Many marketers who have discovered tips or tricks about their field keep those items close to their chest. It’s understandable why they would want to preserve these secrets, whether for competitive advantage, job security or simple jealousy. They use these strategies to help create leads for their sales teams, and watch their secret tools or methods mature over time and find ways to improve them or get a little more out of them. A lot of these hidden tools and tricks are around finding ways to pull in more leads to the top of your marketing funnel, whether to increase your social media reach, list size, or any other attribute that you are being measured on as a marketer. Here are five steps that you should be doing to make your B2B marketing efforts more effective online.
Network More Efficiently with Followerwonk
Followerwonk is a Twitter networking tool that helps you identify other Twitter users with specific interests, sorted by how popular they are. There are a number of tools out there that do things that are similar to this, but Followerwonk is better than them for a few reasons: You don’t need to sign in or give it information about yourself, it’s very fast, and it doesn’t just do the basics like “Find users like me”. As marketers, we usually aren’t trying to find more people who are just like us, but instead trying to find people in certain segments or topic areas.
Their sorting and ranking is also useful because it places the likely influencers and predictors of the field at the top of the rankings very reliably, and so you can quickly assemble the list of 10 or 15 primary people that you would like to reach out to. You can reach out to them directly from Followerwonk once you’ve established who in a specific field that you want to contact, and engage with them. If you’re instead just trying to build followers, you can also do a search for the people who follow the most people, and then follow them from Followerwonk – They are the people most likely to end up following you back.
Make Sure Your Social Media Presence Has Forms
This is a mistake that a lot of marketers make when using in social media – Forgetting to include the lead form. We frequently get caught up in the other parts of social media like “conversing” and “engaging” and “joining the conversation” that we forget to include our own motives in our work. Make sure that some of your tweets go to landing pages on your site or refer back to content offers that you have. A good rule of thumb is that if you’ve made ten tweets but haven’t linked to something that could generate leads for you, it’s the perfect time to do so. Some marketingautomationsoftware packages can also help you track this and handle it for you. If you have other interactive tweets and actions happening, that means that you have the engaged following that you need to be successful with this.
Special Offers To Your Unengaged Recipients
Build a mailing list segment of people who haven’t been responsive to your last five emails to them, and then send them a special offer and ask them what they are looking for but haven’t seen. You can get very valuable feedback and advice, and generate leads that were otherwise unresponsive. Consider this a different type of leadnurturingcampaign, customized to an unresponsive set of leads or prospects.
In one test, a re-engagement email was sent to otherwise inactive contacts that included a final offer and asked them for feedback on what they’d received so far. Almost 5% of those emailed “woke up” and became actively engaged in some way, by responding to the question or following through on the offer. While that may not seem like a great number, these were previously inactive subscribers, and so were basically dead weight on the mailing list. By getting some action out of them, they were more valuable than before, and the marketer was able to remove the other emails from the list, maintaining list health and reducing the cost of future campaigns.
Make Sure Your Website Is Optimized
This can feel like an obvious item to be aware of, but it’s tricky – It’s too easy to lose track of old pages and outdated offers on your website when you’re a busy marketer. Twice a year, take a quick inventory of your offers and their conversion rates, and then check pages on your site that haven’t been changed in the last six months. If they’re displaying offers or forms that are not converting well anymore, consider switching them out with newer offers or ones that are proving more effective. By getting into a regular six month cycle of this, you will be more aware of what is succeeding or flopping on your website, and better able to turn around pages that aren’t delivering on their potential value to you.
Check Your Historical Analytics
Finally, hand in hand with the previous point, make sure that you are consistently examining your analytics, not just against the previous month, but also against last year’s month and the year before that, if available. Look at your growth, accomplishments, and the milestones that helped set you along that way. If business hasn’t been as strong as the past, carefully review what different segments of traffic and activity looked like in past years. Is it traffic or leads from a particular source or type of source that has decreased? This can help you better understand where you need to focus your efforts to grow again, or where your real problems lie.
What other tips or ideas do you have for success in lead generation?
The idea of automating marketing is scary to some. It should be. In theory it seems like a good idea; better results for less work. However, there are several key factors in the success of a of marketing automation campaign. While setting up a campaign from the beginning is critical, so is maintaining and optimizing that campaign over time.
Let’s take a look at three of the key factors that you need to check regularly to improve your marketing automation campaigns.
1. Too Many Messages
Is your marketing automation campaign sending your prospects and leads to many messages? It is important to view your leads as the human beings they are. Look at your results and the performance of messages over time for the individual people on your campaign lists. Are these messages getting opened? Are people clicking on your offers? If someone isn’t showing a positive response to the emails they’re receiving, have a backup plan that will further engage them. “Maybe the next message will motivate them” isn’t a good plan. Your messages must be useful, informative, and relevant.
