Avitage Blog

The Top 7 Signs That You’d Better Fix Your Marketing Automation Setup – and What To Do About It – Signs 4 to 7

Last week I published signs 1-3 of the “The Top 7 Signs That You’d Better Fix Your Marketing Automation Setup – and What To Do About It”. This week I continue with signs 4-7.

Sign #4: You’re cloning landing pages to create others

It’s tempting to clone an existing page to create another landing page.  I don’t recommend it. Why  not? You’re going to forget to update information. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve seen Marketo web pages with the wrong Page Name (top left corner of the browser), because the page was copied and the person forgot to update the page meta-data. That easy to forget because the meta-data is a bit “buried” and not top of mind to update unless you as using a checklist.

What to do about it:

Rather create a set of typical web page layouts in Marketo, from which you will clone. You can put placeholder info on these pages so it’s really clear to you what needs to be updated.  It will be more productive for you to clone these “templates”, rather than cloning other pages which are already populated with their own content.

 

Sign #5: You’re cloning a program to create another

As of the second part of Marketo’s NEXT Release (Fall, 2011), the previous example and a lot more can be further automated using programs and “My Tokens”. However the same issue applies, and the stakes are even higher in terms of margin for error, with not wanting to clone one program to create another. There is just too much to remember to update, and too high a risk for error.

What to do about it:

Rather create a Program Template, for each of your major event types (e.g. a Webinar Program template). The program template includes your standard rules and assets, using tokens, with placeholder values populated for the tokens. This way, you can clone a program from the master template, and then update all tokens from one central list, with clear indication of what is updated (another not using your placeholder values). Furthermore, if you create customer rules or communications for one program, you won’t run into the issue of having problems when you clone it (since you are always cloning from the master). And as you make decisions to change the way you are doing something as part of your standard practice, you make this update to the program template so that it’s reflected going forward.  I covered this in more detail in this on-demand webinar and related content.

 

Sign #6: All campaigns you create “come from marketing”

One of the key opportunities with Marketo is that not all communications need to come from marketing – marketing can both send content on behalf of sales (using Lead Owner tokens) and provide templates to sales to send via the Microsoft Outlook plugin.

What to do about it:

A simple example is that after marketing sends an invitation to something important (e.g. a key webinar, or a valuable piece of content), to follow this up with an email “from sales” (the Lead Owner) which includes a text-looking message on top, with the marketing email below, saying something to the effect of “I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss this as it’s been really well received by our customers”. Turn off “view as web page” at the top of the email so that the email looks as if it was sent personally by the sales person. Use a really plain font like Times New Roman to make this even more of a “plain look” which ironically helps both capture attention and build credibility of the personalized communications.

To create more later stage content on behalf of sales will require close collaboration between marketing and sales. This microsite explores this topic in more detail.

 

Sign #7: You have employees, partners and vendors showing up in your Revenue Model

You don’t want to have people that would never qualify as prospects flowing through your revenue process and both taking up your time and confusing your reporting. This includes employees, partners and vendors, may include students, and any other disqualifying criteria that you establish.

What to do about it:

Build rules which tag these people based on their criteria. You can have smart campaigns which update flags based on these criteria nightly (recur once per day at a certain time), and then have entry into your revenue process require that these flags are not set in order to move them into your revenue cycle.

 

Other suggestions that didn’t make the top 7:

• You don’t time-box stages in your revenue process – especially on the push to sales – you’ll want to build a process to alert these based on an agreed-to SLA between Marketing and Sales
• You don’t have any flags setup to segment by topic (hint: you’ll want this set up as flags for ease of reviewing, not just Smart Lists)
• You are not updating default URLs for pages – you’ll want these in a user-friendly, hyphenated format, both for users and search engines

Again, please share your own “gotchas” and tips for marketing automation operations.

The Top 7 Signs That You’d Better Fix Your Marketing Automation Setup – and What To Do About It

Thor Johnson, ex-CMO of Eloqua, told me that he saw oh-too-many customers operating their marketing automation system as a “high priced email system.” And eventually their executive team wakes up and says “What is going on here?”

In being in and around many different Marketo implementations the past several years (Yep, I needed to setup a different email address for each login – no duplicate email addresses allowed!), I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly.

So I’m here to share the top signs that you’d better fix your marketing automation setup – and what to do about it.  

It’s based on Marketo although the lessons are applicable to many other tools including Eloqua, Pardot, Act-on, Manticore and others.  You will see some common themes including using a modular and single source asset approach with program scalability and ease-of-maintenance in mind.  

