Product Documents

You may want to track history of Marketo Forms filled out by your Leads so you can identify which Form was filled out first or last. What I am going to share with you today, will give you an idea about how you can easily implement this under your Marketo instance. 1.  Requirements 1.2  Field(s) You will have to create two (2) Fields under Marketo only, if you don’t want their data to be synced to your CRM account. Otherwise, the Fields must be created under Lead/Contact Objects in your CRM (E.g. Salesforce). Make sure there are visible to the Marketo Sync User and that he has Read & Write access on it. They will be then synced to Marketo and ready to use.  Let us name the Fields here  Last Form & Last Form History. Links below must be useful for creating Fields in: -  Marketo:  http://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Create+a+Custom+Field+in+Marketo -  Salesforce: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=adding_fields.htm&type=0 Note that an Admin Role is required in both cases. -  Fields should be “Text” type as shown below: 1.3  A Trigger Campaign -   A Trigger Campaign that will fire when a Lead fills out any Form as shown below under the Smart List Tab: -  And the Flow should be set as the following:                                                                                Remember to set the Campaign under the Schedule Tab so a Lead can go through the Flow every time. Please consider the link below to learn more about it: -  http://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Edit+Qualification+Rules+in+a+Smart+Campaign 2. Expected result   When a Lead fills out a Form, if the Last Form field is empty it will be updated with the Form name. And so the Last Form History. The next time he fills out another Form, the new Form name will overwrite the existing data in the Last Form Field. The Last Form History one will be also updated.

                                                   This article is ONLY valid for Marketo-MS Dynamics integration. WHEN? In a situation where Data in Fields that are blocked from update in Marketo failed to sync over to the corresponding CRM Fields at the first place. REASONS: Fields wrongly mapped, not visible to the Marketo sync User in CRM, system failure, Read-Only Fields in CRM. You may want to update those Fields in MS Dynamics (E.g. Inferred City, Lead Source, etc...) at some stage, here is what you can do. 1. Export Lead/Contact Records from your CRM with the Fields that you would like to update 1.1   Create a Quick View Form to make sure only records with required Fields are exported In the default solution, using the solution explorer, expand the Entities node and select the entity you want to create a new quick  view form for. Expand the entity and select the Forms node. Choose New and select Quick View Form. This will open the form editor. In the form editor, choose Form Properties in the Form group of the Home tab. In the Form Properties dialog box, enter a Form Name and Description to differentiate this quick view form from any others and close the Form Properties dialog box. Edit the form to add the fields you want. In this scenario, I will be updating the Lead Source Field under Lead Entity. 1.2   You can now export the List using the EXPORT TO EXCEL option   1.3   The exported File will look like the following: Note that there are hidden columns on this file, once you edit them, the file will be corrupted. They are very important while importing the final List to update the records in MS Dynamics. They are used to identify the targeted Leads/Contacts so they can be updated accordingly.  This is how the file will look when you unhide them. Do not unhide those 3 Columns otherwise the file will be corrupted. If you attempt to do so, you will get an error when you try to import the List later into Microsoft Dynamics. 2. Update exported File accordingly Note that if the number of records to be updated is huge, you may consider exporting the List of Leads in question from the related Marketo instance. Again, only with the required Fields (E.g. Full Name, Email & Lead Source). Sort the two Lists alphabetically from A to Z to make sure the Marketo List records in cell 1, 2,3… match the corresponding CRM ones. Then copy all data in the Lead Source Field from the Marketo List and paste it into the CRM one. This can be done also by VLOOKUP (https://support.office.com/en-ie/article/VLOOKUP-function-0bbc8083-26fe-4963-8ab8-93a18ad188a1). The final List should look like the one above:   2.1   Save the List as .csv file.  Other supported formats: Text (.txt) Compressed (.zip) Excel Spreadsheet 2003 (.xml) Excel Workbook (.xlsx) Note that the maximum file size allowed for .zip files is 32 MB. For the other file formats, the maximum file size allowed is 8 MB. 2.2   Now import the updated List into CRM by clicking on IMPORT DATA   2.3   Select the file to be imported into Microsoft Dynamics from its location   When you proceed, you will be asked to map the Marketo Fields with the CRM ones accordingly if required during the process as shown below: Continue with next steps until completion. 2.4   Result – Lead Source Field updated successfully in your CRM   All done!