Equip yourself to recognize when a lead isn’t responding, and handle the unresponsive lead accordingly. If someone doesn’t click on a link in three messages in a row, consider them “disengaged.” This type of disengaged recipient needs further qualification. Either you are sending them too many messages or your messages are not properly targeted. Test new targeting strategies as well as a lower content frequency to determine how to maximize engagement. Also consider sending a special monthly email to the disengaged recipients on your list and ask for feedback or if they’d like to be removed from your list. Ultimately, when it comes to frequency in messaging, the goal is to treat your future customers the way they want to be treated.
2. List Expiration
Leads don’t stay at the same company forever. Job changes are one of the biggest challenges to maintaining a quality email marketing list. As a marketer it is your job to create proactive solutions to this problem. This means actively pursuing strategies to have leads re-subscribe with their updated contact information.
The key to encouraging re-subscription is fresh content. As a marketer you need to provide a reason for a person to come back and reconvert. One way to do this is to create fresh blog content and use calls-to-action on your blog to reconvert visitors, and to make sure that you invite your visitors, leads, and list members to engage with you in other avenues, like social media.
3. Campaign Maintenance
Marketing automation isn’t like a Ron Popeil Rotisserie. You can’t simply set it and forget it. Campaigns need regular maintenance. Create a monthly checklist for your marketing automation campaigns. Evaluate your marketing analytics data to determine performance. Based on the data determine how your content or message targeting needs to be adjusted. The most important part of this step is to schedule the time regularly to ensure that optimization is consistent and opportunities aren’t missed.
Don’t take your marketing automation for granted. Automation doesn’t mean touchless. Use these check points as well as other marketing automation best practices to improve your lead to customer conversion rate and drive more revenue for your business.
Marketing automation is easy, right? Build (or sometimes buy) a list of emails, upload them to your favorite email blaster, set some rules, sit back, and qualify a ton of leads without having to invest any human hours. NOT!
Marketing automation is a fantastic idea in theory but, in practice, it may just be one of the most difficult initiatives you undertake in your marketing career, and here’s why:
1. Email Lists Decays 25% Every Year
This is one of the sad realities of marketing. You spend at ton of time building, cleaning, loving a solid list of prospects, but that list is becoming less valuable by the second. As people change jobs, change emails, and hit the unsubscribe button, your list quickly looses it’s punch. As a result, trying to grow your list, or at least keep it relevant is always an uphill battle.
2. Click Through Rates Drop Significantly Over Time
The click through rate for a new mailing list member, compared someone who has been on a list for over 90 days can drop by 5X. That means that, even if you’re prospects aren’t unsubscribing, or changing their emails, they’re just finding easier ways to ignore your messages.
3. Email Filters are Better Than Ever
You’re deliverability is extremely high and your unsubscribe rates are low, but don’t start celebrating just yet. Your prospects don’t have to unsubscribe from your list, or even delete your messages to ignore you; they can just filter you out, and you’ll never know. Now, with tools like priority inbox from Gmail, your prospects don’t even have to create filters themselves.
What this Means for Marketers
We’ve covered the bad news; your lists are decaying, your click through rates are dropping as your subscribers age and it’s getting harder to make it into a prospects inbox. But this doesn’t mean you should just give up your automation efforts. As a marketer, how do you combat these factors?
To be successful, you need to constantly be expanding the top of your funnel. If you’re goal is to grow your list by 10% each year, you will actually need to expand your it by about 35% to accommodate for the attrition described above.
To counter the drop in click through rates over time, you’ll need to create great offers, get and closely monitor your list. Don’t just send people the same stuff over and over. If someone didn’t take an action on your offer the first 9 times, they probably won’t on the 10th. Keep people engaged by creating fresh content, and don’t email the same people if they’ve stopped clicking.
As always, use common sense, create content that people want, treat your leads like humans, engage with prospects through multiple channels.
Numbers and charts in this post are based on “Death By Marketing Automation,” presented by HubSpot VP, Mike Volpe at Dreamforce 2011
The writing is on the wall; email as we know it is dead! We hear this mantra over and over, as social media grows in popularity and the marketing landscape continues to change. But it’s not true. Meanwhile what is true, the $3.2 billion market driven by marketing automation is increasing 15% each year, challenging social media for the title of “next big thing.”
The power of marketing automation as a way to nurture leads can be maximized when combined with a system that allows a website to dynamically adapt to the specific needs of each site visitor, based on where that prospect is in the sales funnel. This ability to adapt and personalize the user experience improves the efficacy of any marketing effort and increases the ROI of any campaign. Let’s take a look of how this works.