As the title implies, for each of the 7 areas, I’ve included the specific action you (or your team member if you are not the principal user) can take to remedy.

Sign #1: You’re only using batch campaigns, not trigger campaigns

The trigger campaign is one of the functions that takes a marketing automation tool way beyond an email system. Trigger campaigns allow you to take a campaign and determine when you’d like to automatically put a prospect into a multi-step campaign (as opposed to having Marketing send out push campaigns, periodically).   Trigger campaigns help increase the likelihood that your message will be read, and when it does, it will stick, based on timeliness and relevance.

What to do about it:

These trigger campaigns need to be “evergreen”, non-date specific campaigns that are relevant based on a prospect’s stage or activities.  You may have the pieces in place but you never took the time to make the campaign automated. Some of the first triggers you should look to set up are:

• A campaign for new leads that enter your database (Intro Campaign) – introduce yourself to them and share content, and begin to track their topical interests
• A campaign as leads move through the buying process – trigger this to start a certain time duration (e.g. 1 day) after they advance a stage in your revenue process  
• A trigger campaign based on access a key piece of content – setting up a series of touches following the access to a key piece of content

 

Sign #2: You’re creating many, many forms

I find this is a major misconception for novice users.  You do not need to set up a different form for each web page that requires a form, in fact your goal should be to set up as few forms as possible. 

 What to do about it:

Start by standardizing the fields you capture – you should have a single form that you use for webinar registration and possibly a different form for content registration. You should only set up unique forms if there is a really good reason on a case by case basis.

You may be wondering how to set up different confirmation emails or lists based on using the same form on a different web page.  To do this, on the trigger action “filled out form”, add a “web page” constraint and select the specific URL. This allows you to tie the rule not only to the form, but the form being on a specific page.

Another common misconception is that you need to set up different forms to track different lead source (e.g. for a specific webinar or piece of content). You can rather use a hidden field and a URL parameter to track this, rather than having to “hard code” it on the form.

Lastly, while you’re at it, with your standard forms ensure that you are using progressive profiling. This allows you to shorten the info that you require on each form and progressively capture this data from  your prospects as they engage with more of your content.

 

Sign #3: You’re cloning campaigns (marketing activities)

When setting up a campaign, Marketo allows you to define a Smart List (who the campaign is to be targeted) and a Flow (defining the steps in the campaign).  Another common mistake that I see is cloning a campaign to run it to a different audience or Smart List. The issue that you’ll run into is this will become very unmanageable when it comes to maintaining your campaigns when you need to make updates.

What to do about it:

When setting up a campaign, call it “Run Campaign X”, whose Smart List is triggered by a “Marketo Flow Action”.  This means that you will now have the option to “Request this Campaign” from other campaigns in order to run it.  So you could set up two different campaigns, over a period of time, both which will request “Campaign X”, instead of having to copy the steps and rules of Campaign X into two places.

This both saves you time in setup, and ensures that if Campaign X ever changes, you only need to change it in one place. You want to have one source campaign to update, not many copies of the campaign when it inevitably changes. Modularity and single source are key principles.

Lastly, by always executing the campaign from a single source, you can set this to "run campaign once" to ensure that you never accidentally push the same person through that same campaign a second time.

And here I continued with Signs 4-7.

And below please share – what is on your list? What are key knot holes or problem areas that you’ve learned based on experience that you want to share with others?

Marketing Automation – 10 Points on What to Do First

I was recently asked – “We have 3 months until we turn on our marketing automation system (in this case, Marketo). What should we do before we set it up?”

First off, don’t wait for anything to turn on marketing automation.

You don’t want to wait one more day because the moment you turn it on, it’s going to provide you with visibility into who is engaging your web site and you’ll begin building an activity history that will later be associated to an individually named prospect (as soon as they click on one of your emails).

OK, so now you have your marketing automation turned on, what’s next?

To help you ensure that you fulfill on the promise of marketing automation and meet the expectations of your management team, the below list are must-have components of an automated lead management and lead nurturing program powered by marketing automation.

These are not optional.  If you overlook them, you will feel the pain later!

Depending on how fast you want to accelerate your outcomes, you will want to create and execute a plan over the first 30-90 days whereby you explore and document each of these components.

This 10-point plan is grouped in three categories: Customer Buying  Process (as you’ll see, this is really the key to everything), Content and Design/Layout.

Customer Buying Process

1. Lead Stage Definitions (reviewed by Sales & Marketing) -– What defines a Marketing Qualified Lead? What defines a Sales Ready Lead? This will be vital for the underlying process that you setup in a marketing automation system. By defining and documenting this, you will remove the confusion, wasted time and even animosity that will result from a lack of clarity around a joint process.

