While Pardot can be useful for your marketing efforts, depending upon how robust your performance goals and objectives are, be aware that there are some hidden costs to using this marketing automation system.
Email campaigns that are created in Pardot can take 24 hours to deliver leads to the sales staff in their CRM. Did you know that if leads aren't followed up on within the first five minutes after an offer response is generated are 400% less likely to qualify into a revenue generating opportunity.
I don't know about you, but that's too high to play around with. The timely opportunity to catch the prospect while she's actively looking is too precious to squander.
Reports for email, social, SEO, PPC and keywords have to be manually created. You won't find a single dashboard or jumping off point to handle and analyze this data. You have to manually manage appropriate social channels and copy and paste information from multiple sources to make cross channel reports.
Again, how much time do you have to do this? There's a critical time lag between receiving the data, putting it into a report, delivering it to your sales staff and engaging the lead. The longer the lag, the worse your chances are of capturing the prospect's attention.
It's not possible to create a unified company-wide logic and mapping to tie campaigns to your CRM. Unique automation rules have to be created for every campaign, and re-created. If you're planning on launching two to three campaigns per week, this could add to up as much as five additional hours of work.
I prefer systems that are one and done. Create something once and launch it to do the work for you. Manually following up on leads to make sure the right sales person received them is time-consuming.
There's no functionality in Pardot to create social media posts and offers, or to syndicate them to your various social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Nor can you syndicate content directly to your blog. These have to be managed and maintained outside of Pardot.
Social media and blogs can generate 21% of your leads. Wouldn't you rather have a single platform where you can create, schedule, distribute and track social media efforts? What if you have multiple products and services - can you see yourself doing this several times over?
If leads don't get sent to your CRM with Pardot's automation rules you create, there's no reporting mechanism to let you know this. You (or someone you designate) will need to manually spot check this and get in touch with your sales force to see where the problem occurred.
My experience with this is that you can lose 10 - 15% of lead flow to sales. That's a huge impact that's too much to absorb for any given length of time.
Finally, you can't get reports on dollars sourced to marketing efforts you've implemented. Pardot lets you see revenue tied to specific emails. Otherwise, you need to root out and compile marketing data manually. This wastes time and ties up resources that could be better used to complete other goals and objectives.
We see these issues constantly with our prospects and clients. Measured Results Marketing can help you gain efficiencies and use your time and resources wisely by analyzing your current systems and programs.
Contact us to learn more about how to make your marketing efforts and programs work smarter.
