Salesforce.com Releases Pardot Engagement Studio

Salesforce.com recently announced the general availability of its Pardot Engagement Studio solution, which enables B2B marketers to visualize, build, test, and measure one-to-one buyer journeys.

"The B2B marketing and sales process thrives and lives on the salesperson and the marketing person being completely aligned, [sharing] one platform, one data set, with complete transparency and visibility across both," says Shannon Duffy, vice president of marketing for Pardot.

Engagement Studio is designed to be a command center for B2B marketing teams, allowing them to manage all touch points with prospects and customers in a single place. Moreover, the platform looks to improve communication between sales and marketing teams, which often use different solutions to manage customers, creating data silos.

The solution aims to empower B2B marketers in three key ways. First, it enables marketers to craft automated rules, actions, and triggers based on customer data, thereby delivering more personalized experiences to customers. Once a marketing program is built, it can be used as a template for future programs, thereby saving time.

Second, Engagement Studio allows marketers to visually plan out all assets in a central canvas, with the goal of establishing a complete view of the buyer journey. Marketers can follow the exact path to purchase that a buyer takes, and launch new journeys by finding and fixing gaps.

Third, the platform aims to simplify the process of understanding and using campaign results. Success metrics are layered directly over the buyer journey map, ensuring that marketers don't have to navigate multiple screens and allowing them to easily identify and amend areas where prospects prematurely abandon their journey.

Engagement Studio also integrates with Salesforce Engage and Salesforce Sales Cloud. Salesforce Engage provides marketers with a library of email templates and allows users to run campaigns from Salesforce CRM, the Salesforce1 Mobile App, and Gmail. Engage also offers a custom, real-time prospect engagement feed and interactive graphical dashboards.

Sales Cloud provides marketers with a visual workflow that uses a drag-and-drop system to design and automate business processes. The platform also features a file-sync and -share system and, when combined with Engage Studio, delivers real-time alert notifications to marketers when a prospect indicates the intent to buy.

"It's great to be a marketer today…because we can actually track our marketing efforts—online, digital, we're able to see what's working, what's not, and we can make data-driven, metric-driven decisions," Duffy says. "But one of the challenges marketers have is that it's hard to get this data—we might have to have a really good BI tool, or download stuff into a spreadsheet and sort and look and try to really dig and pull these insights out. It's really time consuming, and it can slow us down when it comes to building a campaign. Engagement Studio has completely fixed that."

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