Product Documents

Creating an A/B Test program in Marketo Create a new Program in Marketo:                2. Choose the Campaign folder, provide the program name and choose the program type and the channel: Channel should be Email blast 3. Create a new asset within the program: 4. Choose Email program as the asset: The idea of creating Email program as an asset within a program is to have the ability to track progression statuses in a better way with the original program being the one tracking statuses.        5. Give a Program name and choose the type and channel:     6. Create an email within the email program and approve the email:        7. Go to the Email program created: 8. Choose the email created and approved in the steps above: 9. Add the A/B Test to your email:    10. A/B Testing can be done based on Subject Line, Whole emails, from address and date time: 11. For this example let’s choose subject line: 12. Define the subject lines for the email on which we are trying to test and choose the sample size of the test: In the above example, we chose 20% as the sample size and we have 4 subject lines to test. So 5% of the audience list will each receive email with a particular subject line and the winner will be send to the remaining 80%. 13. Define the Winner criteria based on which the email would be treated as a winner and you can also declare winner manually after viewing the test results: 14. Schedule the test and the winner, choose the email address you want to send notification to: 15. Click on Finish: 16.Verify the details and click on close: 17. Define the smartlist(audience) for this email send: 18. Define the filters for the smart list:    19. The audience details will be reflected in the program now: 20.  Approve the program:    21. Once the test is run successfully, the results can be seen as shown below:   

Here are a couple campaign request form templates that were developed to capture all the information needed to build a webinar program in Marketo. I build a lot of these one-off programs and was finding myself spending too much time tracking down information from various people. The attachments are as follows: Campaign Request Form - External (used when campaigns originate from a department outside of marketing (ex. Sales)) Campaign Request Form - Internal (used when campaigns originate from a member of the marketing team) Campaign Request Form - External First tab: this is the tab that the campaign originator will complete Second tab: this is an example of what a completed webinar campaign request form will look like Third tab: this is an example of what a completed email campaign request form will look like Campaign Request Form - Internal First tab: this is the tab that the marketing team member will complete to originate the campaign Second tab: this tab contains the appropriate tokens used for emails/landing pages Third tab: this tab contains the appropriate information for GoToWebinar Fourth tab: this tab contains information need to post a portal ad The additional campaign tabs are added to the external request form once received by the marketing team. We also use a Google form for some project requests. That may be an option too!

  Whether you’re new to Marketo or trying to clean up a mess, you may wonder what you can do to keep your Marketing Activities organized within your instance. Through hiccups and hair pulling, our team has finally discovered a great way to keep ourselves organized, which has enabled us to work more efficiently. Take a look at what we’ve done and determine if it’s the right fit for your organization. In the Marketing Activities section of our Marketo instance, our main folders are set up to represent different activities that are performed in Marketo. Example: >Active Marketing Programs >Demand Generation Programs >Customer Support / Operational Activities >Operational >Archive Folder >Learning Folder Within those folders, we have additional folders that are broken out by the various channels we use. *Active Marketing Programs example below Example: >Active Marketing Programs > Digital Ads > Email Blasts > Events > Newsletter > PPC > Website Within those folders, we've create more descriptive folders for the various campaigns running in each channel. *Event example below Example: >Active Marketing Programs > Digital Ads > Email Blasts > Events                 > Trade Shows                 > Webinars > Newsletter > PPC > Website We have several campaigns running in each channel, so we've built out folders to specify by a specified time frame (year and quarter). *Webinars example below Example: >Active Marketing Programs > Digital Ads > Email Blasts > Events                 > Trade Shows                 > Webinars                                 > 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q1 – 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q2 – 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q3 – 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q4 – 2015 Webinars > Newsletter > PPC > Website Within the specified time frame folder is where we house our individual campaign folders that contain our programs and other local assets for the campaign. For these folders, I’ve found it helpful to follow a very structured naming convention. This helps to ensure that our instance stays organized and everyone working in our instance knows how to label items. My recommendation would be to use the channel type, the date (YYMMDD) and brief description of the program (for our webinars we use the time of the webinar, the service name we're promoting, and the target audience of the campaign). Below is an example of our webinar folder structure. Example: >Active Marketing Programs > Digital Ads > Email Blasts > Events                 > Trade Shows                 > Webinars                                 > 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q1 – 2015 Webinars                                                                 > Webinar – 150205 11 AM SERVICE A – PERSONA 3                                                 > Q2 – 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q3 – 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q4 – 2015 Webinars > Newsletter > PPC > Website This folder houses our event program for the webinar (the event program has the same naming structure as the folder). We also use the same naming structure for our SFDC Campaign Name. Check with your Sales team to see if that’s a viable option for your organization. The folder also houses our "granular channel programs" that we use to attribute success to the various channels we use to drive traffic to the webinar event (such as PPC, email, social, etc.). Happy Building!

