7 Reasons Why Marketing Automation Projects Fail

Needless to say, Marketing Automation software is very popular today. It can be used for email campaigns, drip marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, landing page management and for brewing coffee. It is often positioned as something that will solve all your marketing problems for a couple of thousand dollars per month. Okay, I made up the part about brewing coffee.

In reality, Marketing Automation can help you automate existing campaigns, and also create new campaigns that would not be possible without automation. But there are limitations to what Marketing Automation can do, and I’d like to mention 7 possible reasons for project failure. And please share your Marketing Automation “horror” scenarios in the comments below!

prepare for project failure

1. Unclear Prospect Profile(s)

Part of a good lead management process is knowing exactly who are involved in the sale. For best results, the website and nurturing campaigns need to be highly relevant for them. Also, lead scoring only works if you know who you want to target. If possible, create personas for all people involved in the buying process.

2. No Interesting Content

A marketing automation system is great for continuously running campaigns. In complex B2B sales situations you cannot rely on product-centric communications, nor on discounts (“this week 10% off!”). For each persona you need to have relevant content: whitepapers, blog posts, case studies, webinars, and so on. Even more: the content should match the phase in the buying process, from awareness to validation. If you currently don’t have interesting content, and you don’t have capacity to create lots of interesting content, then there is a big chance your project will fail.

3. Not Enough Leads

A Marketing Automation system does not generate inquiries (or “raw leads”). It develops inquiries into sales opportunities. So if you have few raw leads, you should solve that problem first. An exception is when you have a lot of customers, and want to use the Marketing Automation system to cross-sell and up-sell.

4. Sales & Marketing Don’t Get Along

One of the primary goals of Marketing Automation is to deliver better qualified leads to sales. However, if Sales doesn’t believe in the benefits of Marketing Automation, that can kill the project.

5. Lack of Expertise

“Ease-of-use” is big theme in Marketing Automation selection. Several vendors claim to have self-service solutions that does not require IT involvement. The fact that no IT is involved doesn’t mean that you don’t need expertise. Getting the most out of a Marketing Automation system is hard, and if you don’t have people on your staff who’ve done it before, you may want to hire some expertise to avoid failure or unmet expectations.

6. Bad Business Model

A lot of startups and high-growth companies are using Marketing Automation to help them grow faster. However, if growth has stalled because you’re selling the wrong products to the wrong people, Marketing Automation will not help. You will just try harder, and still not sell anything.

7. Selling Simple Products

Marketing Automation is ideal for long sales cycles involving many different people. If you sell low-priced widgets with a very short sales cycle, Marketing Automation won’t help you. You are better served with B2C merchandising tools.

Have You Seen Marketing Automation Failures?

First of all, I think Marketing Automation software has great promise. But I hope we can avoid the same disillusionment phase that CRM went through. So if you have any advice or suggestions, please leave a comment.

What is the ROI of Lead Management?

Earlier this year I downloaded Silverpop’s lead management workbook, and I planned to write about it. Unfortunately, not enough time… Last week I received a copy of Marketo’s Lead Nurturing workbook. Similar books, but each with their unique approach and lots of smart advice.

Both books show how you can increase sales by nurturing all leads, from inquiry to opportunity. Heck, why not nurture customers too? (that is one of the great suggestions in Marketo’s book).

lead management roi

Both books cover lead nurturing and ROI calculations, and Silverpop also explains lead scoring. Silverpop’s book is a little more high-level and written in magazine style, while Marketo’s offers more practical advice on how to set up your nurturing campaigns. Read them both!

By the way: on August 19th Marketo has a webinar about lead nurturing and on August 20th Silverpop has a webinar about lead scoring (hopefully a recording will be available afterwards).

Why Lead Management

Both books do a good job of describing why you need Lead Management. A proper follow-up ensures that leads are nurtured until they are ready to talk to a sales person. And – because of the nurturing – they are much better educated, making the sales person’s job a lot easier. Because you can follow up with 100% of your leads, and because your sales people can be more effective, you will turn more inquiries into sales. See also my post on the MarketingGenius blog for an introduction to Lead Management, and The 4 steps of Lead Management.