2. Segment Definitions -- How do you segment your database? By role, by industry, by topical interest?

3. Ideal Customer Profile -- What information would you like to collect on leads, to help you best complete an ideal customer profile? This will inform progressive profiling questions that you will ask customers over time, in small batches, as they consume your content. The more you know about your prospect, the more relevant you can make your communications; and the more relevant your communications, the more effective they will be.

4. Customer Buying Questions -- What questions do customers require to buy your product or service, by stage? This will inform how you structure nurturing, content creation requirements, call to action and tracking. You will be creating content to address these questions, and you will use these questions to help you determine the customer’s buying stage and what information will be relevant as a next step to move their buying process forward.

5. Disqualification Criteria -- What would disqualify a lead as one that would never be a good prospect for you? This can often be overlooked, but if you ensure you are removing leads that would never qualify for your services up front, it will keep your process and reporting of the funnel as clean as possible – and again, save you time.  Consider what company names (or words that may appear in a company name), titles (or words that may appear in a title) or email extensions would never be a prospect for you.

 

Content & Data

6. Clean Contact Data –- Clean & tag your data (based on your above segment definitions) to allow yourself to best target your marketing. There may be significant data clean up required. Marketing to a “dirty” database will yield inaccurate results and cloud your ability to focus your go-to-market strategy, not to mention yield unnecessary spam-related issues. Ensure customers, partners, vendors are tagged, and based contact info is standardized and complete.

7. Content Inventory -- The points above, especially customer buying questions, will inform the content requirements. You’ll want to start by creating a content inventory to tag your content by buying stage and the aforementioned customer questions. This will help you identify the content gaps which you will need to fill when setting up lead nurturing.

8. Keyword List -- What is your keyword list? This will be a resource to tag your content, landing pages and microsites, and a key part of your content marketing strategy which is the sibling of your lead nurturing program.

9. Content Publishing Process -- Design a continuous content publishing process. Rather than get into the details here, you can read more about how to create content like a publisher.

 

Design & Layout

10. Templates –-  Create templates for emails, landing pages & microsites… and then make even more specific templates for content registration (for middle stage content), webinar registration, etc.  Landing pages should be laser-focused, while microsites will be richer in content to allow prospects to go deeper into your content. For email templates,  you’ll want to consider marketing emails vs. sales emails. Creating templates up front will enable consistency and save time later.

 

Automated lead management and lead nurturing programs require both preparation and documentation to maximize their success. Allocating time to do this immediately after turning on marketing automation software will pay off in a big way by helping the program reach desired outcomes faster, and with greater opportunity to measure and continuously improve.

“The How” - More effective execution around webinars and event marketing

I have been asked to instruct an upcoming Marketo University course on event management as part of Marketo’s Revenue Rockstar Roadshow in Boston.

The course will cover how to leverage Marketo’s programs & “my tokens” functionality to best manage lead generation events, both offline and online/webinars. By using a set of database-driven templates to manage all event web pages, emails and rules, you (marketers) can spend less time on event setup and operations, and more time focused on event promotion  -- and therefore, getting more out of your events.  And this return on event investments (success rates and new lead acquisition) is rolled up into a single, management report compiled in real-time.

Moreover, this approach means you can more easily incorporate best practices into your event and webinar programs.  When it comes to marketing, most of us know what we should be doing, but effectively operationalizing it (and ensuring it sticks) is where most companies fall short with their marketing programs.

Here are two examples of applying best practices to event marketing and how they can be applied through marketing automation -- one for pre-event and one for post-event activities:

Automate Event Invitation from Sales

Senior level executives are very unlikely to respond to a marketing invitation to a webinar or event. In fact, our data shows that executives are more likely to unsubscribe from your list, rather than register, as a result of a marketing invitation.

So as part of our event program template we set up invitations from sales people to executives from their major accounts. The email includes a message “from the salesperson” communicating why the webinar is relevant, with the event information and promotional message below in the email.

In order to execute this, the steps are:

1. Ensure executives are tagged (based on title rules)
2. Use lead tokens (database-driven content) to ensure emails come from the salesperson (the lead owner in SalesForce)
3. Setup a sales version of the webinar invitation, re-using the same token-driven marketing assets
4. Setup the executive list to receive the sales version of the invitation (and be excluded from the marketing version)

Nurture After the Event

Let’s start with what you should NOT do after the event (HINT: it’s what most marketers are doing today and therefore not getting the results they should from their webinars and events):

#1 - DON’T hand over the entire registrant list to sales and consider all of your registrants to be leads, without properly considering both their demographic and behavioral activities (digital body language).

