Monthly Archives: September 2009

8 Tips to Get Started with Marketing Automation

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“Where do I start?” is the question I get asked most by attendees of the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit in San Francisco. Marketing Automation is still very new for many companies, and it’s not immediately obvious how you can get started step-by-step. In this post I listed 8 ideas to address this question (and feel free to share yours in the comments!).

Choose Your Products and/or Business Unit

If you start doing marketing automation or lead nurturing, first focus on the most attractive subset of your prospects. For example, focus on a particular product or market segment with a high value. SAGE Publications, one of the presenters at the conference, has many business units with different marketing needs. They first focused their marketing automation efforts on academics who pick the text books for their classes, because winning over one teacher could mean selling hundreds of text books.

Make Sure You Have Enough Leads

An often made mistake is to nurture too small a database. If your problem is lack of raw leads, first address that problem. Genoo, another presenter, used Social Media to fill their prospect database, primarily leveraging LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Answers.

Set Your Goals

What is going to make your boss really happy? Is it more qualified leads, a higher percentage of marketing-sourced opportunities, better ROI on marketing investment, customer loyalty, or something else? Pick the most important one and make sure you deliver. The presentation of Ness Technologies clearly pointed out that the CFO can spend money in many ways: make sure you can justify the CFO’s investment in marketing.

Describe Your Lead Flow

Leads go through various stages, from new leads to existing customers. In each stage the follow-up may be different. Find out in which stage marketing can contribute most in the short term. Tom Hayden from SAGE Publications created a flowchart that guided discussions in the entire organization, from the sales teams to the CEO. It was used to gain consensus and set the right priorities.

Improve Your Data Quality

Marketing automation only works if you clean up junk leads, merge all duplicates, normalize company names, and verify all contact information. Additionally, enriching the data with the prospect’s interests makes it possible to better target your campaigns. National Instruments, another presenter at the MarketingSherpa conference, used website behavior to enrich the prospect profile and personalize lead nurturing campaigns.

Create Some Good Content

The key ingredient for lead nurturing is high-quality content, not about your solution itself, but about the broader issues that it addresses. Although more content is better, you can already start nurturing with a few pieces of good content. For example, Ness Technologies used 3 well-chosen content assets to run an entire campaign.

Make Sales Happy Quickly

Improved marketing will drive better-quality leads to sales, but it takes time and trial-and-error to get there. Create some goodwill by giving sales some quick results, for example a tool that alerts them when prospects visit the website. Or give them more background information on prospects: how did they find the website, which pages did they visit, what whitepapers did they download, and so on.

Don’t Worry About Failure

Okay, this may sound a little strange, but failure is not a big issue in online marketing. Just recognize it and change course and soon as possible. You can measure results fairly quickly, so use this information to learn as you go.

MarketingSherpa B2B Summit Comes Recommended

What impressed me about this conference is how well the speakers were selected. In this post I’ve only mentioned a couple of speakers, but all speakers brought up very relevant issues, and creative solutions to common marketing problems. If you’ve missed this conference, you can still attend the B2B Marketing Summit in Boston on October 5 and 6.

I’d love to hear your tips to get started with marketing automation: please let me know in the comments.

LeadSloth Marketing Automation Blog – Survey Results

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LeadSloth Marketing Automation Blog – Survey Results
About two weeks ago I posted a survey that asked the LeadSloth readers what they wanted to read about. As it goes with surveys, it took some effort to get people to fill it out. But this week it reached critical mass, so I was able to draw some interesting conclusions.
The Most Requested Topics
The top 6 topics mentioned in the survey were:
Metrics & ROI
Marketing Automation Best Practices
Lead Nurturing / Drip campaigns
Landing Pages & Forms
Social Media
It is interesting to see that ROI and Best Practices score so high. I was surprised to see Landing pages & forms: important, but not very exciting. And the last topic “Social Media” confirmed my gut feeling that Social Media is hotter than Inbound Marketing and Search Marketing (which were hardly mentioned by the respondents).
There were also some runner-up topics:
Data Quality & Data Management (boring but essential)
Multi-channel Campaigns (not for everyone)
Content Marketing (the latest trend)
The Favorite Types of Posts
The first question was about the topics, and this one is about the way it is delivered. These were the preferred types of articles:
Thought leader interviews
Practical how-to articles
Opinion pieces
Advanced topics
I was surprised to see that the large majority of respondents mentioned Thought Leader Interviews: I clearly need to do more of those. Then both practical but advanced posts and opinion pieces were highly valued: clearly people enjoyed some of the recent posts that had a lot of discussion, like the “7 reasons why marketing automation projects fail” post.
Other Interesting Comments
In the text boxes people gave lots of useful suggestions, like these:
Choose your own “purple cow”
Avoid vendor bias
Talk about the best mix of lead gen approaches (also based on the economy)
Explain how to make a business case for Marketing Automation
And luckily one person responded to my request for jokes. Here we go: “A plane was flying to Houston.  A blonde girl stood up, walked up to First Class and sat down.  They asked her to move back to coach and she refused.  They asked for help and she still refused.  Finally, they asked the pilot to speak to her. He whispered something into her ear, she stood up and walked back to Coach.  Asked about the remarkable thing he said, he told them “I simply told her First Class was not going to Houston.” ”
Conclusion
Based on these results, I will try to keep posting once or twice a week, but with more focus more on Thought Leader interviews and on vendor-neutral articles. I will focus on Marketing Automation and Social media, with an emphasis on mid-size to large marketing teams. ROI and best practices will be the main topics, but always with a practical voice. And maybe I will throw in the occasional joke ;-)
Let me know any additional feedback!

