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I wanted to share a step-by-step on our solution to track multiple landing pages with a Person Attribute Field while using one generic form, without relying on URL UTM parameter. I hope this will be helpful to anyone looking for a solution. This solution was pieced together through some research from different sources and some trial and error. Feel free to share your thoughts or comments on it! Let's begin. [Problem] We have multiple landing pages linked to different campaigns and different assets to download. We wanted to use one generic form for all of those landing pages, and capture a Person Attribute Field to track the campaign, we didn't want long UTM parameters following our URLs or multiple forms so we built it into the page instead. [Solution] Populate a Hidden Field on your form through HTML code embedded into your Landing Page to capture campaign information. An alternate solution which doesn't use Person Attribute fields –  you can also use the "Add Constraint" option on the Fills Out Form trigger to select any form and the web pages you want to capture for the campaign, as shown below. If that's all you need, this simple solution would suffice. Step 1: Setting your Generic Form Field In your generic form, add a new Field and select the Person Attribute you're going to use to track the landing page. For our form, I used the "utm_campaign" Person Attribute because we're already tracking through that field. You can choose to use any Person Attribute that is appropriate for your Marketo instance to track campaigns. The Label doesn't matter, set Field Type to "Hidden", and set Form Pre-fill to "Disabled". Edit the Autofill, set Default Value as "utm tracking missing" (or anything similar of your choice, we'll get into why later) and Get Value from as "Use Default Value". If you don't set a default value Marketo defaults to "null" which will block changes to that field for this form. Once you're happy with your other fields, save your form. Step 2: Populating the Hidden Tracking Field through your Guided Landing Page HTML In your Design Studio, find the Landing Page Template you're using for your Landing Pages, and edit it. Note this step is only for Marketo Guided Landing Pages*. In your head section, place the following Marketo String with your meta tags (more information on Marketo Strings here). This will allow you to easily adjust the landing page campaign later as you create more pages. Find where your Marketo form div is located, and insert the script code following the mktoForm div as shown below. This script will change your hidden "utm_campaign" field to the value indicated on your landing page. "utmcampaign"** is your Person Attribute Field name, and ${hiddencampaign} points to the Marketo String you set up. Save your Landing Page Template and you are done with this step. *Note: You can also do this step with embedded forms on non-Marketo pages using the code for setting Hidden Fields on this page. Note that you'll skip setting the Marketo String Syntax and input your desired Person Attribute value directly into the script as Marketo Syntaxes cannot be used on non-Marketo pages. **Note: You'll notice that the HTML form.vals "utmcampaign" is different from the displayed Person Attribute "utm_campaign" in your form editor and Marketo record. Sometimes the actual SOAP API value used by the backend is different from the Friendly Display value in Marketo, I will include steps on how to check the SOAP API value in the appendix at the end of this tutorial. Step 3: Create your Landing Page Once your HTML is set in your Landing Page Template, create or edit your Landing Page using that template. Set your generic form from earlier, and in your right-hand elements bar you should see a section for Variables, where you'll see the "Hidden Campaign Field" you created using the mktoString meta tag. Type in the campaign name you want to track with there. I chose "Example Campaign" for the purpose of this tutorial. Once you're happy with the rest of your landing page go ahead and save it. Your landing page form will now populate the "utm_campaign" Person Attribute for the Person with "Example Campaign" once the form is submitted. Step 4: Set your Trigger Capture Campaign Now that all the client facing elements are ready, you can create your Trigger Smart Campaign to capture and update the Person record. In your Marketo Program, create a new Smart Campaign. I've named mine "Campaign Capture" for my own organization, but you can name it whatever you want. Description is up to you, or just leave it blank. Once it's created, go to the Campaign's Smart List and add the Trigger Filter "Fills Out Form", and indicate one or more forms that feed into this campaign. Now add a Filter for "utm_campaign" and set the value to the "Hidden Campaign Field" you indicated on your landing page, in this case "Example Campaign". Insert any other Filters you want to exclude or include People that come through the program, and make sure to adjust your Smart List Rule Logic accordingly. Once you're happy with it, move onto the Flow step and set your form fill success actions. For this tutorial, we've opted to "Change Program Status" to Responded and "Send Email" confirming form success. Now "Activate" your Trigger Smart Campaign and you're ready to go! Step 5: Error Reporting No process is without errors, so now we'll set up a simple error reporting Trigger Smart Campaign to notify you when your campaign capture process fails at the form step. You'll recall that in the form, we set the Default Value for our "utm_campaign" as "utm tracking missing". This is so that in the event the HTML code in your Landing Page fails to populate the field with a value, the form sets this as the "utm_campaign" Person Attribute. To catch this error and notify myself, I set up a new Default Program with our "Operational" channel settings and named it "Tracking Error Notification". Inside it I created Smart Campaign and and an Alert Email (information on creating Alert Emails using the specific Alert Token). In the Smart Campaign Smart List, insert a Trigger Filter for "Data Value Changes", Add Constraint "New Value" set it as the default error value, in this case "utm tracking missing" Now all that's left is to create a Flow Step to "Send Alert" (information on how here). Now you'll receive an email alert anytime the utm_campaign field fails to populate through the Landing Page form. *EDIT: A commenter recommended that the error message be cleared so that multiple exceptions can be flagged, which would be a great step. To do so, add a "Change Data Value" flow step for the Person Attribute, in this case "utm_campaign" and set the new value to "NULL", which will clear the "utm_campaign" field after the alert is sent. You're done! Now for all future Landing Pages with this generic Form, just remember to populate the "Hidden Campaign Field". I hope you've found this tutorial helpful. Cheers, Lawrence Mien Marketing Operations TigerText The Very Short Appendix So you've set your hidden Person Attribute field and indicated it in your HTML code, but the Person Attribute is still not populating correctly through the form. The issue may be that the Friendly Display Person Attribute field name is different from the SOAP API Person Attribute field for HTML. If you don't have Marketo Admin access, or don't feel like exporting the full field list, here's how you can check it: Publish or preview your Landing Page and go to it in your browser. Right-click at the bottom of the form (on Chrome) and hit Inspect. This will pull up the righthand side development panel to show you the HTML. Find the where the Marketo Form HTML is located and expand the mktoFormRow where the hidden field is. In the highlighted section below, you'll see that the SOAP API name of the Person Attribute is "utmcampaign" and not "utm_campaign". Simply drop this correct SOAP API Person Attribute name into your code back in Step 2.
