Monthly Archives: June 2009

Inbound Marketing Automation

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Should Marketing Automation systems add Inbound Marketing tools as standard features? Or is it better to keep those tools separate? I brought up this question in my previous blog post, and Maria Pergolino had some very good comments on which tools to use and how to integrate them for ROI reporting. That gave me enough ideas for a new post, so here it is.

What is Inbound Marketing? Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot defines inbound marketing to include search, social media and blogs. In short: any marketing activity that draws people to your website.

What is Marketing Automation? Maria Pergolino defines this as “Post-click, and Post-Conversion”. In short: any marketing activity that happens after people come to your website.

In my opinion any B2B company needs both Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation: the first to get in touch with new prospects, the second to move those leads through the funnel from suspects to sales-ready leads. I wrote more about this and about Lead Management on the Genius.com blog. Because both are different steps of the same process, it seemed logical to recommend a single tool for both Marketing Automation and Inbound Marketing. But let’s take a closer look.

Why Automate Marketing?

The ultimate goal of automation is to make marketing teams more productive, by automating repetitive tasks and creating better reports. Let’s give two examples. In case of SEO, checking the search rank of your website for specific keywords is time-consuming, especially if you also want to check the rank of competitors. In case of marketing automation, manual execution of email drip campaigns is a drag. Automation systems can do this work for you, and – in additional to saving time – also improve quality.

What does a Marketing Automation system do?

In an earlier post about Lead Management I listed the following Marketing Automation features:

  • building landing pages and registration forms
  • nurturing via email and other channels
  • calculating a lead score until the prospect is sales-ready
  • collecting as much information as possible (web & data analytics)
  • tracking the source of leads and providing ROI reports

Often these features work together to automate a specific campaign, such as organizing a webinar or promoting a whitepaper. The alternative to a Marketing Automation system is a hodgepodge of specialized systems, such as email marketing and form building tools (see also Maria Pergolino’s post on the Marketo blog). There are certain features – like activity-based lead scoring – that only exist as part of comprehensive Marketing Automation systems.

So the key reasons to use a Marketing Automation system are:

  • Save time because it’s one integrated system (no copy-and-pasting between various systems, no integration effort needed)
  • Get specific features that are unique to Marketing Automation systems, like advanced lead scoring
  • Get better reports on the marketing ROI

So we should find out whether pre-built integration with Inbound Marketing systems decreases integration effort, adds unique features or provides better reports.

What does an Inbound Marketing system do?

For simplicity sake, I’ll limit myself to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features of the Inbound Marketing systems. For a full list of Inbound Marketing features, see the previous article. These are the most important ones:

  • Keyword research: which keywords do you want to optimize your website for?
  • Link building: which sites have you asked to link back to your site?
  • Rank tracking: how does your site rank for the selected keywords?

To start with Link building tools: those are usually project management tools, so there’s little benefit in integration with a marketing automation system, other than having a single login.

Keyword Research tools provide keyword suggestions, and help you select keywords based on volume, relevance and difficulty. It is useful if you can automatically add the selected keywords to the rank tracker, rather than having to put them in a spreadsheet first.

Rank tracking is most relevant if it shows the website traffic and conversions generated by the keywords, in addition to the position in the search results. Ideally it should even show the revenue per keyword. This is only possible by integrating with Web Analytics (traffic and conversions) or Marketing Automation (traffic, conversions and revenue). So this is an important ingredient for measuring Marketing ROI.

Who is in Charge of Marketing ROI?

It would be ideal if marketing ROI can be measured in a single location. In my opinion this should be the Marketing Automation system. This is an ROI chart that Marketo’s Jon Miller presented in the ‘Secret Sauce for demand generation‘ webinar.

ROI report from marketo's secret sauce webinar

This is a high-level overview that is already very powerful. However, it would be great if you could drill-down to see which keywords are responsible for most opportunities, and which of those keywords are actively managed in an SEO campaign. Based on this information, you can fine-tune the SEO campaign. To accomplish this type of report, the Marketing Automation system needs to pull in the keywords and rank information.

Conclusion

I’m not sure if there is a strong case for integration of Inbound Marketing features into Marketing Automation systems. It would reduce some integration effort, it does not add any unique features, but it can definitely provide more insightful reports.

