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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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As part of my role in Marketing Operations is to manage data quality. Data comes form many sources and not always in the optimal state I require it to be for lead routing. Not all Marketers are data savvy and will need some coaching when they hand over a CSV file from an event they have just ran. As we collect data from a variety of regions, not all of it is going to be perfect. Some folks expect Marketo platform to cleanse the data on upload. Some maybe missing mandatory data points in order for them to be routed to the appropriate sales rep for follow up. Bad practices of data collection can leave your data base with gapping holes and will require extra scrutiny at some point. One of the first things I do each Monday morning is check on how many leads we are collecting from our marketing activities with missing data by running a Marketo report. We took advantage of Marketo lead report in Revenue Cycle Analytics with the ability to add custom smart lists to the report. This report can then be subscribed to on a weekly or monthly cadence. Below are the steps to take to build a database health report: First off, we need to build smart lists for every field we need visibility into. Create a new folder in your Smart List section of Marketo Data base, name it ‘Data Base Health Report Smart Lists’ and create a new Smart List and start off with First Name. Make sure to name your Smart Lists the way you want them to be named in your custom columns as they will appear exactly the same. Drag and drop in First Name field into your smart list, select ‘Is empty’. This smart List will group all leads in your DB with a missing First Name. Do the same for Last Name, Company Name, Country, Lead Source, Industry, Phone etc. All the ones you need to monitor. Now go to Analytics section and create a new lead report. Go to set up and add in your custom column smart lists, the first two columns will be your 'Grouping' and 'Total leads', so be sure to add them in the order you want them to appear in the rendered report. Note: can only add up to 10 smart lists as custom columns to the lead report. Now group your report by lead create date and select to view monthly. Go to subscription section and add yourself and pick whatever cadence you want your report to be sent out. In the smart list section of your lead report, add any filters you need to segment your report by, E.g. try to look only for leads created by a certain date or from a large static list etc. Below I'm making sure I don't pull leads with empty email address and a lead type of Corporate. This area helps you to focus your lens to a smaller set of data or leave blank and pull in your whole data base to the report. Now hit report to render, once rendered, you may need to adjust the columns. Your report will now show you your total leads by your chosen create date and grouped by created month. Along side will have columns to show total leads and how many of that total are missing First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Country, Lead Source, Industry, Phone etc. Advanced actions: Using this method of reporting can show many more ways to chop your data up. Try using smart list columns for certain Marketo forms your monitoring for engagement. Filter on lead sources with lead source detail.
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Personal thanks to Stephane Hamel​ for providing this document. If you have an feedback, .. if you find it useful, if it helps you, if you see any errors or things that could be improved - let me know! Please let Stephane Hamel​ know.
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Email performance analytics sits at the heart of every digital marketer, you want to be aware of how the performance has been and need the ability to report on the same using various dimensions relative to your marketing. More often than not, all marketing automation systems have a performance issue when it comes to providing analytics quickly with the parameters that you would like. Marketo has also been lacking in this area for quite some time since RCA is sold as a separate product and that also had performance issue till last year or so, when the UI was changed but still performance is not up to the mark and Marketo analytics is not that powerful a feature to suffice the digital needs of today. As a resolution to the same, Marketo has introduced Email insights to provide lightning quick reporting on Email performance with a plethora of dimensions/parameters to filter your report. It works real fast and allows you to report on performance which not only includes batch campaigns but can also include trigger campaigns and operation emails (You can choose to exclude them as well). There are options of choosing performance relative to one/multiple workspaces, you can add parameters such as segmentations, channels and program tags and include them as dimensions and report on them. There’s an option to filter the report on Audience (country and state parameters), Content (email, program, smart campaigns, theme) and Platform (Device OS and Device type). You can generate charts to assess the performance during selected period based on Time (Day, Week and Month) and filter on various parameters. On the right hand side you can also select metrics such as opens, clicks and unsubscribes to check on the performance by parameters of audience, content and platform. You also have the ability to save these reports as quick charts for periodic performance review, you can save up to 20 quick charts. Although it’s a fresh new option for analytics there’s a lot of scope for improvement, for example. The ability to export data/reports/charts is not available so if you want to share the data with anyone outside Marketo you can’t, which is a huge disappointment. There’s no option to report on custom parameters such as conversions, program successes etc.  There are only 10 custom dimensions that can be added which makes the set up limited. The ability to report on custom lead filters using smart lists as available in Email performance reports is not there. There’s no email link performance analysis. Overall a fresh new interface and a much needed option for Email performance reporting but still has a lot of scope for improvement. Here’s the Summary: Pros: Lightning quick reporting capabilities. Dimensions and work-space options for reporting. New filter options such as Audience, Content and Device. Ability to create quick charts. Cons: Inability to export reports Only 10 custom dimensions No custom lead filters and custom parameters No Email link performance analysis Here’s an example of how to use Email insights for your reporting purposes, it includes the steps you need to follow to leverage the various capabilities available for reporting. Log into Marketo and click on the tab on the top left hand side to go to Email Insights: This is how Email Insights home screen looks like: It provides you a lot of options of choosing to report on, you can select the Workspaces on which you want to see the performance: In this example, I want to check the performance in Europe, so I’ll choose Europe as the work-space. You can select the dates for which you want to check the email performance: There’s an option of comparing periods as well. You can click on sends on the top left corner to check the various email sends during the period and choose from it the one that you are interested in: If the desired email communication doesn’t show up here, then it could be because it is an operational email, the general settings of Email insights excludes the operational and trigger campaigns, you can change the same in the personal settings: There are a lot of parameters on which Email insights allows you to filter, one of them is Audience. You can filter the audience from country/state and check the email performance for them, for example: If you want to report on email performance during the last month in California etc. You can also filter on specific content, which can be either email sends: Select the email send you want to check the performance. You can also filter on Smart campaigns and the same would reflect in the report: Similarly program filters are also available: A new and fresh addition would be the ability to report device and OS performance, although this option is available as a constraint in Marketo Analytics, this is much better and faster, as it provides you comparative performance views on devices, which is nor the case with Analytics: You can select the Operating systems as a filter as well: There are filters available on your left and right side and you can select either to modify the report/chart: Here’s an example of filtering using parameters on the left side: On your right hand side you have options of choosing filters as well, by default all filter options will show: You can click on Audience, content and device to filter on and analyze the performance further: You have an option of viewing the performance by time as well in the selected time frame, you can select from day, week and month and the report will be modified accordingly: You can also add custom dimensions to these reports which can be used as a filter. To do so, click on the settings option: You can go to System settings to add dimensions, you can add segmentation, channels as dimensions and report the performance on them. Program tags can also be added as a dimension, a maximum of 10 dimensions are allowed with Email insights: Once you are done creating your report/chart based on all the filters and parameters, you can save it as a quick chart for periodic performance review: Name the chart and save it: You can it on the quick charts option on the right hand side, a maximum of 20 charts can be saved: Hope this was informative and helps you in leveraging Email insights for your organization. Your feedback matters a lot to me so if you have any suggestions/comments/queries relative to this, please comment below.
