out his article, “Pardot: Top Small Workplace“ on the AJC website.

Sound like a place you’d feel at home? Great news, we’re hiring! Check out the following infographic to see if you’d be a good fit for our company culture, then head over to our careers page to see what positions are available.

Download this infographic (PDF).

Embed Working at Pardot on your site: copy and paste the code below.

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Working at Pardot – An infographic by the team at <a href="http://www.pardot.com/blog/">Pardot Marketing Automation</a>
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Have you been exploring Pinterest? What about Instagram? And I’m sure you also rushed to set up your company’s Google+ page last summer, right?. It’s hard not to be swept up in the tidal wave of new media channels and marketing techniques being blogged, shared, and tweeted each day.

Like many marketing blogs, we’ve covered our fair share of social media channels here as well. These new channels have been used in a variety of industries to increase reach and effectiveness. However, the most valuable “share” your content receives may be coming from email.

In a recent study on how content is shared, Buzzfeed discovered that email, not social networks, delivers the greatest traction for a marketing message. Not what you were expecting right? Let me explain.

The power of social media is based on the assumption that the greater the size of your social network, the more influence you ultimately have with your message. In theory, this logic is fairly sound — the larger your network, the more people that see your message. However, Buzzfeed’s study found that this may not be the case.

The study found that the median ratio of Facebook views to shares was only 9-to-1. That means that for every Facebook share, only nine people visited the story. With the average facebook user having 229 friends, this ratio falls well short of what you may expect. Twitter’s median ratio is even lower, at 5-to-1.

The data suggests that viral content is not the result of a few “influencers” setting the tastes of the masses, but a large number of people sharing content with small, intimate groups. This personal form of sharing has been emails’ M.O. since inception.

The 1-to-1 sharing ratio of email compares favorably with the ratios from leading social networks. Email becomes even more attractive when you factor in the intimate nature of email interaction and the sheer amount of time spent using email each day. New email tools such as autoresponders and drip marketing are making the channel even easier and more effective for marketers. Many email platforms give you simple sharing capabilities through features like AddThis integration.

Social media channels are still great ways to distribute content and foster communities, but email may not be as far off the pace as you might think. So if you are planning to increase content views, conversion rates, or web presence this year, make sure email is still a big part of your strategy, and think carefully about sending content that’s engaging, interesting, and fun for readers to share.

Best of the Basics – Marketing Automation Campaigns You Can Run With [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, April 26, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EDT (US)

Speaker:
Mathew Sweezey, Sales Manager, Pardot LLC
Mathew Sweezey is a leading expert in Marketing Automation, specifically lead flow analysis and nurturing execution. His primary focus is in Advanced Lead Nurturing Workflows. He has worked with numerous lead technology companies, helping them create and execute their lead flow and nurturing processes.

Blogging is an underrated resource for B2B marketers

The life of a B2B marketer can be stressful. You are pressured from all sides to generate new leads on an ever shrinking budget. Even if you’re successful, odds are that most of the credit for that sale will still go to the sales team. It’s tough.

Luckily, the number of tools you have in your arsenal is always growing. We’ve certainly covered a few on our blog, from landing pages to drip marketing programs. However, one of the most successful tools for generating leads may be nothing new: your blog. While new tools come and go, the humble blog has remained a great source of potential leads.

So if you haven’t looked seriously at your blogging strategy in awhile, here are five reasons to give it a second look.

SEO. The more relevant content you create in your industry space, the more relevant your company will seem to search engines. Creating keyword rich pieces of content will help your company to appear higher in search results for your industry.

Thought Leadership. Although it may not always feel like it, you are an expert in your industry. You possess a great deal of knowledge about how the industry works, your competitors, and the tricks of the trade (or at least you should!). Your potential customers will be grateful if you share this knowledge with them and will view your company as an industry leader when they look to purchase.

Calls to Action. Once your blog is optimized in search results and devoted fans are flocking to your site each week for your industry knowledge, you can begin to convert this traffic with calls to action. Your blog is the perfect place to advertise your new content and provide opportunities for conversions. Just make sure your blog does not become a billboard for your company. Focus on adding value for your readers first. Readers will reach out when they are ready.

Email sign-up. The easiest way to generate leads from your blog is the simple and oft forgotten email sign up. If your content is provides enough value, readers will exchange their email address for keeping up to date with your posts. It’s a great way to start building a relationship.

Reuse old content. Content has a long shelf-life, but getting full use out of a well crafted piece of content can be hard. Your blog provides a great way to link back to this older content where applicable, squeezing value out of your content for years to come.

Are you using a blog in your lead generation strategy? How is it working for you? Let us know!

Abstract

Learn the secrets of how B2B marketers are putting Google AdWords to work for them. AdWords, the leading Pay-Per-Click (PPC) platform, can be critical in reaching more customers and understanding exactly what they are searching for as they seek solutions, tools and services for their businesses.

In this webinar, we’ll cover PPC marketing best practices, including how to:

• Reach the right audience using Google AdWords and boost your ad performance by choosing the right keywords and writing compelling ads
• Stretch small PPC budgets to the max and still reach business goals
• Craft a winning PPC strategy based on improving value and decreasing waste

This webinar is ideal for businesses that are new to online advertising, as well as existing AdWords users who want to get more results from their online advertising investment.

Speaker:
Jeffrey Demers, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Wakefly, Inc.

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When a company is planning their social media strategy, Google+ is often sent to the chopping block. In recent months, there has been speculation over declining usage rates and lack of activity on Google’s social network, making it an easy choice for B2B marketers to cast aside. But ignoring Google+ may be a hasty decision without a closer look at the network’s potential for B2B businesses. Here are a few reasons to give Google+ a second look:

Search
Google has forced the issue of Google+ usage on business by completely integrating Google+ pages into their search algorithms. Google users are now provided with a “personal results” section in their search results, which contains images, posts, and videos from a user’s Google+ network that relate to their search. An active company on Google+ will have a greater amount of relevant content available for indexing into search results, increasing their reach.

A few tips:

• Share with your circles often. The more content you share, the more potential touchpoints you create with prospects.
• Add +1 button to your content. Adding the +1 button to your blog posts can help to improve the search rank of your content. To Google, the more +1’s you get, the more relevant your content is.
• Vary your content. Google indexes your content types differently. Varying your posts with pictures, videos, and articles helps expand your reach.

AdWords Integration
Shortly after the release of Google+ Pages, Google announced an integration between AdWords and Pages. This new AdWords feature, called “Social Extensions,” allows users to leverage their +1’s from all channels into their AdWords campaigns. This means that when a Google user searches for a company utilizing AdWords, their search results will not only return relevant ads, but also the total number of Google+ connections that user has that have given a +1 to that company’s content on any channel (i.e. 50 of your friends recommend this company). With consumers so deeply influenced by recommendations, this extension can dramatically improve ad performance. A few tips:

• Enable Social Extensions. Click the Ad Extensions tab in your account and select Social Extensions from the drop down menu and choose “new extension.”
• Use social report segments.  AdWords reporting now offers a “+1 Annotation” segmentation in its report to provide insight into a the impact of social media on ad performance.
• Add +1 button to your content. The more social recommendations for your company that can appear in search results, the more success your campaigns will have.

Segmentation
When Google+ was first released, Google heavily promoted the platform’s “Circles” feature. Google made the bet that a major feature missing from Facebook was the ability to easily segment contacts into social “circles” as we do in our day-to-day lives. For the most part, the bet turned out to be a smart one and many have praised the feature and its advantages over Facebook. Circles can also be used to easily segment a client base — a huge value for B2B marketers. Segmenting your networks allows for greater relevance to those you share with, better understanding of your own network, and allows you to avoid oversaturating your followers’ feeds.

A few tips:

• Start Early. Wherever possible immediately sort new contacts into circles. Your network will grow fast (hopefully!) and segmenting a large number of people can be a pain.
• Update your circles. How you classify a connection can change frequently. Try to find a free hour at least once a quarter to reevaluate your circles to ensure the right people get the right posts.

If you’re still debating the value of Google+ in the B2B space, your search results, content strategy, and campaign effectiveness could all be suffering. Regardless of the platform’s activity and user base, tight integration with AdWords, influence over search results, and simplified segmentation make Google+ necessary for business of all types.

Check out Pardot’s Google+ page here.

Are you using Google+ in your social media efforts? Let us know!

If you spend so much time analyzing results and identifying the perfect content that you don’t actually send anything out… well, you’re not helping yourself win the deal. Luckily, creating a successful drip campaign doesn’t have to be as daunting as it seems. Here are three ways to create content for your drip campaign in under an hour.

Get inspired by your sales team. Chances are, your sales team is already sending out emails. Many drip campaigns will be sent from an assigned sales rep and are meant to sound natural, so what better way to accomplish this than borrowing content from sales? Tweaking an existing email to meet your needs is a lot less intimidating than staring at a blank page.

