Product Documents

combined steps 1-3 of the marketo-salesforce integration

Hi Community, I recently worked on a template to prove my social media ROI to my boss ! And I want to share it with you here because I need some feedback on this job For french readers here is the complete article which explains the purpose, and the template : [Template] Le ROI social media enfin démontré à ton boss | LinkedIn (I will translate it soon) If you need more information, you can ask me at : marineboussat@gmail.com Or add me on Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/marineboussat/ Thanks !

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.

Email performance analytics sits at the heart of every digital marketer, you want to be aware of how the performance has been and need the ability to report on the same using various dimensions relative to your marketing. More often than not, all marketing automation systems have a performance issue when it comes to providing analytics quickly with the parameters that you would like. Marketo has also been lacking in this area for quite some time since RCA is sold as a separate product and that also had performance issue till last year or so, when the UI was changed but still performance is not up to the mark and Marketo analytics is not that powerful a feature to suffice the digital needs of today. As a resolution to the same, Marketo has introduced Email insights to provide lightning quick reporting on Email performance with a plethora of dimensions/parameters to filter your report. It works real fast and allows you to report on performance which not only includes batch campaigns but can also include trigger campaigns and operation emails (You can choose to exclude them as well). There are options of choosing performance relative to one/multiple workspaces, you can add parameters such as segmentations, channels and program tags and include them as dimensions and report on them. There’s an option to filter the report on Audience (country and state parameters), Content (email, program, smart campaigns, theme) and Platform (Device OS and Device type). You can generate charts to assess the performance during selected period based on Time (Day, Week and Month) and filter on various parameters. On the right hand side you can also select metrics such as opens, clicks and unsubscribes to check on the performance by parameters of audience, content and platform. You also have the ability to save these reports as quick charts for periodic performance review, you can save up to 20 quick charts. Although it’s a fresh new option for analytics there’s a lot of scope for improvement, for example. The ability to export data/reports/charts is not available so if you want to share the data with anyone outside Marketo you can’t, which is a huge disappointment. There’s no option to report on custom parameters such as conversions, program successes etc.  There are only 10 custom dimensions that can be added which makes the set up limited. The ability to report on custom lead filters using smart lists as available in Email performance reports is not there. There’s no email link performance analysis. Overall a fresh new interface and a much needed option for Email performance reporting but still has a lot of scope for improvement. Here’s the Summary: Pros: Lightning quick reporting capabilities. Dimensions and work-space options for reporting. New filter options such as Audience, Content and Device. Ability to create quick charts. Cons: Inability to export reports Only 10 custom dimensions No custom lead filters and custom parameters No Email link performance analysis Here’s an example of how to use Email insights for your reporting purposes, it includes the steps you need to follow to leverage the various capabilities available for reporting. Log into Marketo and click on the tab on the top left hand side to go to Email Insights: This is how Email Insights home screen looks like: It provides you a lot of options of choosing to report on, you can select the Workspaces on which you want to see the performance: In this example, I want to check the performance in Europe, so I’ll choose Europe as the work-space. You can select the dates for which you want to check the email performance: There’s an option of comparing periods as well. You can click on sends on the top left corner to check the various email sends during the period and choose from it the one that you are interested in: If the desired email communication doesn’t show up here, then it could be because it is an operational email, the general settings of Email insights excludes the operational and trigger campaigns, you can change the same in the personal settings: There are a lot of parameters on which Email insights allows you to filter, one of them is Audience. You can filter the audience from country/state and check the email performance for them, for example: If you want to report on email performance during the last month in California etc. You can also filter on specific content, which can be either email sends: Select the email send you want to check the performance. You can also filter on Smart campaigns and the same would reflect in the report: Similarly program filters are also available: A new and fresh addition would be the ability to report device and OS performance, although this option is available as a constraint in Marketo Analytics, this is much better and faster, as it provides you comparative performance views on devices, which is nor the case with Analytics: You can select the Operating systems as a filter as well: There are filters available on your left and right side and you can select either to modify the report/chart: Here’s an example of filtering using parameters on the left side: On your right hand side you have options of choosing filters as well, by default all filter options will show: You can click on Audience, content and device to filter on and analyze the performance further: You have an option of viewing the performance by time as well in the selected time frame, you can select from day, week and month and the report will be modified accordingly: You can also add custom dimensions to these reports which can be used as a filter. To do so, click on the settings option: You can go to System settings to add dimensions, you can add segmentation, channels as dimensions and report the performance on them. Program tags can also be added as a dimension, a maximum of 10 dimensions are allowed with Email insights: Once you are done creating your report/chart based on all the filters and parameters, you can save it as a quick chart for periodic performance review: Name the chart and save it: You can it on the quick charts option on the right hand side, a maximum of 20 charts can be saved: Hope this was informative and helps you in leveraging Email insights for your organization. Your feedback matters a lot to me so if you have any suggestions/comments/queries relative to this, please comment below.

