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.
One of the most important decisions made in B2B marketing centers around choosing the right media (print, online, social, events, pr, tv/radio etc) to deliver your message. The question each year is how much of your budget do you assign to each category. Overwhelmingly marketers are being bombarded with the notion that print as a media is becoming a less relevant part of the mix.
Is that true though?
Not based on recent research conducted by Readex Research. In a Media Usage Studies survey of 2,095 professionals between September 2010 and May 2011, when asked which media is used regularly in their work, respondents shared that:
77% regularly use of search engines,
74% regularly use print publications,
74% regularly use e-newsletters,
55% trade/industry publications websites.
Furthermore, the survey revealed that “Of the nine forms of media listed, 55% indicated they used five or more, and only 5% indicated they used only one.” What we learn here is that instead of one media form (digital) replacing another (print), individuals are increasing the number of media types they are using in their work.
Translation: To increase the strength of your marketing, your message needs to permeate all the media channels being used by your customers. And according to this survey, PRINT must be one of them.
Peter Drucker is attributed with saying that ―Business has only two basic functions – marketing and innovation. Why is marketing so important? Perhaps the answer lies in Phil Kotler’s point of view that:
Marketing has the main responsibility for achieving profitable revenue growth derived from acquiring and retaining profitable customers.
Marketing jointly and equally shares the responsibility for generating revenue with our very important partners in the sales organization. I confess. I’m confused by the recent emphasis on Marketing being focused on revenue. We now have blogs, websites and roadshows dedicated to the topic of marketing and revenue. Hasn’t Marketing always been focused on revenue? I mean, isn’t that the job, growing the top line? Did I miss something over the past 30 years?
Maybe the reason for the recent surge is that so many marketers have focused on generating awareness and leads without real clarity around how investments in these efforts drive revenue. Today’s executives expect more than awareness and a higher number of qualified leads from marketing – they want a measurable return on their marketing investment and they want marketing to be able to communicate how it is relevant. Perhaps, the microscopic scrutiny on marketing that has put marketing in the hot seat has also brought the topic of revenue generation into sharper focus.
But here’s the rub and the trap. As a marketer, when was the last time you marketed to a bucket of revenue? This is not the question you should ask. The questions to ask are: how many customer “deals”, both net new and additional business from existing customers, constitute this number? And how many of these is Marketing expected to drive? Why? Because as marketers our job to help the company acquire, keep and grow the value of profitable customers. This approach allows Marketing to help the organization take a customer-centric approach rather than focus on an internal revenue number.
To make this approach work, Marketing needs to translate the revenue number into how many customers and which ones. Ideally marketing should be informing our respective organizations which customers and prospects to target because as marketers we are the ones who are supposed to identifying the best customer and market opportunities from our customer and market segmentation and sizing efforts.
Armed with information about the state and size of the target market, their needs and wants, and how our offer best meets these needs and wants, we can develop strategies and programs designed to connect with these customers, increase and accelerate their consideration, and motivate their conversion to purchase.
Now as a marketer, you can go about setting marketing key performance indicators and program performance targets that will enable you to measure Marketing’s impact on revenue. For example, let’s say you need some number of net new customers for a business unit by the end of the year. Before you can set a target for the number of customer deals Marketing will generate, you will need to know the typical sales cycle type and cost to acquire a net new customer for this business unit. This information can then be used to establish a target number for marketing qualified leads, the cost per lead and a target conversion rate for how many of these will be accepted by sales. And before you establish these numbers you will most likely want to set a performance range for how many customers/prospects a program will enable you to connect with and a target conversion rate and cost for these.
Driving revenue for the business takes working the numbers, then tracking and reporting on the performance to the numbers. Taking a customer-centric view rather than an internally oriented revenue-centric view and “doing the math” facilitates creating a marketing organization that is relevant, can measure its value, and more importantly affect revenue.
What do you think? Do we need a return to the fundamentals? Or are you as surprised as me about all this talk about something that should not need to be said? What do you think is happening to our profession?
As the economy tries to gain a solid footing, and small businesses wonder if they’ll be hiring or laying off employees the remainder of the year, business owners are wise to review their marketing strategy for what remains of this year and going forward in 2012.
While some small businesses are living in fear, worrying that their revenues will not improve anytime soon, others view the shaky economy as an opportunity to further expand their marketing efforts, picking up some business that other companies lack the ability or will to go after.
