MARDREAMIN’ SUMMIT 2025
MAY 7-8, 2025 IN ATLANTA - GA
Days
Hours
Minutes
Seconds
View the session live or catch the replay here. You’ll find the recording and all related resources on this page once available.
Our live discussions are happening over in Slack. That’s where you can connect with speakers, join session threads, and chat with other attendees in real time.
In this session we will outline and describe the five emotions every marketer experiences while taking a campaign from conception to delivery through the eyes of characters from Disney’s® Inside Out. From ideation to hopping on the train of thought, we’ll ride through each stop along the way to delivering an impactful and relevant message to our intended audience. We’ll be sure to take a minute to review and prioritize what we keep and what we dump along our way to ParDomination!
Team work makes the dream work. Just like in the movie, you need balance.
Each stage offers unique POVs and an opportunity to learn
Marketing Automation Set and Forget
Foundation for testing practices and strategy
Benchmarks and KPI development
Good documentation (audit, hygiene)
This session uses the five core emotions—Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear—as a framework to break down the process, pitfalls, and necessary steps for successful automation, testing, analytics, and documentation in Pardot.
You are the Change Agent: The marketer (represented by Riley) is the ultimate decision-maker, and all five emotions are internal “team members” who must be managed to maintain balance and achieve success.
Process vs. Paralysis: The initial decision paralysis (Sadness) must be overcome by setting a clear end date for the campaign and working backward to streamline decisions.
Not Set and Forget: Automation and analytics require continuous review, tuning, and iteration; setting and forgetting is a recipe for disaster (Anger/Disgust).
Future Self Will Thank You (Fear): Documentation is an act of self-preservation that provides confidence and context for future decisions.
The process of implementing any marketing campaign involves five critical steps, each triggering a core emotion.
The journey begins with decision paralysis caused by numerous choices: audience, messaging, CTA, automation methods, and edge cases.
Solution: Take a deep breath. Define the campaign’s end date and work backward. This provides clarity and helps answer the ultimate question: to automate or not to automate.
Automation is not a “set and forget” activity. Just because you can automate everything does not mean you should.
Solution: Start simple. Quick, small automations add up to significant time savings. Map the desired process (even on a napkin initially) into a design document.
Collaboration: Collaborate with all involved teams (the other “emotions”) and schedule ongoing reviews to tune the efficiency of the automation once live.
Testing is often viewed as a time-consuming, excruciating, iterative process.
Happy Path vs. Edge Cases: Do not just focus on the happy path (the steps you know will work). Put yourself in the audience’s shoes and test the edge cases (late clicks, forwarding to a friend) to find pitfalls in your automation logic.
A/B Testing Best Practice: To ensure reliable results, test only one variable at a time (e.g., subject line) while keeping all other variables constant.
When presented with complex charts and graphs, the CFO (Anger) wants to know: “Bottom line, what is going on?” Metrics must be translated into actionable business results.
Initial Targets: Start by setting initial benchmarks and KPIs (recognizing they are guesses) and ensure they align with delivering value to the audience.
Measurement Focus: Don’t be fooled by high open rates; focus on what matters most: click-through rate, CTA completion, and pipeline generation.
Iteration: Reports must be continuously refined over time to ensure evolving benchmarks and KPIs remain relevant.
Documentation can be fearful—judgement, lack of clarity, or simply not knowing where to start. However, it is an essential resource.
Confidence and Context: Documenting every decision (who was involved, why it was made, what the expected outcome was) provides clear historical context for the data, which gives you confidence to pivot or defend your efforts.
Future Self Will Thank You: Documentation serves as a historical repository for onboarding new staff and is the foundation for future decision-making.
Just Start: Take it one step at a time. Start putting your hands on the keyboard and write out the decisions. Revisit the documentation later to add clarity and color.
Centralize Marketing Stats: Break down data silos and get marketing data into a centralized profile (the CRM) as much as possible, as Salesforce should be your system of record.
Communicate Testing: When speaking to the sales team, frame testing as an essential investment that delivers impactful, qualified data (e.g., inviting them to observe the testing process to see the value).
Resources: Utilize documentation and resources provided by the community to guide your process.
