Account Based Marketing (ABM) has become a standard practice over the last decade or so. As companies prioritized ABM initiatives, scalability was usually an afterthought. At many mid-sized and large organizations, this resulted in convoluted ABM practices with a lack of repeatability or even ways to measure performance.
Since ABM landing pages have different requirements than traditional gated content, they’re developed as one offs. If a company is serious about ABM, this can lead to an unmanageable number of individual landing pages for some poor soul to maintain. Services like Uberflip and Instaflip are decent solutions for this, but that becomes yet another system marketers need to be trained on and another integration that needs to be maintained.
Pardot has an out-the-box solution for this that’s rarely implemented for ABM applications. The steps in this post will look similar for other common marketing automation platforms with similar functionality like Marketo and Eloqua.
Using dynamic content, you can have a single ABM landing page that displays logos, imagery, blocks of text, contact info, videos, assets, etc. instead of creating one for every possible account. If edits are needed to the general template, that only needs to happen once instead of altering dozens or hundreds of individual landing pages.
What is dynamic content?
Pardot’s dynamic content feature enables users to tailor assets to prospects based on condition sets. Dynamic content can be used in landing pages, layout templates, and emails. The feature is useful for anything from ensuring prospects are served assets they haven’t viewed yet to arranging newsletter content so readers see the items they’re more interested in first.
Dynamic content is created with a WYSIWYG editor. HTML knowledge isn’t necessary for the most part. Users can add dynamic content to landing pages, landing page templates, emails and form thank you messages. Some coding skills are necessary to add to some sections of landing pages – such as headers – but it’s a basic cut and paste job.
Creating dynamic content
To get started, navigate to Content > Dynamic Content when logged into Pardot. The tracking domain should match the domain you use for your ABM landing pages. If there’s only one domain associated with your account, don’t worry about it.
Default content
This is what prospects will see if they don’t meet any of the conditions. It should be broad and not contain anything specific to particular accounts. If prospects are landing on the page via email programs, they should only see the content customized for them. If they forward the URL to their Gmail address or they copy it and open in a private browser, they would see the default content.
Variations
Dynamic content can have up to 25 variations based on one prospect field. Logistically, it’s easiest for marketers to maintain dynamic content for their accounts. If content is specific to a niche, you can segment on industry or a custom field that’s populated via a Pardot automation.
Here is how the variations would look if I was targeting this group of random companies: Bayer, Welch’s, Nickelodeon, and Uline. The simplest way to segment is by email address, but you could also use Account/Company or a custom field depending on requirements
- Variation A: Show when Email ends with bayer.com
- Variation B: Show when Email ends with welchs.com
- Variation C: Show when Email ends with nickelodeon.com
- Variation D: Show when Email ends with uline.com
I recommend the ends with condition to prevent prospects who have the specified text elsewhere in their emails.
Embedding content
Copy the javascript snippet Pardot provides in the dynamic content creator. If you’re placing it in the main body of a landing page, you should be able to do this without a developer. Just toggle to the HTML editor and insert the javascript.
If you have multiple pieces of dynamic content to include, a developer will be able to add them to the layout template. If multiple templates are needed due to the number of accounts, it’s just a matter of swapping out the embed code in the sections of HTML.
Tracking Performance
Since ABM landing pages usually aren’t gated like standard pages, you’ll want to use custom redirects or file links so they can be scored and their campaign statuses can change accordingly.
Need Help?
If you need assistance leveraging Pardot for ABM initiatives, contact me for a consultation.
