We sat down with Pardot Trailblazer Jennifer Schneider of Cheshire Impact to learn about the hot topic of Connected Campaigns. Plus, she shared how you can fold Conversational Marketing into your larger reporting strategy.

MR: Let's start from the beginning. Pardot Connected Campaigns. What is it?

JS: When I talk to folks I ask them three questions. 

1. Are you asking for attribution reporting?
2. Are you struggling to report on your marketing events, your content, or your sales activity?
3. Do you really want to follow what the sales activity was after a particular marketing engagement?

If you have those three questions, the answer is Connected Campaigns. Think of that campaign object as the mothership. That's what's going to pull together what everybody's doing in one space.
‍

Connected Campaigns is a way to organize your data, your thoughts and your actions so that you can report on them in an aggregated manner.

MR: Who's looking at Pardot's Connected Campaigns? Is it the sales team or the marketing team?

JS: Both! That's what's really what's cool about it. Once you've established what your buckets are and you're inside of Salesforce, everyone can have access to that campaign. So instead of fielding a thousand questions from sales, they can go into that campaign and instantly see how many people did this, how many people did that, what activities they have open to follow up on, what pieces of content are getting the most engagement. And maybe that will inspire them to use different content to send out to their own lists, maybe in a separate type of campaign or a separate type of initiative.‍

MR: Walk me through life before Pardot created Connected Campaigns. What were people doing before this was possible?

JS: In my world, I was creating a one-to-one relationship. You had to add people to a Pardot list – there's a little button on the campaign object in Salesforce and you'd push people into Pardot – then you'd manually push them back into Salesforce with completion actions. It was a manual process and you had to be very diligent.

You would still create that parent/child hierarchy in Salesforce, but you would have to do twice as much admin work. 60-70% of folks were just living in Pardot alone. They weren't even engaging in Salesforce campaigns. They may not have even had knowledge about what a Salesforce campaign object was, nor did they have access to Salesforce. So they were creating campaigns in a vacuum, in their own world, living in Pardot, maybe not bucketing things appropriately, maybe just throwing everything in one campaign. That made reporting really difficult.‍

MR: How would you summarize the value that Connected Campaigns brings to an organization? How would you sell it to one of your clients who is scared to take the leap?

JS: Here are the top 5 values I see in Connected Campaigns. 

1. Everything’s in Salesforce: Now you have the engagement of your asset KPIs inside Salesforce. Huge, right? Everything from clicks to opens, you can now see them all in Salesforce Lightning via Engagement History Report Types.
2. Sales and marketing alignment: The sales team can see what both sales and marketing are doing in real time. It's not just some PowerPoint presentation that you create on a Friday and send out to the team. They can actually log in and take a look.
3. Ability for follow up: You get to see when you touched prospects, if sales followed up with them, and what the ROI was, all in one dashboard. That's really powerful. 
4. Campaign influence: We had our primary campaign source, we had our Salesforce model, but now we have the ability to have three models: first touch, last touch, even touch attribution. That’s a complete upgrade.
5. Executive visibility: Your executive team now has a holistic view of what the entire organization is doing towards a particular effort. Take ABM for instance. Now executives can see what their sales team and marketing team are doing to penetrate our top accounts.

These things are all now possible with Connected Campaigns.
‍

The reason to take the leap if you're on the fence is validation. Do you want validation for your marketing efforts? Do you want to finally find that holy grail of attribution? We've been talking about attribution for seven years. It's actually real now.

MR: How are Pardot's Connected Campaigns going to affect a marketers’ role and make them better at their job?

JS: I think it's going to challenge all marketers to think differently, which is awesome. It's going to challenge you to report and bucket things in a way that might not be just for you, but for your entire company.

Salesforce has their Salesforce 360, the whole view of the customer. So now we have to think about campaigns as not only a way to get that first touch, but show all the things you did as a marketer and the entire journey of the end user.

Let’s say John is part of a campaign. John went to a webinar, went to an event, and engaged in some digital ads. We now get to see that John did all 7 of those things and is part of an opportunity won. So as a marketer, you start to look at all the different buckets and perhaps you can combine multiple efforts. And that's going to help my conversion. That's going to help my team close sooner. These are the most effective ways people are engaging. It's not just about the first touch, it’s also about what happened after. Marketers are going to become more well-rounded and also understand their business more. It's a really healthy shift. 