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

Information on the latest industry metrics for email marketing. Enjoy

What terms should we add to this magical list? A/B Split – Refers to a test situation in which a list is split into two pieces with every other recipient being sent one of two specific emails, to determine which email is more desirable. A/B Testing – A method of testing a control sample against other versions in which a single element varies Above the fold – The part of an email message or web page that is visible without scrolling. Material in this area is considered more valuable because the reader sees it first. Accelerator Campaigns -- Campaigns that attempt to move prospects along the buying cycle faster by providing relevant “nudges” triggered by specific buyer behaviors or sales updates Account – Companies or organizations; can be prospects, customers, partners or even competitors Acquisition Cost – In email marketing, the cost to generate one lead, newsletter subscriber or customer in an individual email campaign; typically, the total campaign expense divided by the number of leads, subscribers or customers it produced. Alert – An automatic notification in sales and marketing technologies triggered by a lead’s specific behavior, change in status or the reaching of a specific lead score threshold Apex – A development platform for creating Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications on top of Salesforce.com functionality Attachment – A file that is sent in addition to the text or html in an email message Authentication – Technical standards through which ISPs and other mail gateway administrators can establish the true identity of an email sender Authentication - Technical standards through which ISPs and other mail gateway administrators can establish the true identity of an email sender. Examples of proposed authentication standards include: SPF (PO Box, AOL), Sender-ID (Microsoft), DomainKeys (Yahoo), and DKIM (Cisco and Yahoo). B2B Blogging – Also known as corporate or organizational blogging; involves the use of a blog or online journal to promote a company’s products or services with the goal of increasing conversions and driving revenue B2B Social Media - the various channels of the social web (blogs, social networks, wikis, etc.) as they pertain to business-to-business interactions. B2B social media also refers to how prospects, customers and businesses use the social web to research, listen, communicate and engage with each other through the exchange of content. BANT – The acronym for budget, authority, need, timeline— critical attributes that are used to determine the sales readiness of a lead Blacklist – A list of IP addresses believed to send spam Blog – A contraction for “weblog,”; an online diary or journal Blog – An online journal, with new entries appearing in sequence as they are written Bounce – A message that is returned to the sender because it was not deliverable. Buying Committee – Refers to all individuals involved in the B2B buying decision at an organization Campaign Management - The process of creating, executing, and measuring marketing programs directed at specific audience segments Campaign – Any marketing program to be tracked in Salesforce.com or Marketo CAN-SPAM – Federal legislation governing unsolicited commercial email that went into effect on January 1, 2004. This law does not prohibit unsolicited commercial email, but it does regulate how it must be sent. Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) – Controls the design and format of a document written in HTML Closed Loop Marketing -- Campaigns that send communications based on a prospect’s previous actions and their place in the buying cycle Cloud Computing – A term referring to a development platform in which applications are delivered as services in the “cloud,” requiring no hardware or software to maintain Company Score – The total score of all leads for a specific company. This may also be calculated by average. Also known as Account Score Contact – An individual belonging to an account Conversion Path – A specific online path offered to web visitors after clicking on a landing page Conversion Rate – The primary success metric for landing pages Conversion – A specific event that represents the goal of the landing page Converted Lead – A lead that has been deemed qualified for sales and that converts into a Contact Custom Field – A field outside of the preconfigured fields provided within Salesforce.com created to fit the specific needs of a business Custom Object – A custom Salesforce.com database table that enables organizations to store information unique to them Custom Report – A report outside of the standard set of Salesforce.com reports created to measure and analyze data in a specific way Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – Systems and strategies that seek to drive revenue through an improved understanding of customers and an increase in customer satisfaction and relationship building Dashboard – A visual display of a company’s performance metrics based on one or more custom reports De-duplication – The process of finding and consolidating and/or updating duplicate sets of contact information Deliverability – The ability of an email message or campaign to reach the intended recipient’s inbox, which is affected by spam filters, client-side filters and junk folders Delivery Status Notification (DSN) – Also known as “bounce message”, a system that informs the sender of a delivery problem Demand Generation – The act of using marketing to create interest or demand in a company’s products or services Depreciation – The ability to automatically lower a lead score due to inactivity, status change, or any other attribute that signifies a decrease in the level of interest – sometimes known as Lead Degradation and Score Decay DNS Records – The database records stored in the domain name system Domain Name System – A naming system for computers connected to the Internet or private network DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) – A method for email authentication that allows an organization to take responsibility for a message in a way that can be validated by a recipient Drip Campaign -- A series of scheduled emails that deliver thought leadership to prospects that have opted in to receive marketing communications Dynamic Content – Email content that changes from one recipient to the next according to a set of predetermined rules or variables, either by preferences the user sets when opting in to messages or based on behavior or demographics of the recipient. Dynamic Site Change – Dynamically changing content, images or other elements according to a user’s real-time preference (e.g. search term used) Email Campaign Management – The process of creating, executing and measuring email marketing programs directed at specific audience segments Email Marketing – The use of email communication to increase awareness, generate leads and build relationships with prospective and existing customers Email Service Provider (ESP) – A company that provides email services, including batch email and email marketing Explicit Data – Information that a prospect provides that is unambiguous such as title, industry, company, etc. Force.com – A cloud computing development platform that allows for the building of SaaS applications and enables them to be run on Salesforce.com servers Groundswell – A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations Hashtag – A community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to tweets Heuristics – Quick methods often involved in problem solving, such as gut instinct, educated guesses or “common sense” Implicit Data – Information that is revealed by a prospect’s online behavior such as pages visited, and recency or frequency of visits Inbound Marketing – A type of marketing characterized by prospects and customers seeking out and finding companies rather than vice versa Incoming Lead Processing Campaigns -- What you do and how you act when you first meet someone will affect how he or she perceives you from there on out Influencer – A person who is highly recognized in an online community and has the ability to sway others’ thoughts or opinions Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) – A number assigned to each computer or network in order to distinguish each network interface and networked device Internet Service Provider (ISP) – Sometimes referred to as Internet access provider (IAP), gives customers access to the Internet Interruption Marketing – A type of outbound marketing that seeks to capture a prospect’s attention by forcing marketing communications in front of them; opposite of permission marketing ISP Feedback – When the ISP forwards complaints of recipients to the organization that sent the email Landing Page Optimization – The process of obtaining the greatest number of conversions from a landing page by continuously testing and revising various landing page elements Landing Page – A web page that a user encounters after clicking on a link from a search engine, advertisement, email or other marketing vehicle Lead Database – A system used to collect information on a company’s leads, such as demographic; budget, authority, need, timeline (BANT); and behavioral data Lead Handoff -- The process of passing a lead from marketing to sales Lead Lifecycle Campaigns -- Campaigns that ensure movement and interaction with prospects, even if they are not ready to buy or sales does not engage Lead Nurturing – The process of building relationships with qualified prospects regardless of their timing to buy, with the goal of earning their business when they are ready Lead Recycling -- The process of passing a lead from sales back to marketing because a lead was not yet ready to buy Lead Scoring – The process of determining the sales readiness of leads using a pre-determined scoring methodology and ranking them accordingly Lead – An individual or company that has the potential of doing business with your organization LinkedIn – A business-oriented social networking site List Fatigue – A condition producing diminishing returns from a mailing list whose members are sent too many offers, or too many of the same offers, in too short a period of time. List Hygiene – Process of cleaning and de-duplicating email files to ensure all addresses are accurate, unique, current, opt-in and deliverable. Marketing Asset – A piece of marketing content (e.g. whitepapers, videos, newsletters, webinars, etc.) used to educate and generate interest for a company’s products or services Marketing Automation – The use of technology to manage and automate the process of converting prospective customers into actual buyers Marketing Lead -- A lead generated by marketing, which has not yet being qualified as a sales prospect Meme – A catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet Microblogging – A type of blogging that allows users to send brief text updates or micromedia, such as photos or audio clips, and publish them. The most popular microblogging platform is Twitter Microsite – A small website consisting of a few related pages that is part of a larger website Multiple Scoring – The ability to assign multiple scores to a lead, which can be useful for companies with multiple products or campaigns that need to be managed separately Multivariate Testing – A method of testing a control sample against other versions in which multiple elements may vary Opportunities – Deals that constitute a sales pipeline and contribute to forecast Opt-in – The agreement to receive email from a business source. Confirmed or Double opt-in refers to a double-check procedure in which a decision to be included on a mailing list is confirmed. Parent-child Campaign – A campaign that involves an umbrella “parent” campaign record (e.g. “2010>Q1>Email”) that is comprised of numerous “child” campaigns (e.g., “2010-Q1-Email-Introduction,” “2010-Q1-Email-First Follow-up,” etc.) Permission Marketing – A type of marketing that seeks to first gain permission from prospects before marketing to them Persona – A fictional person used to represent a specific target segment for a company; personas aid in marketing, product development, usability and other areas Personalization – A targeting method in which an email message appears to have been created only for a single recipient. Personalization may include any known demographic or behavioral information including recipient name, company name, website page visited and more. Phishing – Sending email that claims to be from a legitimate organization to trick recipients into providing personal information Plain Text – Text in an email message that includes no formatting code Point Cap – A limit placed on a lead score to prevent scores from being inflated by repeated actions or triggers (e.g. multiple downloads of the same white paper) Post-Click Marketing – Everything that happens once someone clicks on an organization’s website, but before they are a known lead. This includes the site itself, but also all landing pages that work to drive conversions for a company Post-Conversion Marketing – Includes all activities and communications from marketing after a prospect shares their information with a company until they become a customer. This includes email marketing, lead nurturing and lead scoring, all of which are critical for B2B companies to get the most of their pre- and post-click marketing Pre-Click Marketing – Everything that happens prior to someone getting to a company website. It’s the area of marketing that focuses on driving a prospect to an organization’s website and can be just as important as the website itself, since without pre-click optimization, the website may never be seen Product Score – The score for a lead that indicates their interest in a specific product. An organization may capture multiple product scores Qualified – The lead characteristic of being ready to engage with sales—a definition that is agreed upon by marketing and sales according to the profile of an “ideal” customer and a scoring methodology Revenue Cycle – A new way of looking at the traditional sales cycle, the revenue cycle starts from the day the organization first meets a prospect and continues through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship Role Accounts – An email account that is associated with a department, office, position or task RSS – (Really Simple Syndication) A web standard for the delivery of content — blog entries, news stories, headlines, images, video — enabling readers to stay current with publications without having to browse to their content. Sales 2.0 – Also referred to as social selling, the merging of Web 2.0 technologies with traditional sales strategies, enabling salespeople to better prioritize their time and serve as experts—not just negotiators— in the product selection process Sales Ready Lead -- A lead that has been qualified by marketing based upon criteria agreed upon by both sales and marketing Scoring methodology – The framework by which leads are scored (e.g. points, letter grades, etc.) Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Also known as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising; the process of paying a search engine to advertise a product or service Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – The process of employing different tactics to improve a business’s ranking in organic or unpaid search results to ultimately increase conversions Seed Email Accounts – Accounts created by a monitoring service with each of the ISPs Seed Nurturing -- The process of building relationships with qualified prospects before you have their contact information Segment – A portion of an audience that is targeted to receive a specific marketing campaign Segment – The ability to slice a list into specific pieces determined by various attributes, such as open history or name source. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) – An email vailidation system that is used to prevent spam Sender Score – An indication of the trustworthiness of an email source Sentiment – A level of assessment that determines the tone of an article, blog post, a company, etc.; usually positive, negative or neutral Short URL – An alias short URL used for redirection of long URLs Social Media Monitoring – The use of search engine technology to ‘listen’ for specific keywords as defined by your organization Social Media – Any strategy, software system or media outlet that relies on social interaction and the participation of individuals or communities to create and publish content Social News – Websites where users submit and vote on news stories or other links, thus determining which links are presented Social Proof – The determination of what is right by finding out what other people think is right Social Selling – Also referred to as Sales 2.0, the merging of Web 2.0 technologies with traditional sales strategies, enabling salespeople to better prioritize their time and serve as experts—not just negotiators— in the product selection process Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – A way of deploying software so that users access the software “on-demand” as a web-based service, and the software vendor hosts the application on its own web servers Spam Traps – Old inboxes that ISPs reactivate specifically to trap spammers. Because these addresses have never been registered to receive email, any mail that lands in the trap inbox is labeled as spam Spoofing – A fraudulent email activity in which the sender address and email header are changed to look as though the email originated from a different source Statistical Significance – In the case of online testing, the probability that an event did not occur by chance Stay in Touch Campaigns -- Campaigns that “drip” out relevant content to prospects over time, helping to educate them and build trust and credibility for your company Suppression File – A list of email addresses you have removed from your regular mailing lists, either because they have opted out of your lists or because you do not wish to email them (competitors, etc...)_ Threshold – A score used to determine whether or not a specific action should be taken on a lead Trigger – An event based on a change or update in status, demographic information, or user behavior that causes a lead to proceed along a specific workflow branch or new path Twebinar - A mashup between a live podcast/audio broadcast and Twitter as the backchannel for discussion Twitter -- A social networking and microblogging service in which users send and read other users' updates known as tweets that are 140 characters or less Unsubscribe - To remove oneself from an email list, either via an emailed command to the list server or by filling in a web form. Web 2.0 – A term used to describe the second generation of web tools and software that encourage users to become more active participants, creating content and interacting with each other within web-based, social communities Website Monitoring – The ability to monitor page visits, click-throughs, form submissions, and other online activities from either known or anonymous visitors Widget – A mini application that performs a specific function and connects to the Internet YouTube – A video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos What terms should we add to this magical list?