Repurpose content. In today’s content marketing craze, there’s a constant pressure to create, create and create some more — but don’t forget that sometimes the exact content you need has already been created. You can send prospects news articles and blog posts (your own or otherwise) that have already been written, as long as they are well suited to your drip program goals. You can also use small snippets of longer content (like white papers) to create the base for your email campaigns.

Link to dynamic content. Create a few extremely simple templates that link to dynamic content like your blog, new features page or a list of recent press releases. Since the information on these sites is constantly updated, you don’t need to worry about keeping your content up to date – because you already are!

Bottom line: even though you’re pressed for time, there are still lots of ways to provide your prospects with valuable content. A very basic drip program is better than no drip program at all — even if it’s only three emails. So don’t let the pressure of creating the ultimate drip nurturing campaign prevent you from getting content out there, and keep in mind that you’ll learn as you go along. Maintain communication with your sales team to figure out what’s working (for both content and timing), and perfect your drip program gradually.

Looking for more tips on drip nurturing? Check out our white paper, Automate Lead Scoring and Nurturing (registration required).

‘Pinning’ is hot these days – there’s no denying that. The social media pinning site, Pinterest, has become the fastest growing social media network ever - reaching 10 million unique visitors quicker than any other social media network. Seemingly overnight, Pinterest has evolved from a social tool dominated by fashion-crazed young women to a widespread marketing phenomenon — and now B2B marketers have jumped on the bandwagon. While adding a Pinterest account to your already overflowing daily social media tasks might seem a bit daunting, there are already several new tools out there that can help you maximize your Pinterest campaigns. Here are 3 useful (and free) ones to help get you going:

1) url2pin.it is designed to help you share your websites on Pinterest. “url2pin.it” allows you to share a screenshot of your website, instead of just pulling a single image from your homepage.

2) PinAQuote allows you to highlight any text on the web and pin it to your Pinterest board by turning it into an image.  (You can share it on your other social media networks too!)

3) Pinstamatic helps you to get more from Pinterest by adding so much more than photos. You can now add locations, music, quotes, calendar dates, Twitter profile links, sticky notes and websites.

As mobile internet usage continues to increase, mobile email usage is not being left behind. In a  new report released late last week, marketing agency Knotice found that more than 27 percent of emails were opened on a mobile device during the second half of 2011.

This number marks a soaring increase of 36 percent overall in 2011. According the report, mobile phones accounted for 20.6 percent of mobile email opens, with tablets making up the other 6.8 percent.

An important note – the report is quick to point out that although open rates are on the rise, click activity is still lagging behind. The most likely reason for this discrepancy is that a majority of email content is still not optimized for mobile users, which makes it hard for recipients to take action.

This means many businesses are missing opportunities to convert and engage with leads. If you are using an email marketing service or sending out your own emails, here are a few things to look for to make sure you are optimizing your emails for the growing mobile segment:

• Test compatibility on multiple email clients and devices. The best services will allow you to perform a “preflight check” to check email compatibility and preview your emails on different clients and devices.
• Create both HTML and Text formats of your emails for BlackBerry users. Some services will automatically generate both versions for you. This is a necessity in reaching mobile users.
• Know the deliverability score of your emails. Make sure you are checking all of your emails for deliverability in order to stay out of spam filters.

You can download the full report from Knowtice, no charge or registration required.

What steps are you taking to incorporate mobile into your marketing strategy. We would love to hear your ideas!

The Wonderful World of Webinars [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, April 19, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EDT (US)

Speaker:
Rob Dyson, Technical Project Manager, Pardot LLC

In previous posts, we’ve covered many of the ways to make your landing pages successful and how to avoid common landing page mistakes. We’ve assembled these posts and other resources into a comprehensive infographic to help you create a landing page that will take your lead generation to the next level. Take a look:

For more on landing pages, check out our Best Practices Guide to Landing Pages or 8 Quick Steps to Double Your B2B Conversions (registration required).

Embed The Complete Guide to Successful Landing Pages on your site: copy and paste the code below.

<img src=”http://www2.pardot.com/landing-pages-infographic” width=”600″>
<p>The Complete Guide to Successful Landing Pages – An infographic by the team at <a href=”http://www.pardot.com/blog/”>Pardot Marketing Automation</a></p>

If you’re anything like the rest of the modern workforce, you are locked in a constant struggle to keep your inbox under control. When a new email comes in you have to read it immediately right? Then your biggest obstacles to getting your inbox to zero each day are the automated emails you receive from the web services you use. Most people have developed the ability to spot and delete system generated emails from their inbox immediately without giving them a second thought. Unfortunately, if you use email in your marketing mix, your emails also fall victim to this ruthless inbox pruning everyday.

So, how can you write an email that makes the cut and actually gets read? Make it more personal. Our brains are hardwired to seek out human contact. Crafting your emails with a little more personality can be just what you need to increase your open rates and conversions. Here are a few suggestions on how to accomplish this:

Use Variable Fields
Variable fields allow your emails to change dynamically based on criteria such as user, situation, and stage of the sales cycle. Dynamic content goes a long way toward personalizing the experience a user has with your email and brand. Variable fields are the difference between “Good Morning Valued User” and “Good Morning John!” (assuming your name is john – it is, right?).

No Sales Pitch in the Subject
For some reason, many marketers try to squeeze an elevator pitch into the subject line of their emails. This is an immediate red flag for all email users. Write the subject line you would use if you were writing directly to your reader. More personal subject lines will also go a long way toward keeping you out of the spam folder.

Timing
Why do some companies insist on sending their weekly newsletter at 2am? Nothing says non-human sender like non-human sending hours. If your email system has the option, make sure you schedule emails to only be sent during business hours. This will be more convenient for your readers and increase your open rates.

Smart Sending
If your emails aren’t being sent based on criteria like a user taking an action, you are missing out on a chance to target your leads effectively. Using a drip marketing program can help ensure that your emails are sent at the best possible time for your recipients – and that the content is tailored to their interests.

Do you use any of the above tips in your automated emails. Did we miss any? Let us know!

If your business maintains a Google+ page (and if not, why not?), you may have had a bit of a surprise in store for you upon signing in to your account Wednesday morning. This week (barely a week and half after Facebook Timeline’s March 30th switchover), Google plus rolled out a new layout featuring a left-hand navigation panel, a new dashboard for chat, and (you guessed it) a cover photo.

The good news? You don’t have to change your current photos if you don’t want to. Although the profile picture and thumbnails from the old Google+ format have swapped sides and changed in size, they will still show up in the new format without your having to upload them again. However, if you do want to change your Google+ to cover photo layout and coordinate it with your Facebook cover photo for a consistent feel, then we have some bad news for you. You will need to make some adjustments. While Facebook cover photos are 850 x 315 in size, your Google plus cover will need to be 935 x 180 — almost like the banner ad version of your Timeline cover.

Check out how we’ve adjusted our Facebook cover photo to fit Google+ dimensions:

This quick video from Google (under Step 1 “Set Up Your Profile”) will walk you through the process of uploading your cover photo.

What do you think of the new Google+ layout? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

• Learn about the latest in Pardot features and functionality
• See how fellow users are implementing and using Pardot
• Participate in relevant round-table group discussions on audience-chosen topics

Lunch will be provided at the meeting (seats are limited); reserve your free ticket now and find out more details. Looking forward to seeing you there!

In response, Google embarked on a study in 2011 to determine just how many times a paid search ad was displayed (an impression) versus how many times the same company appeared on the first page of the organic results for the same search. In short, Google found that 89% of traffic generated by paid search ads is NOT replaced by organic clicks when your paid search campaigns are offline.

In their most recent study, Google went even further and found that a paid search ad with a corresponding first page organic result actually has a higher click through rate (CTR). Assuming your SEO efforts have landed your site on the first page of Google’s organic results, anywhere from 50 – 96% of your ad clicks are actually incremental.  Of course, it’s important to note the source for this data is Google, who obviously has a vested interest in driving its paid search product. Nevertheless, the data is informative and certainly revealing.

So what does all this mean for you as a marketer?

Well, in layman’s terms, this means that even if your page ranks well in an organic search, people are still electing to click on the paid search ad instead of the organic result. And, as an SMB attempting to maximize ROI on paid search campaigns, it means that paid search should be used in tandem with your other online marketing efforts, including your SEO efforts. The most efficient online marketing campaigns are integrated across different tactics, and paid search is an important piece of any robust online marketing strategy.

In order to properly leverage your own paid search and SEO efforts and make sure that they are not cannibalizing each other, it’s important to review and monitor your campaigns frequently.

Want to learn more about organic rank and paid search? There’s a Google infographic for that.

