Making Marketing In Salesforce Fun With Pardot!
During the pandemic I was working for a few different small companies as their Salesforce Admin; I guess you could say I was dabbling in the contract-gig-lifestyle. The outside world was experiencing drastic changes that were heavily impacting the small business industry, leaving us to buckle ourselves down for a bumpy ride. One of the changes I wasn’t expecting to happen was having to switch my Salesforce knowledge into marketing; the budget cuts finally caught up to us and the multiple hat roles had to be filled, so when my boss presented this new role to me, I accepted the challenge. How hard could it be to learn marketing?
What an ignorant assumption that was.
I entered the marketing world greeted with endless tools, automations, new data, and new fears. But what a rush it was to experience a whole new playground of endless learning; there is something different with the data we capture in marketing vs sales, revenue or in any other department. To me, the data we capture in marketing seems more creative, more interesting, more artistic and some would even argue that the data we capture as developers, also gives that sense of pleasure.
This exact pleasure was the emotion that drove my interest into marketing even deeper. I began to research ways to expand my marketing knowledge and came across different things that piqued my interest, like social media management, google analytics and the certifications you can gain through google’s courses but nothing piqued my interest more than Salesforce Pardot.
Salesforce Pardot exceeded my expectations when I had the ability to play with it. All the things I had self taught myself about marketing like capturing individuals' contact information into newsletters, building reports and surveys to present that data orderly, were all being met just with one tool. Normally, I was toggling between different tools to track all this data and allow for it to communicate to each other but with Salesforce Pardot, it was all there for you, ready to use.
My favorite item in Pardot was configuring in the engagement studio! It reminded me so much of playing around in the Visual Studio Code developer app and the aesthetics of how the data was presented to you within the engagement studio was easy to understand; it was almost like playing a video game. Which made troubleshooting anything in the engagement studio more enjoyable, I could spend a few hours looking through my work and as the time passed, I just became more enthusiastic.
From the engagement studio excitement, I began to really dive deeper into Salesforce Pardot’s configuration abilities. I soon became aware of the differences between Pardot’s Campaigns and Salesforce Campaigns; the ways they differ and the ways they interact. This portion of Pardot seemed to be everyone’s confusion area, which makes sense when they are both, technically, campaigns. What helped me distinguish the details was visually drawing this out, (which I will happily include here.)
Overall, as I learned more about Salesforce Pardot, the more I thought about how this tool needs more recognition in the industry. Writing one blog about this topic was definitely not enough so stay tuned for more parts into the Salesforce Pardot realm!
Blog published at StrayedRoots.com
Image provided and Illustrated by Rae Sage