The document summarizes a marketing manager's 17-month journey building a marketing function at her company Epicom Corporation using the marketing automation platform Pardot. Key points include:
- The company had 5 employees and no formal marketing when they started in June 2010
- Within 2 months they were actively using Pardot to build content and nurture leads
- Over the next year and a half they doubled revenue and staff to 14 employees
- Metrics showed website traffic, leads, and links doubling, as well opportunities from existing customers increasing 460% by June 2011.
Building a Marketing Function with Pardot: Our 17 Month Journey to Success
1. Building a Marketing Function
with Pardot
Our 17 Month Journey to Success
Amanda Anderson
Marketing Manager
Epicom Corporation
2. From Zero to…
Started to build
content in June 14 employees
5 employees 2010 and was
actively using more than
No marketing
Pardot by August doubled revenue
2010
17. Inform Sales of Process
• DEMO to Sales Team
• Meaning of
Notifications
• Define Nurture
Program (when to set
to nurture status)
• Campaigns
• Custom Redirects
18. Round Robin in Pardot
Web
Form
Sales
Pardot SugarCRM
Follow Up
Outside
Sources
19. Results
25 active 51 active
customers in to customers in
May 2010 October 2011
21. Results
Web traffic
June 2010 June 2011
doubled
22. Results
Website leads
June 2010 increased June 2011
63%
23. Results
Links to our
website
June 2010 Today
increased
2,400%
24. Results
460% increase in
opportunities
June 2009 June 2011
created from
existing customers
25. Think Big, Do Great
Amanda Anderson
Marketing Manager
Epicom Corporation
amanda@epicom.com
(512) 782-0007
www.epicom.com
Hinweis der Redaktion
Before Pardot, Epicom wasn’t doing any marketing. There was the occasional blog post and “newsletter” like email that went out, but no reoccurring or strategic marketing was being done. A year and a half ago, I joined Epicom to help build a marketing function and come up with a marketing strategy for the company. On my first day… I was handed Pardot and told to become a guru at it. The question was - how do you communicate with prospects and customers when there is no content, no programs, and no standard for comparison? Get creative and use your software as your guide was the answer for us.
It’s not just about knowing demographics. It’s about knowing the psyche.
DEMO Pardot to your sales team. Let them see how you are using it so they understand what messages are going out to prospects and customers. Beyond having a marketing plan using Pardot, you have to inform your sales team of how to respond to different notifications and Pardot activity. You must sell the product to them. After all, it is there to make their job easier. Get them excited about it and they will use it appropriately. Hold meetings periodically to see how they are doing and how they are following up. This is also a good time to see how the prospects are responding to Pardot emails and newsletters so you can adjust accordingly. We also provided our Sales team with custom redirects to some of our content that isn’t on our website. If wanted to send an interesting article or a video, our sales team would use a custom redirect link so they would know if it was clicked on when they sent the email from their gmail account.
We enter leads into Pardot and assign it to different sales reps on a round robin basis. We originally entered the leads into the CRM system, but found it was a better solution to be done in Pardot. For certain leads, we send automated emails the second they are entered into our system. This helps our sales guys incase they cannot follow up immediately. Best practices for quick lead conversion is to follow up immediately, but that isn’t always possible for our sales team to manually follow up. Pardot in this case acted as an extension of our sales team.