Lead Scoring

Silverpop includes a great overview of Lead Scoring. They explain that sales & marketing need to jointly create a definition of a qualified lead. Then you can implement scoring rules to identify those leads, based on implicit and explicit criteria. Marketo has published separate Lead Scoring Guide with similar suggestions. See also my introduction to Lead Scoring.

Lead Management ROI

The word “ROI” is often abused, but not in these workbooks. Marketo provides several worksheets that make it easier for you to calculate your return on lead management. Silverpop presents a 5-step process for proving the ROI. Both vendors suggest to look at conversion metrics between buying stages: from inquiry, via qualified lead and opportunity to a closed deal. This is the best way to get quick indicator of improvements, because waiting for the closed deal can take a while if you have a long sales cycle.

Silverpop suggests starting your ROI calculations with a simple metric, such as the number of leads. Marketo has a great recommendation to identify how many opportunities come from fast-moving leads (say under 30 days old) versus older leads (> 30 days old). If you have few opportunities from older leads, your nurturing should be improved.

I’ve just published a introductory post on Marketing Automation ROI on the MarketingGenius blog.

Some Highlights & Smart Ideas

I don’t want to summarize the entire workbooks in this post, but I’d like to highlight a couple of smart ideas that are mentioned in these whitepapers.

Marketo mentions Accelerator campaigns, in which the prospect can choose to speed up the nurturing campaign. A simple and nice idea. Also, their workbook gives lots of examples of their own nurturing processes (used by Marketo themselves): this makes the recommendations come to life.

One of Silverpop’s lead scoring tips is to decrease the weight of scoring activities over time: older activities are just not as relevant. But how long should you wait? They recommend to take the length of your average sales cycle to start decreasing, and twice the sales cycle to completely omit the activity.

Both papers suggest setting the duration of your nurture campaign to the length of the average sales cycle. By that time the average lead should be sales ready. If not, you can put them on a long-term nurturing program. In principle, leads should not just ‘sit idle’: you either nurture or toss them.

Both papers also look at the buyer roles (e.g. economic buyer, end-user, IT, etc.) and the stages in the buying cycle (e.g. awareness and evaluation). For each stage and role you need to have optimized content. Yes, that means a lot of copywriting!

Oh, and both have hired illustrators to make these whitepaper pretty colorful. Does that make it a not-so-whitepaper? :- )

Conclusion

Big kudos to Marketo and Silverpop for creating these comprehensive workbooks on lead management. Their best practices are useful for any demand generation practitioner, and are not tied to one particular marketing automation system. And even as an experienced marketer I read several new and interesting ideas in both books.

Have you read these books? What do you think: are they good or do you see room for improvement?

B2B Pay Per Click Advertising

Interview with Terry Whalen from CPC Search

terry whalen cpc search To generate demand for your products, it’s not enough to nurture the existing leads in your database. You also need a steady stream of fresh leads coming in. There are many ways to find these new leads: inbound marketing, search advertising, tradeshows, lead programs, etc. They all have their pros and cons, and most companies use a combination of strategies.

I have written a lot about Inbound Marketing (social media and search engine optimization): it’s free, but takes a fair amount of time to set up. Search advertising (pay-per-click) is another popular option: it costs money, but it immediately starts driving people to your site. I recently got in touch with Terry Whalen of CPCSearch, a B2B PPC agency, and he offered to answer some questions: this turned out to be a great B2B Search Marketing primer. If you have additional questions for Terry, please leave a comment below.

Jep: Some of my friends claim that B2B paid search is less interesting than B2C because the average B2B search budgets pale in comparison with B2C. What is your take?

Terry: B2B paid search tends to be more challenging to get right versus B2C – so if you like challenges, B2B paid search can be quite fun. It’s true that measuring true ROI usually takes a longer time and more effort than measuring ROI for B2C campaigns – so, when the ROI data does start to come in, it’s all the more exciting.

Jep: What are some of the key differences in running a B2B paid search campaign vs. a B2C campaign?