Traditional Marketing Automation
If you use any of the traditional marketing automation tools (Infusionsoft, Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua, Silverpop, LeadFormmix, Act-On, Manticore, ExactTarget, or Loopfuse) you already know the power of marketing automation to help move leads forward or backward in the lead funnel based on the prospect’s online activity, interaction with the site and other triggers. Everything the lead sees or does can have an impact on the lead nurturing stage that the lead is in. Every lead nurturing stage includes specific emails and landing pages targeted to leads that are included in that stage.
What’s Missing in Marketing Automation?
Most companies that have multiple websites have one goal for their marketing automation system — moving leads from stage-to-stage through the lead funnel. The missing link in lead nurturing is that a visitor can enter a website without that site recognizing the prospect and where the visitor is in the lead funnel, which prevents the site from treating that prospect any different than another user. This causes the site to miss out on a valuable opportunity to present that visitor with the appropriate landing page, messaging and sales positioning.
Adaptive Websites
The idea of a website adapting itself based on the stage of each lead in the marketing automation tool is an interesting idea that could work like an add-on to the traditional marketing automation tools by not only making landing pages that focus on getting leads to the next stage but making the entire website or websites adapt to the clients’ lead stage.
These sites would respond by personalizing the content, the calls-to-action and offers to appeal to the specific interests of each visitor. At Reedge Inc., we offer personalization tools that can integrate with existing marketing automation systems to leverage historical visitor data from email lists to optimize the lead flow across client websites and portals.
Experiments With Adaptive Sites
We are testing the following adaptation with our own Conversion Rate Optimizer a personalization and A/B testing tool with the aim of improving the ROI of our email funnel. Here are some of our experiments and the results:
Removing email sign-up forms when users already signed-up in the past. This resulted in the reuse of that area (real-estate) with a banner. Increasing revenue of this blog by 3%.
Showing specific whitepapers on a lead generation site based on the historical download stats of whitepapers. This change moved the leads 10% faster though that specific segment of the funnel.
Adapting the homepage based on the segments the user was interested in, based on the clicks from a travel newsletter. By giving more focus to a specific location, sales for that segment grew by 4%
When to Use Web Personalization for Leads
Email marketing is improving the ROI of promotional campaigns every year. The last two years, the most positive changes were made in areas of list segmentation and event-driven triggers in marketing automation, according to the 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Survey by MarketingSherpa. Email content that moves to the website in adaptive blocks to stimulate revenue growth and optimize the funnel is an area where we can expect to see significant increases over the next few years.
Like all personalization technologies, these adaptive websites will need to be carefully developed to ensure that we do not over-personalize the content, since websites should always retain a sense of discovery, which can also help to advance a lead to the step of the decision process. Through the careful use of personalization, a website can add a sense of serendipity to this discovery process, helping to move prospects ahead in the funnel, proving that adaptive websites can give email marketers the ROI boost that they are looking for.
Major shifts are taking place in B2B marketing that started a few years ago but have accelerated in recent months – in the marketplace as well as inside vendor organizations.
Prospects and customers are becoming more sophisticated and better informed than ever before. They are tuning out a lot of the marketing noise they receive which makes it harder for marketers to reach audiences the old fashioned way. Customers are are in the driver’s seat today. This has profound implications on marketing and the way companies engage with prospects.
In the “old days”, the mainstream marketing approach was to interrupt and engage prospects, educate them on the vendors offering and move them through the sale cycle towards a transaction – a very vendor and product centric approach. Contrast this with the sophisticated and networked and community-embedded buyer today, who conducts research and talks with their peers in online communities long before identifying and narrowing down the list of potential vendors that can solve the problem.
These buyers and decision makers don’t want to get interrupted by a product promo email or a cold call that likely doesn’t come at the exact time they have a specific problem the caller can help with. And today’s customers are busier than ever. They want to be able to engage with a vendor when they are ready and actively seek out advice, often very late in the buying cycle, and have the vendor guide them through a complex buying and problem solving process – outsourcing part of the buying process to the vendor community if you will.
A simple 5 step program can help you refocus your marketing efforts and adjust to the new requirements for B2B marketing success:
Step 1 – Understand Your Audience
Customer focus begins with understanding your customer and their market environment. What business problems do they face? What are the drivers in their industry that impact profitability? Also make sure you segment your target markets according to demographics, psychographics, and business environment to identify the segments that are the best fit for your company’s offering; segments that have the most to gain by becoming your customers.
Step 2 – Build a Strong Value Proposition
Build a strong customer-centric value proposition that puts your product and services in the context of the customer’s problem, communicates the value you provide and your differentiators vis-a-vis competing alternatives.