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I created this as I was studying for the Revenue Cycle Analytics exam. I tried so hard to understand Attributions in Marketo by watching a video about attribution in Marketo University, as well as reading the Product Docs. However, it took me so long until I am able to fill in data for the attribution tables. The Revenue Cycle Analytics Certification may be closed soon, but I do hope my note and explanation would be beneficial, and would complement Marketo's Product Docs in regards to understanding Attributions
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A good doc to keep near your desk or on your desktop.
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By: Johnny Cheng Posted: August 3, 2015 | Marketing Metrics I’m baaaack! It’s me, Johnny, with your next blog from the Marketo Institute! This time around, we’re going to take a look at conversion rate. Conversion rate is one of the most important marketing metrics. It’s a metric that lead generation marketers—from practitioners all the way up to CMOs—are measured on. And that’s because today marketing owns just as much of the pipeline as sales does, and conversion rate is a great indicator of pipeline health—starting from the marketing end of the funnel. Let’s start at the top of the funnel and look at conversion rate by acquisition channel. This will help answer the age-old question of channel performance. For every dollar, what percentage would you allocate to which acquisition channel? Easy! The one with the highest conversion rate, win rate, and velocity. What Is Conversion Rate? The conversion rate, in terms of demand generation, is the percent of “contacts” that successfully go from one stage of the funnel to the next. Conversion rate could identify with any activity such as clicking a call-to-action and going from a “name” to a “lead”, or reaching a certain lead score and going from a “marketing qualified lead” to a “sales qualified lead”. But the ultimate conversion rate every demand gen marketer is measured on is lead to opportunity. Converting an interested customer into a buyer is what marketing is all about. Now, let’s dive into the data! Channels That Convert The chart below represents average conversion rate (from lead to opportunity) by acquisition channel across all Marketo customers. The darker shade of green indicates where leads converted at a higher rate. The first column shows the acquisition channel where leads are sourced. The second column shows the average conversion rate percentage of each channel. The third column shows normalized conversion rate to highlight relative standings (e.g. Paid Marketing converts 2x Events). So what does this data tell us as marketers? Looking at the results, here’s what stood out to me: Referral: The power of “word of mouth”. Bah, I guess that old cliché saying was right. Referral is by far the highest acquisition channel for conversion rate (almost 4x the average.) In fact, some of the largest, fastest adoptions (Gmail, Dropbox, Zappos) can be credited directly to “word of mouth”. Takeaway? Build a great product, build a great experience, tell the world, ask your customers to tell the world (maybe even reward them)—and you’ll profit. Inbound: Content is king. As Bill Gates predicted in an article written in 1996: “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet”. Almost 20 years later, this couldn’t be more true, especially in the digital marketing era where choice of content is in the hands of the consumer. Imagine a popup ad (outbound) versus a funny infographic you chose to look at (inbound). Data clearly shows that people who choose to interact with your brand naturally convert higher (28% more than paid marketing). What are your doing to build content to support your customer’s journey? Not sure? Well, for one, it’s time to take a cue from me and start writing those awesome blogs! Prospecting: Mining for leads. This one is a bit surprising. Leads sourced from prospecting convert at a third of overall average. But this goes to show you how old-fashioned prospecting such as door-to-door or cold calling just doesn’t work well compared to other sources. It isn’t uncommon these days for me to hear about companies with 60-80% of their leads sourced from marketing. It’s much more efficient to have sales do what they do best: selling, not cold calling. Email and Nurture: Emails have the lowest conversion rate. Wait…what?! Don’t fire your email marketing team. This is showing conversion by acquisition channel, which means if your lead source came from emails and nurture, you’re doing something wrong, or you’re just desperate, or…you’re a spammer (which also explains the bad conversion rate). And as we’ll see in an upcoming Marketo Institute blog, emails and nurture both have amazing ROI for multi-touch attribution after you’ve acquired the lead. Now, It’s Your Turn Let’s use this analysis as a comparative exercise. Take a look at your conversion rate, broken down by acquisition channel (or first touch attribution, if you prefer.) How does it stack up against the Marketo average? Are there channels that are much higher or lower by comparison? Here’s what you could possibly see: “All my conversion rates are way higher than average”. Congratulations! You’re doing a great job! Take the day off. Well, unless it’s high because you have no lead scoring in place, in which case—get back to work. “My conversion rates are all over the place”. This could be due to several factors, first and foremost is the industry. When I sliced and diced the data by industry I saw some interesting things. I saw that the real estate industry’s highest conversion channel is events, which makes sense if you think about open houses being the main source of leads. Or that the non-profit industry’s highest channel is prospecting, which also makes sense if you think of all of the donation calling. Another reason your conversion rates could vary is resources and timeframe (urgency.) Certain channels are just more resource intensive (dollars or people) and can greatly differ in time-to-value. An example would be if you have a sizeable budget but need to meet an immediate spike in leads this quarter, you’re probably not going to rely on inbound content marketing. Another example would be if you have an incredibly strong partner ecosystem or reseller program, you’re going to focus more resources on those channels. “All my conversion rates are much lower than average”. Conversion rate alone isn’t a good indicator of marketing success. This is where you’ll need to look at other data sets. Align your conversion rate with win rate and velocity by channel. Hopefully you’ll start seeing some positive patterns in the data. If, for example, your conversion rate is low, but your win rate is phenomenal, it could just mean you have a very conservative marketing handoff or stringent lead scoring system, which is OK. Another scenario could be that your leads have extremely low velocity so they are sluggishly moving through the funnel, taking years to convert and realize value. But if all of the data indicates poor performance then you should take a look at your funnel. Be extra careful of this common pitfall: casting too wide of a net top-of-funnel, hoping to play a numbers game, but lacking focused programs, activities and content to drive the leads through the funnel. This is doubly dangerous because you end up wasting extra resources pulling in bad leads (ones that would never convert), while leaking out potentially good leads due to the lack of attention and touch points. Notice something in the data that stood out to you? Let me know in the comments below.
