The marketing magician has many tricks in the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) toolkit. One of those magical tools is the Pardot custom redirect.
What makes a Pardot custom redirect special? It allows you to segment and get the right data at the right time as your customers and potential customers interact with your marketing assets. This in turn allows you to better target interests and hone in on what’s working and what’s just cluttering your audience’s feeds.
So, what can you get out of using Pardot custom redirects? Read on to find out!
Use Pardot Custom Redirects to Better Understand Your Social Impact
Every social media channel contributes a unique insight about your offerings to your audience. When promoting content through social media channels, it’s important to make sure you measure what your audience reaction is to ensure your message is effective and not ignored (or worse, annoys your target audience).
If you’re publishing the same content to multiple platforms, you should create separate custom redirects for each platform. Not only will you see which of your social sites receives the most traffic, but patterns of engagement will emerge and help you draw conclusions about the specific interests of each audience.
Measure the Marketing Impact on Event Sign Ups
Every marketing department wants to show the impact they are making. One of the key drivers of revenue is based around events. It’s important to place custom redirects behind any event promotions created by marketing.
You should also give your sales reps custom redirects to use when they pitch the event as well. Better yet, create separate custom redirects for each channel that you use to promote the event for more insight into what’s working and what’s not.
Identify Your Most Compelling Calls to Action
There is a lot of buzz around the importance of “calls to action.” But how do you know which are most impactful?
The answer: a custom redirect! You can “play” with wording, placement and who clicked (did you get a response from your intentional target audience or someone else?). Now you can measure and make adjustments that will help ensure the right action from the right audience.
Utilize Your Partner Relationships to Understand Value
Want to get even more reach for very little investment? Use custom redirects with partners that show how their site is impacting traffic to your site. This information can help you make decisions about the value of the partnership and where you should invest more.
Get The Most Out of Your Offline Efforts Too!
While it might seem obvious, the value of creating custom redirects that are specific to written and offline content is critical. An engaged audience will interact with your content and their next step will be to visit your site.
Knowing which pieces generated the most interest (or sales in the long haul) helps you make the most of your marketing budget and determine what efforts are worth investing in. Offline is expensive… do you know what it’s doing for your business? Now you can.
Find Out Who is Engaged Internally
Most businesses send important information to their employees. But, do you know who actually reads those communications? Are they effective? Is your desired message being received? Are there patterns based on subject? Or frequency? Or send time?
We often consider these questions when we are dealing with our external audiences, but they are just as critical internally. Consider custom redirects as another tool that human resources, marketing or any department internally can use to ensure your company’s internal resources are engaged as well.
Check out this blog post for more creative ways to use Pardot to increase employee engagement.
Get Creative with Pardot Custom Redirects: Create a Quick Poll
How can you get quick input from your audience without a full online survey? Custom redirects might be the answer.
The process is simple. Create custom redirects to the separate links, buttons, or images used for voting and they will automatically record the clicks on each link.
A great example of this would be something like a Net Promoter score. You can create links with one question (example: Would you recommend our company/product/service to someone else?).
From the reporting side, you could now segment between “Yes” (raving fan) and “No” (potential detractor) answers. Then you can address any concerns from those who need follow up or are ready to promote your brand for you!
Monitor Prospect Activity
Ever wished you could be alerted to a certain prospect’s activity on your site? Imagine you’ve had a prospect close to close for over a month now, but they want time and space to make their own decision. Wouldn’t it be nice to know when that person gets serious and looks at your pricing options?
Custom redirects allow you to track such activity in a few different ways. For example, If using email to contact prospects, create custom redirects to monitor prospect clicks.
Using a service like Account Engagement (Pardot)? You can create an automation to notify your team that an action has been taken by a prospect, allowing you to be super responsive to high probability prospect activity. Strike while the iron is hot!
When you’re ready to level-up your sales team response skills, check out Salesforce Engage. Here’s a blog post that walks you through the tool.
Experience the Magical Insights Pardot Custom Redirects Can Offer
The most important thing when preparing any marketing effort is to determine how you will measure success. Custom redirects allow you to effectively collect relevant and timely data on who did what and why.
Used correctly, they can greatly improve the efficacy of your marketing activities and help you “prove” what you already know: Effective marketing strategies work. Even beyond that (and maybe more importantly) understanding what’s not working and being able to “fail fast” and move on to more impactful actions.
Need help understanding the full impact of your marketing efforts? Here’s a blog post that provides insight into proving the impact of your marketing efforts through connected campaigns. And if you’re still feeling lost, you can reach out to the Sercante team for help.