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: Gareth Goh Posted: March 29, 2016 | Modern Marketing Marketers have a well-deserved reputation of being creative types, thinking outside the box and experimenting with new ideas that build brands, reach audiences, and engage customers. However, there is a critical component to marketing –and it’s one that can feel unintuitive to marketers—Data. And I don’t mean just random numbers and records, but accurate, high-quality, and actionable data that informs marketers how they should execute their growth plans. Marketing responsibilities are becoming increasingly technical in nature, and the task of collecting, analyzing, and making sense of all that data is moving away from the realm of a dedicated operations manager to the entire marketing team. The typical modern-day marketer works with a full stack of different technology platforms on a daily basis. At the very least, they are working with a marketing automation system and a customer database/CRM as the most basic must-haves. But the average digital marketer likely has several other systems at their disposal, from content management platforms and business intelligence to social media and lead nurturing tools. Needless to say, each of these individual platforms contains reams of valuable marketing data, but none of this data is very helpful if it exists in a silo. The best marketers rely on pieces of this data (from the various platforms) to successfully pull together and execute their marketing campaigns. But how can you pull together disparate data? This is where “marketing middleware,” one of the fastest-growing aspects of marketing operations, comes in. Middleware serves as the glue that connects all these different applications, greasing the wheels so they can work together to enable the back-and-forth sharing of data and, subsequently, strategy, insights, and execution. While marketing middleware has gotten a bad rap over the years, due to its (earned) reputation as being an archaic and complex system to set up and use, there are simply too many benefits that come from having your marketing data fully integrated to be daunted by the admittedly technical aspects of a marketing platforms integration. With middleware, you can drive more effective campaigns using sales team data, more efficiently distribute leads to your sales team, and create a hierarchy of systems to serve as a “single source of truth”, and more. There are certainly some back-end technical nuances and wiring for marketers to wrap their heads around, but don’t be deterred! There’s a great deal of legwork that marketers can undertake by laying the foundation for a successfuldata integration before looping in IT or an outsourced data integrations specialist. Follow these three steps to integrate your data and achieve a marketing operations peace of mind: 1. Figure Out Which of Your Platforms Should Be Integrated, and Why This is a natural place to start your data integration–figuring out what data you want to integrate in the first place. A common place to begin is between your marketing automation system and your customer database/CRM, to further align your sales and marketing data and processes. But consider whether it also make sense to integrate your customer support client with your marketing automation as well. How about your finance and e-commerce platforms too? It ultimately boils down to asking yourself one simple question: How will it benefit you, as a marketer, if this data and these platforms were synched and consistent? Does the answer to that question help you achieve your marketing or organization’s goals? To look at it from another point of view, ask yourself if the inconsistent data currently living across your multiple platforms is preventing you from working effectively. 2. Sort Out Your Field Mappings Field mappings are probably the most critical part of any data integration project. Different platforms collect data and information through different fields, some of which might not translate across disparate systems. For instance, your marketing automation might ask for “Name” while your CRM might ask for “First Name” and “Last Name” as two distinct fields. When synching this data, you need to make sure those fields with different names, but containing the same information, are mapped to each other. Go through your key fields to look for any inconsistencies (such as in the above example) and note them down for each platform. Additionally, determine a hierarchy of your systems to figure out which system should “own” certain fields in the case of an inconsistency. When data is overwritten, it should be done so to your specifications. Let’s say a customer named Robert Owen is entered into your CRM as “Bob,” but entered your marketing automation platform as “Robert,” and you have determined that your marketing automation is at the top of your hierarchy. In this case, all Bob Owen’s in this context would be overwritten as Robert Owen. 3. Understand and Plan for Risks One huge obstacle holding marketers back from diving whole-hog into a data integration project is the crippling fear that their data may get