Marketo Users often create a Trigger Campaign to trigger "Clicks Link” or “Open Email” activities on AB Test Email Program. They are surprised that they cannot find the emails in question under the Smart List drop menu for the trigger (1). Or, they successfully selected the Emails without issue and activated the Trigger Campaign, but after all it is throwing errors (2). What happened? 1. When Emails are used under AB Test Email Program, their name is wrapped with the Program Name + Test Type Name. E.g.  TEST AB TESTING.Whole Emails Test (it will look different depending on Test Type you select. But, it will always start with the Program Name). Then, targeted Emails name can be located under Constraint Trigger “Test Variant” as shown below (Emails Name here are Email A/Email B & Test Type: Whole Emails):   Note that Link & Test Variant can be found under “Add Constraint”. Also, it is very important to approve the AB Test Program before you create the Trigger Campaign otherwise those data won’t be available there for you to use. 2. Errors can be the result of not activating the AB Test Email Program before doing so for the related Trigger Campaign. Because, if it is activated in the first place there is no way to find the Emails' Name under the Trigger Smart List. Meaning that after initiating the AB Test, the system can no longer retrieve the targeted Emails name. Consequently, you get an error under the Trigger Campaign Smart List and it won’t fire.          

We’ve reached peak ABM hype. You’ve seen countless variations of the same presentation about how to get started with ABM, how to sell ABM internally, the ideal ABM tech stack, and on and on. And I agree that it’s time to start getting down to business and actually design ABM plays that can drive your business more revenue. But my ABM pitch is going to be a little different from the ones you’ve been hearing over and over. It also doesn’t involve having to buy the hottest, newest toy on the market. My example of an ABM campaign will be based out of Marketo. But the same setups/flows/logic should be broadly applicable to most marketing automation platforms, or even your favorite sales acceleration/cadence tools. So fire them up and follow along with this post. Step 1 — Build your target account list Earlier this year at LeanData, we identified a leaky spot in our pipeline. The timeframe between the 1st demo and what should have been the 2nd demo was a place where prospects were going dark on us. Under the guidance of Adam New-Waterson, now the vice president of demand generation at RevJet, our marketing and sales team sat down together and compiled a list of target accounts that we believed could be brought back to life. The next step was to push all the leads and contacts associated with those target accounts into our ABM campaign. We used our own product to tag all the leads and contacts associated with those target accounts with the value of “2nd demo” in a segmentation field. This step could be done a number of ways depending on the specific tools you’re working with, but the ultimate goal is to end up with some way of separating out the leads and contacts for your target accounts. In this case, we used a smartlist in Marketo filtering on the “2nd demo” value to push the list into our campaign. Step 2 — Segment the relevant stakeholders CEB research has shown that 5.4 buyers typically are involved in a typical B2B deal. Getting all of those stakeholders involved is crucial to making an ABM strategy successful. So to begin tailoring our message to those various people, the next step in our DIY ABM play was to separate out who was important and who was not important to the conversation. For us, we used Marketo’s Engagement Programs to create different streams of content/interactions for each of the five buyer personas we believe are relevant to our business. Step 3 — Set up the play Now for the fun stuff. We didn’t want to just have same boring old stream of emails with slightly varying messages to each buyer. That’s not real personalization. We always strive to create a combination of different touches across different channels, with different players from our team. Our play for the sales operations buyer persona went like this: Standard marketing email featuring a datasheet An alert to our in-house Sales Ops pro to personally reach out, along with a suggested template email Personal invitation from our VP of Sales to invite them to an event we’re hosting An alert to our social media writer to engage the prospect on Twitter Closing out with another marketing email featuring a second product datasheet. This was our playbook. But the sky’s the limit when it comes to the series of touches you can implement. It really comes down to tailoring the messages to your organization and your buyers. Here are some other ideas to get you thinking: Direct mail piece Surveys Webinars Podcasts Interactive content Results Since piloting this campaign with a small group of target accounts, we’ve seen approximately 20 percent of the targets reach back out to schedule another demo with us. An interesting, and somewhat unexpected, development was that most of the responses we received were from someone other than our initial point-of-contact. It just goes to show the importance of a true ABM strategy. You must reach out across a target account and engage with the multiple stakeholders who might be involved in a deal on their own terms. And this is the kind of play that can really lead to closed deals.