Especially if your company gets a lot of leads via organic search, it would be useful to have an ROI report for your keywords. So either this feature needs to be added to the Marketing Automation system, or the Marketing Automation system should import the required data from an existing SEO rank tracking system.

My take: over the past months many Marketing Automation vendors have developed Sales & Marketing collaboration tools. Those tools are often sold as an add-on. So maybe the next add-on module should be for Inbound Marketing: its features will paint a more complete picture of your Marketing ROI, which is worth spending some extra money on.

Inbound Marketing & Marketing Automation

The Marketing Automation industry is evolving continuously. Many digital marketers are using marketing automation tools to automate lead nurturing. But if you want to expand your business, you also need to continuously add new leads to your database. Traditional lead sources are tradeshows or lead programs with magazines. Those are definitely useful, but the number of leads is low and the cost per lead is high. It may be attractive to shift more budget to generating leads via your company’s website. And that’s where Inbound Marketing comes in.

“Isn’t that Search Marketing?”

Yes, I feel that Inbound Marketing is sort-of a rebranding of Search Marketing. But Inbound Marketing focuses primarily on organic search, not pay-per-click (like AdWords). I’ve personally often used Google AdWords to drive traffic to websites: it’s instantanious and you can fine-tune campaigns to target a specific audience. But it can quickly get expensive.  Search Engine Optimization may be a more cost-effective alternative.

Search Engine Optimization focuses on getting your site in the natural search results. That takes a lot of work upfront, but will result in ‘free’ traffic in the future. SEO has not exactly been a science: you have to optimize your site’s structure and content, and you ask other sites to link to you. Both activities have traditionally either been done manually in-house, or outsourced to an agency.

Inbound Marketing is more than just SEO. It also includes Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), blogging, creation of high-quality content, and website conversion optimization. In short: everything to make sure that prospects find you, rather than you trying to find your prospects with ‘outbound’ marketing.

Inbound Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation vendors have done very little to automate Inbound Marketing activities. Their main focus has been on nurturing and scoring your existing leads. Lately, most vendors have added features to monitor anonymous traffic your site (the most recent announcements: Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua). But that doesn’t help with getting more visitors to your site.

There are software vendors that focus only on Inbound Marketing or SEO automation. Hubspot – an early Inbound Marketing evangelist – is one of them, and so are Enquisite, Raven and SEOMoz (probably I’m forgetting at least a dozen vendors, so feel free to leave a comment). Those tools are promising, but not mainstream yet.

What Does it Do for You?

The Inbound Marketing Automation tools have a lot of useful features, such as:

  • Keyword research: find out which keywords to optimize for
  • Rank tracking (or SERP tracking): monitor your site’s rank for those keywords
  • Competitor rank tracking: monitor competitor’s rank for those keywords
  • Link building: get high-quality links back to your site
  • Website quality checking: structure your website properly (title, description, URL & headings)
  • Social Media monitoring: see who writes about your company or your areas of expertise
  • Project management: work together with a team of people
  • ROI reporting: see which activities result in new leads

There are many tools that do one particular thing, such as rank tracking. But there are also integrated tool suites, like Hubspot and Raven. Those include extensive project management and reporting features. Actually, I’ve found they are a real time-saver when you do Inbound Marketing: before using these tools, I found myself copying data in and out of spreadsheets. That took at least 25% of my time. Now I’ve virtually eliminated the use of spreadsheets.

Message for Marketing Automation Vendors

The current Marketing Automation vendors are solving only part of the online marketing problem: lead management. Few offer Inbound Marketing features. In my opinion, they will have to offer at least some Inbound Marketing features before the end of the year. This will differentiate them, and will allow them to increase the revenue per customer. The company that is furthest along with this, is not a Marketing Automation company. It is Hubspot: they’re quietly adding Lead Management features to their Inbound Marketing suite. So Marketing Automation vendors: you’d better hurry!

Conclusion

If you want get cheaper leads by improving your Inbound Marketing, don’t expect a Marketing Automation system to take care of that. Either work with an SEO agency, or read a book on SEO and use one of the integrated Inbound Marketing tools. Marketing Automation systems have many benefits, but they are especially useful if you already have a decent amount of leads in your database.

Request: I could write many more posts about Inbound Marketing, so please let me know what you want me to write about! Leave a comment or email me.