For more SEO tips and best practices, check out our free SEO Field Guide (registration required).

Abstract

All marketers want great conversion rates, right? And because of that, it is truly amazing the number of “deadly sins” that are committed consistently on landing page after landing page…all in the good name of conversion. Too many questions, too many of the WRONG questions, and the list goes on. So, it comes down to this: how does a marketer create the right balance of content and questions, call to action and audience appeal, without bombarding a potential prospect? Find out with us as Mathew Sweezey, Sales Manager at Pardot, explores the creation and balance, along with the pitfalls of creating effective landing pages in this informative webinar, so that you can avoid the kiss of conversion death!

Speaker: Mathew Sweezey, Sales Manager, Pardot LLC

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Note: Pardot auto-detects Google Paid Search (AdWords) and a few other vendors from the referring URL. Unfortunately Bing (Microsoft AdCenter) sends the same referrer for organic (natural) and paid searches. Pardot has taken the same approach as Google Analytics. Simply add the parameter utm_medium=cpc to your Bing destination URLs. If you are not familiar with Google Analytics parameters (which Pardot also uses), you may want to check out the Google URL builder.

If you browsed the tech headlines yesterday, you may have heard that the mobile photo sharing application Instagram became the first Facebook aquisition of 2012 (there were six in 2011). The price tag: $1 Billion. Facebook reported that they would be purchasing the start-up for that sum in cash and stock, a record amount for such an acquisition.

This deal makes Instagram one of the fastest rises to a billion dollar valuation in history and the biggest acquisition on record for Facebook. So what can this deal between two consumer-facing startups teach B2B marketers? Plenty. Here are a few key points:

Do More With Less
Up until last year, Instagram had a total of four employees on the payroll. That includes its co-founders, two recent Stanford graduates. With this small team, Instagram was able to grow to 30 million active users in its short two year tenure. How do they accomplish so much while staying so small? They do more with less.

B2B Tip: Marketing departments in any industry can achieve similar success. All you need is the right tools. There are a number of services tailored to smaller marketing teams to help maximize output. Tools like marketing automation can help you automate common tasks — including lead nurturing, prospect qualification, alerts, email marketing and more. With these everyday items taken care of, your team can maximize their time and focus on more strategic initiatives.

Keep it simple
Instagram didn’t earn its billion dollar payday by expanding their business into new areas or by looking for ways to monetize. They set their goal — quick and easy photo editing and sharing — and worked hard to make the process dead simple for their users. This focus has allowed them to outperform dozens of competing products and earn a cult-like following.

B2B Tip: For every marketing initiative, you should ask yourself, “Does this complement our company’s mission and stay consistent with our goals?” Whether it is a blog post, white paper, or webinar, you should always have a focus and a defined measure of success. Authenticity is a very real currency to brands in the social age. Just ask Instagram.

Find the right partner
Being acquired by a company like Facebook is the dream of just about every Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, but prior to yesterday’s deal, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom had turned them down… twice. Mr. Systrom was picky about potential buyers and only signed yesterday’s deals when the terms aligned with his long-term goals. In separate blog posts, both Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom stated that, at least for the time being, Instagram will remain independent.

B2B Tip: The B2B environment has hundreds of potential vendors and partners vying for your business. Be picky. Do research, read reviews and compare your options. Finding the right fit for your long-term strategic goals can dramatically improve your long-term performance and open doors that were previously closed to you.

What do you think of the Instagram purchase? Is it a good move for Facebook? Let us know what you think.

Abstract

The marketing world has changed substantially over a very short period of time. More tools and automated avenues are broadening the base of a marketer’s reach in today’s world and giving marketing departments the opportunity to be even more productive and efficient. Marketing activities and initiatives are becoming visible and accountable, as marketers are able to measure campaign costs, efforts and results. Join us for this in-depth exploration of the world of marketing metrics, and you will learn:

• About marketing metrics, ROI and KPI’s
• Which metrics all marketers should reference
• How you can use marketing metrics to improve your campaign efforts
• How you can use marketing metrics to your advantage, working smarter and more efficiently

Speaker:
Zach Bailey, Vice President of Product Management, Pardot LLC

Video

Slides

Embed Tracking the Success of B2B Marketing on Your Site: Copy and Paste the Code Below

[html]<img src="http://www-cdn.pardot.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Marketing_Metrics1.png" width="540">
<p>Tracking the Success of B2B Marketing – An infographic by the team at <a href="http://www.pardot.com/blog/">Pardot Marketing Automation</a></p>[/html]

Check out some of the great media coverage of these survey results.

In this webinar, we’ll cover PPC marketing best practices, including how to:

• Reach the right audience using Google AdWords and boost your ad performance by choosing the right keywords and writing compelling ads
• Stretch small PPC budgets to the max and still reach business goals
• Craft a winning PPC strategy based on improving value and decreasing waste

This webinar is ideal for businesses that are new to online advertising, as well as existing AdWords users who want to get more results from their online advertising investment.

Sign up now for the webinar:

Create Success Using Pay-Per-Click Advertising – AdWords 101 [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, April 12, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EDT

Speaker:
Jeffrey Demers, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Wakefly, Inc.

1) Eye-Catching Cover Photo  Obviously, the biggest (and most talked about) change to the new Facebook format lies in the addition of a cover photo. Perhaps thanks to the multitude of articles with hints and tips for finding an effective cover photo (for example, this Copyblogger article), this seems to be one of the changes for which businesses were most prepared. Whether companies went for extreme simplicity (Snickers), a collage featuring several photos (Coca-Cola), or used their cover photo to pay tribute to their fans (New York Knicks), there are a lot of great examples of creative cover photos out there. But one of the most intriguing trends in cover photos (arguably) emerged with the companies that lined up their cover photo perfectly to make it interact with their smaller profile picture. Check out the example below from Google:

2) Telling a story  The whole proposed purpose behind Timeline pages is to allow businesses to tell their story and draw in fans with engaging content tracing all the way back to their roots. Whether it’s because no one has had the time to go back and search for old photos or because they don’t think enough people will look at these archives to make it worth their time, not many businesses seem to be utilizing this particular aspect of Timeline. The notable exception to this lies with sports teams. For example, check out the Atlanta Braves page (we had to give our home team a shout out), which features captioned photos dating back to 1871. But even if you don’t plan to commemorate long-lost milestones from your past, be sure to take note of how the Atlanta Braves have featured this particular milestone of Hank Aaron: by “highlighting” it and making it full-width. You have the option to do this with every photo on your Timeline (just scroll over the top right-hand corner), and it’s a great way to draw attention to upcoming events, company milestones and awards, or product releases.

3) Highlighting Apps  You’ve probably noticed by now that all of your tabs on the left-hand side of your page (photos, notes, etc.) are gone and that Timeline only displays four boxes under your cover photo, but did you know you can control three of those four? You’ll want to think carefully about your company’s strongest assets here — there’s a good chance that unless a visitor is looking for something in particular, he or she won’t click to see what tabs aren’t being displayed. While you’re required to display the Photos tab, you can get creative with the other three so highlight the apps that are most engaging. For example, check out how the “get connected” tab on JCPenney’s page links to a landing page where you can subscribe to their updates. Also, keep in mind that you can change the images on these tabs, so use the dimensions 111 x 74 to come up with something aesthetically pleasing that works with your cover photo.

Want more tips? Check out our blog post on 5 Ways to Maximize Facebook Presence.

• Sign up for a webinar. Webinars are becoming increasingly popular and are effective lead generation tools. You can create webinars that target current customers with subjects like product features and road maps, or you can try to cast into new customer pools with more general, informational webinars that touch on topics like best practices for your industry.
• Download a piece of content. One of the most common ways to nurture leads is by creating a targeted piece of content about your company or its industry. Data sheets, case studies, and white papers are all powerful pieces of marketing collateral that resonate with prospects.
• Build your following. One of the easiest — and most popular — ways to use your CTA these days is to build your social media and blog followers. Creating compelling and useful posts, and then simply asking your readers to follow you is a great way to leverage your CTA and increase your reach.
• Generate a response. The key to any email marketing campaign is to generate your target response. Your CTA is the pinnacle of your efforts and should call out your requested action as boldly and succinctly as possible. Using your emails to generate responses to survey questions, build event attendance, leave customer testimonials or even just respond to the email to open a dialogue are all useful ways to use your CTA.

For specific hints on wording CTA buttons effectively, check out our Quick Tips blog post on CTA buttons.

Note: The text field is still limited to 255 characters currently so you couldn’t put a massive list in there (the Fortune 500 for example). You would have to split that into a few lines. This should cover most cases though.

• To learn about the latest in Pardot features and functionality
• To see how fellow users are implementing and using Pardot
• To participate in relevant round-table group discussions on audience-chosen topics

Lunch will be provided at the meeting; reserve your free ticket now and find out more details. Looking forward to seeing you there!