How to Grasp Opportunities
Small businesses that are willing to take chances and increase their marketing efforts this time around do stand the chance to gain ground on their competitors.
With the economy stagnant at best, small business owners should review the potential for growth that does exist in some markets.
Ways to go about this include reviewing:
How consumers are behaving – While many consumers have tightened up their purse strings, they still need goods and services. Take a look at what your small business offers and how lowering your prices may actually lead to more sales. For an analogy, the guy selling gas at $4.05 a gallon on one corner may think he’s making more revenue than the guy across the street at $3.90 a gallon, but who do you think will actually get more customers?
How your advertising efforts are being deployed – While you may be pulling back on print and television ads (if you’re running them in the first place), what are your efforts online? Social media provides a great opportunity to promote your goods and services, with the only expense basically being time and effort. Using Facebook fan pages, Twitter profiles etc. prove invaluable ways to promote your company;
Are you getting the most out of your employees? – Most employers have a heart and do not like the idea of layoffs. Not only do unemployment costs come into play, but no company wants to get a reputation as a graveyard for jobs over time. That being said, one way to avoid layoffs is dispersing more of the work around the office. Employers want to know they’re getting their money’s worth out of each and every employee. If you’re not able to hire more full-time staff right now and the work is piling up, either disperse the work to current employees or bring on temp help;
Stand out from the competition – If you haven’t been already, determine how to best stand out from competitors. Your niche in your market is even more important now given the shaky economy. Review what your strategy was coming into the year, where you were a year ago and where you want to be a year from now.
Given the recent plunge of the Dow, the wrangling over the debt ceiling, and uncertainty on whether or not President Obama will get or even deserves to be re-elected in 2012, it is important for small business owners to ramp up their marketing efforts, not slash them.
Most importantly, tell a story to consumers of why your small business can provide for them unlike the competition.
A major part of your strategy is reminding your present customers why they should stay with you and not consider jumping ship. Lastly, reach out to potential new customers and explain to them why they should come aboard.
With no crystal ball to determine where this economy is headed, those small businesses who best market themselves will likely be the ones who emerge a little battered and bruised but still standing when all is said and done.
The need for multi-channel marketing continues to be the next opportunity for many marketers. Having a presence, voice and communicating to your target audience in one channel alone became ‘old school’ as many companies began connecting marketing efforts across mobile, social media, websites and email initiatives.
As marketers move toward creating and promoting messages across channels, which consumers are demanding, each should be aware of the following 5 Mandates for Survival in the Digital World.
Digital marketing will continue to evolve. According to Forrester Research, digital marketing budgets are expected to surpass $20 billion for the first time. What this means to marketers, other than perhaps an increased presence at the revenue table, is identifying where marketing needs to expand. What channels are effective and should continue? Which weren’t?And maybe more importantly, where do you think competitors might break through in upcoming months? Scoping out competitors websites’, networks and advertising placement is a great way to stay up-to-speed with what they are investing in more frequently.
Mobile marketing. As more people stay plugged in everywhere they go, the more marketers will try to reach them via mobile devices. An important sub-category is location-based marketing. Most mobile devices are equipped with GPS, so if your business serves a local market, make sure it’s listed in all the local directories and peer review sites like Yelp.If you are already exploring location-based marketing via FourSquare or a similar service, try taking it to the next level by offering discounts/coupons to someone who is currently at a nearby retail store/restaurant.
Social Media Conversations. The move from talking at your customer to engaging them in conversation is fast becoming the norm. If your company hasn’t had a chance to invest time and resources into the channels that make it easy to build relationships, such as Twitter, Facebook or blogging, it’s likely time.
Cohesive content strategy. “Content is king” is still the reigning slogan out there, but “unify your content” is becoming an equally important rally cry. The ability to stay “on message” across a website, Facebook, Twitter, blog, email, press releases, and live chat can be difficult.Help your team stay on message by creating a content matrix which aligns messages and indicates the timeframe for particular messages, discounts or promotions. This allows all team members to be aware of current content marketing campaigns and if hosted in a shareable space, can alert teams of updates in real-time. Expect to see more “content czars” as companies strive to consistently brand themselves across the multi-faceted digital world.
Video. Increased processing power and bandwidth make downloading and watching videos easy, so people are coming to expect (for example) a 3-minute product demo accompanying a web page, white paper or press release.Written content will always be important, and adding video to your content strategy will most certainly give your company the competitive advantage it needs in today’s digital marketing landscape
Some other mandates to consider include:
Development of tools to analyze communications across digital channels.