#2 - DON’T send the webinar archive as a full video after the event and consider this to be an effective follow-up or post-event nurturing strategy.

So what should you do?

Most companies are trying to reach a c-level or executive audience… who may  be interested in a webinar topic or ask one of their colleagues to attend but likely won’t have the time themselves.

We know that the webinar attendees may be open to sharing content on the topic with their executives… but only if the content is short and relevant…. A 45-minute GoToMeeting or WebEx webinar archive video will not make the cut.

What does work is an Executive Summary video vignette – a 4-12 minute, well produced summary of the webinar, covering the key points and targeted at the executive.  It begins “We recently ran a webinar in depth on this topic, but as an executive we thought you’d be most interested in these key points…”

 This executive summary video vignette becomes a key part of the follow-up strategy. As part of each webinar program, we setup a nurturing campaign, where the flow and framework for the campaign is templated, and the appropriate content or links are populated per topic.

So a typical post-webinar nurture flow is:

1-hour after the webinar:  Send a featured webinar segment or executive summary. Unlike most, our first touch after the webinar is NOT the webinar archive --- we want something short, engaging and different than what they saw in the webinar. We also want this to be very timely and relevant… and receiving an archive for a webinar you saw an hour earlier in not relevant.

1 day later: Send a link to a landing page which has the archive, along with mp3 and transcript versions and a set of webinar highlights. Webinar highlights are much more shareable than a webinar archive – you are not going to share a full length webinar with a colleague (in respect of their time), you’d much rather give them the highlights version. 

2 more days later: Share curated content on the topic, with a call to action.

2 more days later: Share bonus content (not included in the main webinar), with a call to action.

The latter touches are backed up by a microsite to allow prospects to self-select areas of interest as a way to both serve your buyer and get a better understanding of their needs and interests.

What’s exciting is that with the combination of the right technology and the right expert resources, you can take your programs such as lead generation webinars and automated lead management to the next level.

5 Things You Must Consider Before Purchasing Marketing Automation Executive Summary

As part of a recent Focus Webinar, David Raab -- Principal of Raab Associates Inc -- presented a webinar entitled “5 Things You Must Consider Before Purchasing Marketing Automation.”

Several factors (including the relatively low cost of the software itself) have caused marketing automation to reach a stage where many companies make the decision to buy marketing automation without really knowing why. The purpose of the webinar was to raise certain questions that should be answered before purchasing a marketing automation system. These questions include:

1) What programs will achieve my specific business goals?

2) What do I need to run those programs?

3) How will the programs happen?

4) What can I do already?

5) How do I fill the gaps?

This is an executive summary of the webinar and the insights shared by David Raab.  And as Avitage specializes in helping companies take ideas such as these to execution, in the coming weeks we will be sharing specific processes, practices, methodologies and checklists to execute on these ideas outlined by David.

 What kind of programs will achieve my specific business goals?

The first issue to consider before purchasing marketing automation software is your specific business goals. Often goals are stated too generally. In this case, organizations should identify specific, measurable business goals before considering the purchase of marketing automation software. It is not enough to say you want lead generation or revenue to increase; rather there should be numeric goals set by logical calculations. How many new leads will there be and how much extra revenue will they generate?

Once the specific business goals are established, you can begin to consider what kind of programs will help achieve these goals.  Here are some of the types of programs you may consider:

1) Acquisition: SEO, PPC, Social Media, Email

2) Nurture: Web forms, Segmentation, Content Streams, Behavior Tracking

3) Sales Support: Lead Scoring, Lead Transfer, CRM integration

4) Marketing Cost: Media buying, data acquisition, landing page creation and content creation.

What do I need to run these Programs?

Once you have chosen the necessary programs, you need to assess what resources they need to run. Do this by creating a program flow with the various steps leads will go through: Receive email, click on landing page, fill out form, receive download, new lead call…etc. For each of these steps in the flow, you will need to know the content necessary for each step, data required and how each step will integrate with other systems. This is not an assessment of what you already have in place; rather it is an assessment of the resources needed to make these programs run efficiently. It is beneficial to be as thorough as possible.

How Will the Programs Happen?

For each step identified in the previous flow, an organization needs to know how that step will actually happen. What are each step’s staffing requirement, training requirements, incentives, and system requirements? 

At this point the organization has not even considered the technology aspect of marketing automation. In order to have a good marketing automation program, goals and processes must be identified first.

What Can I do Already?

