I somehow ended up on the Israeli MUG LinkedIn group the other day and saw Itay ask about whether people used a program per collateral/asset. I told him I'd share with him how we're doing it at Planon via email, but I figure if I spend the time to help one person I should help everyone. So I moved it here instead.
When I first started we had 500 landing pages after 3 months using Marketo. So I worked with Eric H to create a javascript to dynamically serve assets by URL parameter. First this is really complicated for non-techie people to understand, even using a URL-builder & a snippet to hold the code, it proved to be a bit illusive for my colleagues to grasp. We happily used the system for nearly 2 years. Then people were concerned that users could put in fake email addresses, and the only real way to get their true address is to send them an email with their asset. That and for SEO purposes, having a single landing page wasn't helping out page ranking.
Over the past 4 months we have been building out this solution. We market in '6 languages' (2 english, 2 french, dutch & german).
First we created a channel per type of asset. This was mainly important for scoring that we could score product literature differently than an article or a case study. They all have the same statuses, Pre-Visit, Introduced, Visited, Downloaded & Shared.
The program itself a bit mirrors the statuses. Here's an example from the UK so people don't get confused by dutch.
Two Landing pages + an email along with 4 campaigns & a list. Here's the registration page & the email that comes once you register.
But of course to build on the true strengths of Programs, everything starts in the tokens section. The Landing pages & the email are nearly all tokens.
So here we have the link to the asset, the description of the asset, the link to the registration page, related assets (we'll get to this later), the title of the asset, the name used in tracking utm_campaign for google analytics, and the person sending the email.
Pro-Tip: As I said earlier we have 6 languages for each piece of collateral. We have between 50-300 pieces per language. If there's an asset campaign for each piece and then the Marketing Manager leaves. Someone has to go into every single program and update the name of the person sending out the email. No WAY! That would take a week! So instead we have the last two tokens, Sender-Email & Sender-Name. Then at the very very top level of each language's main folder we have these tokens as well. That way every sub-program below has the exact same Sender-Email & Sender-Name. If someone leaves the company we can then go in once at the very top folder and put in the new person's name & email. Then the hundreds or thousands of emails below all get updated at once. If you have a one-off program that's send from someone different it can be overwritten at the individual program level.
Even the main block of text in both the email & the registration page is contained in a token so it doesn't have to be replaced twice per asset.
On the registration page there are all tokens and a small piece of standard texts that we use on all ASLP.
In other languages we've already implemented the Sender-Name/Sender-Email tokens for the confirmation page as well. Just after the standard "check your spam" message there's a ... If you don't receive it please contact the marketing manager message using those two standard tokens. As a just-in-case backup, I'd rather over than under serve our prospects.
Here's the first place you see Related Assets. We'll come back to this at the end.
Here in our email, you see our Sender-Name & Email tokens along with the Title of the asset acting as the From Name/Email & Subject Line. The download button is linked by the token {{my.Asset-Link}} along with a line below it.
Not many people will share a piece of content before they view it. So now that they've had the opportunity to actually see the collateral, I want to give them the chance to socially share it again, which just links back to the Registration page. Finally you'll see the related assets here again.
(Just to ensure this saves properly, I'll stop here and pickup with the campaigns in a second)
When I first started we had 500 landing pages after 3 months using Marketo. So I worked with Eric H to create a javascript to dynamically serve assets by URL parameter. First this is really complicated for non-techie people to understand, even using a URL-builder & a snippet to hold the code, it proved to be a bit illusive for my colleagues to grasp. We happily used the system for nearly 2 years. Then people were concerned that users could put in fake email addresses, and the only real way to get their true address is to send them an email with their asset. That and for SEO purposes, having a single landing page wasn't helping out page ranking.
Over the past 4 months we have been building out this solution. We market in '6 languages' (2 english, 2 french, dutch & german).
First we created a channel per type of asset. This was mainly important for scoring that we could score product literature differently than an article or a case study. They all have the same statuses, Pre-Visit, Introduced, Visited, Downloaded & Shared.
The program itself a bit mirrors the statuses. Here's an example from the UK so people don't get confused by dutch.
Two Landing pages + an email along with 4 campaigns & a list. Here's the registration page & the email that comes once you register.
But of course to build on the true strengths of Programs, everything starts in the tokens section. The Landing pages & the email are nearly all tokens.
So here we have the link to the asset, the description of the asset, the link to the registration page, related assets (we'll get to this later), the title of the asset, the name used in tracking utm_campaign for google analytics, and the person sending the email.