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Basic Nurturing Advanced Nurturing Measuring ROI Calculating the ROI of Nurturing Understanding the Engagement Dashboard Basic Reporting - (Login Required) Measuring ROI Understanding Engagement Scores Engagement Stream Performance Reports Defining Nurture How to Create a Nurturing Strategy Working with Engagement Programs (Login Required) Add Streams to Your Program Optimizing Nurture How to Test and Optimize Nurturing Engagement Engine, Scoring, and Data Management - (Login Required) Segmenting for Nurture Basic Nurturing Segmentations Segmenting for Nurture Advanced Nurture Segmentations Transition Leads Between Engagement Streams Engaging with Content How to Create Content on a Budget Content Marketing Tactical Plan Worksheet Add Content to a Nurture Stream Nurturing Across Channels Your Multi-Channel Nurturing Strategy
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Over the last few years all these translations have been gathered together by my colleagues. One of them had kindly gathered them into this beautiful display and I thought it was worth sharing with you all. CTAs English Simplified Chinese (CN-S) Traditional Chinese (CN-T) Portuguese (PT) Japanese (JA) Spanish (ES) Korean (KO) German (DE) View Now 现在就查看 現在就查看 Veja agora 今すぐ見る Vea ahora 지금 보기 Read More 阅读更多 閱讀更多 Leia mais さらに読む Lea más 더 읽기 Watch Video 观看视频 觀看視頻 Assista ao video 動画を観る Vea el video 비디오 보기 Learn More 了解更多 了解更多 Aprenda mais さらに学ぶ Aprenda más 더 알아보기 Read the brochure 查看资料手册 查看資料手冊 Leia o material 小冊子を読む Lea el folleto 브로슈어 읽기 Broschüre lesen Register today 今天就注册 今天就註冊 Inscreva-se agora 今すぐ登録する Regístrese hoy 오늘 등록하기 Explore more opportunities 发掘更多机会 發掘更多機會 Explore mais oportunidades 他の機会も探る Explore más oportunidades 더 많은 기회 알아보기 Read full report 查看完整报告 查看完整報告 Leia o relatório completo 完全レポートを読む Lea el informe completo 보고서 전문 보기 Read article 阅读全文 閱讀全文 Leia o artigo 記事を読む Lea el artículo 기사 보기 Read press release 阅读新闻稿 閱讀新聞稿 Leia o release de imprensa プレスリリースを読む Lea el comunicado de prensa 보도자료 보기 View tool 查看工具 查看工具 Veja a ferramenta ツールを見る Vea la herramienta 도구 보기 View quotes 查看报价 查看報價 Veja as cotações 相場を表示する Vea las cotizaciones 시세 보기 View contract specifications 查看合约规则 查看合約規則 Veja especificações de contrato 商品仕様を見る Vea las especificaciones de contrato 상품 명세 보기 Listen to podcast 收听广播 收聽廣播 Ouça o podcast ポッドキャストを聴く Oiga el podcast 팟캐스트 보기 View presentation 查看 查看 Assista à apresentação プレゼンテーションを見る Vea la presentación 프리젠테이션 보기 Get started 开始 開始 Aprenda 今すぐ始める Comience a aprender 시작하기 View offerings 查看产品及服务 查看產品及服務 Veja ofertas 商品とサービスを表示する Vea las ofertas 제안 보기** View schedule 查看日程安排 查看日程安排 Veja programação 予定を見る Vea el programa 스케줄 보기*** Read white paper 阅读报告 閱讀報告 Leia relatório oficial 白書を読む Lea el libro blanco 백서 읽기 Read fact card 阅读事实卡 閱讀事實卡 Leia o cartão de dados パンフレットを読む lea la tarjeta de datos 팸플릿 읽기**** Download PDF 下载PDF文档 下載PDF文檔 Baixe o PDF PDFをダウンロードする Descargar PDF PDF다운로드 PDF herunterladen Items found on Research Articles English Simplified Chinese (CN-S) Traditional Chinese (CN-T) Portuguese (PT) Japanese (JA) Spanish (ES) Korean (KO) German (DE) View this article in PDF format. 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About the Author 关于作者 演说者简介 해설자 소개 Über den Autor Disclaimer Common Headings English Simplified Chinese (CN-S) Traditional Chinese (CN-T) Portuguese (PT) Japanese (JA) Spanish (ES) Korean (KO) German (DE) Resources 资源 資源 関連情報 참고 자료 View in: English 简体中文 (CN-S) 繁體中文 (CN-T) 日本語 (JA) 한국어 (KO) Português (PT) Español (ES) 语言: 語言: Ler em: 使用言語: Ver en: 언어: Key Features 主要特点 主要特點 Principais características 主な特長 Principales características 주요 특징 Key Benefits 主要优势 主要優勢 Principais benefícios 主なメリット Beneficios clave 주요 혜택 Contact Us 联系我们 联系我们 Entre em contato conosco: お問合せ先 Contáctenos: 연락처 In the News 相关新闻 相關新聞 É notícia 関連ニュース Recursos 뉴스 화제 Figure 1 图1 圖 1 Gráfico 1 図1 Figura 1 그림 1 Abb. 1 Getting Started 简介 簡介 Começando ご利用を始めるにあたって Primeros pasos 시작하기 Related Content 相关资料 相關內容 Conteúdo relacionado Contenido relacionado Forms English Simplified Chinese (CN-S) Traditional Chinese (CN-T) Portuguese (PT) Japanese (JA) Spanish (ES) Korean (KO) First Name 氏 氏 Primeiro nome 氏 Nombre 이름 Last Name 姓 姓 Sobrenome 姓 Apellido 성 Business email 电子邮箱 電子郵箱 Email corporativo 業務用メールアドレス Correo electrónico empresarial 이메일 Phone number 电话号码 電話號碼 Telefone 電話番号 Número telefónico 전화번호 Country 国家 國家 País 国 País 국가 Address 地址 地址 Endereço 住所 Domicilio 주소 City 城市 城市 Cidade 市町村 Ciudad 도시명 State 省 省 Estado 州・都道府県 Estado 주 Firm name 公司名称 公司名稱 Nome da empresa 会社名 Nombre de la empresa 회사명 Company Type 公司类型 公司類型 Atividade da empresa 会社の種類 Tipo de empresa 회사 유형 Job Function 工作职能 工作職能 Função 職務権限 Función del cargo 담당 업무 Comments/Specific Interest 评论/咨询 評論/諮詢 Comentários/Interesse específico コメント/質問 Comentarios/Interés específico 건의사항 또는 관심 사항 Submit 提交 提交 Enviar 送信 Enviar 제출 Regulator 监管者 監管者 Regulador レギュレータ Regulador 규제당국 Vendor 供应商 供應商 Fornecedor ベンダー Proveedor 벤더 Other 其他 其他 Outro その他 Otro 기타 Indicates required fields. 必填项 必填項 Indica campos obrigatórios 入力必須の項目です。 Indique los campos requeridos 필수 항목을 가리킴 Contact Us 联系我们 聯繫我們 Entre em contato conosco お問合せ先 Contáctenos 연락처 Must be valid email. Example@yourdomain.com 请填写有效邮箱, Example@yourdomain.com 請填寫有效郵箱, Example@yourdomain.com E-mail válido é necessário. Exemplo@seudominio.com 有効なメールアドレスでなければなりません。例:Example@yourdomain.com Debe ser un correo electrónico válido. Ejemplo@sudominio.com 유효한 이메일이어야 합니다. Example@yourdomain.com This field is required. 该项是必填项 該項是必填項 Este campo é obrigatório. この項目は必須です。 Se requiere este campo. 이 항목은 필수항목입니다. Thank you. Your message has been received. Someone will contact you shortly 您好,您的信息已收到,我们的工作人员会尽快与您联系 您好,您的信息已收到,我們的工作人員會盡快與您聯繫 Obrigado. Sua mensagem foi recebida. Você será contatado em breve. ありがとうございました。メッセージを受信いたしました。こちらよりご返信いたします。 Gracias. Hemos recibido su mensaje. En breve, una persona se pondrá en contacto con usted. 감사합니다. 귀하의 메시지가 접수되었습니다. 곧 연락 드릴 예정입니다. 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[氏名]様ではない場合は、ここをクリックしてください。 Haga click aquí si éste no es usted 다른 사람이시면 여기를 클릭하십시오 Topic 主题 主題 Tópico トピック 주제 Select One 请选择一个 請選擇一項 Selecione um 一つ選択してください 하나를 선택하십시오 Register for future communications 注册日后接收通讯 登記日後收取通訊 Inscreva-se para contatos futuros 今後の通知を受け取るための登録 향후 커뮤니케이션을 위해 등록하십시오 Thank you for registering. ご登録いただき、ありがとうございます。
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In our first post, we discussed the concept of URLs and UTM tracking. Now that those are in place, we will dive into the setup with Marketo. Here are the high-level steps: Create the UTM fields in order to have a place to store the values Add the fields on your form pages as hidden fields, add to a landing page Setup the Marketo programs and/or smart campaigns to process them Test and check to make sure it's working Step 1 - Create UTM fields If you are setting this up for the first time, or you have inherited a Marketo instance, I recommend checking to make sure these fields are not already in place, or they exist, but are named something else. If you have access, go to Admin > Field Management, and search for any fields containing "utm" or "ppc" to see if they are there. In the screenshot below, you'll see that all 5 fields have been created and are currently mapped to the SFDC lead and contact records. *Side note: The mapping is important if you want the values for leads or contacts since SFDC treats them differently. Also, if you are creating them for the first time, make sure to do it in SFDC and wait for the fields to sync to Marketo or you'll have to get it re-mapped. ​ Step 2 - Add fields to your forms Now that you have the fields created, add them to any relevant data forms. There are two main options for this. If your website uses custom non-Marketo forms, ask your web developer to add the extra fields to the forms and make them hidden. In the field management screen, there's an "Export Field Names" button which will export all the necessary fields that you can provide to your developer. The file provides a mapping for the UTM values that need to be written to from the website form field to the Marketo field. There might be other options such as native plugins that might already accomplish this. If you are adding them to a Marketo landing page, drag those new fields onto your forms and make them hidden. In the Autofill property, choose Edit and you'll see options to chose where the field values will populate from. Choose URL Parameter and type in "none" for the default value or anything that you can filter on later to troubleshoot if it's not working. At this point, the landing page is just waiting for a referring visit with UTM values. Consider what happens when someone clicks a link, but does not sign up right away? The values from the URL parameter must be present at the time of submission in order for this to work. So if someone navigates away and the parameters disappear, then the UTM values will not be captured. To solve for this, we have created a tracking script that will store any UTM parameters it finds into a cookie. Now when a visitor fills out a form that contains the hidden UTM values on a form, the cookie will store the UTM value across the main and subdomains. *Technical Stuff: You can upload the extracted file into the images directory or on your web server. Before doing so, take note to make one change to the file and re-save it for it to work. Open the file with any text editor and looking for a line that says "domain=digitalpi.com" and change it to your domain. Once set, it won't expire for another 365 days. The script should be place where your Munchkin script is also placed. It's a simple script that does the following. If UTM parameters are present, store those into a cookie. This means if it comes from a URL and it's the first time seeing it, the script creates the cookie. If the visitor comes back by clicking another link with different UTM parameters, it will replace with the new ones and continue to do so. It's not session specific which means if the visitor closes the browser and comes back at a later date, it will still be in the cookie and keep it for 365 days. Here's a link to the tracking script: dpi-ppc-tracking-script.js.zip So that you can see this process in action, I created a simple form with visible UTM fields on a landing page. When you click on one of the sample links, you should see the UTM values in the UTM fields where they would normally be hidden. If you want to experiment with it, change any of the UTM values after the equal sign and refresh the page. You'll see the new value populated in the field that was changed. Long version: http://info.digitalpi.com/Marketo-UTM-Sample-Page.html?