Product Documents

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.

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.

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.

We use Eventbrite for smaller, local events (such as regional happy hours or lunch & learns) that our non-Marketo team members set up and run. The integration between Eventbrite and Salesforce was not allowing us to capture the data the way we wanted to, so we looked for a way to feed the data from Eventbrite into Marketo, prior to sending it into Salesforce. The solution for us was adjusting our data flow process to utilize “zaps” via Zapier. This step-by-step guide will show you how we were able to integrate our systems to capture the data we need. Side Note: Zapier offers a 14-day free trial which will allow you to test this functionality to see if it will work for your organization. WHAT YOU NEED TO GET SET UP: Admin access to Marketo, Eventbrite and Zapier Unique email address to create Zapier/Marketo connection (ex: zapierapi@yourcompany.com) Custom Field: Eventbrite ID (this may or may not already be available – just check ) PROCESS TO GET SET UP: Step 1: Add Eventbrite and Marketo to your “Connected Accounts” within Zapier Connect Eventbrite account to Zapier account Connect Marketo account to Zapier account Follow the instructions found here to obtain your Client ID, Secret and Domain Please note: You will need to create an alias email address to connect the Zapier API to your Marketo instance (ex: zapierapi@yourcompany.com) Step 2: Create Zap to capture event “registration” in EventBrite and feed the data into Marketo EVENTBRITE: Create the event in Eventbrite. Make adjustments to the “order form” as needed to ensure that the appropriate fields are being captured upon registration. If certain fields are necessary to add to your database, make sure that they are “required” fields on the order form (ex. First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Email Address, etc.). Make your event “live” and submit a test registration (you’ll be able to remove the test later). MARKETO: Create a list in your Marketo Lead Database to capture registrants. For scalability, it’s recommended that you create a “Zap Lists” folder under your “Group Lists” folder. Use a naming convention that will clearly identify which list should be associated with which event. We use the date of the event as the unique identifier (ex: 160629 NE Happy Hour - Registered) MARKETO: Create an Event program in Marketo. If you would like to use the Marketo Events app to check people in at the event, be sure that you use the appropriate channel for your program. In the “Setup” tab, be sure to add your period costs, appropriate tags, and analytics behavior. Also, be sure to “schedule” your event if you plan to use the Marketo Events App for attendee check-in. MARKETO: Create a smart campaign to add the appropriate registrants to the event program. SMART LIST: Trigger: Added to List > List Name is [insert the list name you created in Lead Database to capture registrants] Filter: Eventbrite Id > Eventbrite Id is [leave blank until you obtain the id from Zapier] FLOW: Change Program Status > Program [the program you created] New Status: [channel > registered] Please note: You can create whatever additional flow steps or smart campaigns you need to facilitate your program. The above are just the basics needed to associate the lead with the program for the Zapier dataflow process described here. ZAPIER: Once you’ve completed the items listed below, select the “Make a Zap!” button. Be sure to clearly name your Zap, so you know what event and action the Zap represents: The Eventbrite and Marketo accounts are connected The event has been created in Eventbrite The event registration list has been created in the Lead Database (Marketo) The event program has been created in Marketing Activities (Marketo) Create Step 1 of the Zap. Follow the document titled “Use Zapier for Registration” for visual guide of the following steps: Select Eventbrite for your trigger app Select “New Attendee” for your Eventbrite Trigger Select the appropriate Eventbrite account Select Event Status is “live” Select Event is [the event you created in Eventbrite] Review the details of the attendee registration to obtain the “Eventbrite ID”. MARKETO: Copy that “Event ID” and insert it into your event program smart campaign in Marketo. This will ensure that the appropriate registrants are being associated with the appropriate events. Please note: event_id = Eventbrite id Create Step 2 of the Zap. Follow the document titled “Use Zapier for Registration” for visual guide of the following steps: Select Marketo for your action