Five Good Reasons to Get an Objective Third Party Audit of Your Marketing Automation System
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., offers marketing automation audits of Marketo and Pardot. A marketing automation audit is an objective third-party evaluation of your Marketo and/or Pardot (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) instance. The purpose is to know how well they are working with your salesforce automation software to achieve your lead and sales pipeline goals. Marketing automation audits can reveal many aspects of underutilization or lack of staff training that, when fixed, can make a radical improvement in your company sales pipeline and measurement. Remember, marketing automation audits aren’t just for the marketing department’s benefit. It’s for the sales department too. It’s your best first line of defense to diagnose and troubleshoot lead quality, and fix scoring and reporting issues.
Many company changes can precipitate the need for a marketing automation audit. The following are five of the most common we come across.
Five good reasons to initiate a marketing automation audit:
- 3-6 months prior to renewal of your Pardot or Marketo instance (and for major MarTech tools)—to review structure and costs
- A top admin leaves (or high turnover in demand gen staff)—to smooth out transition period
- New CMO and/or Director of Demand Gen—to give a good analysis of the current install and what needs to change
- Need to benchmark progress (i.e. have follow-up audits every 6-12 months)
- Need an objective way to separate operational issues from sales & marketing issues
The value of an objective 3rd party audit can be in several areas and often pays for itself in cost savings with renewals:
- Helps budgeting and planning for:
- MarTech stack
- Demand gen staff & vendors
- Training and organizational alignment
- Helps uncover hidden issues such as:
- Missing MarTech tools
- Underutilized or incorrectly utilized features
- Lead leakage / loss and bottlenecks
- Data that can be eliminated (and thus not included in renewal)
- Helps analyze the meaning of the findings
- View data with fresh eyes to point out obvious patterns
- Share relevant “lessons learned” from other orgs
The four major areas our marketing automation audits cover
Our marketing automation audits cover four critical areas of analysis: contact management, data health, governance and campaign management. More details on these areas below.
1. Contact Management Analysis
Goals
- To troubleshoot known issues in Pardot/Marketo to salesforce automation transfer of leads or values
- To identify inconsistencies or gaps in current lead management
- To define standards and rules for form creation and back end processing
- To document Pardot/Marketo to salesforce automation sync (current state and post-fix)
- Document any 3rd party connection synch processes
- Review Prospect, Account, and Opportunity field mapping
- Review use of progressive profiling
- Review Pardot tagging strategy
2. Data Health and Gap Analysis
Goals
- To capture current state and provide a benchmark for judging data health, e.g.
- Active database
- Marketable database
- To define standards and rules for field mapping
- Make initial recommendations for data normalization (e.g. US, United States, USA should all be US)
- Make initial recommendation for list segmentation
3. Usage and Governance Analysis
Goals
- To recommend new standards if necessary
- To ensure compliance with data privacy rules—as appropriate by region/country, etc…
- To apply more controls as to Pardot usage
- Verify email deliverability
4. Campaign and Nurture
Goals
- To identify what ‘clean out’ efforts are needed
- To make it easier to see what’s active or not
- To support better practices around template use
- Troubleshoot email and landing page templates
An audit will result in a report on each of these areas and a set of observations for good findings and areas that need fixing.
Small changes often yield big results. Big changes yield even bigger results
Every marketing automation audit we’ve conducted has yielded a different set of issues and the fixes needed. We often rank the fixes needed in order of priority and help the client to determine the tradeoffs or benefits gained for investing in them. Even small data cleanups can yield big cost savings, and significantly improve lead quality. Bigger investments in fixing nurture streams and lead scoring can yield big results in ushering better leads filling the pipeline—something that will surely warm the heart of marketing and sales alike. Because the marketing automation audit isn’t just for marketing, it’s for sales too. They have a vested interest in what is being pushed over to the salesforce automation system, and a marketing automation audit is your best first defense to ensure better quality leads get there.
Need a marketing automation audit? Contact us for a free consultation.
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