Over the past 10 years marketing has changed in major ways. The environment that had once involved much more tangible marketing has now gone almost fully digital. Tools like Account Engagement (Pardot) have certainly helped marketers make the transition, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t simple mistakes being made in and out of Account Engagement (Pardot). Without realizing, there can be common, everyday errors occuring that can be costly to your organization over time. Learning what these mistakes can be and correcting them can be the first step to elevating your digital marketing environment.

1. Don’t Ignore Your Current Customers
When working on developing new leads and prospects, it’s easy to get lost in it, and forget about your current customer base. But those older customers are the ones that are keeping your organization running, and could provide you with a fantastic growth space. Consider creating a campaign and engagement studio in Account Engagement (Pardot) that reminds them of all the services you offer them! Dynamic lists based on open opportunities and product ownership are a great way to do this. Page Action based Engagement Studio drips are one way that Account Engagement (Pardot) users leverage just-in-time messaging to stay prevalent to existing customers.

2. Refine Your Goals
When your campaign goals are unfocused, you can lose out on new opportunities. Set realistic goals for the outcome of your campaign. Try using the campaign object in Salesforce to hold yourself accountable to your expected revenue goals. Want to develop new leads by getting prospects to sign up through form on your website? Make your call-to-action link directly to that form and have the CTA listed in a reoccurring fashion throughout the campaign! An easy item to remember here is that your goals should be as refined and narrow as possible. If something doesn’t contribute to the overarching goal then you should remove it. Also, there should be one main CTA and goal for each step of the process; control the variables so you know which item is leading directly to your goal targets.

3. Your Appearance is Important
During your day-to-day operations, one of the easiest things to forget to do is keeping track of your website and branding appearance. Have you examined your organization’s website and actually looked at how it can be optimized lately? You could be losing out on many new prospects just because your digital identity hasn’t been maintained. Key items to remember: Train your users on what color your CTA buttons are, and use them regularly and repeatedly.
It's not enough to be mobile-optimized, start thinking mobile-first! Every email and landing page must be mobile-ready and responsive.
Finally, keep track of your social media branding and effectiveness via Account Engagement (Pardot) redirect links to see how your overall brand impacts your revenue.

4. Remember Your CTAs
Time and time again, this has proved to be one of the most important areas to not stumble in when it comes to digital marketing. Whether it’s an email, landing page, social media, or anything in between, call-to-actions are what make or break your digital marketing in-and-out of Account Engagement (Pardot). If you have too few CTAs, your prospects can be frustrated when looking for where to click. Too many, and they may become overwhelmed. Do your best to streamline how prospects engage with your content. One way to do this is Dynamic Content. If a prospect has already filled out a "Free Trial" form, your CTA should change next time, saying something along the lines of "Continue Your Trial".

5. Measure Your Success
Account Engagement (Pardot) gives you tons of tools to measure how successful your campaigns are and not utilizing these tools can cost you in the long run. Try creating custom redirects for your links on your next campaign in order to see how your prospects are engaging with it. Remember to always have a completion action on every form, landing page, and custom redirect so that it "Adds to CRM Campaign". Another simple way to measure your success is to compare two campaigns within the same audience to see which they engaged with more. This can be accomplished with even more ease when you have Connected Campaigns managing your campaign members for you.