app Select “Create or Update Lead” as your Marketo action Select the appropriate Marketo account Associate the fields captured via the Eventbrite order form with the appropriate fields in the Marketo database. Not all fields need to be associated. This step is unique to your organization. Email is the only “required” field and you must populate the “Eventbrite Id” field with the appropriate information. Create Step 3 of the Zap. Follow the document titled “Use Zapier for Registration” for visual guide of the following steps: Select Marketo for your action app Select “Add Lead to List” as your Marketo action Select the appropriate Marketo account To Set up Marketo Lead to List, select List = [the list you created in the Lead Database for registrants]; select Lead = Use a custom value, Custom Value for Lead ID = Step 2 ID You will be able to verify that the registration process fired appropriately by reviewing your list in the Lead Database and the event program in your Marketing Activities section within your Marketo instance. Step 3: Create Zap to capture event “check-in” in EventBrite and feed the data into Marketo The hang up we’ve run into with the Marketo Events app is that you have to use a tablet to “check in” event attendees. With Eventbrite, our reps have the ability to use their phones to check people in, which tends to be easier for our organization. This is why we set up a Zap to push “check in” data from Eventbrite into Marketo. Please note: if you’re using the Marketo Events app to track attendees, you do not need to set up a Zap to push attendee data from EventBrite into Marketo. This is only needed if you will be “checking in” attendees via the EventBrite app/platform. MARKETO: Create a List in your Marketo Lead Database section to capture event attendees. Use a naming convention that will clearly identify which list should be associated with which event. We use the date of the event as the unique identifier (ex: 160629 NE Happy Hour - Attended) MARKETO: Add a smart campaign to your event program that will listen for registrants to “check-in” to the event. SMART LIST: Trigger: Added to List > List Name is [insert the list name you created in Lead Database to capture attendees] Filter Eventbrite Id > Eventbrite Id is [same id from the “add to program” smart list created in previous steps] FLOW: Change Program Status > Program [the program you created] New Status: [channel > attended] You can create whatever additional flow steps or smart campaigns you need to facilitate your program. The above are just the basics needed to associate the lead status change with the program. EVENTBRITE: Go into your event in Eventbrite and mark your test registrant as “check-in” to update the status ZAPIER: Create Step 1 of the Zap. Follow the document titled “Use Zapier for Attendees” for visual guide of the following steps: Select the “Make a Zap!” button Select Eventbrite for your trigger app Select “New Attendee Check-In” for your Eventbrite trigger (this option may appear under “show less common options”) Select the appropriate Eventbrite account Select the correct event associated with the “check-in” for the Eventbrite Attendee Create Step 2 of the Zap. Follow the document titled “Use Zapier for Attendees” for visual guide of the following steps: Select Marketo for your action app Select “Create or Update Lead” as your Marketo action Select the appropriate Marketo account Associate the appropriate fields in Eventbrite with the fields in Marketo. For this step you only need to associate the “email address (profile email)” and the “Eventbrite id (event id)”. This lead (if new to your database) was already created in your registration zap. Create Step 3 of the Zap. Follow the document titled “Use Zapier for Attendees” for visual guide of the following steps: Select Marketo for your action app Select “Add Lead to List” as your Marketo action Select the appropriate Marketo account To Set up Marketo Lead to List, select List = [the list you created in the Lead Database for attendees]; select Lead = Use a custom value, Custom Value for Lead ID = Step 2 ID You will be able to verify that the check in process fired appropriately by reviewing your list in the Lead Database and the event program in your Marketing Activities section within your Marketo instance. Congratulations! You’re all set up. Remember to remove your test registrants/attendees from the Marketo program. You’ll also want to be sure to turn your zaps “on” before collecting registrants/attendees. Another thing to consider is that Zapier charges based on the amount of zaps being used. You may want to consider deleting the zaps once the event is completed, so you will not be charged.