For starters… check out these two helpful blog posts by Pardot’s Tim Niziak. Five is the magic number here: learn some basic pointers with 5 Simple Tips for SEO, and learn more about achieving the results you want with these 5 Free SEO Tools. This is a great place to start if you’re just kicking off your SEO strategy and aren’t yet ready to invest in more advanced SEO tools.

Next… listen in as Pardot Head of Sales Derek Grant delves deeper into this topic with “Unlocking the Mysteries of SEO.” In 45 minutes, you’ll learn about long-tail searches, keyword-rich URLs, and the importance of inbound and internal links.

So, it comes down to this: how does a marketer create the right balance of content and questions, call to action and audience appeal, without bombarding a potential prospect? Find out with us as Mathew Sweezey, Sales Manager at Pardot, explores the creation and balance, along with the pitfalls of creating effective landing pages in this informative webinar, so that you can avoid the kiss of conversion death!
Sign up now for the webinar:

The Deadly Sins of Landing Pages – How to Avoid Them [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, April 5, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EDT

Speaker:
Mathew Sweezey, Sales Manager, Pardot LLC

Stay tuned for an infographic compiling the key findings of our marketing metrics survey, and in the meantime, check out this great coverage from DemandGen Report, TechJournal and Business News Daily:

DemandGen Report: “Study: Many B2B Marketers Still Don’t Use Data-Driven Measurement Tools”

TechJournal: “Many B2B marketers are Not Measuring Campaign Success”

Business News Daily: “Measurement Still the Missing Ingredient in Marketing”

For a full list of articles covering these survey results, check out the In the News page on our website.

Tracking the Success of B2B Marketing – An infographic by the team at Pardot Marketing Automation

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<p>Tracking the Success of B2B Marketing – An infographic by the team at <a href="http://www.pardot.com/blog/">Pardot Marketing Automation</a></p>[/html]

So, on that note, we’re pleased to announce that Elevate, Pardot’s annual user conference, will return to the W Atlanta – Midtown from October 23 – 25, 2012.

What is Elevate?
Elevate is an annual conference put on by Pardot for our clients and partners. Everyone comes together for two days jam-packed with sessions, breakouts, networking, and after-hours events. By day, you’ll get your fill of Pardot tips and best practices while taking in some of the best food and accommodations in Atlanta. By night, you’ll get to enjoy drinks out on the town and meet with other clients and the Pardot staff.

What’s new this year?
By popular demand, we’ll be introducing an optional third day dedicated just to training. These new pre-conference workshops will give you a hands-on Pardot experience in a close setting of your peers. Members of the Pardot team will walk you through new features and use cases – actionable items that you can apply the second you get home. And all of this is on top of the existing Office Hours, one-on-one with meetings with a Pardot services team member.

Call for Speakers and Sponsors
Part of what makes Elevate so successful is the extra help we receive from speakers and sponsors. If you have some Pardot or marketing knowledge that you’re just dying to share, please let us know so we can get you on the podium. We’re also looking for sponsors that are interested in helping us put on this great event. Sponsors get a booth where you’ll get to chat with our intelligent and tech-savvy client base, plus a speaking opportunity (select packages). Interested speakers and sponsors should contact Laura Horton (laura.horton at pardot.com) for more information.

Stay tuned for more details! Tickets will be available soon.

• To learn about the latest in Pardot features and functionality
• To see how fellow users are implementing and using Pardot
• To participate in relevant round-table group discussions on audience-chosen topics

Lunch will be provided at the meeting; reserve your free ticket now and find out more details. Looking forward to seeing you there!

1. Personalize your message. Be sure to include your prospects’ first names, and ideally, their preferred nickname if you have that information. You can segment your lists to target prospects based on location, product preferences, and where they are in their lead life cycle. Personalization builds trust in your emails, and in your company.

2. A conversational tone works best. Remember to write as if you were talking to a friend. That doesn’t mean you should use slang or street jargon (proper grammar is still important!), but it does mean you should stay away from phrases like “Dear Sir” or “Madam.”

3. Use dynamic content. Are you emailing current customers? Then be sure to leverage their past website usage or purchase history to send them customized messages. Are they new customers interested in white papers? Then be sure to let them know where your site’s resource library is so they can read other white papers if they’d like to.

4. Write with a purpose. Remember where your prospect is in their sales cycle. Are they still in the research phase? Or, have they already gone to your pricing page and requested more in-depth information? Each prospect requires customized attention.

5. Include information about who you are. For example, an email sent by the actual sales representative who will handle an account is much more effective than a generic sender (i.e. “sales@yourcompany.com”). This also allows responses to be routed to the correct person.

Abstract

You know how to put together some pretty awesome email and nurturing campaigns. Great – what’s next? Step up to the next level with something different! In this webinar, you will learn how to create campaigns to help drive awesome results and have a little fun at the same time. Mathew Sweezey, Sales Manager at Pardot, is back with part 3 of his webinar series. I promise – Mathew saved the best for last! Join us as he takes us through the creation of these power-packed campaign approaches:

• Twitter Campaigns
• Video Campaigns
• Trade Show Kiosks
• Advanced Social Engagement
• Dynamic Content

And if you missed the first two webinars in this 3-series, you can view them here:

• Webinar #1 – The First Five – Marketing Campaigns You Can Run With – Join Mathew as he explores the first five email marketing campaigns all marketers should consider running and how to get the best results from your campaign efforts.
• Webinar #2 – The Next Five Campaigns – Strengthen Your Email Campaign Reach – Mathew starts off with a little advanced segmentation, a few conditional landing pages and some advanced nurturing tactics, plus more! View the recorded webinar to see what else he has cooked up.

Speaker: Mathew Sweezey, Sales Manager, Pardot LLC
Mathew Sweezey is a leading expert in Marketing Automation, specifically lead flow analysis and nurturing execution. His primary focus is in Advanced Lead Nurturing Workflows. He has worked with numerous lead technology companies, helping them create and execute their lead flow and nurturing processes.

Video

Slides

• About marketing metrics, ROI and KPI’s
• Which metrics all marketers should reference
• How you can use marketing metrics to improve your campaign efforts
• How you can use marketing metrics to your advantage, working smarter and more efficiently

Sign up now for the webinar:

Mastering Marketing Metrics [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, March 29, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM ET (US)

Speaker:
Zach Bailey, Vice President of Product Management, Pardot LLC

Some of the most common reasons Google classifies certain emails as spam are:

• Suspected phishing scams
• Message is from an unconfirmed sender
• It’s a message or sender you had previously reported as spam

Of course, occasionally, emails that we do want to read get filtered into our spam folders by accident, and the solution there is to simply mark them as “Not Spam” and they’ll be released back to your inbox.

But this tool can also serve as a learning tool for B2B email marketers. Look through your own spam folder and take note of the reasons that Gmail has marked these emails as spam — and then make sure to steer clear of these elements in your own content. Want more tips on decreasing your spam rate?
Check out our blog post on 5 Ways to Increase Your Deliverability Score.

Competitor Monitoring Table

You can compare competitors side-by-side, filter by tags, and measure changes in ranking and online presence (changes will be noted with a + or -).

Competitor Monitoring Drilldown

Drilling down on a specific competitor will show you an audit of historical data on that site.

Weekly Email

You can subscribe to a weekly email to have these reports sent to you. Simply check the box in your user preferences and you will receive the report every Monday morning (EST).

Account Limits

• Professional Edition: 10 tracked sites
• Enterprise Edition: 25 tracked sites
• Ultimate Edition: 100 tracked sites

Keyword Monitoring Table

You can compare keywords side-by-side, filter by tags, and measure changes in ranking (changes will be noted with a + or -). If you are not ranked in the top 20 for a keyword, it will be displayed as “unranked”.

Keyword Monitoring Drilldown

Drilling down on a specific keyword will show you an audit of historical data as well as current rankings.

Weekly Email

You can subscribe to a weekly email to have these reports sent to you. Simply check the box in your user preferences and you will receive the report every Monday morning (EST).

Account Limits

• Professional Edition: 100 tracked keywords
• Enterprise Edition: 250 tracked keywords
• Ultimate Edition: 1,000 tracked keywords

1. Don’t overdrip! Don’t be a nuisance – remember less is more when it comes to email marketing.
 If you annoy your target, you risk alienated them and getting your emails marked as spam.

2. Don’t send out ‘salesy’ content. You’ll turn your prospects off and make them less responsive to your messages. Instead send helpful, meaningful content.
 As with all content, the more compelling it is, the more it will resonate with your target audience.

3. Don’t repeat messages. As great as your latest “Top 10 List” is, sending it once is enough.
 Let your prospects share your messages for you, if they choose to.