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By: Johnny Cheng Posted: December 30, 2015 | Marketing Metrics Just like the saying goes to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, it’s important to keep tabs on what your peers are doing as a good benchmark of your own results. While your email campaigns may be hitting all of your marks, you may want to set your goals higher for 2016 based on how other companies in your space are doing. After posting my earlier blog around email performance, in which I revealed which types of email perform the best, I received a ton of requests to break it down by industry so marketers can compare the performance of their email campaigns to those of their peers. The numbers are in and the wait is over! Refresher on Email Types In case you’ve forgotten the three types of email campaigns, here’s a recap from the original blog post: Batch Emails: Also known as “batch and blast”. These types of emails don’t have any “intelligence” built in. Instead they just gather a list of contacts and send them the same email. A great example of this is your company newsletter—it goes to everyone, no matter what. Nurture Emails: This is a series of targeted emails based on personas (e.g. by industry, role, or use case). Nurture emails are primarily used to lead prospects through the sales funnel and warm up leads for a sales handoff. A nurture email offers something different to a person based on where they are in their buying journey. If they are just learning about you, your nurture email might offer a fun, light infographic versus a buyer who has engaged with you many times and consumed your content might get a webinar invitation to a live demo. Trigger Emails: These are personalized emails that are delivered based on prospect actions. Some range of email “intelligence” is built in based on behavior (think of it as a two-way conversation of listening and speaking). An example of a trigger email would be this: a prospect visits your events webpage and then, based on that activity, receives an email invitation to an event in their area. Email Performance by Industry Here’s the email performance for the three types of campaigns across all industries. As you can see below, batch campaigns performed significantly better in Healthcare and Life Sciences and Travel, Recreation, and Leisure. Nurture campaigns, on the other hand, performed the best in Energy, Healthcare and Life Sciences, and Transportation and Storage. Trigger campaigns prospered across several different industries, with the highestaverage click rate across all types of campaigns. This data represents average click rate for the 3 email types across all industries. Per the legend on the right, the green shades indicate the relative click rate performance (0.2% – 23.5%). Only industries with statistically significant averages are shown above. What We Learned This chart speaks for itself, but there are definitely some cool data points that stand out. Here’s my take on why certain email types do better or worse for certain industries. But I’d love to hear from readers of that specific industry (I’m looking at you…) to give their opinion. 1. In General–High Performance Trigger Emails I know I sound like a broken record, but despite its proven success at Marketo and beyond, there are still plenty of email marketers that don’t realize the potential of trigger emails. So I’m going to say this one last time (no promises)…personalized messages based on behavior are much better than batch and blast. In fact, they’re 3x better on average. They are an important customer touchpoint so spend that extra time and effort to create those triggers campaigns! 2. Energy–The Power of Nurtures The Energy vertical has the highest nurture email performance of any industry, at a whopping 12.4%! That’s as high as some trigger email metrics. It makes sense if you think about how an energy utility company communicates with their customers. Do you get regular emails around your energy usage, ways to save energy, and updates to policies? Those highly relevant targeted emails are nurture programs at work. Below you’ll see a similar example from a water department. 3. Travel–Brochures for Everybody! This one is really interesting. The Travel, Recreation, and Leisure industry has the highest batch rates, but the lowest nurture rates. Their batch programs perform almost 40x better than nurtures! This is most likely due to the nature of the travel industry. Interest in travel traditionally happens by time of year and less dependent on the individual. Nurturing a customer every month probably isn’t as effective as blasting your entire database with beach excursions right before summer or a trip to the mountains right before ski season. 4. Healthcare–You’re in Great Shape The most well rounded email performance award goes to Healthcare and Life Sciences. They excel in every type of email campaign. I think this is due to two main factors. First is how technologically advanced healthcare has become in the past few years. The overnight shift to the digital era definitely shows in their marketing efforts. Second is the wide range of use cases that each email type solves for this specific industry. Patient doctor office visits? Triggered emails! Ongoing preventative care tips and tricks? Nurture emails! Hospital announcements and newsletters? Batch emails! You can see that different types of emails serve different purposes, but I hope that digging into this data gave you some ideas on how you can use email more effectively for your organization. Notice something in the data that stood out to you? Have suggestions on what data to dive into next? Got follow up questions for me? Leave your comments below
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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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Note: This survey was created by our LaunchPoint partner, Annuitas. From April 8 to June 15, 2014 ANNUITAS conducted a study to analyze current Enterprise-level B2B Demand Generation Strategies and discover key patterns, including where B2B marketers produce the best results and where they continue to struggle. This survey was unique in that it focused exclusively on the B2B Enterprise (organizations with revenues that exceeded $250M in annual revenue). More than 100 B2B enterprise marketers responded to the study.
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By: Heidi Bullock Posted: June 13, 2016 | Marketing Metrics Does it feel like every day you see a new article on marketing metrics? Lately, there has been a lot of buzz around the RIGHT metrics to focus on. Today it’s pipeline, yesterday it was MQLs, and last week it was customer acquisition cost (CAC). In marketing, the one thing that is a constant is change, and it can feel overwhelming to finally agree on a set of metrics with your team, then go to a conference or see a tweet from an analyst and realize that you’re missing five more. Today, I saw that pipeline is the #1 thing your business should be looking at if you’re in B2B. I can’t say I disagree with this, but I do really think it’s less about one metric like pipeline and more about what metric matters forwhen you’re measuring. Here are a five things I’ve learned over the years about marketing metrics, and while they may not be the trendiest, they still hold true to this day: 1. It Starts With Understanding Your Business Objectives Be clear on your business objectives first, then determine what metrics to measure. One way to do this is by mapping your business stages to the customer journey. In the example below, the customer journey is broken into stages, including: awareness, engage, convert, retain, and advocacy, but they may differ for your organization depending on your business model. These stages represent the different business outcomes your company is driving towards (e.g. retention or share of voice), and it’s critical to establish this first to determine the right set of metrics and timing that map to those objectives. 2. It’s Not About ONE Metric The metrics you measure depend on the set questions you’re asking and the timing. When my team first runs a program–whether it’s for target accounts (ABM) or a PPC program–we understand that we won’t have a pipeline number on day one or even day 14. While we ultimately care about the pipeline/cost ratio and revenue won to show how our programs contribute to business growth, these numbers take time to mature so we track them at a later time. However, this doesn’t mean that you should just twiddle your thumbs as you wait for your programs to run their course. It’s important to track early stage metrics in the meantime because they help you understand whether you’re seeing early signs of success or need to make modifications. The example below demonstrates the different types of metrics you might track for an ABM campaign. While your business objective is to generate more revenue within your target accounts–you need to look at other early- and mid-stage metrics along the way to understand whether you’re making the right progress. Here’s another example for an event. While you ultimately want your event to bring in closed-won deals, that takes time. In the interim, it’s important to look at early stage engagement. While it’s not a perfect predictor, you can still see if you need to make any adjustments, such as sending out more invites or adding a registration discount, to ensure you’re getting closer to the end goal. 3. Agree on Definitions EARLY If you haven’t heard it enough, here it is again: sales and marketing alignment is critical to closing more deals. This starts with agreeing on definitions early on so that both teams are on the same page as leads come in and progress down the funnel. Is your revenue team aligned on the definition of a lead, MQL, SQL, or opportunity? This definition may differ throughout different companies, so it’s critical to make sure your definitions are documented and communicated. 