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=email&utm_term=utm&utm_content=utm-tracking-blog-p2&utm_campaign=blog-sub Shortened version: http://goo.gl/O6VyL9 Step 3 - Setup Marketo processing This next part is just ordinary Marketo smart campaign building. Setup the trigger filtering on UTM values. Make sure it's unique enough to process for the individual UTM parameter (campaign, source, medium, etc.). Step 4 - Test and validate Create a few URLs to your landing page and use different combinations of UTM parameters and click on your form submission. Look for the test record and in the custom fields look for the values. If they are there, it's working properly. Keep in mind these values will change each time a new set of UTM values are set. You can run reports on the different campaigns or even down to the add level if programs are setup to track that. This feature is used frequently, so we hope this article saves a lot of time and frustration. Happy Marketing!!
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Author: Joe Paone  ​ It’s no secret that the financial services industry has been going through a transformation in recent years. Independent financial advisors, as well as large institutions, are moving away from commissioned accounts to a fee-based approach. Firms like Merrill Lynch that were once full of commissioned-based brokerage accounts now have a company roadmap to transition customers to fee-only accounts. Advisors who were once paid on transactions are now be paid a percentage of all the money that they manage. This not only has implications for their business models but their marketing models as well. By tying compensation to assets under management (AUM), advisors are now highly incentivized to retain existing customers (unless they want a pay cut). And if they want to increase AUM, they must acquire new customers or cross-sell additional services like estate planning or tax planning. Impact to Marketers This shift in focus applies to marketers across all verticals, as buyers have higher expectations and are harder to win over without having personalized conversations. Gone are the days where a print ad strategy was all you needed to acquire new customers and keep your brand top-of-mind. Today’s marketers have to be more savvy than simply sending mass emails to their databases or hiring an agency to run a digital ad across the internet. Buyers and investors expect the same level of personalization they would get from Amazon, YouTube, or other retail companies. In an industry that is traditionally slow to adopt new technology, it’s imperative that marketers push their firms to change. There’s a reason robo-advisors like Wealthfront or Betterment are growing at breakneck speeds (granted, a very small percentage of assets are currently managed by robo-advisors). They are embracing technology like marketing automation to more efficiently and effectively acquire and retain customers through a personalized approach at scale. Here are three key ways marketing automation can help you acquire and retain customers, in financial services and beyond: 1. Segmentation To get the right message to the right investor, you must segment your audience. This is the same strategy YouTube uses when suggesting videos you may be interested in, or Amazon uses to suggest products you might want to consider. While there are ways to implement segmentation outside of marketing automation (excel, CRM, etc.), if you want to deliver different messages to different segmentations in real-time, there are no substitutes. Create a personalized journey by segmenting your prospects into different buckets so that you can provide each bucket specific content that aligns to your desired outcome. Basic segmentation can be separated into two different buckets: demographic (based on who they are) and behavioral (based on what they have done). Demographic: If you are an asset manager, for example, you can start demographic segmentation by splitting your audience into two categories: institutional investors and retail investors. For institutional investors, you likely know your target market very well. Marketing automation allows you to segment based on industry, company size, role, location, AUM, investment style, and anything else you deem important. On the other side, you have retail investors, which at a basic level can be segmented by age, net worth or investable assets, location, gender, and investment preferences or goals. Behavioral: Behavior segmentation is based on what your audience does, which could be: where a prospect is in the buying cycle, what their score is (which will be covered below), different financial products or strategies they have expressed an interest in, web activity or email engagement, and, of course, non-activity. All of these behaviors reveal their online body language that indicates their level of interest and future intent in becoming a client. Now that we’ve gone through the basic two components of segmentation, you can define and build specific segmentations for your clients and prospects that leverage both demographic and behavioral information. You will use these segmentations to help tailor your messaging for each group. Target accounts, investment strategy, client behavior, portfolio size, investor persona, and region all lend themselves well to different segmentations. Once you’ve nailed that down, the next step is to start developing even more advanced and targeted segments taking into account behavioral data, scoring, etc. An easy place to start is through your buyer personas. For example, a prospect may be retired and primarily interested in fixed income. If you want to acquire that prospect, it doesn’t make sense to communicate with them about a long-short strategy or some other tactical play. On the other hand, you may have identified some prospects that are more hands-on or sophisticated. Those potential investors may prefer more detailed communications in the form of a whitepaper and more frequent updates. The bottom line with segmentation is that if you know what your customers and prospects care about, you can tailor your communications to them. Whether you’re marketing financial products or business software, by delivering personalized communications to specific segments, with you’ll be able to take the personalized touch and feel of a 1 on 1 conversation and extend it into all of your digital marketing communications. 2. Scoring Lead scoring—a method of ranking leads for their sales-readiness, agreed upon by both sales and marketing—is a concept that you’re probably familiar with. Lead scoring helps you prioritize which prospects sales need to follow up with immediately and which prospects need to be nurtured. While it sounds easy enough to implement, depending on the size of your business, it can be extremely challenging without the right tools. If you work for a large firm, you may have to engage multiple teams (analytics, digital, etc.) and partners (agencies, third parties, etc.) in order to pull all the information that you need for lead scoring. This is extremely inefficient, time-consuming, and more often than not leaves you with stale data. If you work for a small firm, you may have to conduct your lead scoring by exporting data from various sources and running multiple Excel searches s to match known users to their behaviors. You may also be using a CRM system to help with your lead scoring. In either case, you’re left with incomplete data and can only score “known visitors,” leaving all unidentified or anonymous prospects behind. With marketing automation, you can set up rules that score prospects and customers based on demographics (investible assets, investment time horizon, etc.) and behavior (online and offline) as well as anything else that your sales team finds important. If your marketing automation platform integrates with your CRM, when a salesperson updates a record (i.e. changes a person’s investible assets), that information will be immediately reflected in the score. Scoring should happen in real-time, so you don’t have to spend countless hours pulling data and matching accounts. For an illustrative look at the benefits of lead scoring and how to implement it, refer to the chart below. On the right-hand side of this chart, there are two types of scores: latent behaviors (which are really just forms of engagement) and then active behaviors which demonstrate some buying intent. In latent behaviors, a prospect could download an early stage whitepaper and get +3 points. Then, that prospect, who you assumed to be a good prospect, began to visit the careers page heavily. This action indicates that perhaps this wasn’t a prospect at all, but rather someone who is interested in a job, so then you can decrease the score by -10. In active behaviors, if a prospect visits the fees page, you can assign them +30 points. Or if someone requests to be contacted, give them +50 points and send them straight to sales. Using this scoring methodology, you can then set a score threshold that indicates when a prospect is “sales-ready.” For example, if a prospect gets to a score of 100 (and you know that based on sales feedback, a score of 100 or greater indicates a warm prospect that is ready for a sales conversation), you can automatically notify sales. 