4. Don’t make it impersonal. Emails are impersonal by nature so you need to work hard to personalize your messages. Using dynamic content can greatly add to your emails’ credibility. Messages based on user actions on your website, the marketing material they downloaded, or their level of interest are great ways to personalize your messages.

5. Don’t email your entire database. Drill down, segment, and target for each message as deeply as possible. The deeper your segmentation goes, the more customized your marketing messages can be.

Keeping these 5 tips in mind will help you improve your company’s email effectiveness, and minimize your unsubscribe rate.

Abstract

In his monthly feature recap webinar for March 2012, Zach previewed 2 upcoming additions to the Pardot platform: dynamic content blocks and email completion actions. He also previewed 1 “throwback” feature every client should use: webinar connectors for Citrix Webex, GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar, and ReadyTalk.

Speaker: Zach Bailey, VP Products, Pardot LLC
Zach leads product management at Pardot and is responsible for evangelizing the Pardot platform and synthesizing customer feedback to steer the product in the right direction.

Video

Slides

Enter “Pardot Kits.” Over the next couple weeks we’ll be putting together compilations of content that focus around a specific topic. If you’re hoping to learn more about landing pages, today’s your lucky day: we’ve compiled the following kit as a complete guide to building and optimizing your company’s landing pages — and organized it according to your preferred learning method. Each piece contains slightly different information (so it may be worth poring over more than one), but all contain great information on landing pages, regardless of your level of expertise.

If you like reading blog posts… check out this blog post series on landing page best practices by Pardot’s Jennifer Betowt. Over the course of six blog posts, Jennifer will walk you through the basics — from understanding the purpose of landing pages, to optimizing content and design, to testing and refining your landing pages accordingly. Feel free to skip through according to your level of expertise.

The Importance of Landing Pages
Concept and Content
Design Elements
Getting Smart with Forms
Sharing Content with Prospects
Testing and Refining

If you prefer to print it out and read it later… check out our white paper, Best Practices Guide to Successful Landing Pages. This white paper will talk about the four types of people interacting with your landing pages, maintaining the look and feel of your company and brand, and converting visitors into prospects. Click on the image to the right for more information.

If you’d rather watch a video… then check out the following video from Elevate 2011, last year’s Pardot Users Conference. Cloud Sherpas presents “Building a Landing Page Engine with Pardot,” and provides a case specific example of how one company is using marketing automation to build and manage their landing pages.

Number Fields and Segmentation, Automation, and Dynamic Lists

Selecting number fields when using segmentation, automation, or dynamic lists gives you new logic types to use. These options are the same as what you would see when using a rule based on score.

• is empty
• is not empty
• is
• isn’t
• is greater than
• is less than

Incrementing a Number Field via Completion Actions

You can also increase (or decrease) the value of a prospect’s number field when he or she takes a certain action (fills out a form, accesses a file, etc.). Simply choose the option to Increment prospect field value and choose +/- to add or subtract from the current value. This allows you to do things like build your own scoring system, separate from the one you set up under administration (e.g. if you had multiple product lines).

CRM Syncing

You can sync number fields with your CRM just as you would any other field types. Simply edit the custom field and be sure to map it to a either an integer or decimal field.

Account Fields

If your CRM connector allows account syncing, you can also sync account date fields. To configure these, Click Prospects –> Prospect Accounts in the left navigation. Then click Configure Account Fields to set up the mapping.

Segmentation, Automation, and Dynamic Lists

Selecting date fields when using segmentation, automation, or dynamic lists gives you new logic types to use.

• is empty
• is not empty
• is after
• is before
• days ago greater than
• days ago less than
• days in future greater than
• days in future less than

“Date stamping” via Completion Actions

Another interesting things you can do with date fields is use completion actions to set a value in a date field when a prospect takes a certain action (fills out a form, accesses a file, etc.). You can either set the value to a pre-defined value (today, a week from today, a month from today, etc.) or use our custom language (+2 months, -2 months, +1 days, etc.).

Form Behavior

To help validate your data, Pardot automatically uses a calendar widget when you either manually edit a prospect’s date field or when the field appears on one of your forms.

CRM Syncing

You can sync date fields with your CRM just as you would any other field types. Simply edit the custom field and be sure to map it to a date field in your CRM (as opposed to a “date and time” fields).

Account Fields

If your CRM connector allows account syncing, you can also sync account date fields. To configure these, Click Prospects –> Prospect Accounts in the left navigation. Then click Configure Account Fields to set up the mapping. Again, these should map to date fields in your CRM as opposed to date and time fields.

• Twitter Campaigns
• Video Campaigns
• Trade Show Kiosks
• Advanced Social Engagement
• Dynamic Content

Sign up now for the webinar:

Advanced Marketing Tactics with Marketing Automation [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, March 22, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EDT (US)

Speakers:
Mathew Sweezey, Sales Manager, Pardot LLC
Mathew Sweezey is a leading expert in Marketing Automation, specifically lead flow analysis and nurturing execution. His primary focus is in Advanced Lead Nurturing Workflows. He has worked with numerous lead technology companies, helping them create and execute their lead flow and nurturing processes.

Abstract

So, you want to increase your deliverability rates. And you think you’re doing everything to make that happen: solid process, all of the components for a successful email campaign have been included, deployment timing is right. But for some reason, the numbers that you want to see for deliverability success are just not quite there. Well, we have the webinar for you! Back by popular demand, join Rob Dyson, Pardot’s Technical Project Manager, as he takes us through the ins and outs of successful email deliverability.

Speaker: Rob Dyson, Technical Project Manager, Pardot LLC

Video

Slides

Luckily there are steps you can take to maximize your survey response rates — we’ve compiled five simple ways to help ensure that your survey is a success:

1. Ask meaningful questions. Be mindful of the overall goal(s) of your survey. Perhaps you want to ask thought provoking, industry-related questions and position yourself as a thought leader? Or, maybe you want to learn what customers love most, or least, about your product and get their thoughts on your latest feature. Or maybe you’re looking for thoughts on where your next user group should be held, or ideas for upcoming webinars. Regardless of what your survey goals are, it’s important to ask meaningful, targeted questions so that you can gather as much useful information as possible from your respondents.

2. Keep your questions concise. The shorter your questions, the better — for a variety of reasons. No one wants to fill out long, drawn-out surveys. Try to limit your questions to multiple choice or check box type answers as open ended questions have a much lower response rate. Save your open ended question for last where respondents can leave any feedback they want in the event it’s not covered in an earlier question.

3. Offer a reward to respondents. Offering a reward greatly increases your response rate. Things like iPods, gift cards, and swag are relatively inexpensive and are great motivators. Who doesn’t like freebies?

4. Share It. Using Twitter, Facebook and email to promote your survey can greatly increase response rates. Naturally, the more people that know about your survey, the more respondents you are likely to have. Just be careful not to inundate people with survey requests or you risk turning people off. Note: when emailing your survey out be sure you follow CAN-SPAM guidelines.

5. Test it. Before you send your survey out to your entire audience, test it with a pilot group (this could simply mean sending it to a few co-workers) and make sure results are tracking properly. It’s also a good idea to test your survey in different browsers as they may display the survey differently.

Once you’ve gathered enough results and compiled your survey data, sharing your results is important. Infographics are a popular way to disseminate survey results externally and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

Make your opt-outs easy, and fast. This is the number one way to ensure that you don’t get reported as spam. You’re not doing yourself any favors by continuing to send emails to people who don’t want receive them — an opt-out won’t hurt your reputation but being reported as spam will. With many marketing automation platforms, a recipient who opts out will automatically be removed from your list, but if you are not using a system that does this automatically, make sure you are regularly updating and quickly getting opt-outs off of your lists.

Be consistent. This may seem like common sense, but don’t go two weeks without sending an email and then send three in one day. If possible, let your recipients know upon signing up what you will be sending them and when (better yet, let them chose how often they receive your emails), and stick to this schedule. Not only does this make your business seem more organized and credible, it makes it far less likely that a recipient will get fed up with an inbox clogged with your emails and hit the “Report as Spam” button.

Chose your words carefully. Basically think of every obnoxious ad that you’ve ever received and make your email sound as least like these as possible. Phrases like “No commitment necessary!” and “For only $_.__!” are the best way to ensure that your email is sent straight to the spam folder. Also, avoid starting emails with “Dear,” and instead use the greetings “Hello” or “Hi.”

Avoid content with forms, javascript and flash. Often if you copy over a website or landing page directly into an email, you can end up including these types of content. Including content of this nature can cause security issues and pretty much ensures that your email will be caught in a spam filter. Instead have your email direct the recipient to a landing page and let them fill out the form on the actual website.