Contrary to what you might have heard, rumors about the Marketing Funnel’s demise are greatly exaggerated. The Funnel is alive and well. And it should be leveraged extensively by Marketers. It provides a consistent and universally understood (and somewhat accepted) framework. The funnel does come in a variety of shapes and sizes and colors – with different twists and turns. Despite this variety, few Marketers really leverage this powerful model. The funnel enables Marketers to have an almost universally understood visual representation of various customer touch points, and makes it easier to track and score a person’s behavior. The Marketo funnel provides a good (although, not the only) framework and consists of six key stages: Awareness: This is the universe of people who know anything about Marketo no matter what social network they participate on, what articles they read, etc. Inquiry: This is when we finally know something about the person; we know at least their their name and email address. Prospect: This is when the individual has taken some sort of action. Lead: Finally This person is treated as a lead and can be shared with a sales organization. Opportunity: The sales team has accepted these leads and added them to their pipeline. Customer: The person becomes a customer and they are passed on to a new revenue cycle for upsell and retention. Of course, each of these stages include multiple marketing tactics and scoring approaches.It’s important, though, to understand the difference between a contact (or a prospect) and a true lead (someone who has explicitly engaged with the company). Obviously, the relationship does not end after an individual becomes a customer. At that point, you can upsell or cross sell them.You can determine the value of a customer based on the different products they purchase, if they adopted your product sooner than others or if they are part of a referral program, etc.  As Seth Godin points out – “Customers are traditionally undervalued, and prospects are all treated the same.”Godin continues:“Once you see the funnel, it’s easy to understand how valuable your existing customers are, and easy to think about how you want to spend time and money in promoting and building your site. Most Marketers are running a flat campaign. Embracing the funnel changes the way you treat people. And treating different people differently is what consumers demand.”Having a model like the funnel and a good marketing automation tool enables you to measure and understand the cost of each interaction. Sharing this information with the rest of your organization helps build a Marketer’s credibility in a company, especially with the CFO.The funnel also provides a learning framework for Marketers to test out different messaging and creative at each stage of the funnel. This gives Marketers the option to fine-tuning his current program.Since I started my first big marketing job in American Express in 1992, I have heard lots of critiques of the funnel. Marketers love the catch phrases, such as ‘The Funnel is Dead.’ Well, I disagree. It’s advantages have has evolved since 1898 when E. St. Elmo Lewis developed a model which mapped a theoretical customer journey from the moment a brand or product attracted consumer attention to the point of action or purchase. (St. Elmo Lewis’ idea is often referred to as the AIDA-model – an acronym which stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action). Let’s address some of the funnel naysayers’ concerns, most of which apply to any marketing or sales model: It fails to take into account the ‘feedback loop between existing customers and prospects.’ Whether it is the funnel or another framework (such as a Life Preserver Ring of unique  ‘Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action areas’), there always exists the challenge of tracking all the interactions among people (customers and prospects ). It’s always difficult to uncover each discussion about your brand online. The funnel is too linear. According to these critics, the primary problem with the funnel is that the buying process is no longer linear. Well, I was always taught that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.  Most of the companies I work with, however, do have the majority of their customers follow more or less a linear process. They can be broken down into the different stages described in the Marketo model above. If fails to track retention or repeat business. I must confess this might be the weakest part of most funnel models. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore the simplicity of the Funnel’s approach. Most frameworks do not go into any great detail about ‘Retention’ or ‘Lifetime Value’ anyway. The bottom line is that good Marketers constantly score their customers over time. American Express might be the masters at this. They leverage all their great Cardmember spending data to model, score and customize online and offline programs. It fails to paint a pretty picture, nor does the word funnel doesn’t sound great. I never did judge a book by its cover or a person by their name. If this is what a Marketer is worried about, then they are focused on the wrong things. There are many powerful Six-Sigma names and diagrams, for example, that don’t convey a powerful image such as SIPOC (Single Point of Contact), DPO (Defects Per Opportunity), PD (Proportion defective) It fails to take into consideration the powerful feedback loops between existing customers and newly arriving prospects that search and social media have wired up. I beg to differ. If you have some of your word of mouth programs coded properly you should be able to track shares, referrals and other types of influencer programs. It fails to consider some products, such as iPhones, where marketing is integrated into the product. I think it comes down to how you set up your programs. You should be able to track cross-sell and upsell, and even referrals from within a product. With Flurry, for example, you can track your customers behavior when they use a mobile app. It tracks the big 3: taps, tasks and transitions. The Funnel fails to capture all touch points. Over time, a good Marketer should be able to define these, however. They also should ensure they are in learning mode so that they can constantly update their list of sources. This means they should be tracking referral links, surveying their customers and analyzing where their competitors get their leads from. And then there’s the McKinsey Consumer Journey (see below) which attempts to demonstrate that the buying process is not linear and that several steps repeat themselves. For the real digital practitioner, however, it’s too simple to say someone goes from Bond to Buy: . While brands may put the decision maker, the Customer,  at the center of the McKinsey Customer Journey, the above excludes the importance of the experience the Marketer and the company are having with the customers. Life is not all about the transaction. For example, at Marketo, our energy goes into building relationships with Marketers as well as connecting Marketers together. In addition, you don’t have to be a customer to recommend a product. I am probably the biggest promoter of Tesla, but I can’t afford one. I have only tried it via a Freemium ride provided by a neighbor and have read great reviews about it on Edmunds.com. Does that mean I can’t recommend the vehicle to others? Obviously not. In sum, CMOs and their teams need to know that the funnel is alive and kicking. Rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated. The Funnel is an easy to use, easy to remember approach to tracking individuals who interact with your brand – either directly or indirectly. It’s simplicity is what makes it special – and it provides the most universally understood way of thinking about an individual’s interaction with your brand. It works not only in a B2C environment, but also in a B2B environment. Marketers should always feel free, however to add their own creative twist on things and rename all or parts of it.  Long-Live the Funnel.