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.

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:   

In light of the Summer Olympics in Rio, we invite you to participate in this week’s 'Marketo Games' in Purple Select & Community.  This will be a fun way for you, our advocates, to engage with each other and learn Marketo, as well as have some fun with Olympic themed challenges like our Olympic Trivia. For participating you will be entered into a daily raffle to win a $25 Amazon gift card. Already a Purple Select Member? Participate Now! ​ OR Join Purple Select ​​​

Author: Pawan Deshpande Content marketers have a big challenge: continuously filling their content pipeline with fresh, insightful, and relevant information. Your target audience expects it and turns to trusted sources when they need to search for answers and seek insights. Whether or not that’s your brand depends on the quality of your content. Moreover, brand managers and product marketers depend on continuing information streams. After all, content marketing is the principal method for connecting with buyers to reinforce brand messages and build awareness in the digital age. But more than that, content marketing helps you build relationships. Good content marketing establishes trust with your audience by offering them informative and entertaining content without asking for much in return. Psychologically, we’re all much more willing to engage and buy from someone we like and respect than someone we don’t. The Power of Curated Collections However, few content marketers have the wherewithal to develop all the content their organization needs on their own. According to Curata’s research study conducted on over 500 marketers, leading content marketers are developing 65% of the assets in their program, curating 25%, and syndicating the remaining 10%. With content curation, marketers can find, organize, annotate, and share the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic, produced by third parties yet relevant for their target audience. Not to mention, your buyers consume content from multiple sources for different points-of-view, so content curation provides them with unique perspectives. Unearthing great content from a variety of sources—even your competitors on occasion—can also be a highly effective way to build your credibility and trust as an unbiased thought leader. Moreover, with content curation, marketers can overcome some of the top content marketing challenges, as reported by the Content Marketing Institute. Here’s how content curation can help you overcome the top five content marketing challenges: 1. Producing Engaging Content Curating relevant collections adds additional assets to your content mix such as videos, podcasts, cheatsheets, worksheets, and infographics. These can help enhance engagement with your target audience, particularly when it’s deployed on different channels. For example, we’ve seen that infographics work well on Facebook, where they are a great prompt for comments. It’s also extremely easy for people to share, retweet, and otherwise promote your curated content on social channels, which they are more likely to do if you curate something entertaining or insightful and easy to digest. 2. Producing Content Consistently Content curation helps fill up your editorial calendar without the same investment needed to create original content. It’s usually a lot faster and easier to find and annotate content than it is to research and write it—particularly if you use content curation software, which automatically crawls the internet for relevant content and brings it to you. To produce content on a consistent basis, consider curating content at least once a week. Even if you send a weekly rather than daily newsletter, it’s good practice to curate on a regular basis to break up your workload and ensure that your site is refreshed with new content. 3. Producing a Variety of Content Curated content expands the mix by collecting and organizing content from diverse sources and in multiple formats. It allows you to offer a wider variety of perspectives than only tapping in-house resources. Even industry giants benefit from adding content curation to their marketing mix. It helps establish them as industry insiders and thought leaders, complements their social media marketing, and also attracts influencers who may contribute to the site. 4. Being Budget and/or Resource Constrained Content curation is not as time or expertise intensive as developing original content, so fewer resources need to be allocated to enjoy its benefits. A data center company based in Iceland, Verne Global, used content curation software to create their content hub Green Data Center News. This site enabled their small team to save over $100,000 in expenses for outbound marketing staff and website development, connect with prospects on a daily basis, and easily get global press coverage. 5. Filling Gaps in the Knowledge and Skills of Your Internal Team Content curation augments your existing expertise by referencing external sources, reducing the need for investing in new content development. For instance, perhaps you’ve hired a journalist for your team who is an excellent writer and editor, but not (yet) a subject matter expert for your industry. Once they read the top publications and blogs in your industry, a smart journalist will know enough to recognize and curate great articles by others with more expertise—saving you the expense of hiring a subject matter expert. Curating content can increase the consistency of a production schedule, requires fewer resources than developing original content, makes it easier to offer more engaging content, expands the expertise pool available, and opens up the variety of content—and perspectives—available for publishing. It’s one of the most effective tools available for dealing with many of today’s content marketing challenges. Have you started curating content for your organization? Share your tips and tricks below.