Don’t buy lists. When you buy lists, you can easily end up sending emails to invalid email addresses, spam traps and unsuspecting (and unwanting) recipients — putting your odds of being reported as spam through the roof. Instead, check out this great blog post by Chris Heiden on the alternatives to buying lists.

For more tips on successful email marketing, be sure to attend this Thursday’s webinar, “Secrets to Inbox Success” with Rob Dyson.

Abstract

Marketers use marketing automation on a daily basis in many companies. Well, guess what? Your sales team can benefit from using marketing automation, too! Sales guru, Kevin Goldstein (Sr. Sales Manager at Pardot), walks us through the ways in which a sales team can increase sales…with marketing automation. As a sales executive who successfully uses marketing automation on a daily basis, Kevin will give you a first-hand, in-depth look at how sales can effectively:

• Obtain a better understanding of a lead’s interests…prior to making the first contact call
• Gain focused insight into where a lead is in the sales process
• Determine when a lead is ready to purchase

This is a great webinar for your sales team (and your marketing team, too!)

Speaker: Kevin Goldstein, Senior Sales Manager, Pardot LLC

Video

Slides

Sign up now for the webinar:

Secrets to Inbox Success [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, March 15, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EDT

Speaker: Rob Dyson, Technical Project Manager, Pardot LLC

There are a number of tools out there designed to help your company extend its online reach with effective SEO. Here are a few free options that we find to be particularly useful (click on the images to check them out for yourself):

1. Google Webmaster Tools is a robust tool suite offers a plethora of useful SEO tools, bundled under one interface. They offer many ways to start tracking your site, including something as simple as adding a metatag to your site or uploading a tiny HTML file to your server. Once you’ve verified your site ownership, you’ll be able to get diagnostic data that shows you exactly how Google sees your site online, analyze keyword search queries, review inbound and internal links to your website, and QA your site map to see how many pages of your site that Google has indexed.

2. Internet Ninja offers an interesting tool that will actually crawl your site for your targeted keyword and tell you how many times (and how many different iterations) your keyword or phrase shows up on a specific page. Keyword density is one of the main pieces of Google’s ranking puzzle, and typically the more targeted keywords you have on a specific page, the higher it will show up in Google’s search results. Just take care to not overly stuff your pages with certain keywords, as that is a red flag in Google’s eyes and they might penalize your site. Remember, useful content is key.

3. Google’s Keyword Tool is another great free tool can help you figure out what keywords to target with your site content. If you enter specific keywords or phrases, Google will show you an estimated number of searches that keyword generates across Google. It also helpfully lets you know how competitive that keyword is.  This insight can be particularly useful if you are thinking about entering a space that is already littered with websites. It might make you think about targeting a subset of keywords that are more specific to your business and designing content around that (i.e. “cars” versus “Ford trucks dealer in Mobile, AL”).

4. GTmetrix allows you to test how quickly your page loads – one of the elements Google uses to determine your PageRank. It produces a nifty report, complete with suggestions for what you can do to improve your site’s page load time. It’s also a tool that’s helpful when it comes to competitive insight, as it allows you to search for your competitors’ sites and assess their strengths and weaknesses.

5. SEOQuake is an SEO plugin that you can use with Firefox, Safari, or Opera that shows ‘SEO parameters on the fly’. Essentially, it’s a tool bar that shows various key SEO metrics like keyword density, internal links, external links, website age, and PageRank on any particular page you’re on. You can simply click on the particular metric you’re looking for and immediately gain info.

Share Your Sources
You spend hours upon hours keeping yourself up-to-date on the latest industry trends and looking for ideas for new content, so why not put together a blog post about your process of researching for your blog posts? Link to five articles you’ve found particularly informative, highlight some of your favorite blogs to follow, or suggest LinkedIn groups with useful conversations about your industry. These types of posts require minimal effort on your part (write up a brief introduction, link to your favorite sources and you’re done) and provide other B2B marketers trying to stay informed with valuable information. Bonus: giving other blogs a shout out might make them more inclined to do the same.

Look for Simple Research Projects
Keep an eye out for opportunities to compile simple statistics. An example of this type of content is our blog post comparing Google+ and Facebook Pages for businesses. This blog post started with a question: For brands using both Google+ pages and Facebook pages, how do numbers of followers compare between the two sites? From there it was just a matter of looking up the brands on each site, compiling the numbers of followers for each and opening up the floor for discussion. Gathering information like this might take a little effort, but by providing your audience with statistics from which they can draw their own conclusions spares you from having to be the expert, and getting a conversation going on your site keeps your audience engaged. Plus, this type of data can be displayed in an aesthetically pleasing chart or simple infographic and easily distributed through all of your social media outlets.

Compile Existing Content in a Book
Obviously, this project is a much larger and more long-term undertaking than the blog post ideas above, but consider compiling some of your existing content in a book. This project will be labor intensive in that it requires you to pick out your most valuable content, establish a theme and write transitions so topics flow cohesively. But binding your most valuable content in a book gives it credibility: we’ve been trained (with good reason) to approach information on the internet with a certain amount skepticism, while books are generally seen as more trustworthy sources. Furthermore, if you mail a prospect a book, it’s highly unlikely that it will be thrown out. Even if it’s not read immediately, books don’t seem as disposable as most promotional materials, so there’s a much better chance that it will be stuck on a shelf somewhere (the same cannot be said of mailing a prospect a white paper). And a book can easily be promoted through social media outlets; for example, you can request a free copy of our book, Think Outside the Inbox, on our Facebook page. This is a great way to easily distribute content to interested parties in a compact and permanent format, and well worth the effort of compiling valuable existing content. ]]> http://www.pardot.com/ideas/3-ideas-for-content-marketing/feed 0 http://www.pardot.com/webinars/recorded-webinar-lead-qualification-and-erosion http://www.pardot.com/webinars/recorded-webinar-lead-qualification-and-erosion#comments Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:13:57 +0000 teri.marks-brunner http://blog.pardot.com/?p=3781

Abstract

You’ve got prospects pouring into your marketing automation database from every direction, because of the incredible marketing campaigns you’re running. So, what’s next? Of course, you naturally toss leads over the fence to your sales team, right? WRONG! There are crucial steps that should be considered and taken between gathering prospect information and handing lead information over to sales. Ultimately, these choices will affect the quality of leads your sales team will be acting upon…and your company’s bottom line.

Join Adam Dewey, Senior Sales Manager at Pardot, for a detailed look at when, where and how leads are qualified in your marketing automation process. From there, you, too, can improve lead quality and make the difference your sales team is looking for!

Speaker: Adam Dewey, Senior Sales Manager, Pardot LLC

Video

Slides

• Obtain a better understanding of a lead’s interests…prior to making the first contact call
• Gain focused insight into where a lead is in the sales process
• Determine when a lead is ready to purchase

This is a great webinar for your sales team (and your marketing team, too!)

Sign up now for the webinar:

How Sales Can Benefit from Marketing Automation [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, March 8, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EST (US)

Speaker: Kevin Goldstein, Senior Sales Manager, Pardot LLC – Kevin is responsible for sales and partnerships, as well as lending his expertise to team mentoring of the Pardot sales team.

The shorthand version of the story is as follows (although both full-length articles are great reads, if you have the time):

A man walks into a Target outside of Minneapolis and asks to speak with a manager, disgruntled that his high-school-aged daughter has been receiving fliers with coupons for pregnancy-related items (“Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”). The manager apologizes, then calls the man a few days later to apologize again — to find him far more sheepish: “I had a talk with my daughter. It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

The Times took an interest in the situation and, after a talk with Target statistician Andrew Pole, revealed to the world that Target has the process of identifying shoppers as parents-to-be down to an art form — they may even have a good guess at your due date.

The story, which spread like wildfire (the Forbes version alone received nearly 30,000 shares), best serves as a cautionary tale to B2C marketers. There’s a reason why, after initial contact with Pole, Target refused to talk to The Times and Duhigg’s name was placed on a list of prohibited visitors at Target headquarters: consumers can get sincerely freaked out when they learn how much of their personal lives are revealed to retailers by their buying patterns. In the world of targeted, personalized B2B marketing, it’s not so different.

Here’s what marketers of all kinds can take away from this story:

Look beyond the numbers. Once you get past the initial creepiness of this story, the marketing behind it is completely genius. Target took an overall business goal (to have customers see Target as a one-stop shop), focused in on a demographic that might help them to achieve this goal (as the NYT article explains, one of the few times in life where a consumer will change his or her buying habits is when starting a family), and carefully thought through their customer’s needs at each stage of the journey.

As a B2B marketer using marketing automation, you’re given access to a sizable amount of data — numbers of page views, clicks, social sharing, etc. But if you’re only using this information to prove that you’re reaching people and pat yourself on the back, you’re not getting the full benefit. Instead, look for patterns in these numbers and try to understand the thought processes behind certain behaviors for a far more comprehensive understanding of your different buyer personas.