Use the Salesforce workflow engine to supercharge your marketing automation in this presentation from the Marketo Summit 2014. Presented by Delinda Tinkey and Charlie Liang.

Written by  , one of Marketo's Champions. I often get asked where I do my research on various marketing automation and digital marketing topics. When I first started writing this post, I wanted to break out the top 5 blogs—then I gave up. It’s like picking players for the baseball Hall of Fame with only 1 pick. The fact is there are a ton of great resources you can lean on for digital marketing and technology content. In the end, I broke out some of the blogs based on what I consider to be the core part of digital marketing technology–that’s marketing automation and its effect on driving leads through the funnel. Content is the fuel that fills that marketing automation engine so you’ll find several content blogs on the list. And yes, there are a couple miscellaneous blogs included because the content is so good. What’s not included: There are some great general marketing, SEO and social blogs but they are not included in this list. And yes, I’m probably missing a bunch—I apologize in advance. If there are sites you find useful, please note them in the comments. A special thanks goes out to our content manager Alyssa Reeves who helped pull together this nearly 2,000-word post. The Blog Categories I did however break up the blogs into categories. Top Overall – Expert Blogs. These blogs may fall across several categories but they rise to the top in the content they provide. Marketing Automation/Technology Vendor Blogs. There are hundreds of vendor digital technology blogs out there. I focused on marketing automation blogs as I view these platforms as the engine that everything else feeds into. Professional Services and Agency Blogs. Like the vendors, these blogs put out some great best practice content. Blogs with a Marketo Twist. I am a little biased to Marketo so blogs that highlight Marketo get a little extra attention. Top Overall – Expert Blogs These blogs rise to the top for blogs to check out. There is some overlap with the agencies but the way I broke it out…if I think of the leader before the agency, the site falls into this bucket. Otherwise, the site drops into the Services category. In alphabetical order….. 1) BeachHead Marketo Champion Steve Moody and his team give tips on everything marketing automation with a Marketo focus. @AskBeachhead Visit Site 2) Brian Solis Blog Brian Solis is a digital analyst, anthropologist, and futurist. Not sure I have ever seen those three words together. Brian’s blog focuses on digital marketing’s effect on transforming business. Brian’s blog is consistently ranked in the Top 10 of the Ad Age Power 150, and ranks among the top 1% of all blogs tracked by Technorat @briansolis Visit Site 3) B2B Marketing Insider Michael Brenner is the Head of Strategy for the leading content marketing platform, NewsCred. He created his blog to focus on emerging business and marketing strategy topics such as content marketing, lead generation, search marketing, digital media, and social media. B2B Marketing Insider is dedicated to sharing the ideas, topics and marketing strategies that drive real results. @BrennerMichael Visit Site 4) Chief Martec Scott Brinker runs this blog on everything marketing technology including Marketing Automation. If you have seen that crazy Marketing Tech Landscape Supergraphicwith 1,876 vendors, that’s Scott’s baby. @chiefmartec Visit Site 5) Content Marketing Institute Content is what fuels the marketing automation engine and CMI covers everything related to content. Over 100K subscribers. @CMIContent Visit Site 6) Convince and Convert Jay Baer is a marketing visionary who has worked with more than 700 brands. His blog is one of the top content marketing sites on the web. @jaybaer Visit Site 7) Duct Tape Marketing Content is what fuels the funnel and John Jantsch gives useful advice on how to create content that drives brand. @ducttape Visit Site 😎 Etumos Ed Unthank loves his whiteboard and puts it to great use bringing some key marketing automation concepts to life. Posts about once a month and the posts tend to be on the technical Marketo side. @EtumosLLC Visit Site 9) Fill the Funnel Miles Austin spent 30 years in B2B Sales and Leadership roles. In addition to helping business with their demand gen needs, he now writes blog posts on email marketing for Fill the Funnel. Miles posts about Sales & Marketing tools and ways that they can be applied in your business. He also has a steady following of 11K. @milesaustin Visit Site 10) The Funnelholic Craig Rosenberg is the co-founder and Chief Analyst of TOPO. His blog was created so he can have fun talking about all things revenue. The Funnelholic focuses on sales, marketing and everything in between. @funnelholic Visit Site 11) Heinz Marketing Matt Heinz is all over the place speaking on the importance of digital marketing. His blog covers everything from marketing automation to best practices in sales. @HeinzMarketing Visit Site 12) KissMetrics Although this site is not marketing automation at all, I had to drop it somewhere because their blog is just so good. They have great articles on analytics. @KISSmetrics Visit Site 13) Marketing Land Marketing Land is a general digital marketing site that covers a wide variety of topics. It also has a great marketing technology section. @Marketingland Visit Site 14) Marketing Profs One of the biggest marketing blogs/portals on the web run by Ann Handley and team. Not marketing automation focused but it’s a must read for content marketers. 600K+ members. @MarketingProfs Visit Site 15) Marketing Rockstar Guides Don’t expect fancy graphics but Marketing Rockstar Guides gets my vote for the top Marketo-focused tips and tricks blog out there. Targeted at the Marketo practitioner. It is run by Marketo Champion, Josh Hill, and you get a 844+ page guide for signing up for blog updates–try reading that on the beach. @jdavidhill Visit Site 16) Marketing Tech Blog This blog was founded by Douglas Karr and has over 75K subscribers.  It covers mainly marketing in new media but has a section focused on marketing automation. @douglaskarr Visit Site 17) Money Ball Marketer Channeling your inner Brad Pitt, Moneyball Marketer is Zak Pines’s blog on data-driven demand generation and marketing best practices. Great blog to check out once a month as it updates once or twice monthly. @MoneyballMktr Visit Site 18) Relevance Chad Pollitt cofounded this site and grew it to 50K subscribers in six months (Read amazing story here). The blog brings in industry experts to share expertise on content marketing and promotion. @relevance Visit Site 19) RevEngineInsider You are reading this post so you already know marketing technology is important to us. We cover everything digital that is related to moving leads through the funnel. At a deeper level, we also cover top tips for organizations leveraging Marketo. Primary contributor is Marketo Champion Jeff Coveney. @RevEngineMarket Visit Site 20) The Sales Blog Digital blog with a Sales focus. Anthony Iannarinno is a publishing machine and gives great Sales process tips EVERY day. I keep waiting for him to miss a day but he’s the Cal Ripken Jr. of Sales blog writing. Technology is not a big focus of Anthony’s but his Sales process stuff is vital to overall marketing automation and funnel success. @iannarino Visit Site 21) The Sales Benchmark Index Blog Here’s another site that doesn’t quite fit into “digital marketing technology.” However SBI’s content on Sales and Marketing methodologies and best practices is central to any company trying to develop a marketing funnel. Updates daily. SBI delivers some great  podcasts too such as this one: Case Study: Aligning the Marketing Strategy to the Skills of the Marketing Staff @MakingTheNumber Visit Site 22) The Sales Lion Blog Mark Sheridan runs this inbound marketing blog with a Hubspot focus. Great podcasts also. In six years, Mark went from pool seller to content marketing king. That’s a career path you wouldn’t expect.Read more on Mark’s pool story success. @TheSalesLion Visit Site 23) Sirius Decisions Sirius Decisions is where all the smart people go to try to get smarter about optimizing the revenue funnel. You sometimes need a MIT degree to completely get all the concepts but their forward thinking enables you to plan for the future. Jay Famico is the go-to guy for technology and services so make sure to follow his posts. @JayFamico @siriusdecisions Visit Site 24) SmartInsights Blog This blog (and membership site) offers tons ofactionable digital marketing advice. There are plenty of planning templates, ebooks and online training courses. Some are no cost, others have a fee. There is a no-cost weekly newsletter I’d recommend signing up for. 80K+ members. Co-founded by Dr. Dave Chaffey, Dan Bosomworth and Stu Miller. @SmartInsights Visit Site 25) Topo Blog Topo Blog is UK-based and covers a mixture of sales, marketing and technology data and research. @scottalbro Visit Site 26) Top Rank Marketing Lee Odden’s blog is another extremely strong content marketing focused blog. I almost didn’t include it because the site is heavy on the social flavor and light on digital technology. The content stuff is just too good to leave off. Attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors and has over 50,000 subscribers. @toprank @leeodden Visit Site