Increased pay-per-order advertising.
More personalized advertising (following on the heels of increased consumer tracking).
Find more information on digital integration, including press release tips, by checking out the PRWeb blog.
It’s time for CMOs to stop marketing from being judged on superficial design activity and isolated tasks like event management, and start thinking about how the function of marketing can be accountable for improving the company’s commercial performance.
The role of the B2B marketing function can be precarious. It can be undervalued as firms struggle to make the link between marketing activities and bottom-line improvement. Linking marketing activity to bottom line results has always been a vexing issue for B2B marketers and for other company executives. Measuring the return on investment from marketing spend on tradeshows, adverts in trade magazines, brochures and breakfast seminars is acknowledged as being problematic. As a result, marketing is often viewed as a function somewhat isolated from sales and sales performance and, as such, lacking in credibility.
Marketing departments are finding themselves under increasing pressure to justify their spending, prove the effects of their marketing campaigns, and demonstrate program success… or risk losing their budgets.” – Forbes and MarketShare Partners
In recessionary times, marketing can face the deepest cuts. In fact many Fortune 1,000 companies don’t even have a CMO role. A 2009 Ernst & Young survey noted that just 13% to 15% of Fortune 1,000 companies employed some sort of marketing position with a chief or senior-executive-level title such as chief marketing officer or chief revenue officer. If you’re a CMO the question is how do you change this. How do you get the rest of the executive team to take marketing seriously? The answer lies in using digital techniques to turn marketing into an accountable function that makes a C-Level contribution to your company’s business growth.
First principles…
CMOs and their marketing teams firstly need to recognise that more than 80% of B2B buyers find their suppliers (mostly by beginning a search on the internet) rather than a supplier finding the buyer. This is a fundamental shift in thinking. The buying process is more complex, especially for high-consideration B2B technology sales. Buyers will investigate solutions on their terms. Your job as a marketer is to reach those buyers with the right content at each step in their buying cycle. This is called content marketing: providing content in the right form for your buyers when and where they want to consume it. To do this successfully, you must first get a deeper understanding of your buyers and their buying process so you can understand what content to produce. Once you’ve done this, you need to optimise your site to make sure you can be found and use content to raise awareness amongst your buyers. You then need to use selected content to drive buyers to your website and capture their details in return for interesting content. This gives you permission to continue to nurture them until they are ready to make a purchase decision.
With digital marketing, you can track and record every interaction and response from buyers, which means you can quantify the results of your marketing spend and achieve accountability. The tools used in digital demand generation track and record every single interaction, click, open, and contact along the way showing exactly the result of any activity and the contribution to sales.
It is worth noting that there is some sticky ground here. Marketers should not get drawn into an over-reliance on reporting on email opens, page visits, Facebook likes, Twitter followers and so on. They’re useful indicators but what the rest of the organisation cares about are the number of sales ready-leads generated as a result and the cost of generating each lead. That’s the bottom line for marketing effectiveness. All those other indicators let marketing measure their own effectiveness in the process they implement to ultimately generate a lead and they can also help to measure awareness. Think of it this way: reporting how many lines of code the development team has written today is not very exciting for the sales director, but the availability of a new product is.
There’s no need to limit this thinking to the virtual world either. The framework you build for digital marketing should include capturing and nurturing leads from all sources including things like tradeshows, telephone enquiries, and sales calls. Think of digital demand generation as a best practice toolset for the marketing function as a whole not as a separate foray into the world of virtual lead generation.
When implemented together, and viewed as a whole, these techniques will show you exactly what return they produce. If your email campaign and pay-per-click results are added to your website monitoring and nurturing tools and these are all linked to a lead tracking system, you can see each customer’s journey across all your marketing channels. You can see what interaction helped to move the enquiry into a lead, the lead into a prospect, and the prospect in to a sale. As a result you can clearly measure how your spend on this new approach results in buyer awareness, sales-ready opportunities and contribution to revenue.
Your sales funnel becomes much more transparent and granular through this approach. You can identify what tactics are producing the best return, and you can gauge the return. You can also be more precise about the status of prospects in the sales funnel and the likeness and timelines for conversion to a sale.
The Promise of Marketing Accountability
Fulfilling the promise of marketing accountability will benefit your company in the following ways:
It gives you visibility on future income by showing an accountable pipeline from the very early stages
It helps you form a more confident view of which leads will result in sales.