4. Get the Right Systems in Place to Track Your Progress One of the reasons it’s so important to understand what metrics you’ll track before you run a campaign is because there’s nothing worse than not being able to answer a critical question because the right tracking and technology wasn’t in place. Think of the questions you’ll want to ask first, then work backwards to ensure you can track the different steps that answer them. Do you have the right technology to be able to track the number of blog subscribers on your site? Do you know which email program was the most successful for deal acceleration? Which case study was the most successful for your sales team? The example below shows how a webinar program is tracked in Marketo (although you can use another marketing automation system to do this). You can dig into the data to understand how your leads interacted with your program. Did they register for the webinar? Did they actually attend? Did they engage with the follow-up email you sent? How did this webinar contribute to revenue growth? These are the types of questions you’ll want to ask before you even run your campaigns to make sure everything is set up on the back-end to answer them. 5. Focus on a Few Key Metrics That Help You IMPROVE Your Marketing This means that 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. Think about the contrast of a 747 airplane dashboard and your car dashboard–there are so many different indicators on an airplane dashboard that it’s hard to quickly ascertain the most important ones. On the other hand, the different indicators on a car are pretty clear so that you can quickly decisions like when to bring your car in for maintenance or when to get gas. Likewise, you should have a key set of metrics for your business objectives that you monitor regularly to understand what are positive outcomes and where you need to focus more.  Marketing metrics can be a mouthful, and while it’s important to stay up-to-date on the latest and greatest, all the buzz can get overwhelming when you don’t know what to look for. With the right measurement strategy in place, you can be well on your way to mastering metrics and measuring the right ones. What other factors do you consider as you’re planning your measurement strategies? Share your tips in the comments below!
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This blog was written ​ By: Mike Nierengarten Posted: June 23, 2016 | Targeting and Personalization As marketers, we work hard to acquire and retain new customers, but not enough of us spend much time thinking about what type of new customers we want to acquire by looking at our existing customer base. The best customers are those that last a lifetime, and by segmenting your current customers and identifying which are the most profitable, stay the longest, expand service, and refer new customers, you can allocate more of your marketing dollars to acquiring similar prospects. Segmentation also highlights which of your customers are leaving, helping you understand what causes them to churn and therefore make a conscious effort to fix it. If you’re a B2B organization, your company likely markets to large enterprise customers with large budgets differently than more price-conscious small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) whose needs may be different. You might separate your enterprise sales teams from SMB sales teams, and you may have different cost per new customer targets for enterprise and SMB. If you’re a Consumer organization, your marketing understands that marketing to pre-teens is different than marketing to a new mom—your whole approach may be different, including your revenue goals. Go beyond just segmenting your customers into large buckets and distinguish sub-segments for each of your customer segments. Here are four steps to segment your existing customers to target the right prospects: 1. Identify Your Best Customers to Find Your Best Prospects If you want to acquire the right prospects, it starts with knowing who your core customers are. Your best customers are going stay with you for a long time, refer you, and extend your marketing and sales efforts. So, prospects who have the same personas, or attributes as your core customers are your best prospects. Every company is going to have different ways of defining their best customers and prospects. As an example, Dialpad understands the key attributes that make up their customer personas: industry, number of employees, company revenue, job roles, product interests, etc. But they also realize that their best customers share their positive experiences on social media, so they target prospects who have the same persona as their core customers and are more likely to publicly advocate. Specifically, they look for prospects who have shared positive experiences on social media profiles and technology review sites in the past. Then, they pair this knowledge with data from exploratory questions, onboarding information, and third party tools. They know their best customers use Google Apps, for example, and this factors into their prospect vetting process. 2. Calculate the Customer Value In creating a list of your best customers, take into account the value that each customer brings your business. Calculate their profit margin, customer lifetime value, and retention rate and consider added value such as client referrals, joint marketing, case studies, and reference. While profit margin and lifetime value are significant, do not underestimate the value of advocacy. A past study by Zuberance revealed that brand advocates are worth five typical customers, significantly multiplying the overall customer value. Understanding common attributes in your customers advocating your brand will help you easily identify future brand advocates. 3. Increase Spend on Campaigns Targeting Core Prospects Once you have put together a profile of your best customers, you can use those same attributes to identify your top prospects. Since long-term, highly profitable customers who advocate are worth more than a standard customer, you should spend more to acquire them. Picture a campaign budget of $100,000. Let’s assume a core customer costs twice as much to acquire, but profit margin is 15% compared to 10% for a standard customer and their lifetime revenue is five times a typical customer. If historically, half of your budget was spent on acquiring standard customers and half was spent on acquiring core customers, you could increase profitability by 35% just by shifting your media spend to 80/20, targeting more core prospects. Despite spending more on targeting core customers, these buyers will provide more value to your business due to their advocacy, retention, service expansion, and overall spend. 4. Run More Campaigns Targeting Core Prospects By knowing who your best prospects are from evaluating your best customers, you can optimize your current campaigns and determine which are most effective at acquiring these target buyers. You can go a step further and establish different cost per opportunity targets for core prospects and then optimize campaigns to drive future long-term customers and advocates. For example, if your general customer target is IT decision-makers and you determine that IT companies who use Hadoop with 100-1,000 employees are more profitable and advocate more often, you can increase your cost per opportunity target for the sub-segment of Hadoop users at mid-size companies. Ideally, you’ll know just how much more you can pay. And if in your analysis of your best customer you determine that your best customers are worth 8x a standard customer, you should be able to increase your target cost per opportunity by 8x. Long-term revenue goes beyond just acquiring customers. If you have a good grasp on the correlation between your best customers and what you are willing to pay for those customers, you may end up paying a little more per customer in the short-term, but your long-term profitability will skyrocket. On the flip side, it’s just as important to proactively identify which customer segments are more likely to churn and work hard to continuously provide value to them to retain them. Have you started segmenting your customer base to find the best prospects to target? Share your experience in the comments below!