Step 3 – Map Out Buyer’s Journey
Map the customer’s buying cycle from problem awareness, identifying generic solutions, identifying potential vendors, selecting vendors that make the short list, evaluating solutions in detail and ultimately selecting a solution. Build a simplified model of your customers’ world, the journey they take from problem to solution. This exercise will help you understand how your customers are progressing through the steps of the buying cycle. What are their goals, concerns, what data do they need to move to the next step, where do they look for information?
Step 4 – Build Compelling Messages and Content
With this information you get a pretty good idea for how to influence the prospect along every step, how to educate them, how to guide them to purchase. Build a simple matrix of messages, marketing collateral and sales tools mapped against each phase of the buying cycle. Also add how you want to get your information to your audience – how will they find you. Focus on social networks and Google and special interest sites for the early phases; that’s where buyers will often look first and find your content to make sense of their problem and the solution space and identify potential vendors. Make sure your content is problem and solution focused and doesn’t only talk about your product.
Build call to actions into each content piece to encourage your prospect to keep engaging with you as they move through the buying cycle. Also, make content easily accessible, especially in the early phase of the buying cycle where prospects don’t care about specific vendors but want to understand their options and the implications of available choices to solve a problem. So let your educational content (white papers, Webinars) go free so it gets consumed and shared by prospects across social networks, don’t hide it behind registration forms, but add a strong call to action into the content asset to move your prospects to the next interaction with you.
Step 5 – Invest in Marketing Automation
One size fits all mass email blasts, for example, don’t provide the level of return you are looking for. Marketing automation will allow you to have very targeted digital conversations with your audience triggered by prospect profile and behavior, driven by their buying cycle. Help prospects follow paths that you have defined to guide them, offering content that matches every step of their buying process from white papers and webinars in the early discovery stages to case studies, ROI studies and competitive comparisons during vendor selection at which point your sales will be heavily engaged in the relationship. With each interaction, you collect more data about the prospect which allows you to build a score to identify the hottest leads that you want to engage with directly and focus your time and sales resources on. With sophisticated analytics and reporting, MA tools will also give you insight into what is working and what not so you can adjust and improve your campaigns.
Buyers expect vendors to help them make sense of the options they have available to solve a particular problem, their pros and cons – a very consultative, solution, and customer centric approach to marketing and sales that is very different from yesterday’s paradigms. For marketing teams, this means engaging with prospects much earlier in the buying cycle, educating them long before prospects consider specific vendors, and matching each phase of the customer buying cycle with appropriate message, content and marketing tools designed to ease the buyers journey – from problem to solution and carefully steer them to the favorable outcome – to be selected by the buyer.
It also means using new ways to reach the buyer, including social networks. This approach requires much greater domain, industry and business expertise on the vendor side, to really understand the customer, which in turn requires more targeted segmentation, more intelligent messaging, better sales tools, etc.
The purpose of the guide is to help educate B2B marketers and sales leadership professionals on the importance and power of marketing automation in B2B. It’s an extensive 10 part guide covering a range of marketing topics from automation to lead scoring to demand generation.
B2B buyers no longer follow a linear purchasing process and therefore using a single sales discovery process with all prospects may frustrate buyers and can create an immediate disconnect in the buyer-seller relationship. Both sales and marketing need to 1. understand that B2B buyers can enter the buying cycle at any stage in the funnel and 2. the buyers are entering the buying cycle armed with as much (and sometimes more) information than the sales person. You need a way to identify what the buyers know and what stage of the process they may be entering (or coming out of).
Gone are the days of solely relying on lead capture forms to gain the information you need to be competitive in today’s marketplace. B2B buyers expect immediate, relevant information unique to their situation. Today’s sales teams need to understand much more than the profile of the people they are working with. You need a way to understand and communicate to the sales team the online behavior of the B2B buyers that are coming to your web site.
For all the features and benefits of marketing automation software systems (lead scoring, lead nurturing, campaign management, time savings and on and on), the single most important metric to measure its performance is in *driving tangible revenue improvement.* Don’t miss the forest through the trees.
Something That Made Me Stop And Think
“Search now means more than getting found. It is becoming a factor at the top, middle, and even the bottom of the funnel. Buyers are using more expansive terms [and phrases] as their research narrows on a set of solutions during the evaluation and consideration stages.” You need a way to identify these latter stage terms and close the loop on the link between the keyword phrase(s) and closed deals and closed deal sizes.
Who Should Read It And Why
I’d suggest ignoring the title of this section and offer that not only will a VP of Sales benefit from downloading and reading this section of The Quintessential Marketing Automation Guide, but so too will CMOs and VPs of marketing. While some sales side angles are included, a marketer reading them will gain valuable context that will only benefit the collaborative relationship that must be formed between sales and marketing for the successful implementation of a marketing automation system.
Recap
You need a way to identify what the buyers know and what stage of the process they may be entering (or coming out of).