After identifying all of the necessary goals and processes, step back and identify what your organization already does well. Look at the list of requirements and highlight the capabilities that need the most attention. In some cases this may be fairly obvious. If you want to start email campaigns and have no previous experience doing so, then this is easy to identify. However if you have an email campaign in place that could be better, this could be harder to point out.

How do I Fill the Gaps?

By identifying the resources and capabilities your organization already has, you will be able to identify gaps that exist. Looking at each gap, try to identify the impact, cost and priority of filling this gap.  The results of this gap analysis will lead to a starting point for your marketing automation program.

A good starting marketing automation project will:

1) Require only slight changes to your current processes

2) Require a small extension of capabilities

3) Generate cooperation from outside your span of control

4) Be easily measured in lead quantity, revenue or savings

5) Be Highly likely to succeed.

This full webinar is available as part of www.Focus.com (registration required).

For more information on designing and executing an automated lead management program, supported by marketing automation tools, visit Avitage’s Automated Lead Management Services microsite.

Perspectives on Marketo’s Product Release – Event Management and Webinar Integration

I attended the Marketo product release webinar introducing Marketo’s new event management functionality as part of Marketo’s new pioneer program, for early adopters of the latest Marketo functionality.

Marketo's event management allows users to set up templated event sequences for events such as webinars, and greatly reduces the amount of steps required to re-use assets from event to event. In addition, the first iteration supports direct API access with WebEx, with other integrations planned for the future.

The functionality is a good start and part of an overall development plan from Marketo to better automate event management tied to marketing automation.

It’s too early for me to review the functionality based on a brief introductory webinar – but it did get me thinking about some of the key drivers as to why Marketo has invested their product development team’s valuable time into this new set of features.  

Two key reasons stand out:

(1) The volume of webinars required to fuel lead generation efforts is increasing

Webinars are a key marketing tool – particularly education-oriented, thought leadership webinars that help generate leads and fill the funnel for lead nurturing and the revenue engine. In the 2010 B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Computing Software Industry Report, computer/software companies ranked webinars as their most effective marketing tactic.

To maximize the impact of a webinar program, two key components are relevance and continuity:

• Relevance -- Like all good content, webinars must be relevant to their audience to maximize effectiveness. Relevance starts with targeting by role (e.g. IT vs. End-User; C-Suite vs. Line of Business), and by Existing Customer vs. Prospect.  So why wouldn’t a company run four versions of a webinar per month –  Prospect/Customer x Role 1 / Role 2?  And this does not even get into industry-specific targeting which many companies are facing.

• Continuity -- A webinar series needs to be delivered consistently to each target group.  If a company is creating only one webinar per quarter for a specific vertical industry, then it is losing out on many opportunities to engage that target and drive the revenue engine. Each target segment needs to be engaged at least once per month with the attraction of a topical, thought leadership webinar.

At this point, you might be thinking “I can barely get one webinar out the door each month, what the heck are you thinking with four or more webinars per month?”

The new Marketo functionality is a start to reducing the amount of work required to run a webinar, which will play a role in helping companies increase their webinar volume.  

But fully executing on this requires a different process than most companies apply to their webinars today. This is why we have been advocating a publishing approach to webinars for years. This means shifting from “point production” approach to “thinking and creating like a publisher”.

There is a lot more than registration and email communications that goes into producing a webinar, and on this webinars microsite we have shared further ideas and practices on how to scale your webinar program to today’s volume requirements.

(2) Scoring and tracking all marketing activities in a marketing database is a B2B must-have

One of the key benefits that Marketo and other marketing automation software systems provide to their customers is a marketing database to capture, manage and measure lead activities. 

For this to be most valuable, all lead activities need to be tracked in this database.

But to do this, that cookie has to go down. If you’re using WebEx, Citrix or any other platforms’ registration system without marketing automation, there are (at least) two major problems:

1. The cookie doesn’t go down
2. Spreadsheet reconciliation of data – messy and time consuming

This WebEx integration help to better automate lead scoring around event registration and attendance for Marketo and WebEx customers. 

But, WebEx is just one of many web meeting platforms, so customers of Citrix/GoToWebinar or other web meeting platforms may be asking “How can we best connect marketing automation with webinar management?”

To do this we manage and deliver all webinar campaign communications via Marketo (not the Webinar platform) as part of a campaign approach, with specific touch points to Citrix / GoToWebinar:

1. Include the “Join” URL in the confirmation/reminder emails and calendar notices
2. After the webinar, export attendee lists and import to Marketo, and increment lead score
3. Then de-duplicate by reviewing any non-matches to existing leads (to cater for typos or different email addresses supplied by attendees when joining the webinar)

A little bit of work, but far worth of it for the value of getting every webinar touch cookied, tracked and scored via marketing automation.