screwed up if they “mess with it.” This can be even more daunting if you decide that you want all your existing data to be synced, rather than having your data synced on a “go forward” basis, with just new data. This is a totally valid and justifiable concern, but there are ways to ensure that your data remains safe and sound. Whether you’re attempting such a technically challenging project on your own or reaching out to data integration specialists, make sure that you have a master record created before, during, and long after the initial sync. Most data integration platforms should create such a master record for you as a fail-safe anyways, but be sure to clarify this. Typically, your marketing automation system, customer database/CRM, or ERP should be your “System of Record”–the parent database to which all data questions should ultimately be referred to. This should be your single source of truth. Your various other platforms–be it sales, marketing, support, finance, etc.–will be your child records. Integrating your platforms and the valuable data contained within them is a daunting, but essential element of successful marketing operations. So lay the foundation by determining why your platforms should be integrated, how significant the volume of existing data to be integrated is, which fields should be mapped over and how, what the ensuing workflow will look like, and what the hierarchical structure will be following integration–and you’ll be well on your way to achieving a marketing operations peace of mind. Have any data integration nightmares? I’d love to hear about your experiences and how you overcame them in the comments below!

By: Phillip Chen Posted: March 17, 2016 | Modern Marketing For marketers at growing companies who are ready to make the leap from a small marketing group to a larger-scale function, making their programs larger and more effective is almost always on their minds. But how do you grow with your programs so that you don’t get left in the dust? I started at Marketo when our marketing team was relatively small, and since then we have more than doubled. Throughout this time I have observed two types of marketers—the ones that have been able to grow with the company and the ones that weren’t able to punch above their original weight class. So how do you make sure that you’re growing with your company? Here are four ways to take yourself, and your marketing, to the next level: 1. Start Digging for Insights If you have no idea where to begin, start by looking at which of your programs are performing well and which could use some improvement. Indicators of program performance can include things like subjective opinion, pipeline attribution, or even something as basic as abnormal response rates. When you dig into this, you’ll find is that your original question will cascade into a series of additional questions such as “Is this an anomaly?” or “How can this be replicated?”. Ultimately, it’s the insights that stem from your curiosity that will lead you to a new idea to boost your programs. At Marketo, to gain insight into how we could grow our virtual event from 9,000 attendees to over 20,000 attendees, we put together a focus group of people with varying degrees of knowledge about what a virtual event was. Then, we asked them a series of questions, drilling into their answers looking for more insights. What we found were new ways of promoting the event, messaging around it, and other things our current event lacked. For example, we found that virtual attendees appreciate subtitles as not everyone can rely solely on audio. Another insight we found was that there was a misconception that a virtual event was a webinar, and that people didn’t realize it was very interactive and that they could interact with sponsors, network, listen to different sessions, download content, and also win prizes. Aside from focus groups, other ways you can uncover insights for your company include surveys, internal interviews, customer interviews, and of course reports. 2. Coordinate with Other Teams The difference between a small program and a larger program often comes down to cross-functional coordination. If you are effectively able to leverage other teams, you’ll have a greater impact with what you can do. The reason our field events at Marketo have grown so vigorously is because we have a buy-in process with sales and a coordinated effort of different roles and responsibilities to penetrate any given region. We start by showing our sales reps all the options available to them in terms of campaigns, events, and reports. Then, we have them request these options through a form or meeting. Doing this enables us to understand what our reps needs, which we can then translate into a plan. Our plans are reviewed by sales, so they can provide their feedback on whether or not it supports their objectives. As you can see, our program would be stifled if only handled by one group and not as a collaborative effort. Cross-functional coordination doesn’t apply to just sales and marketing alignment for B2B marketers, but extends to other departments as well as applies across marketing. Consider working closely with customer success, support, and other teams in your organization. 