Why Standardizing Job Titles in Pardot Can Boost Your Marketing Impact

When it comes to maximizing your marketing impact, MarTech automation platforms like Pardot are powerful tools. Because they can help you create effective campaigns that are tailored to specific audiences at different points in the customer journey or with varying levels of influence on the buying decision, they allow you to provide the right message to the right people at the right time.

With many companies laser-focused on ROI in today’s dynamic business landscape, it’s more important now than ever to make sure your marketing is as comprehensive and effective as possible. However, as your efforts get increasingly sophisticated, it’s critical that you have good, clean data and can classify and segment your audience appropriately. In other words, the devil is in the details. And one of the most commonly overlooked yet vital categories is the job title of your leads.

When you can narrow your audience based on their role, seniority or title, you can deliver hyper-targeted content that boosts your marketing efforts and amplifies the impact of every campaign.

Why Are the Job Titles in Your CRM All Over the Map?

There are many reasons that job titles for your CRM contacts might not be standardized, so let’s dive into a few.

Form Intake

When using lead generation forms, if you allow your leads to self-define their roles, it’s really a free-for-all. In addition to titles that don’t fit traditional conventions, like “Brand Evangelist” or “Dream Alchemist,” people define their titles in widely varying ways.

For example, if the word “manager” is in their title, they might enter it any of the following ways:

• Manager
• Manger*
• Mgr
• Mgr.
• Man.

The above list doesn’t factor in what they’re a manager of—marketing, technology, product development, etc.

To illustrate that further, you can see another series of ways to write a Chief Marketing Officer title:

• Chief Marketing Officer
• Cheif Marketing Officer*
• CMO
• C.M.O.
• C.M.O
• Chief Mktg Officer
• Chief Mktg Off

And there are many more.

*Typos above are intentional

While it seems like an obvious answer to push people into standard roles, gaining their full titles also yields a variety of data, including role, department, responsibilities, and more. And in many cases, this additional layer of data allows you to narrow campaign focus for more effective marketing.

Even if freeform data is a mess to clean up data, it’s not always the best practice to turn it off entirely. If forms were the only source of unstandardized titles, then the solution might lie in asking them to enter their full title and choose a company role: assistant, manager, director, C-suite, president, owner, etc.

However, forms are far from the only source of data.

Trade Shows, Legacy Databases, and M&A

Anytime you inherit contacts from other data, that data can have any of the issues above, and more, since all of the data may be formatted slightly differently.

Third-Party Marketing Data

Anytime that your data comes from third parties like Salesforce, Ad platforms, or other prospecting tools, you can have title standardization or data formatting issues. And we see it all the time, whether you’re using native integrations or API conversions.

The Importance of Standardizing Job Titles

It’s not just about creating standardized job titles to fit everything into a nice box. Your marketing team must have good data to be as effective as possible in their jobs. After all, they’re asked to build lists, automations and grading mechanisms that frequently hinge on job titles because of their influence on buying decisions.

And building these manually isn’t a smart use of their time, especially when marketing could be sorting leads based on title and department, and automating updates to the list based on real-time contacts.

So not undertaking title standardization doesn’t just mean wasting marketing team resources. It also means that for every person whose title isn’t standardized properly, you’re leaving money on the table.

How to Create a Title Normalization Program in Pardot

There’s no way to beat around the bush—standardizing job titles in your data can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. And while doing it manually for a handful of people isn’t the end of the world, it’s neither realistic nor feasible for hundreds (or thousands) of contacts.

That means creating a title normalization program to input and clean bad data and automate list segmentation. But before you do that, you’ll need to sit down with marketing and sales and confirm the different roles or levels that matter to them and which lists they need to be on.

Next, you’ll need to build a series of cascading conditional automations in Pardot, using If/then logic: IF [any of these variations], THEN [create new field or overwrite title field].

And you’ll need to do this for every bucket before tagging every contact as #TitleCleaned so you know which have been through title normalization.

The “TitleCleaned” tag can then trigger a dynamic list automation that adds contacts to the list if they meet criteria (for example, #TitleCleaned AND #Manager), which in turn seeds a welcome or nurturing automation or even a lead scoring rule.

Need a Sample Account Engagement (Pardot) Normalization Program Set-Up?

Here’s how it could break down:

• Identify your standardized roles (VP, Executive, Director, etc).
• Create Dynamic Lists in Account Engagement (Pardot) that the most common variations that would fit within the standardized roles. The purpose of this is to collect them in this list as they get created in the database.
• Create automations (could be an Automation Rule or an Engagement Studio) that are fed using these lists.
• If you choose to build an automation rule, your next step is to select the list that you created for a specific role or job title.
• Next, create the action. The action is what will set the value of the standardized role or job title.
• An additional action to include could be setting a tag that identifies the record as having been normalized.
• I would test the automation first to confirm it is capturing the relevant records.

Once testing is complete the automation will run on its own. As records are added to the list, the automation will run to update the records to the correct title or role.

Best Practices for Normalizing Titles

Keep in mind that every list requires a subsequent automation. While managing your title normalization can be time-consuming and require maintenance, it keeps your marketing machine on track. Here are a few best practices as you build and manage your normalizations.

Understand that Normalization is Iterative

The process is not one-and-done. As you get new roles, titles or abbreviations, you need to determine if you need to update the if/then logic. For example, if you decide that people with a title like Supervisor, should fit into the “Manager” bucket, you might add a half dozen (or more) title variations: Supervisor, Super, Sup, Supr, etc.

You’ll also want to decide how you want to handle edge cases, like “Brand Evangelist” or “Dream Alchemist” as mentioned above.

Maintain Communication Lines

Meet periodically with sales and marketing teams to maintain alignment and make sure the buckets are still correct and reliable. When both teams are on the same page, you reduce headaches down the line.

Document Everything

Documentation is critical to make sure that your processes continue to run correctly. While the person who manages it knows how it works, if someone else needs to step in, they may be facing technical debt or a steep learning curve.

Ready, Set, Normalize

Forgoing title standardization is playing with fire. While it may seem like semantics, normalizing titles is more important for modern marketing automation than most people realize because data quality has a significant impact on ROI.

Title normalization affects your ability to market effectively to sub-sets of your database. To give you a real-world example, if all 300 people who sign up for a webinar enter a different job title and you’re building an audience for an email, it can be difficult to segment your list appropriately. Moreover, if your job title search says manager and pulls 40 people, but another 50 used different variations, those 50 won’t receive your email, meaning you could be missing out on more than half of all sales.

In addition to the missed opportunities in the above scenario, consider the cost and effort that goes into lead acquisition and how leaving money on the table affects the ROI of your event.

Neglecting title normalization leads to low confidence that everyone has the tools to do their jobs and in the effectiveness of marketing efforts. You may start to hear questions like “How many of the ‘right people’ did we miss because our data wasn’t clean enough?”

At BDO Digital, we regularly help clients develop normalization processes and database cleanliness. If you don’t have good data, then you can’t count on sales, especially when you have a limited market. If you’re ready to boost your marketing efforts and enable more concise, tactile, and productive campaigns, we’d love to help. Contact us today.