You need a way to understand and communicate to the sales team the online behavior of the B2B buyers that are coming to your web site.
Quick and efficient routing of leads to sales or into a lead nurturing program
The single most important metric to measure the performance of a marketing automation system is driving tangible revenue improvement.
Put the focus on marketing’s contribution to revenue
Search now means more than getting found, it is being used during all stages of the buying process. Identify these latter stage terms and work to understand the link between keyword phrase(s) and closed deals and closed deal sizes.
We can all agree that B2B buying and selling are evolving (rapidly). It’s hard to envision a future where marketing automation software has not become the norm for every B2B marketing and sales organization, isn’t it?. Read Why Marketing Automation Is A Must Have For Every B2B VP of Sales and you might just feel the same way.
The morning of keynotes at day two of Eloqua Experience provided attendees an opportunity to learn from two of their peers and get inspired by one of the most compelling and inspiring speaker’s today. We heard from Kendall Collins, CMO of Salesforce.com and Heidi Melin, SVP/CMO of Polycom, and thought leader and pioneer in business visualization Tom Wujec, Senior Fellow at Autodesk. Each of the presentations offered attendees insights and inspiration.
Kendall shared many experiences about what its like being the CMO of a company with over 80,000 customers and revenue exceeding $1.5B. He stressed the importance of openness and transparency (depicting their internal use of Salesforce Chatter), testing and measuring, (allowing data to inform your decisions and not feelings of “oh, I like that.”) and meritocracy (the idea that merit and individual effort determine success). He also shared the following insights:
An improved relationship and collaboration between marketing and IT is just as critical as the alignment of sales and marketing. Today with so many technologies available to improve how you market and what you measure, it is vital to have a partner in the IT team to assist you in utilizing, selecting, and implementing the right tools.
You can’t ignore the importance the IT team plays in your success.
In the past year, the salesforce.com marketing department took a page from the world of development and reorganized and shifted to Agile Marketing. Agile marketing has paid off in many ways including:
Major shift in velocity
Prioritization
Resourcing Clarity
Approval Process
Video has been the single most important thing Salesforce.com has done in the past year, because of the ‘fidelity’ of the message. We captured customers telling their success stories. ”There really isn’t a better way for the message to be shared than through the words of our customers.”
Another important piece of information Salesforce.com learned about video is that “people who view video on our site are more likely to fill out a form (by a lot).”
Heidi Melin, SVP/CMO Polycom
The theme of Heidi’s presentation was celebrating the Art of Conversation and communicating the value and the impact of the marketing team. She shared six key learnings for today’s CMO.
Importance of roles and responsibilities
It must be clear who is doing what and why.
Sales & Marketing alignment is critical
Sales and marketing are not two different processes, it is one process from response to revenue.
Even in the absence of perfect data, measuring performance is critical to provide direction and insight.
Leverage best practices
Hire the best people
Look for people who have deep, extensive expertise in their area and create a good balance on your team of creative and analytical people.
Infrastructure investment must be coupled with process improvements
The technology is just one piece of the puzzle, effective systems must be in place to support the success of the team.
How do you communicate the value and impact of the global marketing team?
It starts with the premise of communicating “the right information to the right audience in the right format.” Know your audience. The Executive Team and Board don’t care about campaign reports, so keep them out of the board room. Develop a consistent dashboard and common metrics to communicate your value. Change the mindset of marketing as an expense to marketing as a profit center. The categories Polycom uses in their marketing dashboard are:
Awareness and Thought Leadership
Demand Gen Programs
Solution Oriented Sales Tools
Partner Programs
Web Metrics
Tom Wujec, Senior Fellow, Autodesk – Fostering Innovation
Tom Wujec’s keynote was the best presentation I have ever had the opportunity to attend. Not only due to the message Tom shared but also because the presentation had you amazed, engaged, learning, and thinking about new ways of doing things, all at the same time. Simply incredible.
Littered throughout his presentation were amazing examples of design innovation and strategy being made visible. He shared wonderful stories and information he’s learned conducting The Marshmallow Challenge. A summary of the keynote by me would likely do it more harm than good. So I’ll simply share some of the words of wisdom he shared with us.
Innovation starts with a clarifying question.
Strategy is much more effective when you can visualize it.
Ultimately, innovation boils down to the questions we ask.
Make strategy visible, make ideas persistent.
“Continuous partial attention” is a symptom of today’s media overload and affects our ability to be present and innovate.
Images have the power to move us and connect us at the level of meaning.
The act of representing customer visually allows companies to make decisions “on behalf” of their customers.
To quote an attendee, “Tom Wujec (Fostering Innovation Skills) keynote just made this conference absolutely worth attending!” I couldn’t agree more.
