Pardot Ties Social Media To Marketing Automation Tools

Pardot is broadening its marketing software to encompass social media publication, as well as identification of prospects through their social profiles.

Pardot provides a marketing automation system particularly geared to helping small and midsize businesses (SMBs) gather leads online. This includes managing email marketing campaigns and providing the online lead-capture form prospects fill out when they respond to the offer in the message. Now, Pardot users will be able to launch social media marketing campaigns built off the same content. The social posting feature is tied to the bit.ly URL shortener, with the option of associating links with bit.ly custom-branded URLs.

"It's no different from what you can do with a tool like Tweetdeck, but when you do it with a marketing automation tool you're not only sharing it out but doing it with a special tracked link associated with that prospect," Adam Blitzer, co-founder and COO for Pardot, said in an interview. "You aren't just seeing that 15 people clicked on your link via Twitter, you're getting insight into exactly who those people are. For sales reps calling on leads, it provides another reason to reach out and engage a prospect."

Marketing professionals at SMBs in particular don't have time to juggle several tools for communicating across multiple electronic channels when they could be doing it all in one place, Blitzer said.

Pardot will also provide more social media insight for prospects, regardless of whether they come in response to a social campaign. Through an integration with social media data service Qwerly, Pardot can automatically populate its system with any public social profiles it can match with a prospect's email address. In many cases, a prospect's photo, location information, and a short description can be added to the prospect's record, Pardot said, along with a link to the individual's profile.

Social data is also included in the content passed on to a customer relationship management (CRM) system for customers who take advantage of Pardot's integration with Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and NetSuite.

The announcement was made Wednesday at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event in San Francisco.

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