3. Plan Your Program Backwards Dream big, and then figure out what it takes to get there. This might seem intuitive, but in reality this is probably done poorly most of the time because of the considerable amount of effort it takes. Say for example that you want 1,000 people to register for your event. What do you have to do to get there? It will take a lot of brainstorming, and although you may not reach your goal initially, over time you will learn more effective ways to achieve the big dreams that you have. Remember that this is an iterative process. The first time you do this, your guesstimates or forecasts will probably be off. For example, you may think that sending one email can drive 100 people to a webinar, but it only really drove 10. While your assumption was off, the next time you go through this process, you will be able to better understand your investments and how to reach the numbers you are trying to achieve. 4. Obtain the Appropriate Resources I hate to tell you, but the honest truth is, if you want something to grow and scale, it will require resources in the form of time and money. What I will say though is that when there’s a will there’s a way. If you’ve done a good job of planning, you’ll be sharp and ready to handle any objections when talking to stakeholders—proving to them that what you want will help them achieve their goals. It’s unbelievable the number of times I’ve gotten my program invested internally over others, purely because I’ve put together a well-thought out plan of how the investment will be used and why it’s the right allocation of budget. At the end of the day, obtaining the appropriate resources is about creating a convincing argument as to why your program deserves more investment than another. To help you create a convincing argument, measure as many aspects of your program as possible to see where there may be outlier results that you can leverage to get your project funded. Things to measure may include pipeline, new logos, customer acquisition cost, new names, attendance rate, or number of marketing qualified leads to name a few. Growing with your marketing can be painful. It requires adaptability, a big dream, but also the willingness to learn and sweat to create something larger than yourself. Ask questions and get curious, bring in other teams to do something larger than just one function, plan a way to get what you want, and ask for the appropriate resources to get there with the right metrics to back it up.

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

We live in the age of the unicorn. No, not the mythical single-horned creature, but the age of the rapidly growing private company that is disrupting the status quo and receiving ‘billion-dollar’ valuations as their reward. While many have come to associate this new catch phrase with the valuation side of the equation, the more important part—to me—is the growth side of the equation.  These so-called unicorns are demonstrating what every young business—whether it is 15 people, 50, or 500—aspires to do: namely, they want togrow…and they want to win. Every industry and company has its own combination of factors that lead to its success. However, I thought it would be worthwhile to find out how these types businesses are using marketing, marketing automation technology, and customer engagement—to help fuel their growth. Over the next few months, we’ll be publishing interviews with the heads of marketing at several of these high-growth companies. Not only can we all learn something about how marketing helped to drive their business—but, I think there are some personal lessons in here as well. To kick it off, I spoke with Matt Epstein, vice president of marketing at human resources software company Zenefits. As someone who grew his marketing team from the ground up (and adopted Marketo as a foundational element, I might add), Matt’s insights into what companies need to do to jumpstart growth through marketing were simple, powerful, and enlightening. Enjoy the conversation below, and look out for more insights from industry leaders on how marketing has led them to success in this Marketing First world. Zenefits At A Glance: Year Founded: 2013 Size of Marketing Team: 18 Marketing Stack Components: CRM, Marketing Automation, Data Analytics, Google applications for day-to-day Number One Reason for Choosing Marketing Automation: Scalability, efficiency, ability to quickly A/B test en-masse Q & A: 1. As Zenefits employee number one, you’ve been involved in the company’s growth from the very beginning. How does your approach marketing strategy today differ from when you started? There are three things that have changed the most for me personally. The first was the shift to being a data-centric organization. I went from basically operating on zero data—making decisions with a finger in the wind—to a job that is 50 percent about data. A large part of my role that has transformed is establishing a solid reporting structure, from making sure we’re hitting our lead goals to most importantly making sure we’re acquiring