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!

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

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!

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!

By: Patrick Groover Posted: April 26, 2016 | Sales Marketing Alignment Have you been approached by your sales team within recent months asking for more leads or, in many cases, higher quality leads? (Where are my Star Trek fans?) As marketers, it’s no longer enough to be building the best communication with sales; it’s vital that we deliver the highest quality prospects to the sales team and reduce the amount of time spent on unqualified inquiries. And this can only be accomplished with the right insights. In this blog, I’ll cover two trends that are driving the demand from the sales team for higher quality leads, and how a strong marketing automation platform can help you provide your sales channel with greater insight into audience behavior: Understanding the Trends The first trend is a tech-savvy sales team. Greater access to information and exposure to technology are developing a new breed of salespeople. Marketing automation platforms and CRMs are no longer a novelty; they are the standard. And with this standard, the sales team is asking for tools that don’t just collect information. They want visibility into their return on investment, and as a result, sales looks to marketing to connect the dots surrounding the buyer journey and provide insights that will help them prioritize and act on the hottest targets for business. The demand for marketing services is no longer focused solely on the outside alone; there is a new consumer of strategic marketing services–the sales team. The second trend is the convergence of technology. Companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, and other industry leaders have laid the foundation for ubiquitous networks that condition buyers to expect universal access to information. This conditioning starts at young ages, with platforms such as Xbox and PlayStation setting an intrinsic expectation of connected experiences. Add to that the widespread usage of mobile apps, reminding buyers that they can quickly and easily access all kinds of information at the touch of a screen. As a result, marketing has inherited the expectation that insights into buyer behavior should be universally accessible by sales. Similarly, insights should be categorized and prioritized in a way that makes selling to the right audience at the right time as simple as possible. Responding to the Demand for Insights For many marketers, connecting the dots and prioritizing targets can be a daunting task. To start, connecting databases can be an immense challenge if the logic to consolidate and centralize insights around the lead, contact, account, and/or opportunity is missing. Take the standard request to pull together a report around tradeshow results. Many marketing teams can measure aspects of the event, but connecting these results together is oftentimes challenging because legacy marketing systems don’t “talk” to the CRM. The impact is a lot of marketing activity that cannot clearly be linked to revenue. Taking this thought a little further, the marketing systems that manage web activity, campaigns, and content may be disconnected from centralized tracking of customer interactions as well. Pulling together the full history of how a target moved from unknown, to known, to engaged, and then to closed is challenging at best. Addressing the Gaps and Finding your Insights The good news is that growth in ubiquitous platforms has reached the marketing world. Rather than struggling to connect the dots through SQL queries, congested lead routing, and manual scoring, marketing automation platforms are helping marketers define and share insights with sales. Here are three examples of how a solid marketing automation platform can help you answer the call for strategic prioritization of leads: Leading solutions deliver a strong and scalable API. There are a wide variety of systems out there and you need a centralized solution that can handle connecting the many different data points that drive your result. Strengths of a solid platform include (but are not limited to): A wide and open network of partner solutions The ability to connect to multiple types of data sources (e.g. e-commerce, CRM, DMP, etc.) The ability to both consume and act on data inputs Marketing has access to pre-designed and configurable insights that can be shared with sales. As a marketer, you need to be able to identify and highlight behaviors and events that indicate which targets have the highest likelihood to produce revenue. Scoring is important; however, the ability to pass specific events and alerts to your sales team at the optimum buying time is an additional criteria for delivering strategic marketing value. Marketing has access to pre-designed and configurable insights that can be shared with sales. As a marketer, you need to be able to identify and highlight behaviors and events that indicate which targets have the highest likelihood to produce revenue. Scoring is important; however, the ability to pass specific events and alerts to your sales team at the optimum buying time is an additional criteria for delivering strategic marketing value. Connected reporting helps tell the full marketing story which is essential to demonstrating impact. Your ability to show that particular opportunities were the direct result of marketing interactions is one of the primary ways that you can build a successful marketing career. Being able to connect the dots and gauge ROI from specific campaigns based on the full set of marketing interactions along the buyer journey delivers a competitive advantage to savvy marketers. The modern salesperson is used to having any and all types of information at their disposal. As a marketer, your ability to supply these insights with marketing automation can quickly demonstrate the value of your team, campaigns, and investments. Do you see any other trends driving a shift in marketing? Share your insights in the comments below.