Pro-Tip: As I said earlier we have 6 languages for each piece of collateral. We have between 50-300 pieces per language. If there's an asset campaign for each piece and then the Marketing Manager leaves. Someone has to go into every single program and update the name of the person sending out the email. No WAY! That would take a week! So instead we have the last two tokens, Sender-Email & Sender-Name. Then at the very very top level of each language's main folder we have these tokens as well. That way every sub-program below has the exact same Sender-Email & Sender-Name. If someone leaves the company we can then go in once at the very top folder and put in the new person's name & email. Then the hundreds or thousands of emails below all get updated at once. If you have a one-off program that's send from someone different it can be overwritten at the individual program level.
Even the main block of text in both the email & the registration page is contained in a token so it doesn't have to be replaced twice per asset.
On the registration page there are all tokens and a small piece of standard texts that we use on all ASLP.
In other languages we've already implemented the Sender-Name/Sender-Email tokens for the confirmation page as well. Just after the standard "check your spam" message there's a ... If you don't receive it please contact the marketing manager message using those two standard tokens. As a just-in-case backup, I'd rather over than under serve our prospects.
Here's the first place you see Related Assets. We'll come back to this at the end.
Here in our email, you see our Sender-Name & Email tokens along with the Title of the asset acting as the From Name/Email & Subject Line. The download button is linked by the token {{my.Asset-Link}} along with a line below it.
Not many people will share a piece of content before they view it. So now that they've had the opportunity to actually see the collateral, I want to give them the chance to socially share it again, which just links back to the Registration page. Finally you'll see the related assets here again.
(Just to ensure this saves properly, I'll stop here and pickup with the campaigns in a second)
To pickup here with campaigns, there are 4 campaigns which essentially just move people through the different progression statuses.
For 0 Introduced, the thought behind it is for truly accurate cost per membership you should add people to the program when you put the chance to download infront of them. When a DRIP nurturing campaign offers a single piece of appropriate content to a user, the resulting flowsteps can call this campaign so the lead is added to this campaign as having been introduced to the content. The real reason to do this, unless it has been bug-fixed by now is that you can't update multiple statuses in multiple progressions from a single flowstep.
1 Visited is the second piece of the investigation into why people do or do not participate in content. We want to know who visited this download page but didn't actually fill out the form.
I think static lists are a really important & powerful feature of Marketo that is often overlooked because it's about one of the oldest features of the product. The biggest thing is that an anonymous visitor can not be added to the program with the status of visited, because it doesn't yet have an email address. But as long as an IP address exists it can be added to a static list. Then at a different piece of content later on a visitor converts into a known lead, on this list they will now show the name & email.
Most things happen at 2 Engages, there are many flow steps here. First as soon as the form is filled out, I want to send the email that they've requested. Then I want to
Then I want to give 30 seconds for the lead creation process to run if this is a brand new lead.
Since we don't have Marketo Sales Insight, instead of setting an Interesting Moment here, I'm doing the same thing of updating a custom CRM field where I push history about what our prospects are doing over for Sales Enablement. I have one field per asset which corresponds directly to the Channels. You can't see it, but I'm concatenating the old data to the new data here by putting the new name "Planon Sustainability" with the token {{lead.Product Literature Name}} .. It adds the old data to the new data.
Here I'll update the Lead Source & Lead Source Detail if the lead is new. I block field updates from everything except flowsteps. So it's very important it only affects the ones which are empty. For the detail I just use the {{lead.Acquisition Program Name}} token. I don't want this very important step to ever get looked over by an inexperienced user cloning a program. Itay, I know you have more questions here, but I'll save that for the end.
Finally social sharing.
We unfortunately do not have the new cloudfactory social buttons yet, renewal in July //fingers crossed//. Once we do this'll be 'was socially shared' or whatever the trigger is. For now I just trigger based on clicking the link to share, which isn't water tight but the best I've got.
For 0 Introduced, the thought behind it is for truly accurate cost per membership you should add people to the program when you put the chance to download infront of them. When a DRIP nurturing campaign offers a single piece of appropriate content to a user, the resulting flowsteps can call this campaign so the lead is added to this campaign as having been introduced to the content. The real reason to do this, unless it has been bug-fixed by now is that you can't update multiple statuses in multiple progressions from a single flowstep.
1 Visited is the second piece of the investigation into why people do or do not participate in content. We want to know who visited this download page but didn't actually fill out the form.
I think static lists are a really important & powerful feature of Marketo that is often overlooked because it's about one of the oldest features of the product. The biggest thing is that an anonymous visitor can not be added to the program with the status of visited, because it doesn't yet have an email address. But as long as an IP address exists it can be added to a static list. Then at a different piece of content later on a visitor converts into a known lead, on this list they will now show the name & email.