About two weeks ago I posted a survey that asked the LeadSloth readers what they wanted to read about. As it goes with surveys, it took some effort to get people to fill it out. But this week it reached critical mass, so I was able to draw some interesting conclusions.

The Most Requested Topics

The top 6 topics mentioned in the survey were:

  • Metrics & ROI
  • Marketing Automation Best Practices
  • Lead Nurturing / Drip campaigns
  • Landing Pages & Forms
  • Social Media

It is interesting to see that ROI and Best Practices score so high. I was surprised to see Landing pages & forms: important, but not very exciting. And the last topic “Social Media” confirmed my gut feeling that Social Media is hotter than Inbound Marketing and Search Marketing (which were hardly mentioned by the respondents).

There were also some runner-up topics:

  • Data Quality & Data Management (boring but essential)
  • Multi-channel Campaigns (not for everyone)
  • Content Marketing (the latest trend)

The Favorite Types of Posts

The first question was about the topics, and this one is about the way it is delivered. These were the preferred types of articles:

  • Thought leader interviews
  • Practical how-to articles
  • Opinion pieces
  • Advanced topics

I was surprised to see that the large majority of respondents mentioned Thought Leader Interviews: I clearly need to do more of those. Then both practical but advanced posts and opinion pieces were highly valued: clearly people enjoyed some of the recent posts that had a lot of discussion, like the “7 reasons why marketing automation projects fail” post.

Other Interesting Comments

In the text boxes people gave lots of useful suggestions, like these:

  • Choose your own “purple cow”
  • Avoid vendor bias
  • Talk about the best mix of lead gen approaches (also based on the economy)
  • Explain how to make a business case for Marketing Automation

And luckily one person responded to my request for jokes. Here we go: “A plane was flying to Houston.  A blonde girl stood up, walked up to First Class and sat down.  They asked her to move back to coach and she refused.  They asked for help and she still refused.  Finally, they asked the pilot to speak to her. He whispered something into her ear, she stood up and walked back to Coach.  Asked about the remarkable thing he said, he told them “I simply told her First Class was not going to Houston.” ”

Conclusion

Based on these results, I will try to keep posting once or twice a week, but with more focus on Thought Leader interviews and on vendor-neutral articles. I will focus on Marketing Automation and Social media, with an emphasis on mid-size to large marketing teams. ROI and best practices will be the main topics, but always with a practical voice. And maybe I will throw in the occasional joke ;- )

Let me know any additional feedback!

What Should LeadSloth Write About?

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I’ve been writing this blog for a while now, but I’ve never explicitly asked for your input. The topics have been diverse, and I’d like to focus a little more on what you would like to read about. So please tell me about your preferences!

Can you please fill out this questionnaire? If you have any questions, please let me know (jep on leadsloth dot com).

9 Marketing Automation Metrics

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Marketing Automation is on its way to the peak of the hype cycle. People start adopting software because it’s cool, not because they know what to do with it. The result: inflated expectations.

hype cycle

However, there are a couple of B2B Marketing experts who understand how to avoid inflated expectations. One of them is Megan Heuer of SiriusDecisions. Together with Craig Rosenberg (aka The Funnelholic) of Tippit she presented a webinar called The 9 Metrics Every Marketer Must Track. This webinar shows how to focus on the correct metrics rather than on gimmicks.

My recommendation: use your Marketing Automation project to improve these 9 metrics and you have a good chance of avoiding disillusionment (and pleasing your CEO).

Key Performance Indicators

Some long-standing VPs of Marketing seem the best marketers of their own performance: by staying vague about results and telling a good story they can hold on to their jobs for quite a while. However, the truly effective VPs of Marketing promote transparency and have an intense focus on improving the few metrics that matter. The strongest metrics show how marketing contributes to bottom-line revenue.

In the webinar, Megan mentions the following key performance indicators:

  1. marketing sourced pipeline
  2. marketing influenced pipeline
  3. investment-to-pipeline
  4. investment-to-revenue

The first two focus on the influence of marketing on the sales pipeline, and the last two give an indication of the ROI. Obviously, #4 (investment to revenue) is also dependent on the performance of the sales team (whether they are effective in closing deals). You can watch the webinar to get benchmark figures for these KPIs.

Key Metrics

Updates to the KPIs from the previous paragraph take some time to show up, because inquiries first need to turn into opportunities. Megan suggests 5 metrics to keep an eye on this process. These metrics are starting to get broader adoption, so I encourage everyone to standardize on these stages:

  1. Measure Inquiries
  2. Marketing-qualified leads (MQL), definition should be established together with sales
  3. sales accepted leads (SAL), formally accepted by sales
  4. sales qualified leads (SQL), evolved into an opportunity
  5. closed/won business

An inquiry could be any new lead, also someone who dropped off his business card at a tradeshow, or a download of a whitepaper. An MQL is also called a sales-ready lead. Usually some kind of Lead Scoring is used to determine whether a lead is ready to be passed on to sales. For more details and benchmarks, watch the webinar.

The cool thing about these metrics is that you can update them more frequently, so you know immediately whether you are on the right track. This is your Lead Management Thermometer!

How Does Marketing Automation Fit Into This?

Marketing Automation is a tool. It’s supposed to improve business results. In my previous post, I suggested to look only at increased revenue to measure success of Marketing Automation. These metrics are a great way to see if you’re on track.

More practical: how does Marketing Automation influence these metrics? Just some examples: continued lead nurturing turns more inquiries into sales-ready leads; lead scoring shows when leads are sales-ready; lead scoring gives quick feedback on the quality of various lead generation programs. But ultimately, the features of the Marketing Automation are only valuable when they are used well, and improve the above-mentioned metrics.

What is your favorite Marketing Automation metrics? Let me know in a comment…