Author: Hally Pinaud As a kid, I watched a lot of cartoons. Ninja Turtles. My Little Pony. Carebears. But one of my favorites was actually a syndicated oldie-but-goodie that my parents grew up with called Underdog, where a “humble, lovable shoeshine boy” (who was a dog, but still) transforms into a caped crusader and somehow always foils the bad guy. I’m not alone–we all love a good underdog story, don’t we? But these days, being an underdog among enterprises sort of makes you a superhero, too. In fact, according to Gartner’s report, “Predicts 2014: Seizing the Digital Business Advantage,” 20% of all market leaders will lose their dominant position to a company founded after the year 2000. To be clear, it’s not about the year the company was founded. It’s because these nimble emerging enterprises seize adigital business advantage. That advantage is crystal-clear when it comes to building a growth-oriented marketing strategy around existing customers. Enterprises should be laser-focused on customer base marketing because: Customer retention is key to market share Happy customers are the shortcut to trust Repeat customers spend more Passionate customers are the best kind of marketing Here are three ways to seize the digital business advantage by leveraging a complete marketing automation platform to do customer base marketing: 1. Nurture Existing Customers To grow market share, you have to retain your existing customers. (And if I were a superhero myself, I would be Captain Obvious.) Retention rates above industry standard, therefore, are an absolute must if you’re an emerging enterprise. You can’t grow if two steps forward come with three steps back. Also, here’s something that’s less obvious: new customer acquisition is much more expensive than retention. Keep the customers you’ve got by continuing to provide them with value, long after their first purchase. Many companies save nurture for prospects, but don’t be one of them! If you want to maximize your relationship with current customers (and accordingly, retention and loyalty), stage and interest-based nurture are a must—well past the point of purchase. Ask yourself: what do these individuals need? And proactively answer their questions. With a marketing automation platform, you can listen to your customers’ actions and behavior and respond with relevant communication tailored to their interests. 2. Look for Moments of Cross-Sell and Upsell Intent The 80-20 rule is alive and well. According to the old business adage (another oldie-but-goodie), 20% of your customers account for 80% of your sales. This makes sense: it takes a lot less to run effective cross-sell and upsell campaigns for people who already know and trust you. So if you want to grow your enterprise, start with the people who love you already. Behaviors like viewing product information or visiting specific content might indicate that a customer is interested in doing more. With automated campaigns like trigger-based nurture, web personalization, and retargeting, you can give your customers more of the content they need to keep your brand top of mind and help them evaluate options. Meanwhile, customer scoring and sales intelligence will guide your customer account team toward timely outreach. 3. Help Your Advocates Advocate Ever heard the old adage: “No one ever got fired for buying…(insert industry behemoth here)?” If you aren’t the known quantity, you’re the risk. One of the most fantastic things about a legion of happy customers is that they give you powerful credibility as the up-and-comer. If you’re doing a great job with customer engagement, it’s time to hand your most passionate customers the megaphone. “Great,” you’re thinking, “but we sell a subscription service for socks, not software. No one’s going to get fired for what I do.” I won’t get into the obvious risks associated with sub-par socks. Instead, I’ll point out something that resonates with every marketer: 92% of consumers trust personal recommendations over all forms of advertising, according to Nielsen. Happy customers create a virtuous cycle that’s necessary for amplifying the effect of your marketing campaigns. Marketers savvy about engagement marketing recognize that the nurturing process is critical to creating and maintaining customer advocates. Pay ongoing personalized attention to customers you hope to develop into brand advocates and use referral marketing to share offers, incentives, and campaigns that entice your brand advocates to spread the word about you—an approach that emerging enterprises like Dropbox have mastered for major growth. In short, the right engagement marketing solution can help you cultivate your own advantage. Look and act like a huge enterprise customer marketing team by becoming more proactive, efficient, and helpful. Want to learn how else your enterprise can use digital marketing to get an advantage? Check out our ebook 5 Ways Marketing Automation Can Help Your Enterprise Grow.