3. Sales Efficiency Implementing a segmentation and scoring strategy will ultimately help your sales team become more efficient. They will better understand the right people to call (based on their lead score) and better understand what to talk about (based on their segmentation). As an example, let’s say that before you implemented marketing automation, you were sending 30 prospects per day to sales. Of those, only five were warm and ready to have a conversation. But since sales didn’t know which prospects were warm, they had to call all 30 to find the five warm prospects. That is inefficient. With marketing automation, taking the same example of 30 prospects per day, you can eliminate sending 17 of those prospects to sales because they didn’t reach the scoring threshold. Furthermore, you can eliminate three other prospects who visited your careers page. Ultimately, you end up only sending 10 prospects to sales, which means that your salespeople only need to make 10 calls to find five warm prospects, rather than making 30 to reach the same outcome. Through marketing automation, segmentation, and leading scoring, you’ll increase sales efficiency and your salespeople can spend more time prospecting through their own outbound efforts. All the companies and industries can benefit from a solid marketing automation platform. The financial services industry, in particular, is perfectly positioned to realize tremendous value. Investing can be very emotional for people as money doesn’t come easy, so if you send them mass emails or blanket messages that don’t speak to their particular needs or situation, you’re likely to alienate them. But with the right segmentation and scoring in place, you can create timely and hyper-relevant marketing campaigns that will help you acquire and retain clients, grow your existing customer base, and ultimately increase sales efficiency. What other industries can benefit immensely from marketing automation? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Here are a couple campaign request form templates that were developed to capture all the information needed to build a webinar program in Marketo. I build a lot of these one-off programs and was finding myself spending too much time tracking down information from various people. The attachments are as follows: Campaign Request Form - External (used when campaigns originate from a department outside of marketing (ex. Sales)) Campaign Request Form - Internal (used when campaigns originate from a member of the marketing team) Campaign Request Form - External First tab: this is the tab that the campaign originator will complete Second tab: this is an example of what a completed webinar campaign request form will look like Third tab: this is an example of what a completed email campaign request form will look like Campaign Request Form - Internal First tab: this is the tab that the marketing team member will complete to originate the campaign Second tab: this tab contains the appropriate tokens used for emails/landing pages Third tab: this tab contains the appropriate information for GoToWebinar Fourth tab: this tab contains information need to post a portal ad The additional campaign tabs are added to the external request form once received by the marketing team. We also use a Google form for some project requests. That may be an option too!
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By: Sanjay Dholakia Fellow marketers, if recent economic headlines are leaving you antsy, if not mildly panicked, you’re not alone. Last year ended on a whimper — fourth-quarter gross domestic product grew by only 0.7 percent — and then the stock market promptly dove about six percent in January amid predictions of greater turmoil ahead. The uncertainty also has had a spillover effect on many smart marketers I’ve spoken with since the financial tempest blew in with the new year. Increasingly, they talk about internal pressures from their companies’ financial gurus to choose cheaper alternative products and services. Even though they remain far from best-in-breed in their categories, the argument is that they are “good enough.” And it doesn’t end there. As more marketing departments are asked to accomplish more with less, the to-do list grows, while resources are stretched thinner and thinner. Pretty soon, marketers are looking at program outcomes and saying, “Well, good enough.” Just good enough? This hardly sounds like a battle cry for success. Actually, it feels more like a myopic recipe for mediocrity. Marketers are in the business of finding new ways to make their companies stand out from the pack, and in doing so, drive the bottom line. You can’t achieve these goals with “good enough” as your guiding principle. Marketers need to know how to resist the “good enough” temptation in their operations — and they also need to know how to articulate the value of their own offerings so they avoid falling victim to the “good enough” mindset with their own customers. Here are some very basic lessons I wish someone had shared with me on why “good enough” — for lack of a better term — really sucks. ”Good Enough” Costs A Lot “Good enough” gets expensive fast. When I graduated from college and needed to swap jeans and sneakers for formal business attire, a relative suggested that I shop at a discount shoe retailer famous for offering deals. I took the recommendation and returned home with a real bargain: two pairs of shoes for the price of one. A couple of weeks later, the first pair had rubbed my toes so raw that they bled when I walked. The other pair wore out within three months. I had to buy two new pairs — I bought with quality in mind the second time. The postscript: Buying “good enough” ended up costing me three times as much — and gave me bloody feet. Like a pair of lousy shoes, “good enough” inflicts a little more hurt each day. Say you have a goal of increasing customer retention, but you’re also juggling driving new revenue and entering three new markets. With the plan you have time to execute — emphasis on have time — your retention begins to improve, but nowhere near the rate that would actually move the needle for the company. But at least the numbers are rising, so you proclaim, “Good enough!” That’s no way to operate! Same thing goes for the tools marketers use. I’ve seen companies choose a solution just so they could save $20,000 a year in costs. But did their “good enough” products help scale the business? Nope. In the end, the companies were forced instead to hire more people to deal with the limitations, costing another $200,000 in incremental yearly costs. No self-respecting CFO or CEO will argue that the $200,000 is better than the $20,000 cost. If they do, your company has bigger problems. “Good Enough” Wastes Time The Romans built their first aqueduct in 312 BCE. It was one of 11 separate structures that would supply water to the city of Rome for centuries. The ancient Romans didn’t scrimp on the quality of masonry, brick or concrete used in construction. If they had gone with “good enough,” their aqueducts would have crumbled long before Julius Caesar. The aqueducts were so well built that some even found use in the Renaissance era. This is long-term thinking with an exclamation point! Short-term thinking won’t allow you to plan very far into the future. Going with a good enough strategy, or even good enough talent, means you’re bound to wind up wasting time, effort and money to compensate for the original mistake of a penny wise, pound foolish approach. In marketing, if you settle for the “quick fix,” you’re bound to shortchange yourself in the long run. “Good enough” often slows down your entire team as they seek to cope with the inherent limitations of poor planning or a subpar tool. Worse, tools that are not built to last — by design — will force you to stop your business at some point to replace the product or service that was “good enough.” I’ll very often hear a statement like this: “Well, we don’t need all of those capabilities right now; we’ll just replace this later.” Huh? Yeah, because everyone likes to tell their CEO, “We are taking a break for a few months to redo the process we just did six months ago!” Take a cue from the Romans, and choose talent and tools that will last your company a lifetime. “Good Enough” Will Guarantee You A “C” Every marketer I talk with wants their company to aspire to greatness. They’re in this profession to ignite change, and so nobody wants to belong to the middle of the pack. But “good enough” suggests that you’re willing to be average. Think about the words. When have you as a marketer ever felt satisfied with average? Average will not get you the business outcomes you’re looking to achieve. Average will not drive revenue, and it will not help you gain an edge in the marketplace. There is so much coffee out there at our local gas stations and supermarkets that is absolutely sufficient from a convenience and caffeine perspective that we could claim a glut. That coffee is absolutely “good enough” for the purpose of jolting us awake. It’s not going to kill us. But, it’s not going to taste great either. It’s a solid “C.” That’s why millions of us, every morning and every day, still go out of our way to get that high-quality $5 cup of joe. We don’t settle for “C.” If you want to be a great marketer, “good enough” talent, strategies or tools will never enable you to reach the top. It sends a message to your organization: “Hey, we’re okay being … well, okay!” You have to compete with the best ammo you can muster. And this means not just thinking for today’s outcomes, but tomorrow’s, as well. Go for the “A” outcome — say no to “good enough.” This post originally appeared on Marketing Land on February 9, 2016.