By: David Cain Marketers often believe that investing in analytics and digital marketing tools fully prepares them to compete in a data-driven world. These tools are built to quickly and simply helpmarketers translate data into actionable metrics. But in reality, that’s just half the battle. Keeping pace in the digital age also involves hard decisions about the setup of their marketing organization. But for too many companies, slowed down by old, corporate silos, that’s not going to be an easy transition. Marketing departments in the pre-internet and early-internet era created individual departments (sometimes in excess), which were based on functional expertise and often dedicated to specific channels, such as print, television, email, web and social. These departments were built in a time when companies believed that marketing controlled the customer in a linear process, pushing them methodically through their marketing ‘funnel’—from awareness to purchase and the various steps along the way. That approach worked historically, but the explosion of additional digital channels like mobile and social, and higher consumption across them scrambled the equation forever. The buying process nowadays is anything but linear. Think about the typical consumer’s day. They may start by doing something on one channel. But then later, they may interact with a brand again—this time on a different channel. If the brand is treating each channel as a silo, they won’t be able to have anything but a jumbled, disconnected conversation with their consumer. The new world requires constant company engagement with customers, supplying personalized and relevant information that offers value and informs their decisions wherever they are and whenever they are engaging with you. Shift To Support The Customer Journey This evolution to what we, at Marketo, call engagement marketing, is forcing marketers to move as quickly as their markets and their customers. The challenge to CMOs is to take a sledgehammer to their corporate silos and reimagine a new way to structure their marketing departments. We’re seeing successful CMOs transform traditional marketing silos and channel-focused roles into organizational structures that allow for greater focus on the customer journey as a whole. To be fully prepared for the digital age, your organization needs to be organized around your customer, and you need people who can listen and respond to your customers in a coordinated fashion. In action, this translates into the “hub and spoke” model, that Marketo’s CMO Sanjay Dholakia nicely explains. It’s an approach that features “centers of excellence” (think service bureaus but with a much greater strategic focus) that all of the company’s marketers can turn to when they need help. The shared service model that is at the core of centers of excellence helps teams think about and respond to your customer more collaboratively while also removing inefficiencies. The Value of Centers of Excellence The main building block is the creation of a centralized skills-based competency center,which we call the center of excellence (COE). There can be any number of them inside the company, embracing everything from content to marketing operations to design to events. Replacing the myriad decentralized functional groups that accumulated over the years, these centers of excellence provide a consistent and comprehensive set of services to other parts of the organization. No longer will different groups make arbitrary decisions about the same things. Now and forever, the left hand will know what the right hand is doing. What’s more, you’ll help light creative sparks. People working side by side can better brainstorm and, hopefully, come up with magic—the idea being that 1 plus 1 will equal 3. While this value-added has obvious and subtle benefits, it doesn’t change that people are creatures of habit. You’ll find that people inside your organization may take a while to adjust to the change. They may initially feel frustration that they don’t “own” the resources needed to accomplish their objectives. By definition, centralizing expertise in a COE means that expertise won’t live under the multiple silos. Still, that’s a small price for running a leaner, more nimble organization and eliminating potential duplicate efforts. Consider that the benefits outweigh the downsides. For example: Focus: You get like minds working together, often resulting in a team that pushes each other’s boundaries while focusing on the task at hand. Economies of scale: Better load balancing means you ultimately need fewer people to get more done. Collaboration: Your specialists are no longer laboring in isolation. The potential upside from peer-to-peer collaboration is limitless. Quality: You now can better enforce standards such as brand guidelines and style guides. Consistency across the organization saves time and fosters better quality output. Single voice: A single point of contact ensures a consistent message throughout the organization. The benefits gained from COE’s make organizations more flexible. As companies scale in size, this organizational arrangement makes increasing sense not only because it offers organizations the benefit of streamlined, creative, high-quality work, but because this structure best supports the true customer journey—one that’s dictated by the customer, at their own pace. Siloed teams can flex in their individual units, but without an understanding of the big picture, whereas a customer journey focused organization supported by COE’s can nimbly respond to the customer’s (changing) needs, throughout their journey, and across channels. Today, marketers must understand their customer and communicate with them with the right message at the right time, but it doesn’t end there. To be successful, today’s marketing leaders must not miss the critical step of structuring your organization to adapt quickly.