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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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Big Data is rock’n the Marketer’s world. It is signalling a wake-up call that marketers need to be more metrics driven, more technically savvy and more process oriented. At the top of the food chain, CMOs are taking on responsibilities that traditionally belonged to CIOs. And at the middle management level, marketers are being required to be more technical and metrics oriented. The days of just fishing for eyeballs or operating based on one’s gut instinct are long gone. It is no longer acceptable to just look at demographics or psychographics or just count eyeballs. Instead, marketers need to focus on the numbers — people’s tribes, their behaviors, their interests, their online behavior — both in terms of surfing the website or a mobile app or transacting with a page or shopping cart.. Most marketers would agree, however, that they are not prepared for the incoming Big Data wave: they lack resources, lack data know-how, and they don’t know how to get started. According to a study from The Economist Intelligence Unit, only 24% of marketers use data for actionable marketing insight. Furthermore, in that same study almost 50% of marketers cited a lack of capacity to analyze big data. Some companies are increasing their budgets for Big Data analytics. The problem is that there’s no road map for getting these marketers up to speed. Rather than focus on the bells and whistles (the technology) of big data, here’s are 7 steps a marketer a marketer can take to get out of their comfort zone and jump into the Big Data World: Understand the definition of Big Data, which is usually defined by the 3Vs: Volume or the amount of data involved Variety or to how the data is structured Velocity or the rate at which it is generated and analysed Subscribe to and learn from few key bloggers, who can teach you the ropes: SemAngel Blog by Gary Angel: Gary brings over twenty years of experience in decision support, CRM, and software development. Gary co-founded Semphonic and is the President and Chief Technology Officer.  But don’t let the CTO title fool you. Gary is the the brightest consultant I have worked with and can take complex techn issues and break them down into easily digestible and understandable. chunks for markets Analytics Blog by Justin Cutron: Justin is currently the Analytics Advocate at Google, so he has a boatload of knowledge. In his blog, he breaks down digital analytics for businesses. Customer Analytics blog by the SAS’ companies – This blog is for anyone who is looking for ways to improve the business of marketing and communicating with customers, which includes everything from multi-level marketing to social media campaigns. Big Data Hub by IBM: This blog is filled with case studies, videos, etc. from key players at IBM and beyond. Business Analytics Blog by Tim Elliot: Tom is an Innovation Evangelist for SAP. This blog contains his personal views, thoughts, and opinions on business analytics. Get your organization big data ready: Tear down your organization’s silos and engage multiple departments Give team members homework — tell them to read the blogs mentioned above. Think about how you will link your current data infrastructure to your project (that means a business analyst, and IT guy, etc. should be involved in the meeting) Know and recognize that Big Data is a team sport Work with  framework your organization agrees on, such as: Define Your Goal Understand your resources Review key segment’s Journey Confirm you are capturing data during each phase Establish benchmark Create a small measurable deliverable (test) Track over time Establish toll gate reviews Expand program Tweak your programs as needed Define the desired outcome and the one question you want to answer Yes, narrow it down to one (primary) question Answer the question and move on Understand your inputs by breaking down your customer(s) journey Identify the different sources of data, such as social network behavior, information from third party lists, mobile usage, downloads, etc. List out different types of potential metrics you could track: Information related specifically to the customers transactions (or actions) Information related to a segment’s usage patterns Information related to the overall marketing program In some respects Big Data is just an extension of database marketing, a popular term in the 1980s and 1990s because it focuses on leveraging customer information to segment an audience and develop personalized campaigns. The biggest difference now is that we can leverage unstructured data (video for example) and implement just-in-time programs. I am a big believer in learning by doing. If a Marketer really wants to be figure out how to integrate big data into their business processes, they need to have on-the-job training. (And to that point, I actually believe this is important for the CMO as well as the Business Analyst, although the latter might get more in the proverbial data weeds!). If marketers don’t do this, they will lose their admission ticket to be in the marketing world.
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By: Johnny Cheng  I hear this question from email marketers all the time: Does the size of my email send affect the performance? To answer this question, we’re going to play MythBusters! Email Myth #1 “The larger your email sends, the higher your unsubscribe rate”. Hypothesis: This one seems reasonable. I feel like if you’re doing huge email size sends, your messaging is probably going to seem “spammy”, and so a larger percentage of recipients will unsubscribe due to irrelevance. Data and Analysis: Here, you’ll see email send size against unsubscribe rate. Each dot represents an email send from a customer. I’ve cut off the data at 1M emails because everything above that becomes a special case. There is no significant correlation here. In fact, you can see there’s actually a slightly negative correlation. Larger email sends actually have lower unsubscribe rates. This could be a result of companies with larger databases having more well-known brand names so they are more careful with their email campaigns. But, I think the opposite is true in that there are many “experimental” small email sends that are sent to “unknown” contacts. Results: Myth busted! Email send size does not affect unsubscribe rate. Wow, this one wasn’t that intuitive. I assumed large email sends mimicked spam email which would warrant higher unsubscribes. But the data shows that email volume size doesn’t affect unsubscribe rate. However, it’s important to note that several other factors such as frequency, content, and relevance do. Take a moment and think about your every-day email behavior: if could be seen as annoying or irrelevant, you’re probably going to take the extra effort to unsubscribe. Email Myth #2 “The larger your email sends, the lower your click-to-open rate”. Hypothesis: Just like the first myth, this one looks plausible. Huge email sends dilute the messaging so I would imagine email performance would suffer. It’s hard to imagine one email would be relevant to millions of people, at least not relevant enough for them to click through. Data and Analysis: Here, you’ll see email send size against click-to-open rate. Each dot represents an email send from a customer. I’ve cut off the data at 1M emails because everything above that becomes a special case. There’s a very strong correlation here. If I were to sketch out the natural curves, it would look like a sideways funnel with a huge drop-off at around 20,000 to 50,000. Email sizes above that rarely reach higher than 20% click-t0-open. This makes a lot of sense if you think of content relevance. More segmented email sends, with more targeted messaging, get more clicks. And for all you inquisitive minds out there, if you’re wondering about just click rate, yes, the exact same phenomenon as click-to-open rate occurs. Results: Myth confirmed! Email send size is directly tied to performance. I love science! We proved an industry-old myth with data! But if you really think about this one, it makes a lot of sense. Open rate is tied to your subject line and sender info. Click rate is tied to your content and offering, which equals relevance. The larger your email sizes, the harder it is to stay relevant and have a compelling call-to-action that appeals to that audience. Especially after the email send size exceeds 20,000—where the average click-to-open band narrows to 3-18%. It’s very rare to escape that band. What We’ve Learned The main takeaway here is to find a good balance between the granularity of your segments and the relevance of your content or offering. If you have the resources, segment your email campaigns based on the audience persona (industry, demographic, geography, etc.) and behavior (e.g. looked at your product webpages). As a general “guideline,” the email size sweet spot is around 5,000. However, as long as your message is relevant and resonates with the recipients, you’ll get good email performance. It’s just very difficult to stay relevant beyond a certain audience size. Notice something in the data that stood out to you? Leave your comments below.