Joe’s keynote focused on the importance for marketers to expand their to contribution to the company’s they work for by helping their CEO deal with the number one thing they care about the most – revenue growth.
Joe explained through both his informal polling of customers and Conference Board research, that CEOs care more about revenue growth than anything else. Hence, Eloqua’s introduction of the discipline of,
After discussing revenue performance management, Joe then introduced the “C-Suite 16.” A new, standard set of sales and marketing reports with the intent of offering “One View Of The Truth” into revenue performance. Joe explained the importance of sales and marketing working from one set a metrics and information that is consistent and commonly agreed to.
He called for a consistent methodology and framework for marketers to communicate their contribution to revenue. Eloqua vision is that these reports will be adopted across industries and labeled them GAAP for Sales and Marketing (TM)
Two key principles of the C-Suite 16 report framework:
Effectiveness – “What Cost” Questions – Tracking $$$ in
Why Eloqua? Why are they the right company to introduce these reports? For one, 10,000 months worth of benchmark data. Eloqua just introduced the Marketing Automation Trends, Benchmarks & Best Practices. This data was vital in identifying the reports that are most important to c-level executive and boards. Secondly, Eloqua is willing to take the bold step forward to advance the discipline of marketing and “no one else has!”
Eloqua Product Innovation
Joe then turned the stage over to Andre Yee and Matt Grantham to talk Eloqua product innovation. Andre gave a quick update on numerous enhancements that have been made to Eloqua9 and then moved on to the much anticipated, introduction of Eloqua10.
Admittedly taking some inspiration from Apple, the underlying vision was to make the software “a joy to use.” Eloqua10 is a complete redesign of the architecture and user experience. Repeatedly Andre and Matt mentioned the desire to make it as easy as Powerpoint to use. “Everyone can use Powerpoint, right?” (Looked easier than Powerpoint to me.)
We watched as Matt quickly went through a combination of dragging and dropping and built and scheduled a campaign in just minutes. There is no need for any level of technical knowledge, you simply open it up and are ready to go. The UI is super clean and crisp, though that’s not all that is new in Eloqua10, enter Eloqua Insights. The reporting and analytics engine that sits underneath the surface and quickly provides marketers the data needed to report and adjust as necessary. While I haven’t gotten my hands on Eloqua10 just yet, it does look like it will be a joy to use. Well done, Andre, Matt and team.
Joe came back on stage and asked, “So Andre, when will it be ready?” Andre’s answer, “NOW!”
It will be ready for general availability in November. Joe then answered two more key customer questions:
When will I have to upgrade Eloqua9 to Eloqua10? Answer: Never. If you are happy with what you have, no need ever to transition.
How much more will Eloqua10 cost? Answer: Nothing
When the applause stopped, Joe made some final remarks and introduced Eloqua’s new mission:
To make our customers the fastest growing companies on Earth.
All in all, it was a great way to begin Eloqua Experience 2010 and with the introduction of Eloqua10, it appears Eloqua is well on their way to achieving their new mission.
Last week’s b2b social media and content marketing interview with SAP’s Michael Brenner received a lot of positive feedback. The main reason: it shared real life experience of implementing and managing social media marketing.
It wasn’t a best practice research report. It was Michael. He shared his story, his advice and his knowledge. We learned through his experiences.
Well, this week, in my interview Eloqua’s Director of Content, Joe Chernov (@jchernov), you’ll benefit from the same thing.
We cover marketing automation, the recent consolidation in the industry, and of course, b2b social media, content marketing and ROI. I promise, you are going to like Joe. He is a smart marketer, a great person, and one of the people forging a new way of marketing to today’s digital B2B buyers.
Jeremy: Tell me a little bit about yourself, your role at Eloqua, and the size of the team that is responsible for social media, content marketing, and online communities.
Joe: I joined Eloqua in November – the same week my son was born, incidentally – in a PR and social media role. Over time, CMO Brian Kardon and I realized that there was a broader opportunity, beyond traditional communications. So I sketched out what that role might look like, and eventually that “job description” turned into our first infographic, The Content Grid.
At Eloqua the entire company is responsible for social media. That said, one person is most accountable for it. I suppose that’s me.
Jeremy: As a follow up to that actually, can you explain the structure of your marketing organization?
Joe: Our marketing organization is a collection of really strong specialists – data analysts, marketing operations, demand gen, partner programs, public relations – who, conveniently, work great together. I think these disparate skills are really coming together right now. We just launched a campaign that fused social media distribution (free, viral content) with demand gen (gated content). I just haven’t seen companies tear down the fence that tends to separate those two camps. This notion of “social content … with a purpose” is what I am most excited about.
Jeremy: Tell me about Eloqua’s market position.