customers profitably. We spent 12 months creating an attribution model for all of our campaigns—from email to paid media to content—that we report on on a weekly basis. This is something I’m very proud of. It’s not an easy thing to do, especially in marketing where you have so many channels. Second thing is the shift to full-funnel campaigns. When I started, I was setting fireworks off right and left with no rhyme or reason. I would just wake up and say, “What can I do today to drive business?” Now we send an email that’s followed by a handwritten note, that’s followed up by a Twilio call, that’s followed up by a targeted YouTube ad, etc. The one thing about marketing is that it’s all about touches. It’s about connecting all of these separate campaigns—and obviously automation plays a large part of it—and finding a way to hit everyone in as consolidated a timeline as possible with the same message. It’s not easy, but it’s where things are starting to shift. The third thing is optimizing for revenue. This may not be breaking news for most CMOs, but for me, shifting an organization to only think about revenue means that if you’re producing a piece of content, don’t look at how many leads you get, don’t look at how many demos you get, don’t look at how many opportunities you get—you should be cutting the cord or pouring more gasoline on the fire based off what revenue came in. What’s interesting about looking at revenue and not any of the other numbers is that it forces you to backtrack in the funnel and figure out where things went wrong. So now in everything we do, we start with the revenue number and nothing else. 2. Within your marketing automation platform—which you talked about—what have been the capabilities that were essential to drive that growth? The thing beyond Marketo that makes automation possible, which for us has been essential for growth, is the structured data. Your automation is only as good as your data. We’ve invested a ton of resources into keeping our database clean. For our sales people, we have very rigorous rules that make sure when they speak to someone the fields are marked correctly. We closely track field updates—if you got off a call and there’s nothing updated, we know you’re not doing your job. This is essential for scoring on the prospecting side. Are you reaching out to the right people at the right time? This is every day now in marketing, but it was a new concept not too long ago. At the end of the day, if you have bad data, you’re going to have bad automation, both for your prospects and for your customers. 3. One of the biggest problems that high-growth companies face is the ability to scale. Within marketing, how have you kept your customer interactions effective and genuine as you’ve expanded? We do a lot of events. I believe events are one big opportunity to convince customers that a company’s view of the world is the right view. It makes the audience into evangelists, not users, because they believe in your mission and want to help you accomplish that mission. This makes customer events hugely impactful. We also do a newsletter, which, again, is something that is status quo now. We keep it short, and our criteria for a newsletter are, of the three articles in there, did one actually help you? Did you learn something new that actually makes your business better? We are disrupting the brokerage industry, which is one of the last offline, very high-touch industries in the business world. We’re replacing people that take their customers out to lunch every day. This is our opportunity through Marketo to at-masse act as our customers’ trusted advisor. The third thing is that we created a program called Zenefits Important People where we nurture a list of hundreds of customers as a pool of evangelists to make sure they are in line with our vision and that they know what’s going on in the company. This connection is essential because they’re the ones out selling Zenefits, and it is essential to have their buy-in and support. The fourth thing is that our CEO Parker Conrad and I directly respond to customers and tweets, hop on sales calls, and work the support lines over holiday break. I think it’s very easy to lose touch with your customers. In fact, something I recommend all CMOs do is close at least one deal per year, especially if you’re a transactional company. At the end of the day, if you’re a marketer, you’re essentially a sales person. As soon as you stop hopping on calls and learning about customer pain points and convincing them you can solve them, your messaging will be off base. 4. You have 10,000+ customers—does marketing automation still primarily drive customer acquisition or are you using it to support goals like retention, upsell, etc.? What else are you driving through automation? I’m incredibly passionate about helping our customers succeed. What’s been most interesting for me both in Marketo and in the category of automation itself is that I always assumed that the neatest things you could do were around demand generation. I think the untapped opportunity is retention and support. A lot of companies manually look through a list of people who have not been reached out to in three months. Automating that process is not quite Skynet or Terminator, but it is something that eliminates the admin work and allows you to put your focus on doing what it takes to make them happy. You can score prospects like you score customers, making it incredibly complex through automation. Retention is the coolest part of automation because it’s so much cheaper to retain someone than to acquire them. It just makes sense. 