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.

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!

By: Chris Gillespie Posted: March 22, 2016 | Sales It’s an easy mistake to make, and most of us are guilty of it: we make decisions based off our emotions, which sometimes steer us in the wrong way. And as a sales rep, who could blame you? You’re juggling conflicting priorities that pull you in all sorts of different directions. Some days you’re focused on sharpening your product knowledge and other days you’re learning to listen better and uncover compelling events. Support teams want you to set better expectations, marketing wants you drive people to a conference, and your boss needs you to forecast more accurately. With all of these moving parts, your productivity is constantly rising and falling, and if you don’t pay attention to the health of your funnel, your income and job security will always be in flux. But with some driver-awareness, you can learn to steer things towards success. Sales Is Like Driving a Car The analogy I always like to draw is that sales is like driving a car. As you’re driving, you pay attention to the road, speedometer, and mirrors for helpful feedback that keeps you on track. In sales, you also have constant feedback from the people who ignore your emails, the pitches that backfire, and the deals you don’t win. The problem here is that we sometimes start ignoring this feedback because it can be uncomfortable. So instead, we stick to talking about our wins. But the consequences for ignoring this feedback in both selling and driving are the same: after a while, you’ll drive yourself off the road. The first step towards staying on course is learning to accept feedback and resisting the urge to defend yourself. It’s important not to see it as criticism because feedback is the only way you can get better. Once you’ve done this, the best place to start looking for feedback is within your sales pipeline, which in many ways is the quantitative accumulation of all of your sales feedback. Based on what’s not going well, you can steer yourself out of a ditch and onto the performance highway. So, check your mirrors for these three common pipeline problems and learn how to address them to get back on track: 1. Not Enough Leads Coming In While this is a top-of-the-funnel problem, the issue may not be with your marketing or sales process, but with your perspective. If you’re starting from scratch in a new territory, you’re in a good spot. The best thing to do here is identify what makes a “good target” from other successful reps and start going through the list of companies you have. Spend your time narrowing them down into a few manageable lists, then determine youroutreach strategy and get cracking. But if you have a module of set accounts that you’ve been at for a while, you may be suffering from a bias against familiar companies that you refer to as “dead territory”. Your deep knowledge on prospects in the territory might actually be holding you back. Approach these accounts with a fresh mindset, and make a point of going after the ones that are hard to get and challenging yourself to call everyone in that account or ask to be referred in. Flip things on their head and you’ll start seeing results. As motivational speaker, Jim Rohn said “If you truly want something, you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.” So find a way. If you feel that you have already reached out to every possible company, consider that whatever list you’re working with is like looking at your territory through a straw. You start to think that you’re seeing the whole world when it’s really just a fraction. I know this from vast experience and I’ve often found myself crying “I’ve called everyone in the state of New York!” before suddenly getting a fantastic inbound lead. Take a break and get some outside perspective. Tell your peers what you’re running into and get their feedback on new ideas. There are always more approaches, lists, data providers, and strategies. 2. Leads Aren’t Moving Forward Are your prospects getting excited or setting up next steps, but then nothing follows through? Perhaps you need to work on your delivery. Work on your pain discovery process and how you apply your product to solve a prospect’s specific problem. Without getting to the pain point plus a commitment, you’re going to just keep having conversations that go nowhere. So, don’t let your discovery calls end until you have discovered their pain. If there’s no pain, then there’s no commitment to move forward in the process and buy. What does pain sound like? It involves emotionally charged words like fear, worried, serious, terrible, embarrassing, awful, etc. You can discover it through repeated questioning and genuine curiosity, and when you hear those words, dive into them with more questions. Once you have identified a specific pain, demonstrate how your product solves it and secure a commitment to buy. Use a line like, “Great, so if we can help you improve [insert pain point here], is there any reason you wouldn’t be able to sign today?” and repeat back to them what you just heard. This invokes what Psychologist Robert Cialdini calls the “consistency principle” and drastically increases compliance. 3. Full Pipeline, but Nobody Is Ready to Buy Most people have a hard time telling anyone “no”. The natural reaction is to say “maybe” and then try to avoid you. You can fix this by directly telling people that you want them to feel comfortable telling you they’re not interested, and politely explain that you’ll end up wasting a lot of their time chasing them if they can’t. Once you have identified that your prospects are indeed interested and you understand their pain points, you need to figure out why they are not acting immediately. Ask questions to see if they’re seriously committed to solving things. When you do finally get to the bottom of things, their reason for not acting may be something like lack of authority, lack of budget, internal politics, need to make a hire, etc. In this case, you’ve finally reached a concrete core-objection that you can work with them to build a mutual close plan. Feedback is tough, and no one ever said it would be easy to hear. But it’s only through admitting that we’re fallible and listening to our critics that we can identify our blind spots and course correct. Like a driver on the road, if you aren’t constantly checking your mirrors and listening for the honks of other drivers, you’re putting yourself in peril. And the same goes in sales—you need to be able to look at your funnel, see what’s blocking you from merging onto the performance highway, and realize that it might be something that you’re doing. So, it’s time to course correct!