Be sensitive with personal information.  Having access to information on a prospect has obvious benefits for both sides — the business is able to grab the prospect’s attention by appealing to their specific needs, the prospect is provided with information on how to fix their particular problem, and both parties save a lot of time. So, more so than revealing how much information, it’s important to use discretion in revealing your access to certain types of information. Marketing automation provides marketers with a wide array of information on a prospect — from the number of times they viewed a page on your website to links to their personal social media outlets. Revealing that you know your prospect is particularly concerned with pricing is one thing; revealing that you saw their status about an important event in their personal life (such as, say, the birth of their first child)…well, that’s a whole different ball game.

Perhaps one of the most striking quotes from this article (and a good note to leave things on) came from Pole, regarding Target’s observance of privacy laws. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws,” Pole said. “But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.” The information that marketing automation provides can be an invaluable tool for B2B marketers, but without discretion and respect for personal boundaries (even beyond privacy laws), this information could end up working against you.

Abstract

Engaging content – the cornerstone of your marketing efforts, right? Whether it’s websites, white papers or press releases – you want prospects to find your marketing content findable, relevant, and valuable. Learn how the right content will ultimately result in more leads and more customers by facilitating the buying cycle. Join us as we look at some real company website and content examples, and learn how to become a content creation pro with tips, including:

• How to engage your prospects using your subject matter expertise
• How to develop a customer-focused content strategy
• How to create more findable content with SEO
• Fast ways to create content for your programs

Speaker: Nolin LeChasseur, Partner, Brainrider

Video

Slides

There has been much press surrounding Twitter these days, and one particular hot statistic is the impressive fact that there are now over 360,000,000 Twitter accounts out there. A more telling statistic? One study claimed that only 21 million of them are active users. Someone blinded by the sheer number of Twitter accounts out there might not focus on the other key metric in this scenario –Twitter is struggling with engagement and retention.

Of course, vanity metrics do tell part of the story: they can speak volumes about your site’s ability to engage prospects, and they can provide invaluable insight into how your visitors interact with your web property. As a small business owner, it’s tempting to spend too much time focusing on these kinds of ‘vanity metrics’, and not spending enough time on the metrics that truly matter – the ones driving revenue.

Here’s a quick guide to help you differentiate between the two:

Let’s take a quick look at a few of the metrics that are more worthy of your time, and more representative of the overall health of your business:

Number of Active Users – far more important than the number of registered users, is the number of active users. Users that are active, are engaged and more likely to share your content and interact with your brand

Blog Shares – this telling number reveals just how many of your visitors view your content as valuable, and worth sharing. Visitors that read your blog posts without sharing them suggests your content is not as compelling as it could be.

Engagement – measuring engagement is a bit more challenging. There are millions of accounts on Twitter that are not classified as ‘active’ because their account owners don’t tweet. But, what about the account owners that log in to Twitter every day and read their feed? Are they not ‘engaged’? For your purposes, focus engagement on action or attention to your content. Shares, follows, activity and downloads are all indicators of engagement.

Cost Per Acquisition – is a metric that truly reveals the health of your business. How much does it actually cost to acquire and retain a customer? The number of followers or fans your business has is irrelevant if none of those people are resulting in leads or sales for your business. Map your leads and sales directly from their campaign so you know how to allocate time and resources effectively.

Lifetime Value – determining the lifetime value of your typical customer is a key factor in determining exactly how much you can spend acquiring new customers. Perhaps your typical customer purchases a product from you every month for 12 months at $100 each. Their lifetime value is $1200, and not the initial $100. That means you can spend significantly more to acquire that customer, provided your margins are high enough.

Sign up now for the webinar:

Lead Qualification and Erosion [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, March 1, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EST (US)

Join Adam Dewey, Senior Sales Manager at Pardot, for a detailed look at when, where and how leads are qualified in your marketing automation process. From there, you, too, can improve lead quality and make the difference your sales team is looking for!

Speaker: Adam Dewey, Senior Sales Manager, Pardot LLC

• To learn about the latest in Pardot features and functionality
• To see how fellow users are implementing and using Pardot
• To participate in relevant round-table group discussions on audience-chosen topics

Lunch will be provided at the meetings. Reserve your free ticket now!

• Atlanta – March 14th, 12 – 2p ET
• Boston – March 14th, 12 – 2p ET
• San Francisco – March 14th, 12 – 2p PT

Come out and join us!

Thanks to capabilities on both ends, we are able to use Pardot forms on Facebook. As an example, we have created a Pardot form on Facebook for requesting copies of our book “Think Outside the Inbox.”

We can now capture lead information from visitors that request a copy of our book. This gives us an initial touch on Facebook and the lead is tagged with the “Facebook Book Requests” campaign. Marketing can now track this lead to sale and report on the return of the Facebook campaign.

Before diving right in and adding forms everywhere, it’s important consider an appropriate strategy for Facebook. Employing content and a form incorrectly could do more harm then good. Here are some things to consider:

• Use Forms with Caution – Privacy seems to be a hot button issue when it comes to Facebook. The last thing you want to do is make users feel like they’re obligated to provide even more personal information. When possible, only use forms when it seems most appropriate and keep the required fields to a minimum. The less information you request, the less invasive your forms will seem.
• Be Consistent – If you’re currently giving away content on Facebook, you don’t want to all of the sudden start putting that content behind a wall. Users will be frustrated that content that was once freely available now requires personal information for access. Continue with the way you are currently doing things and use your form for something new and interesting.
• Offer Interesting Content – If your page has regular updates and a good number of likes, then chances are you have valuable insight into what Facebook users enjoy seeing on your page. Spend some time going through your activity and see what kind of content has attracted the most attention. Then consider creating something new or repurposing old content just for Facebook based on your research. This will give users incentive to visit your page and fill out the form.

In the example provided on our Facebook Page, we’re using a form to ask for information and providing something unique for free. The form is necessary because we need the correct shipping information and the book is normally for sale on Amazon. Try to get creative and don’t just require a form for access to a white paper.

Ready to see how it’s done and get started? Head over to our how-to article for a complete walk-through.

Abstract

In his monthly feature recap webinar for February 2012, Zach covered 3 new email-related additions to the Pardot platform: customizable email preference pages, new pre-formatted email layouts or “blueprints”, and the newly revamped email editor.

Speaker: Zach Bailey, VP Products, Pardot LLC
Zach leads product management at Pardot and is responsible for evangelizing the Pardot platform and synthesizing customer feedback to steer the product in the right direction.

Video

Slides

Submission Categories:

• Best Drip Program
• Best Landing Page
• Best Email Template
• Most Insightful Custom GoodData Report

Entries will judged on overall look and feel, as well as effectiveness. Please submit entries by email (along with your name, company and phone number) to contest@pardot.com by April 16, 2012. And remember, the more details you provide, the better insight we will have into the success of your campaign!

Click on the images below to download the appropriate contest submission form (word doc):

Abstract

So, now that you’ve got the basics down – it’s time for the next step! Mastering the five campaigns addressed in this webinar will place you in select company. We’ll start off with a little advanced segmentation, a few conditional landing pages and some advanced nurturing tactics. And there’s more! View the recorded webinar to see what else Mathew Sweezey (Sales Manager at Pardot) has cooked up. This is webinar #2 in a series of 3 informative webinars (you can also view webinar #1 of the series).

Speaker: Mathew Sweezey, Sales Manager, Pardot LLC
Mathew Sweezey is a leading expert in marketing automation, specifically lead flow analysis and nurturing execution. His primary focus is in advanced lead nurturing workflows. He has worked with numerous lead technology companies, helping them create and execute their lead flow and nurturing processes.

Video

Slides

• How to engage your prospects using your subject matter expertise
• How to develop a customer-focused content strategy
• How to create more findable content with SEO
• Fast ways to create content for your programs

Sign up now for the webinar:

B2B Marketing Clinic: Developing Customer-Centric Content [Click here to Register]
Date: Thursday, February 23, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM EST (US)

Speaker: Nolin LeChasseur, Partner, Brainrider

Here are a few easy ways to maximize your Facebook presence and engage your followers:

1. Post frequently. Posting 5 or more times a week versus once a week dramatically increases your engagement with your fans. Your followers are following you for a reason – they are interested in what you have to say. So keep them updated, and remember to respond when they ask a question or offer feedback.

2. Remember to engage. Writing posts that engage your followers is key. In fact, Facebook actually uses EdgeRank (the number of your followers divided by the number of comments on a post) to help determine how likely they are to show your next fan page post to all or most of your followers. If your engagement rank falls too much, you run the risk that your next fan post will only be shown to a fraction of your followers.