5. Describe the marketing team’s relationship with sales. What was the biggest factor in aligning to the two areas of the business? Everywhere I’ve worked prior to Zenefits, it’s always been a very contentious relationship. That’s never happened here. I think it’s because from day one our VP of Sales Sam Blond and I have been on the same page focusing on revenue. This all goes back to measurement. If you know your KPIs and are able to dig down and report on them accurately, there’s really no debate to be had. Because we have good reporting, if the sales team didn’t hit their number, we can track it back to something like the win rate going down, which could track back directly to getting dinged on a review site, etc. At the end of the day, there’s one person who owns every number and they’re held accountable. We’ve never played the blame game, because at the end of the day it’s about revenue, and if the number’s down, you have to figure out how to fix it. 6. What advice would you give to companies looking to fuel growth through marketing? The top three for me would be one, to set big goals, the biggest goals you can possibly imagine, and don’t you dare put the word stretch before or after it. When Parker set a goal of going from one to 20 million, he forced me to think about it as if you had unlimited time or money. You only force yourself to do it if you’re forced to hit an incredibly aggressive goal. The second thing is what I did for the first year and a half was I would constantly go through the exercise of stack ranking all the growth tools available to me, from PPC to social media. I stack ranked them according to what is taking to 10X what I’m doing today, and then everything else was secondary. I would use three of these tools at once, and the second one showed a flicker to life, I would pour gasoline on it and grow the flame. People lose focus and try to do everything at once or one big thing at once, and I think the most thing is to always make sure you’re always doing two to three hypotheses at once, but not losing focus and getting distracted by all the shiny objects. The third would be don’t worry too much about automating, perfecting, and optimizing. We didn’t automate anything until over a year. One of my biggest things is if you release something and you’re happy with it, it means you took too long to do it. It’s all about just getting it out there and seeing if it works. If it works, then automate it.

Provided by Dan Stevens​

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.

  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!

By: Marcus Taylor Posted: August 13, 2015 | Marketing Automation The marketing automation industry has snowballed over the past few years, and yet it’s only just getting started. According to Marketing Automation Insider, in the past five years alone, we’ve seen over $5.5B worth of acquisitions made, and an aggregate vendor revenues increase from $225M to $1.65B! At the current rate of adoption and innovation, you may be wondering where marketing automation is headed, which trends are emerging, and how it will all benefit your business. Well, my friend, you’ve come to the right place! Here, we’ll explore three major shifts in the marketing automation industry and how they’ll impact your businesses on both a macro and micro-level. Let’s get started… 1. Predictive analytics is making guessing a game of the past One of the major trends emerging in the marketing automation industry is the use of predictive analytics and machine learning to power sales and marketing decisions. Predictive analytics uses clever statistical models to identify what your customers will likely do next and then automatically uses those insights to trigger certain actions. In 2012, Amazon filed a patent for a predictive analytics system that would allow them to begin shipping productsbefore a customer even ordered them. (Crazy thought, right?!) But by predicting the probability of someone buying a product based on their behavior on the website and previous history, Amazon could reduce its shipping times and move product faster. There are countless uses for this type of technology, but in the context of marketing automation, it provides the opportunity to eliminate guess work. How long should you wait between sending two emails in a lead nurturing sequence? Which content (blogs, ebooks, etc) should you send to a certain type of lead? How should you score a lead from a particular marketing channel? While experience tends to provide good answers to these questions, predictive analytics can provide dynamic answers that, like a good bottle of wine, become better over time, ultimately surpassing that of an experienced marketer’s hunch. As a result of this, marketing and sales will become less of a guessing game. The most important consequence of this is that companies using predictive analytics will have the competitive advantage. Predictive analytics adoption is still in its infancy, providing the innovative early birds with a great opportunity to get a head start. The question is, will it be you or your competitors that gain this competitive advantage? 