By: David Cain B2B marketers are always on the lookout for the best way to support their marketing goals and make their sales teams successful. Typically that means leveraging a range of owned, earned, and paid marketing channels to amplify a product message and build as much awareness as possible across a wide swath of a target market in order to maximize the number of leads brought into the funnel and deliver the most sales possible out of the funnel. As a result, B2B marketers are intimately familiar with broad-reaching marketing tactics like online and offline advertising, PR, SEO/SEM, event marketing, social marketing, content marketing, mobile marketing and more, all designed to cast a very wide net and feed a sales team with a high volume of inbound leads. This broad-reaching approach to marketing can be an effective way to generate leads and sales BUT it’s not the only way to organize your sales and marketing efforts. In fact, based on the nature of your market, there may be a much more effective approach to achieve your goals—account-based marketing (ABM). What Is Account-Based Marketing? Account-based marketing is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the inbound marketing tactics I mentioned above. Instead of leveraging a set of broad-reaching programs designed to touch the largest possible number of prospective customers, an ABM strategy focuses marketing and sales resources on a defined set of targeted accounts and employs personalized campaigns designed to resonate with each individual account. With ABM, your marketing message is based on the attributes and needs of the account you’re targeting, hence the name account-based marketing. So why would you consider focusing your marketing resources on a select group of customers with an ABM strategy? Sales and marketing teams typically select target accounts because they are “high-value”—they have the potential to generate more revenue and are strategically significant or influential in a market. You might sell products that are only relevant to a small set of target accounts (let’s say, for example, computers designed to run nuclear power plants). In this case your buyer is so specific that your target account list is obvious. But ABM often makes sense even when you can potentially sell your products to a much larger group of companies. You might have a large total addressable market that includes hundreds or even thousands of potential customers, but some customers are certainly more valuable to your business than others. And there is no doubt that optimizing your campaigns with individualized messages for each account will result in better campaign performance than a generalized approach. If you have a high-value prospect you’re trying to turn into a customer (or a high-value customer you are trying to sell more to) and you think that a personalized approach to marketing will be effective in achieving your goals, then ABM is right for you. Top 5 Benefits of Account-Based Marketing Benefit 1: Clear ROI Effective ABM drives clear business results. In fact, compared to other marketing initiatives, the 2014 ITSMA Account-Based Marketing Survey found that “ABM delivers the highest Return on Investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic.” Benefit 2: Reduced Resource Waste Because ABM is so targeted, it allows marketer to focus their resources efficiently and run marketing programs that are specifically optimized for target accounts. With ABM, you decide which accounts are qualified and then go after them. This can profoundly impact the way you think about sales and marketing and the types of programs you execute. Benefit 3: It’s Personal and Optimized ABM not only targets your sales and marketing efforts with laser precision to a specific audience, but ABM also entails personalizing your messaging and communications to specific accounts so that your campaigns resonate with these target audiences. In fact, according to Aberdeen, 75% of customers say they prefer personalized offers, which makes sense. Targeted customers are more likely to engage with content that is geared specifically to them, and is relevant to their business and stage in the buyer journey. And because ABM is inherently personal, your campaigns are automatically optimized for the right audience. Benefit 4: Tracking Goals & Measurement Is Clear When you’re analyzing the effectiveness of campaigns, whether email, ads, web, or events, it’s easier to draw clear conclusions, because you look at a smaller set of targeted accounts instead of a vast set of metrics and analytics that span your database. Benefit 5: Sales Alignment Is Easier ABM is perhaps one of the most efficient ways to align sales and marketing. This is primarily due to the fact that the marketer running an ABM program operates with a mindset very similar to sales—thinking in terms of accounts and how to target them, bringing them to the table, and generating revenue from them. Accounts are what sales people use to measure success, be it accounts in the pipeline or accounts won—for sales it’s all about accounts. The ABM marketer not only speaks the same language, but also works closely with sales to identify accounts and pursue them throughout the sales process. Key Steps of Account-Based Marketing If the above benefits resonate with you and ABM seems like a good strategy for your business, here are some key steps you need to take: Step 1: Discover & Define Your High-Value Accounts Use all the firmographic data and business intelligence you can find to help you prioritize your accounts. But remember, deal size potential is only one factor. You might select accounts based on other strategic factors like their influence in the market, likelihood to purchase repeatedly from you, or potential for higher than average profit margins. Step 2: Map Accounts & Identify Key Internal Players Now that you know your target accounts, you need to understand the way the account is structured and identify the critical players within the organization (e.g. decision makers and influencers). You might have this data already in-house or subscribe to services that can provide it. If not, consider having your sales team conduct the research or purchase this data from outside vendors. Step 3: Define Content & Personalized Messaging It’s important to put real thought into this step. Some define effective ABM as a web banner personalized with the prospect’s business name, which everyone loves but isn’t necessarily effective. Instead, an effective ABM strategy delivers deep and valuable content that addresses clear and significant business challenges the target account faces. Think about how your content, and ultimately your products and services, can address the target account’s specific business challenges in their industry. Step 4: Determine Optimal Channels We live in a multi-channel world and you will undoubtedly want to connect with your audience on many different channels (e.g. web, email, mobile, print…etc) in a coordinated way. But put some thought into your channel strategy because some channels are more effective for certain roles or certain industries (e.g. email is tough in the healthcare industry). You’ll also want to consider things such as opt-in rules in your region or other potential restrictions in your channel strategy. Step 5: Execute Targeted & Coordinated Campaigns Now that your content and messaging is ready to go, you need to make sure the influencers and decision makers in your target accounts see it. You can do this manually of course but technology is enabling marketers to coordinate and execute ABM campaigns at much greater scale and more efficiently than ever before. At Marketo we use our own marketing platform to support our ABM initiative. For example, we use our real-time personalization solution to serve content on our website designed specifically to resonate with key customers while we serve different content to our top prospect accounts. We employ a similar strategy with paid ads, leveraging personalized ad banners on Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook, using our Ad Bridge solution to serve ads specific to target accounts. Whatever your solution, make sure to coordinate campaigns across your channels to ensure a consistent voice and message. And work closely with your sales team so they can follow up on campaigns in a timely manner and with a consistent message. Step 6: Measure, Learn and Optimize As with any marketing initiative, it’s critical to test, measure, and optimize your ABM marketing campaigns to ensure they are effective and you’re always improving your results over time. Of course you’ll want to look at the results of individual campaigns (e.g. email open rates, click-thru rates, first-touch and multi-touch attribution…etc). But ABM isn’t about one campaign; it’s about pushing into a high-value account with a series of campaigns over time. Be sure to look at trend data to see how things are really going. Are you growing your list of known individuals (remember step 2?) within your target accounts over time? Are you generating web visits, campaign responses, meetings, sales opportunities, and, of course, deals and revenue at your target accounts? These are the metrics and signs of account engagement you’ll need to understand to assess the health of your ABM program over time. For more detail, check out the ebook we recently published, “A Recipe for Lean Account-Based Marketing,” for a deeper dive into account-based marketing and for information on how to get started quickly with ABM in your company.