And in addition to the typical webinar-related emails (invitation, confirmation and reminder emails), we expand the webinar campaign via Marketo to include:

• A webinar teaser vignette (1 min)
• Pre-webinar emails inviting question submission
• Webinar follow-up emails to non-attendees sharing shorter webinar segments (1-2 mins)
• Webinar follow-up emails to attendees driving to a topical microsite
• Calls to action including sharing a webinar executive summary with colleagues (5-7 mins)

So for us the key to Marketo’s new release is not so much the WebEx integration, it’s the ability to clone an event promotion and nurturing sequence, and greatly reduce the amount of time required to deploy for each webinar.  This benefits customers regardless of webinar platform, as the majority of work comes in scheduling the touches and updating content, which can be much better automated now through Marketo tokens and cloning of events.

This is all part of our approach of creating like a publisher when creating webinars.

7 Ways to Generate More Sales Revenue with Marketing Automation - Webinar Executive Summary

As part of the Marketo Revenue Masters Series, Mac McIntosh, Founding Partner of AcquireB2B and Jep Castelein, Founder of LeadSloth co-presented “7 Ways to Generate More Sales Revenue with Marketing Automation.”

This is an executive summary of the 7 ways.

Nurture your leads to get 3 out of 4 sales opportunities that come from prospects with longer-term needs

Marketing automation can help drive sales revenue by nurturing leads so that sales opportunities come from customers with the right level of needs. Research conducted by Founding Partner of AcquireB2B Mac MacIntosh, has shown that approximately ¾ of sales revenue comes from long term opportunities over six months. The purpose of these lead nurturing campaigns is to move buyers from awareness, to inquiry, to consideration and finally to purchase by appealing to different audiences in different stages of the buying process.

Those customers in the beginning stages of the buying process require different offers than those customers closer to purchase.

The multi-touch lead nurturing process begins with indentifying the prospect. The prospect can be identified with inbound marketing, previous sales campaigns and business connections. After the prospect is identified, you can move the prospect through the buying process with outbound communications such as email, phone calls and direct mail until you can determine they are ready to buy.

The three keys to outbound lead nurturing are to find the proper amount of communications, design offers that are relevant to the prospect and get started with a simple nurturing campaign. The first key is accomplished by staying fresh in a prospects mind without becoming a pest. A good starting point is 2 to 3 times a month around important announcements. The second key of remaining relevant, can be accomplished by considering a prospects current role, industry and place in the buying process. Finally, providing a simple nurturing campaign can start with three touches (each with a single offer), then add additional offers to each touch, and then later adding additional touches. Along the way, each campaign should be adjusted for different types of buyers and markets.   

Use Outbound Marketing to Follow-up, Nurture and Qualify Inbound Leads

Marketing automation can help drive revenue by using outbound marketing to follow up, nurture and qualify inbound sales leads. Inbound leads are generated best today with online marketing including search engines, industry portals, directories and social media marketing. Once these inbound leads are identified it is important to nurture them along with follow-up such as email, e-newsletters, phone calls and postal mail.

This process starts with an inbound inquiry. This initial inquiry leads to an email being sent out that offers the prospect content such as an invite to a webinar or a whitepaper. Depending on if there is a response to this initial offer, other offers may be sent to the prospect or they may be disqualified.

Use Marketing Automation Driven Campaigns to Generate More Referrals

Another area to apply marketing automation is the design of specific campaigns with the purpose of generating more referrals. The best place to get referrals is from satisfied customers. This process may begin by offering a customer satisfaction survey. Those who respond positively to this survey are then sent an email request for referrals. The referrals these customers give, are very strong leads because they were received by other customers who already appreciate your product or service.

Other sources to go to for referrals are suppliers, associations you belong to, and even your own prospects. Even if your own prospects are not ready to buy, they may know of other leads who would be interested in an offer.

Use Marketing Automation to up-sell, cross-sell, and re-sell your existing customers

While developing new customers is important, there is also value in focusing on existing customers using marketing automation. Marketing automation campaigns can be directed at new customers, existing customers and customer renewals. For example, a “new customer” email campaign can be created to thank customers for their business but also extend a special offer to only new customers. This email campaign can be tailored to reach existing customers or to renew any offers that may be expiring in the near future. These are important campaigns to consider since existing customers are really just another specific type of lead.