By: Brit Tammeorg Posted: March 18, 2016 | Mobile Marketing Businesses large or small can benefit immensely from mobile marketing. SMS marketing, otherwise known as text message marketing, is one of the most personal ways to communicate with your buyers. After all, what other marketing tool do you know of that allows retailers and business owners to have virtually immediate contact with their customers? More than 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes, according to a study by MobileSquared. And while email inboxes can get clogged with spam and unwanted promotions, customers are very careful about opting in to text message updates, which means that your message will reach the right person who is actually interested in your offerings. But simply investing in an SMS marketing program isn’t all it takes to reap the rewards. SMS marketing, like any other campaign, requires time, attention, and the occasional tweaking for your business, budget, and customers.Whether you’re already running an SMS campaign or you’re looking to start one, here are four tips to get the most out of SMS marketing for your business: 1. Comply with the Laws Text message marketing is a privilege for businesses, not a right. Each country adheres to a specific set of laws, so if your business’ SMS campaign has a global reach, make sure you understand the laws in each country. In the U.S., aside from the basic law that you must have the consent (opt-in) of your recipients to send them promotional texts, there are a few other laws that you should be aware of: Opting in can’t be a condition of purchasing. In other words, you can’t force anyone to consent to receiving SMS messages from you by barring them from buying unless they agree to opt-in. You need to include a “Help” function if you anticipate that your recipients may need additional information about your message. That way, they can ask technical questions about texting and get useful answers. You need to include an opt-out or “STOP” function that’s clear and easy for your recipients to do, and that works. Don’t tell them they can opt out by sending “STOP” to 9876 and then keep sending them messages after they’ve followed your instructions to opt-out. Don’t end up like Jiffy Lube with a $47M lawsuit settlement for sending unsolicited texts to customers or Papa John’s whopping $250M suit for the same reason. Not to mention Life Time Fitness’ recent settlement $15M for sending unsolicited marketing text messages.Bottom line: Make sure you’re compliant. Companies of all sizes get sued for the misuse of SMS marketing all the time. 2. Build Your Subscriber List So how do you encourage your prospects and customers to opt-in to receiving your SMS messages and comply with the law? There are several ways to build your SMS subscriber list by making the opt-in function more visible throughout your marketing channels.Take a look at some of the channels below to determine where you can add SMS opt-in information: Facebook: Add a “Mobile Number” field to any Facebook page sign-up and an “Opt-in” button for them to sign on to your SMS campaign. Make sure you validate the number before you add this person to your campaign. If they entered the wrong number, you could potentially be sending text messages to someone who didn’t authorize them. Website: Include SMS opt-in instructions on your website. Email: Make SMS opt-in visible on your newsletter. Direct Mail: All snail mail should have instructions for SMS opt-in printed on it. Mobile: Send an opt-in text, such as “Text YES to receive discounts and promotions from XYZ company.” Additionally, all of your customer-facing employees should be trained to ask for a customer’s permission for opt-in. This means that they need to be able to explain the benefits and details of your SMS campaign (coupons, discounts, appointment reminders, events, etc.). 