MR: Do you think marketers are going to see that a lot of customers are going through the same journey, or do you think that every customer is different with regards to how many touches they have or what makes them convert?

JS: I think it is different and I’ll give two examples.

1. We're starting to see that leads are engaging with different content than contacts. If a contact is someone who has a relationship with you, they already know who you are, they may not need to understand your story. They may be more focused on a particular product or service. So we need to market to them accordingly. Someone that's net new won't be as engaged by a product or service you offer because they’re still trying to figure out if they want to do business with you. Who are you? What's your story? Do you fit with our culture? 
2. The other piece of that that we're going to see is different needs depending on demographics, locations, or product needs. Take a look at your audience and market accordingly. 

MR: Conversational Marketing is a new type of marketing engagement. It happens on your website, either with a sales rep or with a chatbot. How should someone think about folding Conversational Marketing into their Connected Campaigns reporting strategy? 

JS: This is why I love Qualified, because it's a no-brainer. The close connection that Qualified has taken with Pardot and Salesforce means that you don't have to reinvent the wheel just to use the product. 

As people are interacting with Pardot assets that you already have as part of a campaign, that you already have engagement history reports on, Conversational Marketing just adds fuel to the fire of your engagements.

With Conversational Marketing, marketers will learn new things by watching how visitors are engaging with your sales team on your website. As marketers, sometimes we're behind the scenes. We create beautiful content, attend events, promote new things, but we don’t get to be a part of customer interactions as much as our sales team does. We're not seeing how they're reacting to what we have except for opens and clicks. With Conversational Marketing, we actually get to see how people are digesting our content and interacting with our sales team. From a strategic point of view, Conversational Marketing really pulls the whole team together. 
‍

The icing on the cake? Qualified opens the doors for sales and marketing collaboration and you can clearly see how Qualified impacts revenue. 

MR: There’s a synergy with Pardot's Connected Campaigns and Conversational Marketing. The name of the game is bringing sales and marketing under one roof. Let's make sure these teams are using the same technology, looking at the same reports, have access to all of the same information. And it wasn't always like that. 

So you you've convinced me, and I'm ready to do Connected Campaigns. Where do I start? There’s always a fear of doing things a different way. How would somebody traverse this Connected Campaigns landscape and get started?

JS: Funny you ask. The first thing I would say is possibly follow my podcast called Pardot Life Hacks :) 

I did a series just on Connected Campaigns. There are two episodes that are really conversational, so if you're new to it and you want to understand a little more about the strategy and meet some people who are using it, check it out. We've got one with our CEO Casey Cheshire, and we also have one with Salesforce success manager Lauren Daas.

I also have three tactical episodes. So it's going to take you through planning, that strategy piece, which is so crucial. One about execution, how you actually enable it. And then one about reporting. So now that I have it enabled, what do I do? How do I get these beautiful engagement history reports? There’s so much that’s possible once you get your Connected Campaigns in order. 

But there's so many other resources. There are MVPs in your Trailblazer community, and don't forget about trailhead. Definitely get on Twitter, get on LinkedIn, utilize your Trailblazer community. There's so many amazing, talented folks out there that are willing to help. Just ask your questions.

MR: How do Connected Campaigns support your vision of making marketers heroes?

JS: This gives everybody the recognition that they need. And we do that through that attribution reporting. When we can put dollars and a journey against what's coming in the pipeline, we all win. 

I think another thing that is really important, too, about becoming a marketing hero is if you take the chance on Connected Campaigns, you are introducing yourself into a new playground. This is a really good way to get your feet wet, to understand Salesforce objects, because I think it's no secret Pardot is moving onto the platform. All of the new features are being built in the Pardot lightning app. Qualified is going to be growing with that same technology. So this is a great way to get started, ask questions and be that spearhead person in your in your company to get you guys to the next level. 

Wrap up

Connected Campaigns is a game changer for Pardot customers. Plus, you can fold Conversational Marketing reporting right into Connected Campaigns to see exactly how chatbot or sales rep website conversations are impacting conversions, pipeline and revenue. Thank you Jennifer for taking the time to share your Connected Campaigns expertise! Want to keep the Connected Campaigns conversation going? Follow Jennifer on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Check out what other Trailblazers are doing to drive pipeline in our book, Trailblazers in Conversational Marketing.