Use Marketing to Increase Sales Productivity

Generating more revenue is a combined effort between sales and marketing, so it is important to use marketing automation to make sales more productive. One way that marketing can benefit sales is to help organize qualified leads. Sales people can focus more on the actual sale when they have a methodical list of sales leads. Marketing can help generate this list based on response to emails or even by tracking activity on the company website. Analyzing customer profiles and activity level will result in a list of qualified leads.

Once sales has a list of qualified leads, it is also beneficial to them to have a profile of these leads and a collection of information. This package of information should contain all activity of the sales lead to that point including web visits, email activity and form submissions. You may also decide to attach outside information if it is available, like a link to their Linkedin profile. This collection of information will facilitate the actual sale.

A situation may arise when a sales person speaks with a lead that is not yet ready to buy. In this case, sales should be included in the lead nurturing process to push the unqualified lead into whatever email campaign they see as appropriate. This can be managed  more closely by creating a formal process that can efficiently move a lead between marketing and sales. Having a set process like this would insure that no lead is ignored and left in the middle.

Use Marketing Automation to Get More Out of Acquired Lists

One approach to acquiring leads is to purchase lists of business contacts. The problem with doing this is that usually the contacts on this list have never heard of your business and are not aware of its benefits. One way to counteract this is to use marketing automation to get more out of these acquired lists.

Rather than make an immediate sales pitch to this list, it is suggested that you use marketing automation to offer useful content to those on the acquired list. Offering educational material will build familiarity and credibility. It will also lead to a greater percentage of the list moving through the buying process. This is where you may have the opportunity to use the process mentioned earlier of creating multiple campaigns and touches for different audiences.

When sending email campaigns to acquired lists, it is wise to send the email on behalf of a real person. Often there is a temptation to use fictional characters to make offers, but making an offer on behalf of real people will make the email seem less like spam (an important factor when contacting someone for the first time).

Use Marketing Automation to Reactivate Old Leads

Information attained from marketing automation can be useful in reactivating old leads. Building a database based on length of buying process, activity level, web site activity and email correspondence is useful when it comes time to reactivate old leads. If leads have been active in the past but have not communicated in over 6 months, it may be time to renew this relationship with a new offer or campaign.

Next Steps:

View the full webinar from which this executive summary was created 

Visit the Automated Lead Management Microsite for information and guidance around implementing a lead management program

Why Consistency and Standards are So Important – Production and Program Management

I recently reviewed with our production team the importance of why we have consistency and standards around the practices and processes of our business.

By way of background, some of the areas for which we have developed and manage standards include processes to:

• Create content like a publisher – creating content for multiple purposes and audiences through a single process (e.g. content for lead generation, lead nurturing & sales enablement)
• Produce webinars and all the various forms of content that results from it
• Produce vignettes – video-like content easily tailored for multiple audience
• Produce software demos – so that they are much more engaging and re-purposable than most
• Outsource automated lead management programs – Design, implement, on-board customers and operate the program  
• Conduct content inventories & assessments – to align content to buyer roles, interest and stage; and identify content gaps and priorities

Now to “the Why” – why standards and consistency are important.

For our customers:

1. Standards ensure customer expectations are met around the quality of deliverables
2. Standards give customers predictability of deliverables that allow them to better plan programs – critical since our goal and measurement of success is always around customer outcomes
3. Standards reduce turnaround time (by reducing the amount of cycle time spent on revisions and rework) – faster content time to market
4. Standards ensure our costs are managed carefully on projects, resulting in the best possible rates for customers – cost savings
5. Standards ensure our customers’ time is well-managed on projects – and our customer’s time is incredibly valuable, particularly when working with subject experts
6. Standards ensure consistency (of brand, of voice, of presentation, of formats) across communications channels and content types

For our employees / team members:

1. Standards ensure the quality of deliverables
2. Standards reduce the amount of frustration caused through re-work or lack of direction
3. Standards improve predictability of resource planning and scheduling
4. And these are all important for team morale, performance and efficiency

What else have I missed?

In subsequent posts I will detail the standards we have established in the various areas of the business.

Applying Digital Body Language to Webinars

Digital Body Language (the phrase coined by Steve Woods of Eloqua) has become a key principle of B2B Digital Sales & Marketing. This involves using web behavior around content consumption to learn more about customers – their issues, interests, stage of the buying process and more. With automated lead management programs, it is used to score prospects and to deliver relevant content based on their interests and stage in their buying process.

Webinars are a key component of nearly all B2B sales & marketing organizations’ lead generation programs. But companies are missing a significant opportunity to learn more about their audiences when they employ the generally practiced webinar format.

When you conduct a webinar, what do you really know about your audience? Hopefully, you know their name, email address, perhaps organization and maybe role. You know they have a general interest in the topic, but not much more.