3. Write Great Messages Text messages take a different form than emails and other channels of communication, so be mindful of how your message will be viewed. Your subscriber will see your message on a screen smaller than a computer, so keep your messages short and straightforward. But cutting down on the quantity of content doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice quality as well.Remember, your main objective is to give your subscribers information that they can understand quickly and easily. You can try to be clever or humorous as long as your customers are get it. The key is to follow the voice of your brand and be personal. Address your subscribers by their name and understand their behaviors (interactions with your brand, purchase history, downloads, etc.) and what stage they are in their unique customer journey. Then, use this information to send relevant text messages that hit the target. For example, if you’re a massage clinic sending a message to a new customer, text him with “Hi Kevin, thanks for coming in today. Enjoy %15 off your next sports massage with discount code: 15OFF” to keep him coming back.However you choose to shape your messaging, be sure to avoid these SMS sins: Don’t spam. Don’t send several texts a day to your subscribers. Depending on your business, an SMS campaign of 4-12 total messages per month should be sufficient. Don’t send off-target offers. Offer your subscribers something of value. If you constantly send them texts about products or services that aren’t relevant to them, you may lose them as an SMS subscriber or even as a customer. Don’t wake them up. Ideal texting time is between 9am and 8pm. Anything sent before or after that treads the line of being intrusive. 4. Measure Your Results Like your other marketing channels, you’ll need to understand how to measure your SMS marketing results to track the success of each campaign and learn how to optimize them.Track the following metrics and repeat periodically to continue to enhance your campaign: Calculate your churn rate. Take the number of your people who unsubscribed from your SMS campaign and divide it by the total number of customers who initially opted in. This will reveal how quickly your subscribers are leaving your campaign. Determine your redemption rate. Take the number of your subscribers who responded to call-of-action and divide it by number of total subscribers in your program. This indicates how successful your campaign was at generating responses. Calculate the cost. Take the cost of each SMS message and divide it by the redemption rate (calculated above). Based on how much you invested, did it perform well? SMS is quick and effective way to reach your audience wherever they are. By following the tips above, you can get your SMS marketing campaign off on the right foot. Understand the laws, build your subscriber list, craft great messages, and measure and analyze your results. Have you already started on your SMS marketing journey? I’d love to hear your tips and tricks in the comments section below! For more on SMS and mobile marketing, check out The Definitive Guide to Mobile Marketing.