How do you know if your organization is ready for B2B Marketing Operations (MO) 2.0? This paper will help you determine if your organization is ready by asking questions like: What does that organization look like? What are its primary pain points? What is its vision for the future? What pressures are driving it to consider undergoing substantial change? THE CURRENT STATE OF B2B MARKETING OPERATIONS Marketing Operations is still finding its way into the enterprise, but it has certainly made has made significant strides in the past three years. Consider: In Silicon Valley, less than two-dozen companies had formalized Marketing Operations functions in place in 2005; that number today is likely in the hundreds. Even smaller upstarts, such as Big Band Networks, CyperSource, Iron Key and InsideView, have recognized the value of Marketing Operations by investing in dedicated staff. At least a half-dozen MO-related special interest groups have arrived on social media sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo and Yahoo Groups. Conferences, such as ad:tech, eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit and Predictive Analytics World, have added Marketing Operations to their agendas. The Marketing Operations Cross-Company Alliance (MOCCA) has grown to more than 500 members and the Marketing Operations Future Forum, which was just formed in April 2009, already exceeds 300 members. Even in a bad economy during the winter holidays, a search of MO-related job openings uncovered several dozen opportunities. The first courses on the discipline of Marketing Operations were offered through the University of California system and in Asia (Hong Kong) in 2008. The UCSC Extension MO course is expected to become available online in January 2010. A CHECKLIST FOR YOUR COMPANY To see if your company is a good candidate for B2B Marketing Operations 2.0, check all the characteristics listed below that apply. My company invests a significant amount in marketing resources (headcount and/or budget). My company’s marketplace is dynamic and highly competitive. My company’s marketing has evolved into a complex and multi-dimensional function. A diverse mix of programs and resources are funded to reach a breadth of audiences (segments, sales channels, internal and external stakeholders, etc.). My company faces government and regulatory compliance pressures. My company’s marketing processes have evolved to the point where they are no longer well coordinated or even well-understood. My company values best practices but lacks process, technology and metrics to achieve them. My company is pressuring marketing to assume a more strategic role. Within my company, many believe that marketing must deliver greater value for the company’s investment. If you checked half or more of the above statements, your company is a great candidate to benefit by leveraging the power of B2B Marketing Operations 2.0. WHERE DO YOU FEEL THE PAIN? If your company is feeling some pain, you’re probably acutely aware of it. Arriving at an accurate diagnosis, however, requires a careful examination. Before reviewing the checklist below to identify localized pain points, first consider the general health of your marketing effort. Does marketing currently receive wide recognition for its strategic leadership and bottom-line contribution? Is marketing in complete alignment with your company’s strategic goals and other key functions? Can marketing clearly measure its success and demonstrate ROI to your executive team?MO 2.0 is specifically designed to address these corporate pain points: A Marketing team focused on firefighting and tactics rather than on strategy. A Marketing team experiencing difficulty measuring ROI and demonstrating value, causing it often to be on the defensive, needing to justify marketing accountability to C-level executives and investors. Marketing success tied to other groups that have different, or even conflicting, goals. A corporate environment that fails to support collaboration and consequently loses opportunities for synergy. Employee defections that jeopardize continuity, place institutional knowledge and expertise at risk and contribute to high customer churn. Marketing processes that too often constrain internal efficiencies and effectiveness instead of enabling them. Poor coordination of shared processes across functions. Difficulty assimilating and integrating programs, systems and resources obtained from corporate mergers or acquisitions, leading to leading to duplication, momentum loss, lack of focus and resistance to change. If you resonate with two or more of the above statements, your organization may be in enough pain to be ready to embrace B2B Marketing Operations 2.0. WHAT’S YOUR VISION OF MARKETING’S CONTRIBUTION? In a perfect world, marketing operates as a very creative, fast-paced, results-driven function that stays close to the customer and its other stakeholders. It is not only aligned with the enterprise’s strategic agenda but also helps define it. It leads the customer experience and innovation processes. It is well integrated with other corporate functions and takes full advantage of the power and discipline of a strategically designed B2B Marketing Operations 2.0 infrastructure.The MO 2.0 infrastructure layers into the marketing function the processes, technology, guidance and metrics required by an efficient operation that delivers outstanding value on a consistent basis. Such an MO 2.0 infrastructure enables informed decision-making, accountability, sustainability, visibility, teamwork, strategic thinking and repeatable best practices execution.A marketing organization is ready to think seriously about embracing MO 2.0 when it feels internal and external pressures to make systemic changes because it has not been delivering on its vision and has consistently failed to achieve its operational goals. The CEO considers the CMO/Marketing VP to be a valued strategic partner. Marketing is fully aligned with other company functions and stakeholders. Marketing efforts accelerate new product adoption, strengthen customer relationships and increase market penetration rate. Marketing leverages metrics and dashboards to measure and track results, and continually improve them. Dashboards rapidly and accurately inform decision makers. Metrics are aligned with corporate goals and increasingly drive marketing expenditures. The marketing team is energized and highly effective. Employee and customer loyalty are consistently high. High return on marketing investment is clearly recognized companywide. Unless you’ve checked at least half of the above statements, there is a large gap between your vision and your current reality. Your company is ripe—or more than ripe—for MO 2.0. Characteristic Organizational Pain Desired Vision Substantial marketing investment (resources, programs, budget) Unmanageable complexity, difficulty demonstrating ROI, Marketing on defensive Marketing optimizes resources to deliver substantial ROI Leverages processes, technology and best practices to spur productivity, knowledge sharing Utilizes dashboards and metrics to make informed spend decisions Is recognized by C-team for its accountability and ROI contribution Dynamic, competitive market No, or disappointing, growth, super-growth, high customer churn, high employee turnover Marketing aligns with other functions to take responsibility for: Nurturing sales funnel Revenue targets Innovation process New market penetration Customer experience Under media or regulatory scrutiny for: Shareholder confidence Supplier to government High-profile industry Compliance pressure, impact of change on SOX compliance, media magnifying glass Marketing partners with Quality, Finance, IR to meet compliance requirements Maps key processes Documents best practices Applies LEAN, Six Sigma and other methodologies Demonstrates ROI through KPIs, dashboards, etc. M&A integration challenges Actual or Pending Duplicated efforts, loss of continuity, “everything needs attention” syndrome, difficulty getting buy-in for change initiatives Marketing leads M&A and other change initiatives Communications leadership “Walking the talk” More tactical than strategic Firefighting, CYA behavior Marketing is valued strategic partner to CEO and C-team Some or all of the content contained in this white paper was contributed by Gary M. Katz, CEO of Marketing Operations Partners (www.mopartners.com)

Quick Event Checklist: Quick Event Checklist – Marketo.com Checklist for Webinars: Managing Successful Webinars: A Marketer’s Must-Have Checklist – Marketo.com Checklist for Setting up Webinars: Managing Successful Webinars - Marketo Checklist Social Media Calendar Template: Your Sample Social Editorial Calendar Worksheets for Lead Generation: Worksheets Marketing Measurement Checklist: The Marketing Measurement Checklist [Infographic] – Marketo.com Email SetUp Checklist: Secret Email Checklist Improve B2B Email Deliverability with Marketing Automation Marketo Email Marketing: Thinking Outside the Inbox Mobile Email Marketing Nine Signs That It's Time to Switch Automation Systems Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Blogging 2015 Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: LinkedIn Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Google+ Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Pinterest and Instagram 2015 Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Twitter 2015 Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Facebook Inbound Marketing Cheat Sheet The Marketing Measurement Cheat Sheet Online Community Cheat Sheet SlideShare Cheat Sheet Podcasting Cheat Sheet Content Marketing Cheat Sheet Lead Nurturing Cheat Sheet Email Deliverability Cheat Sheet Marketing Automation Cheat Sheet Lead Scoring Cheat Sheet B2B Email Marketing Cheat Sheet Landing Page Optimization Cheat Sheet The Changing B2B Buyer Salesforce.com for Marketers Cheat Sheet Sales 2.0 Cheat Sheet Social Sales - Truth about Sales 2.0 How to Attract, Hire, and Grow a Rockstar Marketing Team Marketing Automation and the Marketing Battles What to Test in Your Emails The Cost of Delaying Marketing Automation When "Boring" Means "Amazing": How Testing Makes Go-Live Day a Snooze 17 Email Rules You Absolutely Have To Break 5 Ways That a Solid Marketing Automation Solution Can Help Small Teams Succeed 30 Things to A/B Test for Lead Generation 5 Lead Generation Metrics Every Marketer Should Track Mapping Lead Generation to Your Sales Funnel Here's How to Make Your Website as Personalized as Your Email How to Create a Marketing Persona for Your Business Cheat Sheet: How to Design a Marketing Automation Discovery Guide SEO and PPC Keywords What To Seek In A Lead Nurturing Solution 4 Pieces of Social Media Real Estate You Shouldn't Ignore SEO Cheat Sheet: Best Practices for On-Page Optimization A Marketer's Guide to Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) Email Deliverability and Design: Email Deliverability Design and Creative Checklist – Marketo.com

Note: This White Paper was provided by our LaunchPoint partner, Cake. This guide explores how multi-touch marketing attribution can increase the success of your digital advertising campaigns.

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.