Terry: As I mentioned, it typically takes much longer to determine things like lead quality and ROI.  To me, this means that we want to be very careful to be clear on the true value proposition delivered by the client’s products and services when we are crafting ad text. I’m a little less inclined to “think outside the box” when it comes to B2B ad testing. Compare that to a B2C account where you are measuring credit card transactions. Because we’ll get super quick transaction and revenue data on any testing we do, we may feel more inclined to test “crazy” ad ideas that – if they do not work – can be quickly killed.  Same goes for keywords. For B2B keyword and ad testing, we tread with a bit more caution.

Jep: How would you describe the unique benefits of Paid Search in the entire spectrum of options that B2B marketing managers have to promote their products (such as banner ads, list rentals, telemarketing, etc.)?

Terry: Well, the reason paid search has become so big is that ads are matched to user searches.  When paid search works well, solutions (ads) are matched to needs (searches). If you can figure out which keywords are aligned with the user intent you are targeting, then you can have ads appear that are relevant to the user, and relevant to what your company provides.  Above all, paid search is very measurable and controllable. So, advertisers have a lot of wind at their back in terms of testing and iterating to get their campaigns working well for them.

Jep: Is there a typical target group that is easier to reach with PPC? E.g. promoting software to developers vs. selling a value-based proposition to C-level executives?

Terry: I’d say it’s easier to target certain groups for the very simple reason of size. For example, there are many more software and web developers in the world than there are CIO’s of F1000 companies. So, if you are selling into CIO’s of F1000 companies, you will certainly have a tougher time – the population you are targeting is a small population, and the number of daily searches done by this group will be a much smaller number than searches done by software and web developers.

Jep: How do you track opportunities or revenue associated with specific AdWords Campaigns? Do your clients use Salesforce for Google AdWords, Marketing Automation systems or other tools?

Terry: For the most part, clients use Salesforce-for-AdWords, which is a very elegant way to link leads with valuable AdWords data like keyword, search term, campaign, etc. For clients that are using marketing automation platforms like Marketo or Eloqua, there is a bit more integration to do, but the links can still be made to work. At the end of the day, we feel that the most important piece of data is the search query – so, if you can just get a hidden field to capture this data and connect it with a lead, you are ahead of the game. In AdWords, you would just append a parameter to each active ad you are running, e.g. keyword={keyword}.

Jep: Could you see some kind of integration with Marketing Automation systems that would make running a profitable PPC campaign easier?

Terry: Yes, in a very general sense, anything that can increase the value of a lead after it has been acquired – which marketing automation can certainly do – should have the effect of increasing ROI from your paid search activities, thus making it easier to rationalize larger budgets and higher cost-per-lead targets, which can lead to additional keyword and ad testing, higher keyword bids, and more leads.

Jep: Do some of your clients use lead scoring together with PPC advertising? If yes, can you use the lead score to refine the campaigns?

Terry: Yes, some do – and yes, we certainly can and do use that to inform our target cost/lead for various clients. Lead scoring can be a great way to speed up the time required before we know if we’re on the right track with certain keyword groups and ad messaging, without having to wait for the lead to have been closed (won, lost, etc.).

Jep: What are you tips for creating effective landing pages and/or microsites?

Terry: I think it’s important to be clear and transparent about what it is that your company brings to the table, include the lead form on the page, have the cursor already be in the first field (if possible), and include at least a logo that will take users to the home page if there is no other navigation available on the page. If you are getting sparse conversion data, consider using less fields in your lead form. If the sales folks are complaining about poor-quality leads, remember that one way to increase lead quality is to raise the number of mandatory fields in your form. There is no set amount of fields that are best.  We have never found microsites to be a good investment of our time.

Jep: What kind of conversion offers (whitepapers, webinars, trials, etc.) do you find most effective?

Terry: Trials, then webinars, then white papers.

Jep: Terry, thank you very much for this introduction to B2B pay-per-click advertising.

NOTE: if you have questions or remarks, please leave a comment below.