This in-depth guide walks through the steps needed to set up a repeatable and measurable direct mail program in Marketo.

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.

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.

Posted on behalf of our LaunchPoint Partner Spiceworks

Posted: Friday, January 22, 2016 Author: Amber Tiffany The most personal conversations happen offline. While a personalized digital experience is certainly enticing and powerful, to really get to know a prospect—their interests, burning questions, and biggest challenges—you talk to them. And what better way to talk to someone than over the phone, where chances for misinterpretation are greatly reduced. I’m sure any sales rep will back me up on this one. Dial in on call intelligence Phone conversations are not only personal, but they’re also one of the most common interactions people have with a business. In fact, nearly three times as many people choose to call a business instead of filling out a form, according to Invoca’s State of the Mobile Experience report. And BIA/Kelsey reports that from 2014-2019, mobile calls to businesses will more than double, reaching an astounding 162 billion. This sharp rise in call volume makes sense when you think about how many people engage on mobile devices today. While digital marketers are certainly able to gather data on mobile engagement, many have little insight into what conversations are going on over the phone, and as a result, their personalization is suffering. Without visibility into these offline conversations, marketers are personalizing their website with the wrong messages or sending follow-up emails that have nothing to do with their prospect’s latest conversation with their company. The missing link is call intelligence. Call intelligence gives marketers visibility into the conversations that customers and prospects are having over the phone. With these insights, marketers not only get to understand customers on a new level, but their personalization is based off the entire omni-channel journey. Here are four ways call intelligence can help marketers personalize more holistically—based on both online and offline conversations: 1. Fix out-of-touch nurturing Lead nurturing is a great way to educate your prospects and keep them engaged with your business. Let’s say a prospect calls your business because they want to find out what differentiates you from your competition. Your sales rep has the perfect answers and makes the competition look pitiful. Well done! However, without personalization, nurturing can come across more like spam than a thoughtful way to educate and engage your prospects. If your marketing automation system didn’t get the memo about offline conversations because you didn’t have a way to share that information, like call intelligence technology, your leads remain in the same generic, top-of-funnel nurturing track. The next thing you know, your leads get an email talking about irrelevant use cases. Too bad you didn’t send them your new buyer guide complete with competitive advantages instead! With the right tools, you can automatically sync call data with your marketing automation, which helps you make sure prospects are dropped into the right nurturing tracks and your follow-up message are relevant. 2. Retarget with the right information Retargeting can re-engage a prospect with a personalized ad. For example, after having an in-depth conversation with one of your sales reps at a tradeshow, your prospect may do a quick Google search for your company and your targeted ad pops up. From there they click on it and head to your landing page. Instead of filling out a form, they want to talk through some question now, so they do what a lot of motivated buyers do—pick up the phone to learn more and get ready to make a purchase. Whoohoo! But if you’re retargeting based on an incomplete picture, you could be sending a dangerous message. If your retargeting platform is out of the loop, completely oblivious to the offline conversation (or other online conversations), it’ll think it’s time to retarget this “unconverted” visitor with a discount offer. The result is an annoyed customer who is now angry that they were about to pay full price. This is a terrible, impersonal customer experience, but unfortunately it happens all the time. 3. Do Web Personalization right Web personalization tools empower marketers to create digital experiences uniquely tailored to each visitor by showing them content and creating an experience based on their needs and preferences, as indicated by their previous activity. Sounds cool, right? For personalization to be truly effective, it has to take the entire omni-channel customer journey into account. If it doesn’t, you could be “personalizing” in the wrong direction. For instance, if you know someone is likely to call your business, why not personalize your website with your phone number and click-to-call buttons for your mobile visitors? Likewise, if a prospect has already called your company, their next visit to your website needs to reflect the conversation. Integrating call intelligence with your web personalization efforts empowers you to show web visitors content related to the product they mentioned over the phone and encourages them to the next step in the journey. 4. Get your sales reps in the loop Personalized marketing doesn’t stop after the digital journey, or at least it shouldn’t. If a sales rep answers the phone and goes through a generic list of questions followed by the boilerplate pitch, the personalized experience is shattered. The trick is to give your sales rep access to real-time information on the caller and their engagement history. Tools like call intelligence, combined with the power of your marketing automation platform, provide demographic data that allow you to share which campaigns and content a prospect has interacted with. The best part? The sale rep can access this data in real-time. This level of insight helps reps customize the conversation. As a marketer, you’ve helped create a seamless omni-channel experience. It’s easy to get lost in the digital realm, but remember that just as it’s important to explore new channels, it’s critical to go back to your roots and dial in on the basics. Use customer conversations, both online and offline, to personalize for your customer’s entire journey. Each conversation has valuable insights that can be used across channels and touchpoints to make your audience feel that they are valued and heard. If you don’t know what’s going on over the phone, you’re probably put your foot in your mouth more often that you’d like. What steps have you taken to ensure a consistent omni-channel experience for your customer? Share your experience in the comments section below!