Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Laura Folio (@LauraFolio) and Adam Blitzer (@AdamBlitzer) at Pardot for this post.

What is Pardot?

Pardot is the maker of Prospect Insight, a “No Hassle” marketing automation suite designed to streamline online marketing campaigns and jump-start ROI for small-and-medium sized businesses. Pardot brings together all the elements of creating an online lead generation program and packages them in a simple, user-friendly marketing automation suite that gives you in-depth insight to your visitors and prospects.

What can Pardot do for you? The Prospect Insight suite was designed to simplify online marketing and make it easy to generate great content that will produce real results for a non-technical user. What does that mean? It means all the tools in Prospect Insight are designed with marketers in mind and consist of pre-formatted templates, easy drag-and-drop builders and step-by-step wizards to guide you through the process. Create custom landing pages in a few clicks. Build a branded email newsletter and personalize it from each individual sales representative with the Pardot template library and a simple, visual editor. Host images and files securely with Pardot, eliminating the need to bug your IT department about uploading your latest logo.

Then, use these shiny new campaign elements to generate prospects and create drip programs to nurture leads. Score and grade your new inbound leads with customizable criteria. Set up rules to automatically segment prospects for follow-up, assign them to your sales representatives and more. Sync this new-found information with your CRM system, creating a seamless flow of data that encourages adoption across your entire organization. Before you know it, the sales team is singing your praise (you’re making their job a lot easier, after all) and you’re able to show meaningful ROI data reflecting the marketing department’s contribution to the bottom line.

That’s right, marketing automation is about results. Its about making the marketing department, sometimes regarded as all “fluffy stuff,” ROI superheroes. Tracking prospects and visitors allows companies to bring in more leads – and more importantly, better leads – while reporting on marketing campaigns like never before. Pardot customers have been able to increase sales team efficiency and generate loads more leads.

Now you know why you need marketing automation, but what makes Pardot different? In addition to building an easy-to-use tool, Pardot designed the “No Hassle Marketing Automation” Promise to define what sets Prospect Insight apart from other choices:

• Pardot is a month-to-month service with no contracts. The simple, low-cost plans include implementation and services, making it easy for smaller companies to get on board without a large upfront investment.
• Pardot includes unlimited users for one monthly fee – that’s right no need to purchase individual seats at an additional charge. Come one, come all!
• Pardot offers personalized services and support. We pride ourselves on client service with our interactive success community and our stellar team of services folks and client advocates. We love to meet clients and invite them to the office to take a spin on the Segway, play a game of ping pong or, of course, chat about all things marketing automation.

To learn more about Pardot and marketing automation, in general, we invite you to visit www.pardot.com and view a quick demo to see Prospect Insight in action. You can also catch up with us on our blog at marketingautomation.net.