2. Intelligent multi-channel marketing is becoming the norm Tests have shown that when you target a customer both in their inbox with an email and on Facebook with a matching ad, the customer is 22% more likely to purchase, as opposed to if you had only sent the email. In multi-channel marketing, the whole is usually greater than the sum of its parts. This is especially true when you add a layer of personalization into the mix, which is of course possible with marketing automation. Let’s look at time for an example. Let’s imagine that you’re the marketing director of a company that sells kitchen appliances online. A prospect named Molly visits your website and adds a fridge to her shopping cart (obviously a very large shopping cart.) Molly enters her details to check out but never completes the transaction. In this situation your multi-channel strategy could look something like this: After 30 minutes, an automated email is triggered encouraging Molly to complete her order (in case she got distracted by a phone call…or Game of Thrones). Using retargeting through a sync with your marketing automation platform and Facebook, Molly sees an ad saying “Molly, are you refurbishing your kitchen?” and linking to a separate landing page. If this landing page is engaged with, Molly would be entered into a whole new sequence with upsells and offers incentivizing her to buy more items. If after one day Molly still hasn’t bought the fridge, a text message could be sent asking if there’s anything your support team could answer or help her with. If after several days later there’s still no purchase, a separate email and Facebook ad campaign could be triggered targeting Molly with different fridges and freezers relating to her original search criteria. This type of multi-channel nurturing is immensely effective for a number of reasons: It’s underused. Despite being very effective, few companies are running such hyper-personalized campaigns. This will likely change over the next few years, as more and more companies realize its effectiveness. With more channels, you can capture more data from your customers, leading to more relevant targeting. The more relevant your targeting, the more likely a conversion will be. It makes it virtually impossible to lose a customer due to distraction, as you’re able to communicate with the buyer across devices and platforms and at different times. We’re likely to see a lot more multi-channel marketing over the next year or two. As marketing automation tools improve their offerings and features, and as more case studies emerge, more and more businesses will begin to use this powerful tactic. Could this sort of multi-channel marketing help your business convert more leads into customers? 3. Marketing automation is becoming widely adopted There are two colliding waves in the marketing automation industry that are converging to form a tsunami-like surge of businesses interested in marketing automation. These waves are 1) the increased awareness of the value of marketing automation and 2) the increasing impact and capabilities of marketing automation software. Since 2012, the amount of case studies, articles, webinars, and events covering marketing automation has exploded, resulting in a heightened awareness of the impact of adopting a marketing automation solution. Simultaneously, marketing automation software is becoming more and more powerful. With new features and functionality, such as real-time personalization and adtech-geared tools, as well as an increasing pool of experts readily sharing best practices, the scope of what marketing automation software can achieve is continuing to expand. Word—and excitement—is spreading like wildfire. These two converging waves have an obvious result: more and more businesses (your competitors included) are implementing a marketing automation solution. As such, it pays to get ahead of the game and start building your marketing automation campaigns early. That way, by the time your competitors are building out their first campaigns, your business could have hundreds of active, fine-tuned campaigns already working on leads. Get to it! Conclusion As far as we can tell from the data, marketing automation is becoming smarter, more tailored, and more accessible. The combination of these trends explains why the industry has grown so rapidly over the past five years and why it does not appear to be slowing down anytime soon. For business owners, the lesson here is simple and Darwinian: evolve now (aka get automating), or risk losing your market share to your competitors. Marcus Taylor is the founder of Venture Harbour, a company that owns a portfolio of online ventures including Marketing Automation Insider.