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Note: This playbook was provided by our LaunchPoint partner, Neustar. This white paper provides six simple steps for developing accurate and usable data. It's a good quick read.
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By: Johnathan Dane Posted: January 18, 2016 | Digital Marketing Have you ever been so good at something that that everyone looked at you jealously while binging on Ben & Jerry’s? In this blog, I’ll share some effective AdWords Display tricks with you that not many people know about. These are the tricks that you can implement today. But before we get into how you can create your own AdWords Display Network plan, you need to understand the key difference between AdWords Search and AdWords Display. AdWords Search Network: You’re limited to bidding on keywords with a finite amount of ad spots. This means that your competition can make your ad clicks pretty expensive, pretty fast. AdWords Display Network: You have almost limitless ad space across various websites, along with the ability to advertise both image and text ads in different sizes. Now, we’re ready to jump in. These are the five AdWords Display hacks you won’t find outlined in user manuals: 1. The Competitor Email Subscriber Hack aka Gmail Sponsored Promotions Your competitor’s hard work can actually pay off for your company. In fact, you can advertise directly to their prospects when they open your competitor’s emails. With Gmail Sponsored Promotions (GSP), you can target competitor domains as keywords. By doing this, Gmail will look for emails from competitors you target, and if the email recipient is in their Gmail account, your ad will show up. Some people think that because GSP is an AdWords Display channel, the intent behind the GSP visitors would be the same as regular Display visitors—low time on site and high bounce rates—since people aren’t actively looking for what you’re offering, like on the Search Network. On the contrary, not only do the GSP visitors hang around longer than many Search visitors, but you’ll find that some stick around for 2-4x the average time on your site. Check out the average time on site from a GSP campaign within Google Analytics: GSP conversions can actually be the cheapest of all AdWords campaigns. Just take a look at the example below at the cost per converted click for GSP vs. other campaigns. So what makes GSP ads so powerful? You’re paying an AdWords Display style cost-per-click that has almost as high of an intent as an expensive Search click. Since your ad recipients are interested in what your competitors have to say, they’ll most likely be interested in you too. You’re stealing away market share from your competitors, one conversion at a time, since your competitors are hoping that their email leads to a conversion for themselves. You’re going to find that it works tremendously well for high-ticket industries that have longer sales cycles, but also great for small-ticket items too. This is because some high ticket industries pay over $50-$100 per click on the Search Network, but only $0.20 with GSP ads. 2. Supersize It, Please: Use Display Layers To Improve Your Display Targeting This next AdWords Display hack is as much a money maker as it is a mouth drooler. Consider for a second that all of your AdWords Display targeting options are one big, fat, juicy burger (if you’re vegan, please substitute for a veggie patty).Each layer of this ‘display burger’ is a different targeting option, and the more layers you add, the more specific your targeting burger gets. . Placements: Actual URLs you want to target. You can use a tool like WhatRunsWhere.com to see where your current competitors are having their Display ads show and target those directly as well.Contextual: This is just a fancy word for keyword targeting. Give Google the keywords, and it will find “relevant” placements for your ads (heavy air quotes on the relevant part).Interests: This is people-based targeting and is considered a stronger way to understand your audience’ browsing behaviors across different sites.There are two types of interest layers you can target: Affinity Audiences: People who have long-term interests, like gardening. In-Market Audiences: People whose browsing behavior shows that they’re ready to buy. Topics: This is a group of websites that relate to a similar topic.Demographics: This is where you get target age, gender, and parental status.Geo/Languages: This includes geographic targeting (country, state, city, radius, etc.) and the language of your targeted audience.You may find that the more layers you add to your burger, the lower the volume, but the better your performance is. Your layers will have different results, and sometimes, simply targeting a direct placement will yield the best results. 3. The Automatic Money Making Robot In the world of AdWords programmatic advertising, the Display Campaign Optimizer is one of my favorite tools when it comes to making money (and impressing people on the dance floor). Display Campaign Optimizer (DCO) takes the targeting criteria from your regular layer targeting (remember the burger earlier?) and uses that info to find new nooks and crannies based off your goal cost per acquisition (CPA) bid that you set.Let’s say you that you want conversions at $5. DCO would then go out and find placements and mobile apps that help you hit that goal. Some placements and mobile apps might be more expensive than others, and if that continues, the DCO would automatically exclude those placements and mobile apps and go after others.A few other things to consider when it comes to Do’s and Don’ts of DCO: Do gradually rotate in new creatives. Do change your CPA bid in small increments. Do use target CPA to control traffic volumes. Do create new ad groups for thematically different ad creatives. Don’t make full ad swaps. Don’t change the target CPA constantly. Don’t remove high performing placements. Don’t test a ton of radically different landing pages. The reason why you want to be careful with big changes is because the DCO uses your ad and landing page info, along with historical performance, to improve its baseline of performance. If you shake things up too often, then it won’t be able continually improve or backtrack to what worked before.Once you find automatic placements and apps that work for you, you can extract them into new campaigns and bid on those to get more volume. But there’s a catch. DCO operates off of browsing behavior signals where it can see the path a visitor has taken prior to the placement where they see your ad. This means that if you extract a specific placement and bid on it, then the performance might not be the same as it was in the DCO campaign. While there’s not much you can do about that, you can still use layer targeting on top of that specific placement to try to replicate the results. 4. The Smallest, But Most Powerful: Mobile App Ads Mobile apps are a huge deal these days. Just take a look at Snapchat and Uber. And then there’s things like the iPhone Blower, which isn’t worth much, but is full  of advertising potential. This is because most of the free apps have high usage rates. With high usage rates come high ad-click rates, and with high ad-click rates, come high conversion volume. And there are literally millions of apps out there that are part of the Google AdWords universe where you can buy ad placements directly in a specific app.You can use your own targeted demographics to find a pool of apps to target or if you use DCO to your advantage (which I hope you do), then targeting mobile apps by themselves will be insanely easy because the robot finds the apps that perform the best for you. Not to mention that it feels like Christmas every time you see the new mobile apps the DCO robot has found in theAutomatic Placements report!Here’s where your Automatic Placements report is located inside AdWord s: Once you find mobile apps that are performing well, you then want to find their unique package names so you can target them individually.Both iTunes and Google naming conventions.iTunes apps have numeric package names that can be found in their iTunes URLs  Play apps have different package : Google Play apps have alphabetic package names that can be found in their Google Play URLs: So now that you know where inside the AdWords Display world to go fish, let’s make sure you have the best bait possible to not just get the clicks, but the conversions too. 5. Your Army of Mini Conversion Baits If you know the big difference between the AdWords Display and Search Networks, then you know that your visitors are in different stages of the buying cycle.Display visitors might not even know they need your solution until you generate their awareness first, whereas Search visitors could be looking for exactly what you have to offer and buy something today. So how do you get your Display visitors to get their foot in your door?It’s relatively simple. All you have to do is test your bait. If a Display visitor sees your ad, but they’re not ready for a free consultation (or whatever other call-to-action you use on the Search Network), then you need to give them something that’s a different—a low threat offer.These mini baits/offers could be a lot of different things, and you’ve likely seen them before. Here are a few examples, all of which you can mix and match: Coupon Checklist/Cheasheet Quiz Video/Video Course Tools Calendar Podcast/Interview Consultation Tickets Live Demo Email Course Swipe File Infographic/Gifographic Free Quote White Paper eBook Industry Stats Case Study This almost goes without saying, but make sure your new Display visitors taken some kind of opt-in approach before they can get what you promised. If you don’t, then you can’t really nurture them to become paying customers in the future. Here’s What You Should Do Next Even though we only covered a small part of what’s possible with the AdWords Display Network, you now have five easy-to-use and actionable ways to expand and grow your conversion volume. Aside from continuously testing, be relentless in tracking everything directly to revenue. You may find odd nooks and crannies that you never thought would make sense to target, but once you have the complete revenue picture, you’ll be excited to continue fishing and expand your AdWords Display targeting portfolio. Happy fishing! What other AdWords Display hacks do you know of? Share them in the comments section below.