It lets you work out what spend is required at the top of the sales funnel to keep up or improve the numbers at the bottom of the funnel
It lets you measure the cost of generating leads
It allows you to invest with clarity in marketing, knowing what the return will be on incremental investments.
The whole picture in focus – from lead to sale
If you have the right process in place, you’ll be able to see what leads are being generated at what cost and from what sources. You can adjust your spend to generate more leads from existing sources, and quickly and cheaply test out new tactics to generate new leads. You can actively nurture each lead with a defined programme of interactions to take them to the point of being ‘sales ready’.
To facilitate better integration of sales and marketing functions there should be an agreed definition of a qualified lead. Marketing efforts can then clearly focus on producing more and more leads that are defined as ready for sales. Leads can be passed back if no longer sales-ready. Marketing can demonstrably show its contribution to the top of the sales funnel. And that means better sales results not to mention a more harmonious existence.
With the right processes in place, you can show how many leads are generated and how many of them turn into sales-ready leads. You can show how long the process takes and how much it costs. And, armed with this information, you can plan with confidence how to increase these numbers to deliver more sales-ready leads. The nebulous activity at the top of the sales funnel is now thrown into sharp relief. The true value of all your marketing activity can be revealed. And if the CMO can show the number of leads being generated by the marketing team and the cost of each lead, it makes sense that this should be reported at Board Level by the CMO just like the Sales Director’s sales funnel and the CFO’s financial statements.
Marketing should never be completely numerically driven. Company awareness, goodwill, and light-touch activities are much more difficult to measure but add significantly in terms of value. But the closer it’s aligned to it’s core activity of producing sales leads, and setting itself up to track and measure this activity, the more license it will have to perform these softer activities.
The CMO will hold more respect and gravitas when providing input to product decisions, overall strategic direction, and will gain more influence within the organisation. In making a contribution to your company’s’ bottom-line, and for the CMO’s career prospects, marketing must show a strong return on investment.
What do you think? Is it time for CMOs to be held more accountable?
Stop pushing press releases into your social streams! Don’t keep pushing the same old messages out! You need to engage!
How many times you read or heard those statements over the last year? After that, how many times have you thought to yourself, “Then what the heck am I supposed to do? It’s the only content I have.”
If you’ve found yourself in this position, rest assured you are not alone. It’s one of the most common challenges facing B2B marketers today.
That said, as complex as the social web can be, your approach to it doesn’t have to be. All you need to get started is the answer to three simple questions about your customer. These questions are at the center of every B2B social media strategy and the answers are your guide.
Where are they?
Understanding where your prospects and customers hang out online may be the single most important question to answer. But the fact of the matter is it takes real effort to discover. So before you rush out and begin building any presence on the social web, your first step is to start exploring and understanding where on the web (social and otherwise) the people that matter to you spend their time.
What do they like?
This question not only helps direct the search for your customers on the web but also feeds directly into your content and editorial strategy. Your target is to learn as much about them as possible from their professional interests to their evolving media consumption habits.
The key point to consider is that as a group, your customers have a set of shared common interests, problems, and values. It’s this information that is vital to the creation of content that is going to influence and attract new and existing customers to your business and brand.
What do they know?
First similar to the “what do they like?” question, it will guide your content and editorial strategy. But more importantly, this question is one that helps guide your efforts once you begin the process of participating and interacting on the social web with your prospects and customers.
As you begin meeting new people and building a community, the real work is in understanding what each of them knows about you and where they are in their buying process. That is the “what do they know” that you care about.Armed with that information, you and your team can have the appropriate dialogue to support their specific needs. After all that’s the whole point right:
to start and nurture relationships,
accelerate the speed at which new opportunities become customers, and
build brand awareness.
So that its, a simple three question approach to building an effective B2B social media strategy. It’s at the intersection of these three questions that the most successful B2B social media efforts are born.
I’ve been catching up this weekend on some of the SXSW coverage. In this interview of Valeria Maltoni by Simon Mainwaring, he captures what I think is a gem of insight from Valeria.
After watching the video ask yourself, “Do you have buyers or customers?”
Don’t have five minutes to invest in the video, here is the gem from Valeria:
Let me take a step back and define what I mean by transforming buyers into customers. Most organizations think of customers as all the people who buy from them. I would like you to think about the transactions, the number of transactions. If you have have a lot of people who buy just once, what you have really is “buyers” you don’t have “customers”.