3. Use your call to action. It’s important to remember that Facebook is a powerful marketing tool. You should treat your Facebook page as a marketing communication tool, and remember your CTAs. See how Intel prompts people to “like” their page and take action by asking them to “Like our Intel page to stay connected”?

4. Keep it light. Facebook is, in its simplest form, a communication platform. People use it to post about everything from the silly, mundane things that go on during the day to the most serious issues plaguing our world today. The Facebook pages that resonate most with fans are the ones that are fun. Cisco keeps it light by using their page as a way to further their brand and position themselves positively with consumers by celebrating their “Super Fans” – what better way to reward your followers than to give them a personal shout out?

5. Sell. Of course you can use Facebook to sell your products or services. The key is balance – don’t oversell your products and services. You can certainly sprinkle in product offers and promotions with your posts, but make sure they are infrequent. A good rule of thumb is to post sales content once out of every five times you post. The 80/20 rule means that you should post content that provides value to your followers at least 80% of the time. In other words, keep the sales pitches to a minimum and maximize the value you provide.

We appreciate your feedback! Click on the image below to participate in our brief survey.

“Having Fliptop’s social data inside Pardot gives [clients] an extra lens through which they can view their prospects and makes it easy for them to follow them on Twitter, connect with them on LinkedIn, and more,” said Pardot COO Adam Blitzer.

Among the findings, the study revealed that:

• In less than the 6 months since Fliptop was integrated, Pardot’s customers have used Fliptop to successfully perform more than 10,000,000 social lookups.
• Currently, over 20% (and growing) of Pardot’s customer base has subscribed to the social features powered by Fliptop.
• According to Pardot, the Fliptop service has matched social profiles to email addresses for an impressive 30% of names.

Click on the image to the right to check out the full case study and learn more about Fliptop.

Probably about once a day, if you follow social media marketing trends. The blogosphere is chock-full of hints, tips and best practices for upping these numbers and engaging with customers through social media. But what is it that actually drives your followers to click the “Like” button, or to invite your daily updates into their Twitter feed?

According to this Star Group blog post, it’s not what you think.

Based on a survey conducted by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Lithium (a social media tech firm), Star Group’s blog post compares responses from over 1,300 consumers and over 120 CMOs on the reasons behind consumer engagement with brands’ pages. And the results show a glaring disconnect between why consumers engage with brands through social media and why businesses think they do.

Before delving too deeply into an analysis of these statistics, it’s worth noting that some of the wording in this study could have potentially thrown off participants. It seems that different options were given to consumers and CMOs. For example, while consumers were able to choose “For the games, contests, and promotions,” CMOs had to choose between “They are looking for incentives of rewards for engaging with the brand,” and “They are looking for special savings or events just for followers.” Additionally, the answer “The content is agreeable,” could cause confusion considering the term “content” embodies pretty much everything. However, despite these discrepancies, one thing seems clear: consumers are looking for a high level of engagement with a brand’s social media marketing, and they expect to be rewarded for their follow.

So what does this mean for B2B marketers?

It’s time to get creative. Many B2B companies might not have the benefit that B2C companies have of drawing customers to their social media sites with flashy advertising, discount coupons or product giveaways. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t come up with a simple contest to encourage followers to interact with you and your product (bonus points if you can get clients interacting with one another). And consider rewarding your most engaged followers with some company swag from time-to-time — if your followers are enthusiastic enough about your product to seek you out on social media, they probably wouldn’t mind sporting a free t-shirt with your name on it.

The most important thing to take away from these statistics is that your social media outlets need life and personality. White papers, instructive content, product information and support can all be found on your company’s website — consumers come to your social media outlets looking for unique interaction that they can’t find elsewhere, so think outside the box.

Keeping these statistics in mind, what are some unique ways that B2B marketers can engage their followers through social media?

The new email editor is a huge improvement over the old WYSIWYG and will make it easier than ever for you to get those important newsletters and announcements out to your prospects and clients. The new email layouts have been developed to take full advantage of all the new advanced features of the editor, and are great examples of email design best practices for getting your emails to render correctly in every email client.

During my February new features webinar, I covered the new email editor and answered people’s questions. You can find my slides and a recording of that webinar attached at the bottom of this post.

To use the new email editor, follow the exact same steps as before to create or edit an email or email template. When you reach the content editing step, you will see a link to activate the new editor just above the old editor. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t force people to use the new editor until they were ready, and we’ll also be keeping the old editor available for a period of 4 weeks as people get up to speed with the new editor.

How have we improved the new editor? Just like you’d expect, the new editor is still a WYSIWYG-based editor, but we’ve gone to great lengths to improve the reliability and ease of use of many of the common tasks such as adding, removing, formatting, and styling your content. Getting your email to render in multiple email clients can sometimes be a chore – you don’t need a finicky editor getting in your way making it even harder!

Questions? Please reach out to me, our support team, or your client advocate – we’re happy to help!

So how do you know what to send, and when?

Our friends at BrainRider broke the lead nurturing process down into three basic stages and put together some ideas for appropriate content at each stage. Based on their recommendations, we’ve compiled this information into a simple infographic for your convenience:

Stage One: Your prospect has yet to realize his or her need at this stage, so it’s important to keep things general. If you received an ad for a realtor, but you weren’t looking to buy a new house, would you check it out just to be safe? Probably not – it would seem like a waste of your time. Similarly, before you can explain to a prospect why your product is needed, you have to prove that you understand their industry and their needs. Sending prospects generalized industry studies, articles and blog posts shows them that providing valuable and relevant information is a higher priority than a hard-sell.

Stage Two: At this point, you have earned your prospects’ trust by showing them that you understand their position and their needs, so it’s time to get a little more specific. Avoid being brand-specific (you’re still resisting the hard-sell), but begin to show how your product can remedy said needs with educational videos, product-specific blog posts and case studies from experts in the field.

Stage Three: Your prospect now understands the problem they’re facing and how your product can help– it’s time to show them why your brand is the best in the business. Provide them with valuable content that will help them in the decision-making process, such as buyer guides, demo videos and success kits, and let your product speak for itself through customer testimonials and reviews.

We’re looking for Pardot client volunteers interested in having their current website content evaluated during our February 23rd webinar, “Developing Customer-Centric Content.” Speaker Nolin LeChasseur, founding partner of Brainrider, will be focusing on ways to engage prospects using the company’s subject matter expertise, as well as developing a customer-focused content strategy.

This is a great opportunity for clients who are:

• Considering an update of their website and looking for purposeful content feedback
• Interested in a general review of how well a company’s website and marketing content connect with that company’s need

If interested, please contact Teri Marks-Brunner at teri.marks-brunner@pardot.com.

Abstract

If you are new to marketing metrics (or maybe are a little intimidated by them, or just curious as to what they are), then this 1/2-hour webinar blitz is for you! In this webinar, you will learn:

• Marketing metrics – What are they?
• Why marketing metrics are important to you and your company
• How you can apply this valuable information and improve your everyday efforts as a modern-day marketer

Join us for an educational and useful view into to the wonderful world of marketing metrics.

Speaker: Kati Newburg, Training Coordinator, Pardot LLC

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Slides

You can now set up as many preference centers as you would like. You still designate which lists you want to be public and give them labels the way you did before (Go to Segmentation and then edit the lists in question). Then go to Emails and click Email Preference Pages. You can create a new page and add or remove lists that you would like to include in it.

You will still use the same variable tag (%%email_preference_center%%) for your default email preference center. For any custom preference centers, simply use the direct link to the page you create.

Consider the stage of your lead.
Have a goal in mind when you reach out to leads in each stage of the lead nurturing process and make sure that you are being conscious of their particular situation at that stage. For instance, you may want to avoid including keywords or branding in subject lines for first-stage leads. Remember that these leads have yet to realize that they have a problem for which your product would be the perfect solution, so if you send them an email titled, “You need [product they’ve never heard of] to fix [problem they don’t know they have]”…well, your email is in the trash before they can finish the subject line. Instead, stick to common language and generalized topics that your audience can relate to (think along the lines of, “Three ways to improve your lead management”).

Include dynamic content.
Yes, even in your subject line. The beauty of marketing automation is that you have more information about a leads’ specific needs than ever before, and you are able to send them content that reflects that. But what good does that do, if your lead never opens the email? So include dynamic content in your subject lines by adding double percent signs and dropping in a variable field ( %%variable field%% ).

Learn from others.
The best thing about finding effective subject lines is that, every single day, you are emailed multiple examples that are tested on a real subject – you. How many emails do you receive in your inbox that you instantly send to the trash? Which ones do you open? More than likely, you respond best to the ones that seem more human, and less like generic advertisements. But what keywords do these subject lines include that make an email seem more personal? Start being conscious of what emails grab your attention and why.

We’d love to hear your input. What are some other best practices for writing subject lines that you’ve found as a B2B marketer? Please feel free to share in our comments section.