Joe: It’s generally accepted that Eloqua built the marketing automation industry. It’s also generally accepted that some great competitors have come along in recent years. Competition is raising everyone’s game. Eloqua is pioneering a new category, dubbed Revenue Performance Management. We see a huge opportunity for marketers to connect our tools to complementary solutions to arrive at a single view of their sales pipeline, and make more intelligent sales and marketing decisions based on a live data feed. That’s our vision. You are going to hear much more on this topic from us in the weeks to follow.
Jeremy: Recent weeks have brought IBM and Oracle into the playing field. How is that impacting Eloqua?
Joe: There’s a lot more focus on us now. On everyone in the industry. M&A is fun stuff to talk about, so a lot of the questions we get now have to do with the future of the space, consolidation, who’s next to get acquired. That sort of thing. Honestly though, we have this Revenue Performance Management category to establish and a major launch on the horizon, so we are focusing on our core business.
Jeremy: What is marketing automation? How would you describe it to your neighbor? i.e. a layperson
Joe: It’s a systematic way to read a prospect’s digital body language and match content and offers based on the buying signals being sent.
Jeremy: Got it, now that said, how do you keep your marketing automation from being too “automated” and impersonal?
Joe: While the process itself is automated, and much of the back-end components (like lead scoring, progressive profiling, etc.) are automated, the content itself is created and curated by real people. We work very hard to make sure we are matching the right messages to the right prospects. A manager in the financial services sector would receive very different content than, say, a VP for a manufacturing firm. The challenge, of course, is that this model requires us to generate massive amounts of content.
Jeremy: ROI – What’s the ROI on an investment in marketing automation software?
Joe: Here’s the thing about marketing automation software: technology alone isn’t the full solution. To truly maximize impact, behavioral changes are often needed. Sales and marketing teams need to align – agree on lead definitions, priorities, measurement methodologies, and share goals. That’s when ROI is maximized. The degree of alignment, the quality of content, the industry … all of these attributes affect return. We have published a number of third-party studies that look at how all of these aspects come together to produce best-in-class results. Your readers can find the resources here.
Jeremy: It’s really evident that Eloqua and your team understand the transition web is going through – evolving into a much more sophisticated communication network and social place. How long have you embraced B2B social media and content marketing? How does that translate into the impact on your revenue?
Joe: Eloqua has been active of the social Web for quite some time. Well before I got here, leaders like Steve Woods, Chad Horenfeldt and Mike MacFarlane were blogging, tweeting, creating LinkedIn groups. So the channels aren’t new per se, it’s just that we’ve doubled down on the model recently. There is so much noise out there, and it’s incredibly difficult to get noticed. Even if you create great content – from a substance perspective – if you release it into a vacuum, what impact will it have on the business?
Our content model has two basic tenets: 1. “aestheticize” content so that it compels people to consume it, 2. don’t expect the world to come and find it on our Website. The first tenet speaks to some of the work we are doing with a-list designers JESS3, the second can be seen in our branded social media outposts, like “The Revenue Hub” on SlideShare and “The Revenue Stream” on Twitter. They are stylistically more consistent with a digital agency than a B2B marketing automation firm, but that’s by design. We need this next generation of marketers to know that we “speak their language” too.
Jeremy: I think the number is five, correct me if I’m wrong, but Eloqua has five different blogs – a mix of corporate and individual written blogs. How did you get there?
Joe: It’s a hub-and-spoke model. Our primary blog is called It’s All About Revenue, and that’s essentially the corporate hub. As you mention, there are several spokes, one of which is Steve’s Digital Body Language blog. “Thought leader” has become a hackneyed term, but Steve Woods truly is one. His blog, which we refer to internally as “DBL,” is his platform to share his expertise with the world.
Sometimes it’s better for credibility to allow an executive to have his own platform, unadulterated by a corporate brand. That’s DBL. It’s Steve’s blog, but Eloqua benefits indirectly from the glow of his credibility. Like I said earlier, everyone in the company is responsible for social media. I am happy to support executive blogs. I just hope they share their perspective on the corporate blog from time to time as well.
Jeremy: How do you manage that from a brand personality and voice perspective?
Joe: When I first started here, Steve Woods gave me the single best piece of advice imaginable. He said, “If the social media guy is the only one talking, the social media guy failed.” A company is the people. We have some very basic rules – don’t flame, don’t spread rumor … basic netiquette – when it comes to employees expressing their personal voice online, but I want to build highways, not roadblocks.
Jeremy: Fun and B2B. Eloqua’s definitely bringing it. From the comics, to Juan Eloqua, what’s behind that?
Joe: A lot of very funny meetings with the marketing team and CMO Brian Kardon, that’s what. Gosh we had so many crazy ideas when it came to this promotion. It started from a content standpoint. That is, we asked, “How can we take something that’s perceived to be complex – like lead scoring – and make people want to read about it?”