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We’ve reached peak ABM hype. You’ve seen countless variations of the same presentation about how to get started with ABM, how to sell ABM internally, the ideal ABM tech stack, and on and on. And I agree that it’s time to start getting down to business and actually design ABM plays that can drive your business more revenue. But my ABM pitch is going to be a little different from the ones you’ve been hearing over and over. It also doesn’t involve having to buy the hottest, newest toy on the market. My example of an ABM campaign will be based out of Marketo. But the same setups/flows/logic should be broadly applicable to most marketing automation platforms, or even your favorite sales acceleration/cadence tools. So fire them up and follow along with this post. Step 1 — Build your target account list Earlier this year at LeanData, we identified a leaky spot in our pipeline. The timeframe between the 1st demo and what should have been the 2nd demo was a place where prospects were going dark on us. Under the guidance of Adam New-Waterson, now the vice president of demand generation at RevJet, our marketing and sales team sat down together and compiled a list of target accounts that we believed could be brought back to life. The next step was to push all the leads and contacts associated with those target accounts into our ABM campaign. We used our own product to tag all the leads and contacts associated with those target accounts with the value of “2nd demo” in a segmentation field. This step could be done a number of ways depending on the specific tools you’re working with, but the ultimate goal is to end up with some way of separating out the leads and contacts for your target accounts. In this case, we used a smartlist in Marketo filtering on the “2nd demo” value to push the list into our campaign. Step 2 — Segment the relevant stakeholders CEB research has shown that 5.4 buyers typically are involved in a typical B2B deal. Getting all of those stakeholders involved is crucial to making an ABM strategy successful. So to begin tailoring our message to those various people, the next step in our DIY ABM play was to separate out who was important and who was not important to the conversation. For us, we used Marketo’s Engagement Programs to create different streams of content/interactions for each of the five buyer personas we believe are relevant to our business. Step 3 — Set up the play Now for the fun stuff. We didn’t want to just have same boring old stream of emails with slightly varying messages to each buyer. That’s not real personalization. We always strive to create a combination of different touches across different channels, with different players from our team. Our play for the sales operations buyer persona went like this: Standard marketing email featuring a datasheet An alert to our in-house Sales Ops pro to personally reach out, along with a suggested template email Personal invitation from our VP of Sales to invite them to an event we’re hosting An alert to our social media writer to engage the prospect on Twitter Closing out with another marketing email featuring a second product datasheet. This was our playbook. But the sky’s the limit when it comes to the series of touches you can implement. It really comes down to tailoring the messages to your organization and your buyers. Here are some other ideas to get you thinking: Direct mail piece Surveys Webinars Podcasts Interactive content Results Since piloting this campaign with a small group of target accounts, we’ve seen approximately 20 percent of the targets reach back out to schedule another demo with us. An interesting, and somewhat unexpected, development was that most of the responses we received were from someone other than our initial point-of-contact. It just goes to show the importance of a true ABM strategy. You must reach out across a target account and engage with the multiple stakeholders who might be involved in a deal on their own terms. And this is the kind of play that can really lead to closed deals.
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By: Elaine Ip Posted: March 23, 2016 | Content Marketing Anywhere you look, it’s likely that you’ll see an ad—whether it’s on your computer, on a mobile app, or on TV. In fact, digital ad spending alone is expected to pass $68 billion in the U.S. this year, according to eMarketer. But you can break through the clutter by providing valuable content that effectively attracts, reaches, and engages your audience—educating them rather than advertising to them. Technology leaders, including the likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple, are empowering publishers to reach even more of their audience, faster, with new product capabilities for content delivery. And who is better positioned to take advantage of these innovations than content marketers—the marketers who publish content in all forms? It seems like a not-too-distant past that content marketing started gaining traction among marketers as they began to recognize that batch-and-blast, pitchy messages weren’t the way to go. Instead, we started understanding the need to communicate without selling, to build relationships with our prospects and customers, and to personalize these messages based on each unique buyer. And we learned that all this could be done through content, by publishing pieces that provide practical tips, advice, and insight, rather than by promoting our brand or product. But what changed in recent years that has made content both a marketing and company initiative, with tech giants jumping on board? Here are a few reasons why content is continuing to gain momentum among publishers and the masses, and you should continue to invest in it as a marketer: People Are Consuming Content More Than Ever Before Buyers today are more informed, as they can easily access and compare product information and pricing, form opinions, and draw conclusions well before they choose to interact with your company. The majority of a buyer’s journey is self-directed before they interact with you and they’re doing this research everywhere, even on the go. In fact, according to Google, smartphones account for more than half of searches in 10 countries. And with all the technological innovations that have emerged, people can now consume and engage with your content wherever they are without sacrificing speed or the user experience. And tech-giants have gotten savvy to this, adding publishing capabilities aimed at capitalizing and capturing the traffic and attention that today’s content achieves on their platforms. For news outlets or content marketers, this shift doesn’t indicate a huge change and so the goal remains the same: keep your audience coming back for more by publishing relevant and personal information, messages, and offers—now, you just have more places to do it. There’s Data Behind It Content comes in all shapes and sizes: datasheets, whitepapers, videos, ebooks, infographics, and blogs, to name a few. And each asset serves as a different touchpoint for collecting data on who your buyers are and what they’re interested in. In fact, with the proliferation of distribution and publication channels, you may have more robust information than ever before. For example, Apple News provides its publishers with both channel-based data and article-based data for metrics like unique viewers, total views, average active time, shares, and likes (Disclaimer: Currently, this data is for usage in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia and is limited to 30 days). Ultimately, successful publishers want to not only get people to engage with the content on their platform, but understand how to replicate their success and iterate for continued improvement. And as a content marketer, this process is essential for optimizing your inbound marketing efforts to drive more traffic and conversions. Content Can Be Measured As the saying goes, data without insight is just a set of numbers.  Publishers can make data meaningful by using it to measure how effective each piece of content is at bringing in new customers, engaging with your audience, building relationships over time, and driving ROI. As new publishing platforms emerge, it will be interesting to see how effectively these platforms deliver metrics that offer a clear understanding of content performance to content marketers. Content marketers in particular are now, more than ever, able to demonstrate the ROI and overall business impact of their efforts and will be looking for it in each new place that they publish their content. For example, if your goal for a piece of content is to convert prospects into customers, you would create that content with the intention and ability to track mid and late-stage metrics that tie into pipeline, opportunity, and revenue contribution. Technology Advancements Are Paving the Way As a content marketer at Marketo, I admit that I am a little biased when it comes to preaching the value of content, but don’t just take my word for it. Take the word of technology giants Google, Facebook, and Apple, each of whom have rolled out new capabilities that enable publishers to provide content to their audiences faster than ever before. Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) allows publishers to create instant-loading, mobile optimized content on the web by using their open source framework AMP HTML. Facebook’s Instant Articles allows publishers to deliver content on their platform—at a speed they report to be as much as 10 times faster. And recently, Apple announced that it’s opening up Apple News Format to all publishers—major news organizations, magazines, blogs, and more–to deliver their content through the iOS News app (pending approval, of course). These recent changes empower content marketers to do what they do best, but more quickly and at scale. With major technology leaders optimizing their content delivery, I think it’s safe to say that leading companies recognize the value of not just content, but more importantly, the consumption of it. Consumers want content, and these innovations allow them to digest it faster than ever with fast-loading, mobile optimized articles. Sounds like a win-win situation for us all. Today, the question isn’t whether you’ve started content marketing in your organization; it’s how you’re improving your content marketing. With everything going your way and tech giants backing up your efforts, it’s time for you to step up your content and offer your buyers real value in more places. These recent innovations have given you an even louder voice, so use it for good—to engage and deliver value to your audience wherever they are. How have you shaped your content to deliver value to your buyers rather than pitching to them? I’d love to hear in the comments section below!