You can find a video here: How Marketo Structures Marketing Operations – Marketo.com

Originally published on Econsultancy.com By Jack Simpson @ Econsultancy Sounds like a buzzword, but actually makes a lot of sense. Data visualization is the art of presenting often complex datasets in a visually engaging way. 
The hope is that presenting data in this way will make it more engaging and easier to understand, so it’s particularly helpful in terms of speaking to clients or internal stakeholders.  With this in mind, I’ve brought together 14 of my favourite data visualization examples from across the web. Why is data visualization important? In his 2010 TED talk, David McCandless argued that sight has by far the fastest and biggest bandwidth of any of the five senses. About 80% of the information we take in is by eye, he said. Students get very excited – and policy-makers and the corporate sector – when they can see the data. Researchers Emre Soyer and Robin Hogarth conducted a study in which three groups of economists were asked the same question concerning a dataset, and the results seem to support McCandless's claim: One group was given the data and a standard statistical analysis of the data; 72% of these economists got the answer wrong. Another group was given the data, the statistical analysis, and a graph; still 61% of these economists got the answer wrong. A third group was given only the graph, and only 3% got the answer wrong. The above results suggest that the visualized data on its own, without the accompanying analysis, was actually the most powerful format. But let me take my own advice and provide some visual examples... The internet in real time Slightly terrifying, this one, but it’s a goodie. A real-time visualization of data from all the biggest sites on the internet. Even if you work in digital, prepare to be amazed. Battle of the internet giants By the same people as the internet in real time site above, this one shows you how much money all the big boys in digital are making. In real time. Excuse me while I have a cry. The one million tweet map This is a good one for checking out geographical data for Twitter. It uses a clustering engine to visualize how people are tweeting about specific topics around the world. In the image below the keyword was ‘Terry Wogan’. Tweetping Live display of people tweeting across the world, but it leaves the ‘pings’ in place so the longer you watch the map the clearer the geographical trends become. Listen to Wikipedia Perhaps my favourite example on this list: a live visual and musical representation of Wikipedia edits. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions, and the pitch changes according to the size of the edit (the larger the edit, the deeper the note). Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. 
It’s strangely addictive, so click that link only if you’re prepared to spend your entire day watching and listening to dots. You have been warned. Google Trends We’ve written about Google Trends plenty of times on this blog, but this little bit of data visualization is wonderfully Google-like in its simplicity. It fills the screen with live trends and when you click on the text you’re taken to a Google SERP for that keyword. Earth wind map You don’t need to be a geography buff to appreciate this. A live visualization of wind around the world: direction, speed, and so on. You can drag the globe around and zoom in on specific points for greater detail. Just awesome. NOAA weatherView More weather visualization, except this one allows you to see representations of various types of weather data such as temperature, precipitation, pressure and so on. Every noise at once A scattergraph plot of almost any musical genre you can think of. When you click on any of the text you get a 30-second clip of a song in that genre. Its creator – Glenn McDonald of Spotify-acquired Echo Nest – explains the organisation of the genres as follows: Down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier. No Homophobia This site provides live visualization of all the homophobic language being used on Twitter, including live tweets containing homophobic keywords. Digital attack map This shows you where DDoS attacks are happening around the world, which is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. Not sure if I completely understand it, but damn if it doesn’t look and sound cool. Flight misery map A handy one for any travellers. Hover over an airport and get a neat little visualization of all outbound flights and their status. Green means good and red means bad. Can’t ask for simpler than that. Spotify musical map An interactive map that shows what music people are listening to in towns and cities across the world. London is mostly big on grime right now, apparently. World population Ridiculously simple but still kind of mesmerising, this site shows the world population increasing in real time. Click ‘watch as we increase’ to see the little stickmen appear in real time.  

By: David Myers Posted: August 10, 2015 | Targeting and Personalization http://blog.marketo.com/category/targeting-and-personalizationRemember the first time you visited a website as a returning customer and saw your first name “magically” appear on the login page? Back then, personalization in the consumer market involved little more than inserting a first name into a login page or email. But with the advent of big data and real-time technologies, personalization has transitioned from static elements to contextual engagement. Consumers feel increasingly comfortable making considered purchases online, and, as a result, marketers must seize any opportunity to personalize cross-channel content. Today’s personalization technology makes this possible, delivering customized web, email, mobile, and ad experiences to new and existing customers to help reinforce their loyalty. The New Personalization Is All About Providing Value In the past, personalization was mainly used to identify visitors by name or location and lacked a specific context or relevancy. Apart from not offering value, in the absence of real-time technology, marketing responses were often delayed and required waiting for visitors to return to the website or targeting them days later via email or ads. Fast forward to the present. Personalization tools now analyze user behavior in real-time and immediately deliver targeted content across multiple user channels. Let’s take a look at an example from the hospitality industry to see how this works in action. If you’re promoting travel packages, and you know the consumer’s age and income bracket, this data can easily be leveraged to customize the visuals and offers depending on the channel. For example, college students on spring break are looking for the best parties in town, whereas seniors are more likely to be interested in luxury vacations that are cruise or resort-based. Also, while seniors may prefer receiving an email with the latest holiday deals, young students are accustomed to receiving push notifications on their phones. Knowing these types of particular preferences is extremely valuable to marketers and can be used to select images, construct messaging, and offer packages that best fit an individual customer’s needs. Personalizing Content at Every Step of the Customer Journey Targeting an existing customer whose details you have is one thing, but what happens in the case of anonymous visitors? If we return to the hospitality example, personalization works based on the web visitor’s behavior. This might be a search term the moment that senior citizen searches for “golf package holidays” or actual behavior she shows on the website, like pages viewed and number of clicks. Based on behavior, real-time personalization tools can change the website’s content to be relevant for the visitor. Instead of showing the general picture of the hotel resort, marketers can personalize the webpage to show images of the resort’s golf courses that would appeal to this specific visitor based on their search term behavior. Left image: regular website Right image: personalized website for individual visitor who is searching for golf packages in particular Once an anonymous visitor turns into a known buyer, past purchasing history or any data that the known buyer has provided can be used for personalization which works great for cross-selling or up-selling opportunities. Where Personalization Meets Engagement Marketing Personalization is core to the concept of engagement marketing. This entails listening to, understanding, and responding to consumers, often over a long period of time, based on who they are and what they do. According to Janrain & Harris Interactive, 74% of online consumers get frustrated when a website’s content is irrelevant to their interests. In addition, using demographic and behavioral data to personalize experiences was found to increase conversion rates by 30%! Personalizing content improves your marketing metrics and bottom line. For instance, a hotel chain that used Marketo’s solutions saw the following results from their personalization efforts. Within one month! Over 3,300 online visitors click on personalized calls to actions. These visitors spent an average of 217% more time on the hotel’s website than before and viewed nearly 300% more pages per visit. Overall, visitors who engaged with personalization campaigns on the website showed a 10x lift in revenue conversion as compared to the average site visitor. Consumer Personalization Spans Many Industries The hospitality case study above was just one example of how personalization can be used to engage targeted consumers. Personalization is also effective in the considered purchase market ranging from luxury goods to finance, healthcare, and real estate.Here are several ways that personalization can be used in these markets: Luxury Goods: For jewelry sellers, if a consumer with a high income profile performs a Google search for “gemstones” and clicks on a search result that links to your website, the home page will be personalized, based on their profile and search term used, to a visual of a higher priced gemstone offer. Travel and Leisure: A tourism website can upsell or cross-sell returning visitors by featuring banners with exclusive VIP packages for loyal customers. Healthcare: Web visitors can be identified by location, enabling healthcare providers to limit website info strictly to policies for that specific location. High-End Retail: Brick-and-mortar locations can offer special discounts or offers to in-store shoppers and target them on their mobile devices. Give Your Consumers What They Truly Want Personalization in the digital world is about understanding who your customers are and which channels are most suitable for them to offer the most engaging content at every moment. Your consumers are constantly interacting with your brand, and you have to be ready, at any point in time, to react with the right messaging. Real-time technology has transformed personalization and makes it more relevant than ever to enable marketers to stay one step ahead of their target market and ensure they’re always met with the best, most personalized content. David is a product manager for Marketo’s Real-Time Personalization (RTP) platform. Prior to joining Marketo, David spearheaded the digital marketing for a leading global consumer goods company. When not dreaming about the next product feature, David can be spotted wasting hours on the cricket field.

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.