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By: Alexandra Nation Posted: May 9, 2016 | Sales Ah, my first software demo–I remember it like it was yesterday (it was four years ago). Somewhere out there is a shell-shocked prospect wondering why on earth they even took my call. If you’re in a client-facing role and looking to improve your demo and presentation skills, this blog post is for you. For your amusement or horror, below is a list of some of the missteps I made during that call: My voice shook from nerves and too much coffee. I didn’t ask questions. Instead, I rambled on with details of no consequence and irrelevant tangents. My mouse flew all over the screen for no apparent reason as I excitedly clicked into every last feature of the product. I jumped to answer every question instead of trying to understand the use case, which invariably led to more questions. I completely neglected to read my audience and adjust accordingly. I made a very sleek and easy to use technology appear complicated and confusing. I called out bugs in the demo instance on the 1-2 occasions that the product didn’t function properly. Tell them. This is when you build your business case for why your solution meets their needs. Don’t just rattle off different features. Speak to how you can help—how can your product or service can help them overcome their challenges? Tell them what you told them. Repeat your takeaways to drive the point home before you end your presentation. When you deliver your demo, pause early and often. In my early days at Marketo, I watched my fellow SCs employ the magic of a pause in their demos. At the end of each section, they would pause for several seconds–to the point where it was borderline uncomfortable–instead of asking for some kind of feedback. Again, it demonstrates through your actions that you care about keeping the call conversational, and it gives your conversational partner an easy way to participate. 5. When You Do Talk, Pretend You’re a News Anchor Think of how news anchors speak: in easily digestible, repeatable sound bites. Celebrity news hosts are especially good at this, but you can watch for it on every single news program. When someone on CNN is explaining a foreign policy decision, they don’t go off on some obscure tangent. Rather, they don’t waste a single word, use plain English, and follow a very logical flow. I just gave you an excuse to watch TMZ to improve in your job—you’re welcome. Pretending you’re a news anchor will also accomplish another important goal: keeping your demo laser-focused. Every click and every screen you show should have a purpose. 6. Take Your Hands Off the Keyboard If you are not specifically clicking on something, take your hands off the keyboard and put them in your lap while you answer a question. This will help you avoid waving your mouse all over the screen and distracting your prospect. They will look wherever you point, so mind your gestures. Plus, who knows what you might accidentally click on? 7. Discover the QBQ–the Question Behind the Question I was recently on an internal certification for one of our newer Solutions Consultants. Our manager asked her how many filters we have in a specific feature, and she handled it perfectly. Rather than scramble to answer, she paused, smiled, and asked him to explain his use case. Sure enough, he had no interest in a number, but wanted to see a specific scenario built out. The conversation took a completely different and far more productive path because it veered away from features/functions and towards benefits and addressing pain points. 8. Balance Likability with Excellent Product Knowledge I firmly believe that people buy from people they like. They also buy from people who know what they’re talking about. It’s important to establish a positive relationship with your customer, but only after you’ve earned it by establishing your credibility. This means that if you don’t know something, admit it candidly. Then, earn their trust even more by following up promptly with the correct answer to their question. 9. Record Yourself The best athletes watch their games and pick apart everything they could have done better. The best salespeople do the same. Use the camera on your computer or phone if you do any onsite presentations, or use a screen/voice capture product like Snagit if you conduct business virtually. This will help you identify your filler words and see how well you navigate your product. 10. Don’t Call the Baby Ugly This one drives me crazy. If your demo instance is lacking some data, loads an odd screen or error message, or just takes a minute to pull up, don’t acknowledge it. Fill the space with conversation and don’t apologize for your tools. Most of the time, the customer doesn’t notice that there’s an issue. Worst-case scenario is that you can follow up after the call with a screenshot of what you wanted to show, which opens a door for another conversation with them. Whether you’re just getting started in sales or looking to master your craft, I’d love to hear from you. Which of these tips resonated? Is there anything you’d add to the list?