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By: Charm Bianchini Posted: March 2, 2016 | Targeting and Personalization What happens when B2B marketers from leading companies gather for a day? They talk about account-based marketing (ABM), of course! ABM has recently gained momentum in the B2B community as an alternative to traditional demand generation strategies. It is a strategic approach to lead generation in which your time and resources go into targeting a key group of specific accounts. Last week, the FlipMyFunnel conference brought together some of the top digital marketers in the Bay Area for another stop in a multiple-city roadshow focused on account-based marketing (ABM) and sales. Understanding what account-based marketing is, why it should be leveraged within marketing programs, and how to measure it effectively were key themes throughout the day. The agenda highlighted customers deploying various ABM programs as well as real struggles being experienced in this new ABM world. Let’s take a look at four key takeaways from the conference that will make an impact on your account-based marketing strategies: 1. The Funnel Must Be Flipped Gone are the broad-based marketing days. Forrester Research states that less than 1% of leads turn into revenue generating customers. Because of this, it’s time to challenge the status quo and focus your time, budget, and resources on generating quality leads vs. quantity. If you want to win and retain certain key accounts, you need to utilize ABM. The old lead funnel with Awareness, Interest, Consideration, and Purchase as funnel stages needs to shift toward an ABM-focused one with Identify, Expand, Engage, and Advocate as the funnel stages. Since we sell to accounts and multiple people within accounts, using ABM to identify and engage the right people in target accounts will help you increase pipeline and improve sales and marketing alignment. While your funnel might be smaller at the top, it will yield more qualified leads in companies that you care about in the long run. 2. Pick a Level of ABM to Execute Deploy the type of ABM programs that work best for your company. What does that mean? There are different types of ABM and one might be a better fit for your marketing strategy and goals. You may want to concentrate on a handful of large accounts and dive deep into an ABM strategy, take a few hundred accounts to do targeted marketing to, or fold your ABM accounts into your existing marketing programs. Spend time on working with sales to select the right accounts and execute marketing programs across various channels for maximum ROI. And you don’t have to master ABM in a day. Prevent yourself and your team from getting overwhelmed by starting small and growing from there. You need to implement ABM in a way that works for you and your organization. 3. Select the Right Technology The conference asked all speakers to list the technologies they are using to execute ABM programs. It’s nice to see marketers are not on their own. Many technologies today make the delivery of ABM scalable and precise. FlipMyFunnel published an ABM stack outlining more than 900 technology vendors to assist the ABM marketer. At the center of the technology stack are marketing automation platforms, like Marketo, that track account insights and engagement, and enable companies to create personalized relationships with their buyers. If you’re just getting started with an ABM strategy, start by evaluating your technology stack and make sure you are leveraging the right technologies to conduct and optimize your ABM programs. 4. Optimize and Measure Launching an account-based marketing program can be hard, but measuring your results can often be more challenging. But, especially with a new strategy and program, measurement is critical to optimizing and ultimately growing your program. Track the funnel flow starting from the top of the funnel to discover incoming accounts and early results. Some metrics to consider include new names, account engagement, conversion rates, meetings, pipeline, velocity, opportunities, and closed revenue. In addition to tracking key metrics, an important part of ABM is getting regular feedback from sales and collaborating with them on new ideas for optimization. So set goals, A/B test, learn from the results,and iterate. To learn more about how to get started on ABM, check out our ebook: A Recipe For Lean Account-Based Marketing. And to discover how Marketo is using it today, come watch my presentation, Account-Based Marketing: Marketo’s Collaborative Approach, at the Marketo Marketing Nation Summit.
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ABM campaigns are about making one-on-one human connections despite the impersonal barriers of big business. If you want to cut through the noise, reach your champion and sway a whole organization you need to act outside of the inbox. Direct mail works and we’ll show you how it integrates with digital channels to make your ABM campaign connect. This guide shares best practices on why and how marketers should incorporate direct mail into their ABM strategies. It includes example campaigns and tips on when to send mail, how to personalize it and how to measure its effectiveness as part of a multi-channel ABM program.
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Posted on behalf of our LaunchPoint Partner Spiceworks
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Great infographic provided by our partner LookBook HQ Nick Edouard​
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From Heidi Bullock is the Vice President of Demand Generation at Marketo. She has over 13 years of B2B marketing experience in high tech companies. Her expertise includes product positioning, brand strategy, product marketing, and demand generation. Now is a great time to be in marketing. Not long ago, if you were asked at a cocktail party what you did and replied, “Oh, I’m in marketing,” you were almost guaranteed a response like, “Wow, you’re the one that works on all the fun logo-covered fleece vests!” Historically, this misconception was largely due to the inability of marketers to demonstrate their impact on the business, i.e. showing the efficacy of campaigns and knowing where to invest (or not)—and clearly understanding the process the buyer takes when evaluating a product or service. But times have changed. Thanks to technology—especially marketing automation—we now have tools that help us understand the digital footprints of our buyers—how they like to be communicated with, the frequency, the message, gain visibility into which programs drive real business results and which don’t, and even ultimately help us predict buying preferences. With such powerful inputs available, marketers today are uniquely situated to understand all facets of their customers and the journey they undergo. One function that has originated as part of this new data-driven era is the role of the demand generation marketer. This role and organizational function is dedicated to driving demand and ultimately revenue. In many organizations demand generation is often associated directly with acquisition, but a better and more modern wa to think of it is as “transformative demand generation,” and this is where marketing executives need to focus. If you align your team around this concept, you’ll gain better insight into all areas of the customer journey—not just the early stages. Transformative Demand Generation Transformative demand generation is comprised of three key criteria: Having an agreed upon, shared model, set of definitions, and goals for aligning marketing and sales efforts. Creating a shared revenue model with clearly defined stages, conversion points, definitions, and service level agreements (SLAs) is critical. This is your blueprint for what marketing and sales are responsible for. A good model should be customer-centric and should model the customer’s journey.  There should be clear handoffs between marketing and sales, and ideally you can put SLAs in place to ensure consistency in response times. By doing this, you can clearly assess the health of your business, identify bottlenecks and respective fixes, and begin to predict your business outcomes.  There needs to be an ongoing focus on the model and an emphasis on iteration as learnings come in—but this is great way to make sure both teams are aligned. A focus on driving revenue first and foremost—and throughout the ENTIRE customer life-cycle. This lens must be used across all marketing programs—throughout the journey, from acquisition to retention. You should have a clear way to evaluate if a program makes sense for the business. Now a large brand initiative may be more complex to assess, but it is still important to understand. This starts with identifying goals and determining when you will measure impact, and when (what are the different points in time?).  There are times you go through this exercise and it becomes abundantly clear that a program does not make sense to continue. That learning is equally valuable. Here is a simple example: Your team may be considering a tradeshow and the goal is for acquisition. If the event costs $20K, the organizer tells you there will be 300 people attending. You estimate that the team can scan half the people, and you estimate that 30% will have the right demographics. At that rate, you are spending over $400 / lead.  That may be fine for your business—or not—but the point is you need to KNOW and then use that knowledge to evaluate the opportunity—and all opportunities with this lens. Being data-driven to measure and iterate to make the best decisions for the business. This one goes without saying—but you can’t manage what you can’t measure. The key here is being laser focused on the right things to measure for your business. It’s helpful to have a mix of performance metrics (answering how did you do?), diagnostic metrics (what’s working, how can we improve?), and lastly leading indicators (these should help you forecast how you will be doing). A key part of your planning process is to identify up-front what decisions you need to make to drive company profits, and then build your measurements to capture the right information. This means you should measure things not just because they are measurable—but rather because they will guide you towards the decisions you need to make to improve company profitability. 