It seems every year brings a new digital challenge, causing our profession to pivot constantly to meet the new normal. It’s our job as marketers to find the proper digital channels to showcase our company’s product offerings and solutions, as well as, creating a long-lasting strategy to support sales revenue and generate ROI. Aligning with the appropriate stakeholders to understand your go-to-market offer, identifying your target audience, creating clear call-to-actions to higher performance, and tracking each touchpoint in the marketing journey is critical to advocating for future marketing spends. Throughout this blog series, you will learn about the prerequisites to developing a digital marketing strategy that will allow you to balance the new technology opportunities and generate a positive ROI for your company.

Throughout this document, you will learn about the prerequisites to your campaign in Pardot to support your digital marketing campaigns:

• Understand your offer or product offering
• Develop your target audience
• Create CTAs that align with the offer
• Understand KPIs to track ROI
• Understand your offer or product offering

This is the start of your journey. Before you decide your target audience, you must establish what problem you are trying to solve for.

Sample questions to ask yourself:

• Is the goal of the campaign to drive website traffic or leads?
• Are you upselling to your current customer base? Or driving net new traffic?
• Are you informing your current product base on software changes?
• Is there a promotion running for the offer?

Develop your target audience

           After you establish your offer, you need to decide who the appropriate audience is to receive this information, whether that be in the form of an email campaign or a digital marketing campaign. Create personas based on these demographics:

• Age
• Gender
• Educational background
• Title
• Location
• Online behaviors/interests

Create CTAs that align with the offer

           Now you know who will receive your marketing materials, it’s time to outline clear CTAs for each phase of the sales journey. A call to action makes it clear to potential customers which action you want them to take. There are multiple CTAs appropriate for each phase of the funnel.

Pro-tip: Make your CTA button pop with a color that sticks out on the page, so your prospects know the action you want them to take.

Examples for each stage of the funnel

• Upper funnel – Get your free Ebook, Register for a webinar
• Whitepaper, Ebook, Marketing Kit or Webinar
• Mid-funnel – Learn more, See product x in action
• Product webinar, case study, demo video
• Low-funnel/ready to buy – Add to cart for 10% off, Speak to sales now
• Form for sales inquiry, phone number for a direct line to sales, free demo, or adding the product to their cart.

Understand KPIs to track ROI

Measuring KPIs is critical to understanding what campaigns are working and what’s not working. This also allows you to measure what impact you are marketing towards the bottom line and sales growth.

Pro-tip: When determining appropriate KPIs to measure the success of your campaign, look at historical data and KPI averages based on your industries to establish a benchmark.

Things you should do in Salesforce

• Ensure you have a clear sales path set up within Salesforce to track each stage as it progresses before an opportunity. For example – open leads, marketing qualified leads, sales qualified lead before progressing to the selling stages of the opportunity
• Also, ensure each status in Salesforce is properly aligned to the appropriate stage in Salesforce to track conversion ratios.
• In Salesforce, you want to measure the age in leads between stages in the lead journey. Establishing a clear SLA with the sales team for customer response time ensures your marketing leads become qualified at a higher rate

In conclusion, it is critical to align with sales to ensure that your marketing campaigns reflect the value of the solution, both parties are clear on revenue targets and your campaign spend is being used wisely. Without setting clear KPIs based on historical data or industry benchmarks, you risk undervaluing the marketing influence associated with each closed deal to the business. As a takeaway, feel free to use the campaign checklist provided below to get you started on the foundational elements to running a successful digital marketing campaign. 

In the next series of my blog, I will continue the conversation with a deeper dive into the technical setup in Pardot to accurately measure campaign success by discussing best practices for form setups, landing page setups, folder structure and routing to Salesforce. 

• Measuring campaign success
• Setting up forms to connect to Salesforce
• Best practices on landing page setup
• Folder structure
• Lead Source and Campaign tracking