By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: March 3, 2015 | Engagement Marketing At our core, marketers are storytellers. We love to tell stories that evoke emotion and pull at heartstrings. As I have shared my vision of the next era of marketing, I’ve talked about how marketing is changing. But, in this post let’s start with how it’s not changing when it comes to building a brand. Then, we can turn to how we, as marketers, willneed to change to build our brands in the next era of marketing. Storytelling Is Timeless In the era of engagement marketing, the essence of what makes you and me marketers won’t change. No matter how much digital, social, mobile we have in the world around us, Marketing will always need well-told evocative stories, and the ability to communicate to your audience’s needs, wants, and emotions. Think about Skype’s “Stay Together” campaign: It demonstrated how people are using technology to develop deep, emotional relationships across great distances. It was a shift from talking about their product and features to talking about the emotional benefits of using their product. In one story, two young girls, each born with one arm, connect from across the world to learn from one another’s experiences. They teach each other valuable lessons about self confidence, and share those iconic teenage-girl moments, like swapping hair and makeup tips. The two girls don’t just keep in touch—Skype allows them to become best friends, even while living on separate continents. The campaign is global and spans multiple channels, but it’s also personal and emotional. It connects with the audience. These kinds of campaigns—big narratives that span a wide range of experiences and stories—will still have a key place in the future of marketing, because we can all connect with them. Your Story As A Starting Place What will change about this type of storytelling in the era of engagement marketing, is that marketers will not use these stories to talk “at” their audience–in cinematic fashion, but rather as a way to initiate a conversation and elicit a response that they can listen to. They will need to create this type of storytelling over time–not just at a single moment, but rather a conversation and narrative that builds to create engagement. Customers will also create these stories with us, by engaging on or across social media, and other channels to share and tell stories. The story becomes part of a larger journey that a customer takes, and how the customer responds will help the marketer determine how best to talk with them. Technology Helps Stories This all means that a big change in the future will be the role of technology in storytelling. Technology augments who we are as marketers—where our core love of storytelling is enhanced by the ability to make the interaction last longer than a single point in time. Technology helps marketers engage with their audience, over time and in a personalized way. It’s the only way to do it at scale. And, it’s the only way to meet the customer everywhere they are—as opposed to just pushing a cool story at them through a single channel like TV. Marketers themselves recognize the power of technology to impact their success in the future—as demonstrated in the results from the recent survey conducted by the Economic Intelligence Unit on behalf of Marketo: More than 80% of marketers will rely on technology to engage customers in conversations and build advocacy and trust with customers. Furthermore, when you look at where marketers plan on spending budgeting dollars in the next three to five years, the picture becomes even clearer. Departments are budgeting to meet the customer everywhere they are–tying multiple places together in a dialogue. More than one-third will increase their budgets for social marketing, and roughly 30% will invest more in mobile marketing. Marketers Must Learn How to Do It In the survey conducted by the Economic Intelligence Unit on behalf of Marketo, we found that marketers were feeling a high degree of urgency to develop this new muscle and capability in their organizations. When CMOs and other marketing leaders were asked what skills were the top areas they needed to develop: The #1 answer, at 40%, was “digital engagement” The #2 answer, tied at 40%, was marketing operations and technology 27% indicated customer experience and engagement Building Ambitious Purpose and a Dialogue In an earlier post, I talked about how marketers will be responsible for the customer experience, but we haven’t yet talked about what that will look like. Customers are hyperconnected. They are also overloaded. I’ve seen studies that show that each of us are bombarded with nearly 3000 messages a day. Customers are looking for more relevant connections and ever greater meaning in their lives. Simply put, the bar is now even higher for marketers to get through. This evolution means we need to think bigger; we need to tap into ideas that inspire customers and help them find meaning in the world around them. We have to develop our “ambitious purpose”. This is what we have always tried to do as marketers. We just need to do it bigger now. And, we need to do it in very different ways. We need to effectively harness the tools that customers are using—meet them everywhere they are, on a sustained basis over time. If I think 90 seconds of a YouTube video, television commercial, digital ad, or entertaining social post is going to build my brand and real engagement, I probably will be sorely disappointed. Customers are now the keepers of our brand in this new digital world, and we need to build it with them. That requires a new and unique set of skills, namely the ability to harness new technology platforms and use them to engage customers. What’s old is new—very new. But, if we keep the core of what is true to marketing and embrace the need for new skills and capabilities in this new era of engagement marketing, our potential for growth and real brand connection is unbounded. What do you think? Has the rise in digital technology changed the stories marketers tell and the way we tell them? I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.