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By: Heidi Bullock Posted: March 24, 2016 | Modern Marketing Earlier this week, the big marketing technology (MarTech) conference swept through San Francisco, giving marketers and technologists a sense of new and upcoming solutions, and what technologies are truly standing the test of time. Every year when this time rolls around, I personally really look forward to Scott Brinker’s updated Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic. And every year, as I look at the graphic and sift through the landscape, I go through a series of emotions (and this year was no exception, with the number of MarTech solutions now reaching 3,874): Excitement: Wow, this is a beautiful visualization of tech geek nirvana. I love it! Look at all of these new companies with interesting new offerings. And Scott has done a great job of categorizing the thousands of companies in a very elegant and organized way. Pride: MarTech is real. Marketing has come a long way and I’m so proud that this area of business is getting the investment and attention it deserves. Several years ago, this would have looked like a few green peas on a big white plate, but today, it’s a satisfying meal–complete with mints when you are done eating. Panic: Dear God, do I really need to know about all of these companies? Am I an incompetent marketer if I am not using all of the “latest and greatest”? How is my budget going to support another tool–and who on my team is going to run this thing? These concerns are real. It’s hard enough to come into the office every day and work on your day-to-day tasks, but more and more, marketers are challenged with being a technical landscape aficionado on top of it–and this is coming from someone who loves it! Calm, Cool and Collected: Okay, stay cool. I have got this and I need to chill out. It’s easy to get stuck in any one stage of the emotional journey, it’s critical to keep moving forward. While an entire book could be written on how to make sense of all of the MarTech solutions, let’s keep things simple for the purpose of this blog. Follow these three steps to navigate the ever-evolving MarTech landscape: 1. Build a Solid Foundation It’s critical to have a few core solutions that represent the foundation of your ‘house’. A good way to think about this is to understand what will be your source of truth or system of record for your key functions. For many companies, this is often your marketing automation systems, customer database/CRM and content management system (CMS) . This is an obvious point, but make sure you put energy and thought into this blueprint. The tools you put in place here are critical to getting set up correctly. For example, understand your data flow, rules, and data hygiene processes. Understand APIs and what is truly out-of-the box versus needing to bring in a team to complete your integration. It’s also helpful to connect with other companies similar to your own to see what they have done right and wrong–essentially, learn from their successes and mistakes. 2. Understand Where You Are and Where You’re Going You need to know what the current state of your business is and where you plan to go. The majority of businesses are trying to grow–so make sure you consider this as you evaluate new solutions. It’s critical to think about tools that will grow with you, so you don’t have to rip-and-replace every other year. Some solutions are excellent for a small businesses, but then reach real limitations quickly. Another important lens is understanding needs versus wants. What is mission-critical for your business? If customer marketing and referrals are important, you may need software to drive advocacy. Or, if this is in your future, build your stack knowing this could be an addition for next year. 3. Avoid a ‘Frankenstack’ Some of you might have seen what’s commonly referred to as a “Frankenstack”, a set of individual siloed tools that an organization tries to get to work together and ultimately results in a hot mess. It can happen to the best marketers, and it often happens because of rapid growth and a lack of planning or impulsive decisions (“Hey we can use it here!”). It is painful for IT, and it is painful for marketers. When this occurs, it is often more time consuming and expensive to fix. The key here is to have a plan, involve IT, and be honest about the resources you need to maintain and manage the solutions. This thoughtfulness will save a lot of grief in the future. The ever-evolving sea of MarTech solutions can be overwhelming, but with the right plan in place, you can understand how to evaluate new solutions and avoid being swept away by “shiny new objects”. Have you checked out the new Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic? What other tips do you have for evaluating these solutions for the best fit for your business?
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By: Jamie Lewis Posted: February 2, 2016 | Marketing Metrics While it may seem like there is a new marketing channel available almost every day (I’m devising my smart fridge strategy as we speak), email marketing, when done right, is still one of the most profitable acquisition and lead retention channels available. To clarify, by “done right” I mean permission-based email marketing with content that is personalized, relevant, timely, and highly optimized. And if you don’t have a great email program like this already, then you’re leaving tremendous value on the table. Be data-cated So how can you craft a slammin’ email channel to drive value to your stakeholders? The answer is actually quite mundane: you need to have the right set of metrics to analyze your email marketing channel and optimize it to stardom. This set of metrics is called your key performance indicators (KPIs) and should be very closely tied to your organization’s primary business goals. In fact, they will be a direct measure of how well you are achieving those goals. Traditionally, email analytics has been hard because all of your demographic data, open rates, etc. resided in your email service provider (ESP) database, while all of your web traffic and conversion data was being tracked by your content management system (CMS) and/or Google Analytics. This was a problem because unifying your end-to-end data is really hard, not to mention time consuming. Nowadays, this problem is being solved by the adoption of marketing automation platforms that unify email and conversion data in an end-to-end fashion. Now let’s talk data. When choosing KPIs that help measure your business goals, it is important that you follow these three rules: keep them very simple, produce them in a timely manner, and make sure they are useful. In other words, make it so that people can view your KPIs, quickly understand what they mean, and then take action on them immediately. This is critical because in today’s world we all need to act fast! There are three categories of data you will analyze when it comes to optimizing your email marketing channel. When creating your KPIs, you need to always be thinking about these things: 1. Engagement Engagement is a category that encompasses email campaign metrics and reveals how your emails are resonating with your target list. It measures things such as: how many emails were sent, who you sent them to, and what the result was. Here are some great KPIs that help measure the business goal of driving deeper engagement within my list: Delivery rate: (# of emails – bounce backs)/ (# of emails) – measures the quality of your lead list. Open rate: (# opened/# emails delivered) – represents the success of your “from” field and subject line. Subscriber retention rate: (# subscribers – # bounces – # unsubscribes)/# subscribers) – measures how well you are targeting your database and if you are delighting them. Click to delivery rate: # of clicks/# of emails delivered – helps you understand the mailing list quality and email content relevance. 2. Behavior Behavior is a measure of what happens after the viewer clicks a link on the email. It answers: what do they do on my site, how well they engage, and do they buy? Here are some great KPIs to measure the business goals of deeper engagement on my website, elevated content consumption, and an increase in Sales Qualified Leads : Bounce rate: (# of clicks to the website with a single page view / # visits) – a great measure of the alignment between email and landing page. Depth of visit: (% of email campaign visits that last longer than xx pages) – especially important for non-ecommerce. Actions completed: (% of visits that took the call-to-action on the landing page) 3. Outcome Outcome is a measure of the goals, conversions, and revenue you drove through your email channel. Tracking all of these conversions and attributing it back to your email programs is critically important. Here is my list of outcome KPIs that measure the business goal of increasing total revenue: Macro conversion rate: (revenue producing conversions / visits) – How successful are you at targeting your audience with the right message at the right time. Avg. revenue per email sent: (total revenue / # of emails sent) – Use this to measure how clean your list is. Profitability: (rev generated – cost – cost of goods sold) / # emails sent) – the “Holy Grail” of KPIs One last thing to note is that there is no one size fits all when it comes to email KPIs, you must be willing to experiment with your campaigns and how you analyze them and change your approach accordingly. Nor is it always possible to track all of these metrics all the time. I find that choosing one from each group may be sufficient. For example, if I wanted to keep it simple I would choose “click to delivery rate” for engagement, “bounce rate” for behavior, and “profitability” for outcome as my top three and go from there. Metrics are critical for building success and identifying what works and what doesn’t. With the right ones in place, you can realize the full potential of your email channel. What KPIs are you currently tracking for your email programs? Share them in the comments below!
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