Most things happen at 2 Engages, there are many flow steps here. First as soon as the form is filled out, I want to send the email that they've requested. Then I want to
Then I want to give 30 seconds for the lead creation process to run if this is a brand new lead.
Since we don't have Marketo Sales Insight, instead of setting an Interesting Moment here, I'm doing the same thing of updating a custom CRM field where I push history about what our prospects are doing over for Sales Enablement. I have one field per asset which corresponds directly to the Channels. You can't see it, but I'm concatenating the old data to the new data here by putting the new name "Planon Sustainability" with the token {{lead.Product Literature Name}} .. It adds the old data to the new data.
Here I'll update the Lead Source & Lead Source Detail if the lead is new. I block field updates from everything except flowsteps. So it's very important it only affects the ones which are empty. For the detail I just use the {{lead.Acquisition Program Name}} token. I don't want this very important step to ever get looked over by an inexperienced user cloning a program. Itay, I know you have more questions here, but I'll save that for the end.
Finally social sharing.
We unfortunately do not have the new cloudfactory social buttons yet, renewal in July //fingers crossed//. Once we do this'll be 'was socially shared' or whatever the trigger is. For now I just trigger based on clicking the link to share, which isn't water tight but the best I've got.
For the related assets, this is just like Amazon's, if you bought this you'd also be interest in that. Of course it would be much smarter to do this with a database and complex logic, but that's a bit above where we are, so instead we'll just take several asset specific landing pages and put them together into a folder called an asset matrix. So all of the assets related to a specific topic, in this case Sustainability, are grouped together.
Then in the program you can set the related assets token.
So that once someone fills out a form and is immediately being emailed the asset, within that 5 second attention span before a bounce can happen we're providing them with very similarly verticaled content dealing with different aspects of the same topic. With some very basic, if you were interested in {{my.Title}} you could also be interest in...
Likewise in the email they recieve they are invited to participate in a different piece of content. In each program I can easily update the related assets if they offer the same piece of content that you're currently downloading. I like to set a master with my 4 best assets at the folder level, then update the 4 programs with additional items.
Then in the program you can set the related assets token.
So that once someone fills out a form and is immediately being emailed the asset, within that 5 second attention span before a bounce can happen we're providing them with very similarly verticaled content dealing with different aspects of the same topic. With some very basic, if you were interested in {{my.Title}} you could also be interest in...
Likewise in the email they recieve they are invited to participate in a different piece of content. In each program I can easily update the related assets if they offer the same piece of content that you're currently downloading. I like to set a master with my 4 best assets at the folder level, then update the 4 programs with additional items.
It's great to me to know in total how many people are successful for each asset. I pull a program performance report for that knowledge.
But what is more important for me & what I report on to the organisation is the number of people who download each asset per month. We have a long sales cycle & these asset specific landing pages are referenced from my corporate website. They're referenced from DRIP Nurturing campaigns, from Microsites, from Advertisements. They have a lot of staying power within our waterhole marketing concept.
For that a Landing Page performance report for the past 30 days is really the best. I like to see both the conversions & number of new names per Program.
But what is more important for me & what I report on to the organisation is the number of people who download each asset per month. We have a long sales cycle & these asset specific landing pages are referenced from my corporate website. They're referenced from DRIP Nurturing campaigns, from Microsites, from Advertisements. They have a lot of staying power within our waterhole marketing concept.
For that a Landing Page performance report for the past 30 days is really the best. I like to see both the conversions & number of new names per Program.
I'm also curious about measuring inbound traffic with programs – how many leads came from search / directly etc…
Itay specifically asked about not just reporting on which collateral drives conversion / new names, but also origination, whether it be search or advertising or partner channels.
When I want to specifically track a source we've putting a lot of effort into I'll add a few sub campaigns to a folder in the program.
Or if it is empty is a separate step, but I guess I could just hit the green button & add NULL.
I really prefer to do it this way so I can see when I compare new leads by lead source detail, where did the speficically come from, without losing the overall program which drove the initial conversion.
Itay specifically asked about not just reporting on which collateral drives conversion / new names, but also origination, whether it be search or advertising or partner channels.
When I want to specifically track a source we've putting a lot of effort into I'll add a few sub campaigns to a folder in the program.
Or if it is empty is a separate step, but I guess I could just hit the green button & add NULL.
I really prefer to do it this way so I can see when I compare new leads by lead source detail, where did the speficically come from, without losing the overall program which drove the initial conversion.
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