How can we apply the principle of Digital Body Language to webinars – or other lead generation campaigns?

1) We recommend to our customers they conduct webinars targeted at specific audiences (e.g. CXX, technical, line-of-business, financial), specific buying stages (early, mid, existing customers) and other profile critical criteria. This is in keeping with the principle of content relevance. But it also helps you know more about the audience to which you are speaking. 

2) By pre-producing 20-minute webinars along with supporting content, programs are tighter, more professional, and less stressful to deliver than most webinars. This avoids any wasted time wandering into content areas that are less interesting to target audiences. As a practical manner, this makes it possible to conduct the volume of webinars this approach requires.

3) By preparing a marketing automation enabled microsite of on-demand content, organized by sub-issues, personas, buying stages, industry examples, and material that is easy to forward to colleagues, you will learn considerably more about your audience than the traditional webinar. And, you will encourage expanded interactions.

Your audience will appreciate this approach for multiple reasons. Our customers have told us:

• For those who “connect” with the topic directly, they can move right from the webinar to the microsite – and dive deeper into the topic with other on-demand content including vignettes, other webinar excerpts, articles and resources. There may even be a call to action to “speak further about this issue” which connects to a tele-nurturing rep at the company to speak to (and further qualify) the individual.
• For those who are screening the webinar for a colleague or boss, the microsite becomes an information resource that they can use to guide their internal follow-up communications.
• For those with limited time the day of the webinar, they get a high level understanding in 20 minutes or less, and then they can explore the topic further on their own time.

Each of the above scenarios (unlike traditional webinar viewing activity) is highly measurable through the principles of Digital Body Language.

We recently ran a webinar on jumpstarting your content marketing and nurturing with a content audit & assessment. We tightly produced the webinar including setting up the issue, reviewing the approach, sharing a customer’s perspective and a review of the available tools and resources – all tightly edited into 20 minutes. We backed this up with a content-rich on-demand microsite.

As the webinar broadcast, we tracked specific viewers moving to the microsite, and both their and their colleague’s activity as the day and week progressed. And we were able to best tailor our follow-up communications and activities based on the microsite content that was consumed and what it indicated about the prospects.

Webinars are too important of a marketing activity to not follow the proven principles of modern marketing success.

How I Created Content Like a Publisher When Speaking at Bentley University

This coming week I have two presentations at Bentley University – first, guest lecturing at Terry Skelton’s class Fundamentals of Content Development as part of the Information Design & Corporate Communication department, and then speaking to Marketing and IDCC majors as part of a spotlight for careers in digital content marketing, hosted by Alyssa Hammond.

To prepare, I followed a process that we use with our customers to ensure that both speakers and audience get the most out of an event experience, by creating content like a publisher.

My presentation includes an overview of B2B Sales & Marketing today – concepts such as inbound marketing, content marketing, digital body language, marketing automation, lead management and the revenue engine. Then I explain how Avitage takes the concepts and puts them into practice through a specific approach and set of processes. Finally I review customer examples and recent case studies with BNA and Teradata.

The process that I followed to prepare for the event was:

1. With input from Terry and Alyssa, I prepared an outline
2. I reviewed source content managed through the Avitage Collections system, to match the outline
3. I recorded the presentation via phone, with the ability to pause between slides, and do any necessary re-takes
4. One of our producers edited the audio and synched it to the slides, to create an on-demand version of the presentation
5. I uploaded the presentation (slides and audio) as new source content to Avitage Collections, so it can be shared and easily re-purposed in smaller snippets for marketing purposes, YouTube and SlideShare.  

By pre-producing the presentation, it gave me the benefit of a rehearsal and mental “word-smithing” without a major time investment.

Even more importantly, it gave me a highly modular, on-demand version, which I can use to leverage the event:

1. with attendees – who want to share the presentation
2. with non-attendees – Bentley will be able to share this with anyone who could not attend the event
3. well beyond the event

For #3, this includes Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook updates linking to the on-demand version, editing the on-demand version to YouTube snippets and writing this blog article about the experience. 

Now the benefit and reach I get from the event goes well beyond the event itself, not to mention that one of the principles of creating content like publishers is making content available through various formats and mediums in which your audience wants to consume it.

At the end of the presentation I will invite the audience to follow me on Twitter where there will be a link to today’s presentation – not just the PowerPoint slides but the actual presentation with audio – what a great example of creating content like a publisher!

This is a process I recommend for anyone participating in conferences, trade shows or other speaking engagements to take the benefit that you see from the event to the next level.

 And here is the on-demand presentation.