By: Nick Westergaard Posted: August 1, 2016 | Digital Marketing Digital marketing isn’t going anywhere. However, new technologies bring about constant shifts, making it hard to keep up without the right strategy. Recently, I hosted a webinar with Marketo on how to create a smarter digital marketing strategy that allows you to optimize your campaigns, even with a tight budget or resource constraints. In this blog, I’ll answer the top seven questions that I received from our attendees: 1. What does it mean to be scrappy? Scrappy means a lot of things to different people, but to me, scrappy comes down to doing more with less. It’s an alternative to checklist marketing, which consists of just checking things off a list instead of doing what makes the most sense. Scrappy marketing means: Putting brains before budget Being both efficient and effective Seeing ideas everywhere When I was talking to the team at Schwinn Bicycles about the scrappy concept, marketing manager Samantha Hersil said, “You know what, we could all use a few people and a few dollars more.” That’s the bottom line. No one has unlimited resources these days. As marketing continues to change, we have to come up with smarter systems for getting the work done. 2. How do the scrappy strategies apply to B2B marketers with longer sales cycle? For all marketers, strategy is a critical first step. But the longer the sales cycle, the more you have to do with less to continue to keep your buyers engaged over time. Marketers with longer sales cycle, which include B2B marketers and consumer marketers selling considered purchase products, need to focus their scrappy strategy on what they’re trying to do, who they’re trying to reach, and when they’re trying to reach them. Strategy first. Always. 3. For a company that markets to both businesses and consumers, how do you differentiate between multiple audiences? Once again, differentiate with strategy. Sketch out a scrappy strategy that answers the following questions for each audience: Why are we doing this? What are we doing? When does this happen? Where does this happen? Who does this involve? How do we get it done? You may find areas of overlap, but you also might find areas where you can focus your efforts even further. 4. How do you recommend looking at other brands in your industry to see what’s working best? Seeing ideas everywhere is one of the key concepts in the scrappy mindset that I outline in my book. In this day and age, we rely a little too heavily on case studies. We wait to see what a company like ours, with a CEO the same height as ours, is doing. Instead, we need to get better at looking at other marketers in other industries. What’s working for them? Could you drop that into your industry? 5. Using people power requires a change in the work culture. How do you go about getting management’s buy-in to change the culture? Too often, we spend too much time talking about people problems and not people power. People are one of your biggest assets, and culture is one of the single most important factors in marketing success. To change your work culture, you have to start with buy-in from the top and work your way through management and finally to individual team members. It’s important to remind management and HR that talent isn’t about finding “unicorns.” Especially for social media, engagement and people skills are sometimes more important than technical skills, which can easily be taught. Getting buy-in isn’t easy, but the impact can be potent. Back to strategy—make sure you start this process by sharing your strategy both up and down your org chart. Your people can only help you if they know what it is you’re trying to do. 6. For a lean team or smaller company, what should be the top priorities to get started in digital marketing? Think about business objectives that you can ground in your strategy with (e.g. branding, community building, public relations, market research, customer services, leads and sales). I know I sound like a broken record here, but a small team has to focus on strategy. You can’t afford to do anything that you don’t have the resources for. Who are you trying to reach? What action do you want them to take? Work on answering these simple questions and you’ll be on your way to creating scrappy marketing. 7. What are your best social media tips, specifically for Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest? For all social media platforms, remember that whether you’re marketing to consumers or businesses, they are still people. They can still be reached with emotional appeals. Take advantage of the visual platforms of Instagram and Pinterest. For consumer marketers, they are valuable platforms for them to connect with their audience on. However, these sites are just as critical for B2B marketers, who may struggle with trying to market rather technical subjects. Images and videos allow your audience to easily digest your content. Facebook is the 800-lb gorilla in the social media marketing conversation. Both B2B and consumer marketers need a robust plan for all aspects of this platform—both organic and increasingly paid, due to Facebook’s constantly changing algorithms. We have to look for ways to focus what we’re doing and simplify our marketing for the long haul. Were these tips helpful? Check out the on-demand webinar Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small if you’re interested in learning more. And if you have any other questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below!