The answer to the question was: make it short, simplify the language, and wrap it in fun. Short and simple became the Grande Guide series, fun became the design of the Guide, the nuanced microsite and, of course, our dear friend Juan.
Jeremy: How are you measuring the success of your B2B social media and content marketing initiatives? Who is accountable for their successful or failure? What metrics are most important to you?
Joe: Every marketer in the world is asking himself these questions. For us it depends on the campaign. The Content Grid infographic was about becoming relevant in the “marketing 2.0” conversation, the Social Media Playbook was about providing value to our community, and Juan Eloqua is about generating demand. In the end, what matters most? Everything. Reputation, awareness, lead generation, SEO, buzz, happy clients (through social support) … it all matters. To measure solely by ROI is to undervalue the discipline.
Jeremy: What advice do you have for other B2B marketers who are in the process of shaping their company’s social media efforts?
Joe: Beware of the ROI trap. Paul Dunay nailed it when he wrote, “Social media is not a campaign, it’s a commitment.” Chasing ROI will trick you into thinking of social media in campaign terms. That is, reducing the broader vision to isolated, serial campaigns, because it’s easier to calculate the ROI of an isolated campaign – say a Facebook contest – than it is to measure how many customers you retained by providing instant, remarkable service on Twitter.
Jeremy: If there was one myth you could dispel about B2B social media and content marketing, what would it be?
Joe: That it should be measured exclusively in ROI terms.
Jeremy: Finally, SOX playoffs? How many wins for the Pats? Sox playoffs?
Joe: They’ve been 5 ½ back forever, and with like 30 games to go. I just don’t see it happening, not with the Yankees’ payroll and Tampa’s pitching. Pats wins. Tough schedule, but I am not as obsessed with the J-E-T-S as everyone else seems to be. That said, they’re getting a little long in the tooth. I’ll give them 10.
Jeremy: Thanks Joe.
If these interviews are teaching us anything, it’s that the people (the Joe’s, Michaels, Staceys, Jefferys, and Gords of the world), are making the difference, not b2b social media and content marketing.
Not all prospects are ready to buy immediately, especially in B2B. Lead-nurturing campaigns therefore become imperative for transforming prospects into sales-ready opportunities. Success hinges on planning, creativity and technology working in tandem.
In this week’s #B2BChat, we cover lead nurturing, an area that’s getting a lot of interest from the B2B field. Here’s a snapshot of what’s up for discussion:
Strategies for lead nurturing (what works, what doesn’t, what could work if improved upon)
Content marketing for lead nurturing
Lead scoring and best practices
Lead nurturing tools
Wish list (hey, it’s a field that’s evolving every day – seek and it may just be granted)
Actual questions to be posted:
What strategies work for lead nurturing, what doesn’t, and what could if improved upon?
What’s the sort of content that works well for lead nurturing? How can it be effectively marketed?
What and how significant a role can lead scoring play when nurturing leads?
What lead nurturing tools are you using / considering to use? What have the results been to date?
How do you want to see lead nurturing evolve? What’s your wish list?
Bring your opinions, experiences and questions for a lively discussion with other B2B marketers.
Join us for this week’s #B2Bchat on Lead Nurturing Best Practices, Thursday, August 12th, at 8pm Eastern (5pm Pacific). Follow @B2B_chat for updates.
About the B2Bblogger:Anol Bhattacharya (@B2Bento) is CEO of GetIT Comms, a marketing and communications consultancy for hi-tech and telco’s, where he helps clients (Cisco Systems Inc, IBM, IDC Asia Pacific, HP, Datacraft etc) in the field of B2B marketing, demand generation, lead nurturing, social media strategy & implementation, interactive digital media for marketing initiatives and user experience design.
Anol is one of the key contributors at B2Bento.com and has had his articles published in various media in the region.
Hi, I'm @jeremyvictor, the founder of Make Good Media and Editor In Chief of B2Bbloggers.com.
B2Bbloggers.com is an online magazine for B2B marketers. Our goal is to engage, educate, and make it easier for B2B marketers to find the information they care about to do their jobs successfully.
As a publisher and new media marketing agency, Make Good Media advises businesses how to integrate social media and content marketing with traditional marketing tactics to attract, nurture, engage, and convert customers in the brave new B2B world of the social, mobile web. How can we help you Make Good Media?
Marketing automation is easy, right? Build (or sometimes buy) a list of emails, upload them to your favorite email blaster, set some rules, sit back, and qualify a ton of leads without having to invest any human hours. NOT!
3. Email Filters are Better Than Ever
About the B2Bblogger:Anol Bhattacharya (