3 Key Benefits of Transformative Demand Generation When done well, transformative demand generation provides marketers the ability to do these 3 things: Align with sales and other key stakeholders within your organization. By establishing an agreed-upon model upfront, definitions and goals—both marketing and sales efforts are pointed in the same direction. Make the right investments for driving the desired business outcomes. It is critical to identify goals for programs (whether it’s a brand campaign or retention) and estimate upfront if your investment makes sense to achieve your desired outcome. Be forward looking—and forecast what will occur. You should be able to discuss not only what just happened, but also what WILL happen. This is one of the most critical thing marketers can do to build credibility. Today’s demand generation has fundamentally shifted. It should no longer be thought of as simple acquisition or the team that focuses at top of the funnel and only generates volume. Transformative demand generation has the power to drive revenue throughout the entire lifecycle of a buyer. Applying transformative demand generation principles will ensure your marketing organization has a framework to align with sales. It sets a new standard to employ tools to attribute, predict, plan, and benchmark campaign performance. You may start to see that half of your programs are not worth the investment—but instead of being disappointed, be glad that you know and are able to identify the gaps. Ideally, the team should be able to predict the future revenue impact of marketing dollars invested. Marketers—from executives down through the practitioner level—that work within this framework will be able to drive and show the impact across the entire buyers’ journey. These are the marketers that will succeed and, of course, have respect.
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By: Heidi Bullock Posted: July 5, 2016 | Demand Generation Often in life, more can be wonderful. For example, I like more tacos. If possible, I would like seven, not two. I would also like more Amazon Prime boxes and more NBA playoffs. Historically in B2B demand generation, more has been better too. More leads? You bet! But wait, let’s go back to college for one second. Remember the law of diminishing returns? There becomes a point when more is not more and the level of profits or benefits gained becomes less than the amount of money or energy invested. This is a very important concept to understand in marketing, especially for demand generation. More is not more, and here are three reasons why you should be wary of focusing solely on volume in demand generation: 1. 20,000 Names Is Not Winning If you bring in 20,000 names from a tradeshow or inbound marketing tactics, but the leads do not convert–so what? It’s important to remember that a name is not a lead. A name is just someone who enters your database (e.g. a student doing research or a candidate looking into your company), but a lead is someone with the right profile–specifically the right demographics and behavior, and ideally even the right account type. It is very important to have a method for making the distinction between what a name and a true lead is. So how can you distinguish the two? Define a revenue model with business rules that determine a prospect’s movement from one stage to the next and at which point a prospect should be handed from marketing to sales. At Marketo, a lead has to meet three criteria to become a lead: right demographics, right behavior, and right account profile. You can score your leads to understand their unique demographics and behaviors so that you can deliver high quality leads to your sales team. 2. Focus on the Right People and Accounts, Not Just Volume Even if you bring in leads who buy your product or service, if they ultimately churn, that is not an optimal outcome. All leads are NOT the same. Some buyers will make better customers and are more ideal for your business. These might include customers who buy additional products or upgrade their current ones, refer your company to their peers, and advocate on your behalf. So how do you determine the right leads to focus on to maximize their customer lifetime value? It’s critical to analyze your customer base to understand what attributes make up the ideal prospect. Is there a buyer persona that is more successful for your business? It may be a specific company size, vertical, buyer type, or all of these combined. You can use predictive scoring to help you identify the profile of an account or individual that is more likely to be a profitable and account-based marketing tactics to market to them in a focused, stream-lined manner. 3. Think About the Lifecycle, Not Just Acquisition Acquisition is really important, but it’s only part of the picture. Yet, many marketers are still primarily focusing their investment and activities into driving acquisition. In fact, according to a 2014 Forrester Content Marketing Benchmark online survey, only 12% ofcontent marketers are focusing on retention, cross-sell, and upsell. That means marketers are missing out on revenue that they could generate from growth opportunities that are much more affordable. By spending the majority of their efforts on costly acquisition techniques, marketers are leaving money on the table (data from Bain & Company shows that a 5% increase in retention yields between 25%-95% increase in profits). The action here? Don’t get tunnel vision with the number of leads you acquire and spend time thinking about the right customers for your business and the programs you have in place to continue to engage, retain, and delight them. How have you tweaked your marketing strategy to focus on obtaining quality over quantity? Share your experience in the comments below!
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By: Renata Bell Posted: May 31, 2016 | Targeting and Personalization Yesterday, I received an email from a retailer suggesting that I purchase a product I already bought last month. Don’t they know me by now?! It’s amazing how we’ve gone from the transactional nature of shopping on the web to demanding a personalized experience. Small wonder, a recent Edelman report reveals that 87% percent of buyers demand meaningful, contextual, relevant experiences. Consider the department stores where the characters of Mad Men shopped. Their shopping experience was extremely personalized—they would go directly to a salesperson that knew them and their purchase history, and therefore could recommend other relevant products to them. But that experience doesn’t scale…or does it? When you think about where we are in digital marketing today, there’s no excuse to not offer your buyers personalized recommendations and conversations. A complete marketing automation solution allows you to do this with trigger workflows that listen to activity across different channels and send personalized, automated responses based on actions that they take (or don’t take). And finding the right solution that allows you to do this is well worth it. In fact, 40% of consumers shop more at brands that personalize for them, according to MyBuys. But the right solution is just the start. Here are 3 easy ways that you can get personal with your buyers: 1. Listen to What They Do, Not Just What They Say To understand what your buyers want, go beyond just listening to what they say they prefer and “listen” to their behavior across your channels. Everyone is one in a million, so consider each and every buyer you interact with as an individual. When you figure that all 18-24 year old females should like X product and send them promotional emails based on that assumption, you’ll likely be marked as spam when your communications don’t resonate. Instead, take a look at each buyer’s unique journey with your brand. Take for example their activity on your website or their interactions on your mobile app. What pages do they visit? What links do they click on? What push notifications do they tap on…or not tap on? What keyword searches brought them to the site or app? And sometimes more importantly, what are they NOT interacting with? Are there content types or product pages they never click on? Use this valuable information to inform and optimize your campaigns. 2. Go Beyond Names Yes, putting a recipient’s name in an email increases open rates and engagement, but you can do so much more! Consider using tokens and dynamic content that will update for every single email. Say you’re an owner of a pet store. You can thank your customers for buying the last product they purchased, build rapport by referencing the animal type they have, and promote offers for their preferred pet food brand. But wait, there’s more. Why not change the image in the email to match their animal as well? You know those dog lovers can’t resist a cute puppy picture! Some options for personalization include: Name Last product purchased (text or picture) Subscription end date Product interest category (text or picture) Industry (text or picture) Location Sales rep name Preferred store location Birthday 3. Nurture for Interests You may have already set up a nurture campaign to welcome new customers, but it doesn’t need to be a generic one. People engage with content they care about and they will identify with your brand more when you offer them content that’s relevant. Consider setting up separate nurture streams by product interest (ex. cars, trucks, minivans) or purchase behavior (never purchased, purchased once, repeat customer). Think of different categories of customers that are easy to identify, such as status or product interest, but also not too niche (red convertible lovers in Utah) so that the content is easier to create. Consider measuring the effectiveness and engagement with each stream to understand how to improve them down the line. In a world of information abundance, buyers are more empowered than ever before. And armed with this info, they are forming opinions and drawing conclusions well before they choose to interact with your brand. It’s now up to marketing, more than any other business function, to become the steward of the customer journey. So, get personal! What are some other easy-wins to get personal with your audience? Share your tips in the comments below!