By: Mike Stocker Posted: July 29, 2016 | Digital Marketing Facebook’s recent announcement of their new Offline Conversions API generated a lot of buzz and excitement among marketers and for good reason. The new API provides stores and retailers with a way to see how many people made offline purchases after seeing a Facebook campaign—connecting offline conversions to digital campaigns. They can then use these offline activities to optimize their ad campaigns and ad spend. As a Facebook marketing partner, Marketo was excited to be a part of their launch announcement. Even more exciting is that our integration enables an expansion of this offline conversion concept to a much broader set of use cases that apply to all marketers, B2B marketers included. Before I get into the details of how you can use the new Offline Conversions API with Marketo, let’s start with some basics. What is an offline conversion event? In this case, an “offline” conversion event happens when a contact in your database performs a desired action on a channel not measured by Facebook. When Facebook made their announcement, most business publications (Forbes, AdWeek, etc.) focused on the retail use case. While that is certainly a huge use case for an offline conversion event, I’d argue there are a lot more potential “offline” conversion events that impact marketers. In fact, offline conversion events can give marketers a complete omni-channel view of all the sales and conversions attributable to Facebook, regardless of location, channel, or campaign. Here are a few examples of offline conversion events that come to mind: MQL (marketing qualified lead) SQL (sales qualified lead) Event attendance Target account Onsite sales consultation Automotive test drive Sports game attendance Demo given Content downloaded Score threshold met Call occurred Call duration Postal mail/package received More specifically, here are four unique ways to use offline conversion events to improve your marketing campaigns: 1. Increase MQLs Let’s say that you’re a B2B marketer on the demand generation team for a SaaS company. If your team buys Facebook Lead Ads to drive top-of-funnel growth, you shouldn’t just optimize your campaign based on form submissions. Instead, tie it to a metric that’s measured internally: the number of MQLs (marketing qualified leads) it drives. All leads are scored within Marketo based on pre-defined criteria to determine if they are ready to be passed to the sales team, and they are considered MQLs only if they meet the right qualifications. This is an important metric to track, since MQLs that are further qualified by sales become SQLS (sales qualified leads), which can ultimately translate into new opportunities and revenue. In the image below, an example revenue model, you can see how leads come in at the top-of-the-funnel as names, then progress further into the funnel as they continue to engage with your company. By optimizing your Facebook campaign for MQLs and not form submissions, you can increase the number of conversions that drive more qualified leads down the funnel. 2. Optimize Your Scoring Model For B2B marketers, and even some consumer marketers, it’s likely that you have (or would) set up a scoring model within Marketo to qualify incoming leads or contacts. Scoring models attach values to various online and offline engagement events between your brand and the buyer. With the integration of Facebook’s Offline Conversions API and Marketo, you can optimize your scoring model so that when a lead has reached a specific lead score as the result of a combination of different interactions, it’s defined as a conversion event. This way, a lead doesn’t need to, for example, download content or attend an event for it to be considered a conversion. The example below shows how a revenue cycle might be modeled within your marketing automation platform, governed by how each buyer interacts with your brand—their behavior across channels, their engagement with your campaigns, their lead score, and even data changes in your CRM system. By tracking when a lead hits a specific score that signals a conversion event, you can optimize your campaigns to tailor your ads to them appropriately. For example, for existing customers who have a score much higher than a MQL, you’re still able to identify scoring thresholds that signals they’re ready for cross-sell. 3. Boost In-Home Appointments If your company sells products that require in-home consultations, such as window treatments, you may want to optimize your Facebook Ads towards the number of in-home appointments it generates, rather than the number of online appointment requests. It’s likely that there’s a discrepancy between the number of online appointments booked and the physical appointments completed, but previously, this type of data was hard to track and made it hard to follow up on. Now, because of this integration, your sales consultant can log physical in-home appointments into Marketo and that data will be sent as an offline conversion event to Facebook. Then, your paid media team can re-evaluate their campaigns to understand how to optimize their ad spend to drive more completed in-home appointments. 4. Track Follow-Throughs For a digital marketer at a car dealership, one of your initiatives probably include increasing the number of visits to your show room and test drives by prospective customers. Previously, you might’ve used Facebook Ads to encourage prospective customers to fill out their info in forms online, but it was tough to tie those initial interest requests to actual test drives. Now, with Facebook’s Offline Conversion tied to Marketo, you can capture how Facebook Ads results in in-person interest and test drives—connecting your Facebook ad spend directly to a test drive of a car so you can better optimize to ultimately improve sales. As you can see, Facebook’s new Offline Conversion API can be used for a whole variety of broader use cases for ALL marketers, not just retail and physical purchases. In conjunction with Marketo, you can drive alignment between your paid media campaigns and other campaigns to improve results and ROI and offer a better customer experience. Have you set up Facebook Lead Ads within Marketo yet? I’d love to hear your use cases in the comments below!