To me commerce begins, when you have those buyers who come back and buy a second time, and a third time. And then with social, you have those customers who not only come back and buy something, but also bring back their friends. You know, it’s kinda the word of mouth on steriods in social media. And now they are helping other people come to your business and make transactions.
So you see the multiplying effect of designing a conversation that allows people who are attracted to your business and solution to come back with other people like them and generate more business.
Today, LinkedIn announced a rather significant milestone: 100 million members. To quote the blog post announcing it, “We’re now growing at roughly one million new LinkedIn members every week, the equivalent of a professional joining the site at faster than one member per second.”
At 100 million members, as a social network, LinkedIn is simply too big not include in your B2B social media marketing strategy.
Whether it be growing your connections, participating in groups, starting a group, responding to Questions, or going a step further and extending your website to use their API, LinkedIn should have a place in your B2B social media strategy.
Personally, I’ve never been overly concerned about receiving a perfect grade as long as I know I’ve done my best. I raised my kids to think the same way. I believe there may be a downside to every kid on the team getting trophies, or taking up an entire cub scout meeting to hand out enough awards, badges and patches to make an old general jealous.
But I understand that awards and recognition for great work can be both fulfilling and fun.
For example, and for some silly reason, I enjoy being the Foursquare mayor of Duck’s Cosmic Kitchen in Decatur, Ga. I just lost my crown today, and I want it back.
And as a partner and creative director of a B2B marketing agency, I’m well aware of the value placed on winning industry awards; it enhances an agency’s credibility among clients and prospects alike. Every award competition has its critics, but there is more at stake than large egos. Special recognition can also help grow your business.
In fact, here’s one of the predictions Mark made for 2011 in a more recent blog post:
“Social scoring takes center stage– Ask any of your friends about Klout and you’re likely to get a blank stare. That’s going to change as social influence scoring goes mainstream. Whether you like it or not, people love to rate and grade other people, and this is going to be an extremely hot trend. Think how large the market is for SEO gurus. Social scoring is basically personal SEO. How is the world going to change when every teenager on the planet is trying to figure out how to improve the social influence score showing up next to their Facebook profile?”
My engagement with social media is primarily through Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. I also blog. And though I enjoy the conversations, interactions, ideas, links and retweets, for me, it’s all about business. And when it comes to social media marketing and B2B, everyone is looking for results.
Are badges, awards, scores, high ratings and recognition by industry peers a way of demonstrating results? I think so, but I also realize it’s more important to measure inbound traffic, lead generation, conversion and sales results.
I don’t keep a personal social media scorecard.
But maybe I should. Do you?
Business-to-business marketing is all about results, and there are more ways than ever to measure the ROI of almost everything we do. Whatever you call it – social media marketing, content marketing or inbound marketing – and whatever way you engage in it – from Twitter to Foursquare – you can score that now, too. There are many services for social media monitoring, conversion analytics and lead scoring, but what about your personal and professional influence?
How are you doing? How influential are you to other B2B marketers and the business community at large? I asked myself that question today and, in the interest of full-disclosure, I will share with you my scores and ratings on Klout and TwitterGrader.
I also compared my score to the aforementioned Mark Schaefer. I respect and follow Mark through his Twitter posts and prolific blogging, and we have become good friends and collaborators on many projects. I’ve learned a lot from his lead, so I thought I’d compare our scores and see if I could glean any new insights.
Klout Score – Billy vs. Mark
Twitter Grader - Billy vs. Mark
What did I learn from these reports?
Well, I learned I have a lot more to learn from Mark Schaefer for one thing.
The Klout score tells me Mark is way ahead of me in level of influence (no surprise there), and that I may never catch up. I did match his Twitter grade, though, and that is rewarding enough for now. It’s not exactly a tie though. Of 8,428,847 twitter users, Mark is ranked 6,930 and I am a long, long way back at number 72,487.
How seriously should we take social media scores and awards? I’m not really sure, but I am interested. Are you? I’d like to hear your thoughts.
And speaking of awards, the 2010 B2B Twitterer of the Year Awards (@B2BTOTY) will be announced live at the conclusion of the #B2Bchat, which begins at 8 p.m. ET on Thursday, Jan. 27.
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?
Peter Drucker is attributed with saying that ―Business has only two basic functions – marketing and innovation. Why is marketing so important? Perhaps the answer lies in Phil Kotler’s point of view that:
