I see a lot of firms really struggling to fulfill the promise that their marketing platforms offer. Many have sophisticated marketing platforms like Salesforce Pardot, but even with all the technology available to them, they’re still struggling to deliver a consistent programme of campaigns and communications to clients. But if it’s not the platform that’s failing them, what is?

The usual answer is lack of people – people with the time and skills to actually put together the emails, execute the campaigns for marketing and provide insights into what’s working and what’s not.

There are many creative and strategic agencies out there who can help with brand-building and content creation, and those are always good to have on-hand, but what’s missing is a firm to bring it all together. A firm like StoneShot whose focus is ongoing campaign execution.

Let’s take a look at three specific examples of how investment firms using Pardot have dealt with problems hindering their campaign success: not having enough resource internally, not having the processes in place to get regular communications out correctly and on time, and not being able to benchmark and optimise the programme.

Not enough resource

There’s an increasing demand for sales and marketing teams to deliver on content creation, design, and distribution, but in an industry where marketing budgets and teams are only shrinking, it’s hard to fill all those responsibilities with a handful or people and limited time. In other words, who actually creates the templates, builds and sends the emails and executes the campaigns? Some firms try to leverage their creative agencies, but they’re not usually geared up for working with email, and may not be well-versed in financial services.

On the other hand we’re set up to work as part of your day-to-day team, creating and sending your email campaigns, building campaign content such as Pardot forms and landing pages, and reporting on campaign metrics, all with tight turnaround. You can think of us as an extension of your own digital marketing team, ready to help out as and when you need us with:

• Template design and build
• Email coding – either starting from scratch or picking up an email build from where you left off
• Email campaign management – we build, test, and send the emails
• Campaign collateral – we design and build landing pages, event forms and microsites to support your campaigns
• Check and send – your team might prefer to handle their email creation themselves, but if they’d like our team to check everything over before they press the “Send” button we can help out here too. It’s a flexible service.

Governance of BAU communications

If you work in marketing for a large firm with a global presence, I am sure you have come across the issue of collateral being created in different regions that may be slightly off-brand – especially when sales teams are sometimes sending their own content to clients that may not have originated from marketing.

I’ve seen it in certain cases where one global investment manager had a number of regional teams who all wanted to use Pardot to send out their local campaigns. The problem here was that to manage a solid email programme they needed to have defined processes about how they work, what they send, when and to whom. How can they enable local teams to create and send content without them doing their own thing and going off-brand and off-message?

StoneShot provided the answer here by:

• Defining the processes
• Creating SLAs
• Building pre-defined template suites
• Giving them a structured approach to campaign management based on industry best practices

The end result was that we enabled the firm to use Pardot themselves more effectively – we gave them a framework to work within, and on-demand support to help local marketers use the platform.

Measurement and analysis

Most firms can pull campaign metrics from Pardot, but without context how can you tell if what you’re doing is actually working?

StoneShot can assist here by benchmarking, analysing and reporting back on your programme. We do this by:

• Quarterly insight presentations
• Benchmarking your communications against 65 other fund groups’
• Analysing your client campaigns by asset class and communication type (i.e. event invites, market commentaries, factsheet emails, etc). This means we can drill down into your programme to work out what’s working well and where improvements are needed.

***

It’s key to our success that we’re flexible – we’re available on-demand, as and when you need us – clients don’t have to commit to a fixed way of working with us or even a fixed spend.

If you’d like to know more, meet some of the team or just hear more examples about how we’re helping our favourite clients execute on their Pardot campaigns, please get in touch with us.