by Sanjay Dholakia If your company doesn’t yet have a digital hub, it won’t be long before your CEO demands to know why not. What is a digital hub, you ask? That’s an excellent question. A digital hub is the central nervous system behind all of a company’s marketing activities. But it doesn’t just stop with marketing; a true digital hub will communicate and integrate with other systems, too, from sales to content management and beyond. The old model is changing. Organizations have historically existed with single-process systems like the ones I just mentioned that each had their limitations. But now, businesses can equip themselves with more sophisticated single data repositories that orchestrate how they talk to their customers, prospects, partners — even their employees. Digital hubs already have many CEOs and CMOs jumping for joy, and the ones who haven’t adopted this technology should be scrambling to get on board. This is because we’ve reached a critical point at which a central digital marketing platform is a must-have piece of infrastructure. These hubs essentially function as digital brains, analyzing and communicating with customers across online and offline channels and touch points to present a comprehensive view of customer experiences. It’s not that that creative doesn’t matter anymore, but as a recent Economist Intelligence Unit study (registration required) sponsored by Marketo (my employer) found, marketing has to supplement its traditional creative background with more technical skills. Capturing all of the new information available and turning raw data into actionable intelligence is where the digital hub becomes the game-changer. The neck bone’s connected to the head bone … So, how’s it all connected? The essentials start with a single database of record, one that can track all of your company’s customer interactions. There’s a reason why Gartner describes digital hubs as foundational. Marketers need to know when someone has visited their company website or when a potential customer opened — or didn’t open — an email. These simple metrics are the building blocks of informed marketing decisions in the new era of customer engagement. A disconnected view of the customer is now a relic from the boom-box era; you can’t make sense of different streams of data if you’re supporting dozens of separate databases that don’t communicate. Therefore, it’s essential for a digital hub to be part of a digital ecosystem with extensible technology that allows for integration with other applications. It needs to communicate across any of the various channels where your customers might want to interact with the company — digital, social, mobile. And, in this nascent age of the Internet of Things, when literally billions of devices are getting connected to the internet, interoperability will allow you to collate signals from everywhere — literally! Worlds collide: adtech and martech You may be thinking, “But I’m already doing things like spending money on Google AdWords and programmatic to make sure I’m getting in front of people who will care about my messages.” Too many of us can’t shake old habits and often just replicate what we used to do before the invention of the internet, when millions of dollars got spent on television and print advertisements. Back then, it was called “spraying and praying.” Nowadays too many marketers are still flying blind. They may use hip jargon like “programmatic,” but it’s just more inefficient spraying and praying. A digital hub puts an end to that charade by helping to identify instantly what is and isn’t working with your digital spend, from Google to adtech and beyond. Marketers can use the full power of digital tools to find out what their customers care about, whether that’s information gleaned from emails, websites, or through ads on social media. At that point, you can calibrate and focus on one-to-one interactions, rather than default to a blunderbuss spending approach. Otherwise, you’re just flushing money down the toilet. Analytics and attribution The other big plus of a digital hub is the analytical insights it offers. For the first time, marketers can knit together relevant data from multiple channels into a coherent and actionable portrait of the consumer. Marketers not only can see all their touchpoints with customers and prospects — from initial awareness through loyalty and advocacy — but also now have a way to attribute value from those interactions to outcomes. That helps to solve one of marketers’ biggest challenges: trying to prove the value of what they’re doing. This is where data science augments the art of marketing. With digital hubs parsing the data, CMOs can use marketing analytics to predict and better forecast. For the first time, marketers can essentially see into the future and plan how to interact with people, rather than always being forced into reacting. The clock is ticking With no shortage of suitors vying for customers’ time and attention, it’s up to CEOs and their CMOs to figure this out soon. Digital hubs are going to become standard pieces of marketing infrastructure at companies hoping to compete in this era of digital engagement. And if you’re still on the fence about whether this makes sense for your company, consider this: For every CEO or CMO who doesn’t have a digital hub helping their organization engage with their customers, rest assured that another rival does. This post originally appeared on Marketing Land on July 22, 2016.

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.