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By: Mike Burton Posted: April 5, 2016 | Lead Management The cult classic movie, Glengarry Glen Ross paints a harsh reality of the world of sales. At the bottom line, the movie is all about a salesman’s ability to close and the endless battle for a quality set of leads. And while perhaps exaggerated in its delivery, these two core messages ring true for marketing and sales teams alike. The ever foreboding challenge is finding and closing the ‘Glengarry’ leads, the ones that will guarantee conversions and revenue. So how do you ensure that, as a marketer, you do your part in finding those Glengarry leads for sales to close? Achieving AIDA to ABC In the B2B world, the notion of AIDA is key: Attention Interest Decision Action Predictive lead scoring, personalization engines, and segment builders have evolved to help marketers find qualified leads and salespeople pursue them, but they can sometimes fall short on accurately delivering on the “Attention” and “Interest” areas of target audiences, making the success of “Decision” and “Action” at best an educated guess. And marketers are only as good as the tools they are equipped with. Enter external intent data. Much like a FICO score provides a holistic view of a customer’s credit history by using collectively shared information from different banks, external intent data provides a business with an understanding of what an individual, a department, or a company in a specific location is most interested in. Through a large cooperative of B2B media companies, external intent data companies monitor a range of audience interactions with your company such as collateral downloads, tradeshow booth visits, articles read, webinar and video views, social engagement, etc.). This external intent data is consolidated and categorized into a range of different topics and then benchmarks are created against each, allowing you to identify when certain topics are experiencing a surge of interest. The result is moving beyond the traditional batch and blast approach to understanding when you have the attention of your target audience and knowing exactly what they are interested in. And when this data is integrated with your marketing automation and CRM systems, you’re armed with key indicators of when marketing or sales should engage with each individual at an optimal time during the decision-making process, thus improving the ability toAlways Be Closing (ABC). No More Weak Leads In the movie, sales are won through slick coaxing and by playing on a prospect’s insecurities; in the age of information, relevance and authenticity are quickly becoming the new norm. So what does this mean? Often, demand for your product or service already exists, but it’s all about finding the right behaviors that indicate this and using it to inform your marketing campaigns. While an email respondent is valuable, an email respondent that is in a relevant research surge, as informed by external intent data, is much more likely to net an immediate sales opportunity. This added layer of data allows marketers and salespeople to understand the difference between the curious content junkies and those that are accessing content based on a current initiatives–ultimately weeding out the weak leads. Take for example a recent VM Turbo campaign promoting an ebook download on their hybrid cloud. When reaching out to surging contacts who responded to an email campaign, they saw a 51% lift in open rates when compared to a control group that was non-surging. Further validating the correlation between intent and engagement, their sales team reported that when they followed up with customers by phone, the individuals from the surge group were more engaged and their conversations much more in-depth. Overall, 80% of all of the opportunities created from the campaign originated from the surge group. Making the Most of Glengarry Leads Integrating behavioral intent data into your marketing automation instance requires a few foundational steps. First, it’s critical to have an understanding of your sales team’s strategy and align your topics. Once your topics are agreed upon and selected, an external intent data provider will be able to append these relevant topics to contacts inside of your marketing automation system. After you create your campaign and run it, you will need to close the loop back with your sales team, ensuring that they follow up on any interactions, especially with individuals in the surge group. The key to success is not only through delivering targeted content to an already interested group, but also in the follow-up conversations, which result in new opportunities. External intent data allows you to take a customer-centric approach, means that your prospects are getting content that they are interested in at a timely point in their decision-making process and it allows you to plan and distribute your content more strategically. Ultimately it opens up a way to uncover your Glengarry leads. Have you already integrated external intent data into your marketing campaigns? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments below.
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Anyone can build a traditional lead nurture track – send email #1 with content offer A, wait a week and send email #2 with content off er B, and so on. But given that 94% of marketing qualified leads never close*, it’s time for marketers to switch up their nurturing playbook. Here is a doc containing a lead nurture checklist to help you take your nurturing program from okay to awesome.
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  If your organization invests more time and money in content marketing and your pipeline of marketing leads grows, is it safe to assume that your investment paid off? Not necessarily. Simply because two events — more investment and a bigger pipeline — happened doesn’t mean they’re related. But there is a way to find out: Use lead metrics to track and measure activity and attribute leads in your marketing automation system to specific pieces of content. Looking at how leads in various stages of your sales funnel interact with your content can help you hone your content strategy. Here’s how to do it: Campaign Tracking The simple do-it-yourself way of tying content to leads is to use campaign tracking in Salesforce and in a marketing automation platform that you’re already using. In Salesforce, a campaign is an object that tracks a user’s activity across Lead, Contact, and Opportunity objects. Creating a campaign for a piece of content lets you see when a user engages with that item (for instance, opening a newsletter, reading a blog post or downloading an asset).   Here are three key aspects of campaign tracking that help you attribute leads to specific pieces of content: Persistence: Once a lead is attributed to a campaign, the campaign mapping follows the lead even as the lead gets converted to other objects lower in the funnel such as a contact or opportunity. This lets you not only track how many leads a piece generates, but also if these leads result in further actions. Multiple Attribution: Under a multi-touch attribution model, a lead can be credited to more than one piece of content. Time Stamping: Lead interactions are time-stamped so that you can replay the user’s content consumption and identify the “last touch” attribution or the piece of content was consumed just before a marketing lead was converted into a sales opportunity.   How to Setup Campaign Tracking Here is a guide to setting up campaign tracking in Marketo Campaign Reporting After you’ve implemented campaign tracking, you can now view content consumption that pertains to a single lead, contact or opportunity record in your CRM.  Below is a screenshot of how we track content consumption for a lead at my company. In a single view, you can see which content was consumed, the type of the content (eBook, newsletter, webinar, etc…) the date of the consumption, and the action perfomed (downloaded, opened, etc...).  From here, your next step is to generate reports and use the analytics to help you evaluate the success of your campaign (these reports could be generated natively or using a plugin like Full Circle CRM for Salesforce). Consider questions like: How many new leads did a particular piece of content generate? How many existing leads in my database engaged with a particular piece of content? Which pieces of content were the most effective at moving leads lower into the funnel (towards opportunities and ultimately sales)? Which parts of the funnel have insufficient content support? Once you’ve tracked your campaigns and analyzed the results, you should have a better feel for whether your investment in content marketing is paying off. These measurements will help you understand where you should invest money in the future to make content even stronger. For more strategies to prove the ROI of your content marketing efforts, download my extensive eBook on the topic, The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics. Author: Pawan Deshpande BIO: Pawan is the founder and CEO of Curata. His work has been recognized through the Boston Business Journal's 40 under 40 Award. He was also a finalist for MarketingProfs B2B Marketer of the Year. Pawan is a speaker at marketing conferences such as AMA, SXSW, Content2Conversion, and Content Marketing World.
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Note: This white paper was provided by our LaunchPoint partner, Cake. Topic:  Using technology to make more profit by selling your leads at the best price.
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