Predictions for 2022: Pardot, Marketing Cloud & MarTech Careers

January 18, 2022
Pardot Releases, Salesforce Ben | The Drip

The Salesforce marketing technology landscape is evolving at a fast rate. At first, I found this speed of change alarming. Now, I see how beneficial the consistent updates are for supporting us to achieve in our careers.

In addition to my annual Pardot predictions, I’ve extended the 2022 edition to include Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce MarTech career trends.

Glance back at 2021’s predictions here.

Pardot Predictions for 2022

I love keeping predictions posts – they’re like time capsules. Where have we come since the start of 2021? For one, thanks to the Pardot-Slack integration, “editable Pardot notifications” seem more plausible for more uses beyond Slack. The new Lightning email experience will be at parity with the legacy email builder following the Spring ‘22 release. The Pardot API has gone from strength-to-strength, plus Marketing App Extensions/External Activities mean third-party integrations appear more “native” to Pardot.

Extensible Orchestration

This term has been used by experts in the Pardot space, but what does it actually mean? Let’s break it down…

Orchestration: most commonly related to a musical conductor’s intentions is to plan and coordinate the elements (instruments) of their situation (the orchestra) to produce the desired effect (harmonious music).

Extensible: designed to allow the addition of new capabilities and functionality.

Extensible and Orchestration come together in a Pardot/Marketing Cloud context to improve how marketers coordinate the elements (data sources, content, workflows), of their situation (teams, channels) to produce the desired effect (single profile of an individual, actionable engagement data) – and be able to add elements without disrupting their situation.

Examples off the top of my head are:

The Pardot API v5 (more endpoints added with each release),
Marketing App Extensions/External Activities,
Email Content object, being able to deploy to different types of emails.

I have a feeling we will see more functionality over the course of 2022 that will make you feel like your Pardot and MarTech stack are more like an orchestra than a “cocktail” of platforms.

CDP for Pardot

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) allow marketing organizations to have a single and complete source-of-truth around their customer data. Salesforce CDP relaunched in 2021 (formerly known as Customer Audience 360) for Salesforce Marketing Cloud users to take advantage of.

Which CDP should Pardot customers use? Will Salesforce repurpose and extend Salesforce CDP?

Slack + Pardot

The Pardot Product Development teams have even said, themselves, that the initial Pardot-Slack release was only a taster of what’s to come. I expect more Slack connectivity will arrive in 2022.

Plus, the Pardot-Slack connector gave us a taster of how completion action could hook into other platforms in the future, such as customizable notification messages, conditional to specific groups (demonstrated by the “channels”).

Which, I’m sure, makes many people sit up in their seats – could 2022 be the year of the conditional completion action?

Account Audit Improvements

Pardot orgs have been challenging to audit, often taking days to complete (depending on how deep you go). Audits aim to run a “health check” on how well your account is running, such as whether data is being processed correctly, if automation design could be improved, or if there’s anything rogue activated.

Getting a bird’s eye view of Pardot automation usage required a time investment. Already in Spring ‘22, we’ll benefit from two new ways to view Pardot automation, in one place:

Completion Actions Audit Tool (which will be available for the Slack Connector).
Email Open Rule Audit Tool

Collaborative Pardot Business Units

Pardot Business Units were released to solve an age-old issue: how to partition one Pardot org into separate units, so that data and assets only remain in their intended unit. This was achieved – but the strict partitioning has led to task duplication, such as recreating marketing assets or automations in each Business Unit. Now there’s hopes that Pardot will make moves to offer the flexibility to keep some items partitioned, and share others according to an organization’s needs. Plus, there have been rumours of Predictive Cross-selling, using engagement/purchase data (TBC) to inform marketing in other business units.

(If we take a leaf out of Marketing Cloud’s book, where Business Units have long-been available, folder sharing is the norm).

Style Kits

With the Lightning email and landing page builders growing in functionality (and user adoption), the next logical step would be to build out themes and branding capabilities. Like a typical marketing style kit, marketers will hope to group together style elements in order to keep branding consistent – regardless of who builds the email/landing page.

Marketing Cloud Predictions

Thanks to Oana for providing these predictions! As a Salesforce Marketing Champion, Oana will be demystifying all aspects of Marketing Cloud on The DRIP. She works as a consultant, supporting clients to make informed decisions and improve their digital marketing strategy, while maximizing their marketing automation technology.

Interactive Emails: with the help of email functionalities, such as the “Interactive” module in Content Builder and AMP for Email, the move from static/dynamic emails to interactive emails will build speed.
Real-time Contextual Journey Orchestration: send or display a message, at the right time, based on customer behaviour rather than defined user settings.
Reporting capabilities: with Datorama Reports Advanced and Google Analytics 4 tagging and reporting.

Salesforce MarTech Career Trends

Thanks to Jaime Lopez for his series of Linkedin posts this month. I’ve picked out some highlights – but I encourage you to connect with Jaime, as the discussions he sets in motion are insightful.

Formal Career Paths for MOps

The COVID pandemic fuelled how marketing operations is developing, and how it’s perceived within organizations. Marketing operations is a function that’s gone from buzzword to indispensible. When I heard this, I thought back to Holly’s talk “Career Paths for Pardot Marketers – No Ninjas, Unicorns, or Rockstars” back in 2020.

“Many of us landed in the field by chance and built the foundation of Marketing Operations based on our own experiences…we can now see formal career paths for MOps…with competence in machine learning, front-end development, UX design and business administration becoming popular during 2022.”

It’s a Candidate’s Job Market

Just like other fields around the Salesforce ecosystem, demand for MarTech talent is rising, which pushes salary potential upwards.
“I foresee that highly-skilled workers will soon ask for raises to keep their purchasing power. Before the great resignation, employees were most likely to resign after being denied a promotion or a raise – so these two effects may compound for an extremely dynamic jobseeker’s market”

Jaime recommends reading the MarTech Alliance’s 2021/22 report, and shared this advice:

“If you are looking to hire martech-skilled people, offer them a fair deal, support and a promising path ahead…if you are looking to change jobs yourself, go for a place that will value your knowledge and will give you enough resources to enact your plans”

Security Vulnerability Readiness

Security enters marketing’s radar. Jaime gives a real-life example that shook many people awake – the critical open-source #log4j package vulnerability, which made many MarTech tools vulnerable.

“In marketing, we have lived for several years not having to worry much about vulnerabilities. Now, our role managing technology requires us to understand this aspect as well. We may even need to step up and handle the customer communications. Nothing beats a quick, on-point and reassuring message telling your customers that you are aware of a vulnerability and are keeping their data safe.”

Jaime Lopez – continue the conversation.