Measure Your ROI on Social Media Leads

On Tuesday Genius.com announced the Genius URL Shortener (GURL), which makes it easier to measure the results of social media campaigns. At first I thought: “what’s new about that?”, and Marketo wrote a post on an alternative way to create tracking links. But when I read Ardath Albee’s post about the Genius URL Shortener I really got it: GURLs are cool!

Lead Source Measurement Needs Improvement

Tracking where a visitor comes from is not a new technique. I first used it inside AdWords, in which they offered cross-media conversion tracking. You could create a tracking URL, which you would include in non-AdWords advertisements, email blasts, and so on. This allowed you to see how many people registered (= converted) for each source.

After that, Google Analytics provided similar tracking features by appending variables to the existing URL (see the Google URL Builder tool). There are two big limitations for using this in B2B marketing:

  • You can only see conversions, not opportunities or revenue (because that information is in the CRM system)
  • You can’t see data on individual users

Marketing Automation to Measure End-to-End ROI

The Google tracking is from before Twitter, so the URLs were long and ugly. Twitter made the URL shorteners popular, like tinyURL and bit.ly. So in my opinion Genius now provides similar conversion tracking, with four improvements:

  • It has short and clean URLs
  • The URLs are easy to create, and anyone in the company can create them
  • It provides end-to-end tracking to see associated opportunities and revenue (pulled from Salesforce.com)
  • It ties into existing identified visitor tracking functionality (so clicks on GURLs and the entire web session are added to the lead record as metadata)

Of course, Social Media is all the rage, but I would also use the Genius URL Shortener for online advertisements, list rentals, and so on. The only place where you wouldn’t need it is in your own email blasts, because those are already tracked automatically.

The one feature I would like to add is the ability to associate links to specific campaigns, so you can see which lead sources were most effective for a particular campaign (Marketo’s approach covers this, but is not so easy to use).

So in my opinion this is a very interesting new  tool that is makes it easier to track campaign ROI for Social Media and beyond.

How would you use this lead source tracking tool? Let me know your suggestions.

Disclosure: I am a guest blogger on the MarketingGenius blog

Free Trials Aren’t What They Used to Be

An important aspect of Demand Generation are the offers: what will your prospects register for? A popular offer for software vendors is the free trial. I read an interesting article on the decreasing effectiveness of free trials as a lead generation tool in the DemandGen Report. In the article Howard Sewell says that free trials “eliminate a huge subset of potential customers at the outset—people who (…) simply don’t want to expend the time or hassle downloading, installing and evaluating the actual product.” Very true.

Over 100,000 Downloads!

In my previous job I managed to get over 100,000 trial downloads. The frustrating thing was: very few prospects managed to use it successfully, so the conversion rate to paying customers was almost too low to measure, maybe 0.02% or so. And as a marketing manager I did not have control over the product experience. Very frustrating.

Developers or End-Users?

The product I promoted was used by developers. They tend to insist on trying out a product, so we had no option but to keep the free trial. Trials that are started by end-users are a different story though. Especially software-as-a-service (SaaS) products seem so simple! Even end-users get the impression that they can use the product in just 5 minutes. And that’s where free trials can really backfire.

Alternatives for Free Trials

The article mentions alternatives, like trials with limited functionality, single-user trials or shared online demo systems that are wiped every night. I think the issue with all these options is that prospects still have to learn the product, which takes time and effort. The other three solutions were interesting though: ROI tools, free consulting offers and paid pilots.

ROI Tools

ROI tools are probably more for decision makers than for product users. But if you don’t have an ROI tool yet, it may be a good idea to develop one. It doesn’t have to be a fancy web application: it could be as simple as a spreadsheet. It is useful to convince the decision makers, but I’m not sure if people who are interested in a trial will be totally satisfied with it.

Free Consulting offers

I see this as a version of the “free initial consultation” offer at most law firms. If a lawyer expects to get 10 billable hours after a 30-minute free consultation, a consulting or software firm may expect 20 billable days after 1 day of free consulting (as an example). The challenge is to qualify prospects well, to avoid providing free services to unqualified prospects.

Paid Trial

This is the alternative I like best, thinking from the vendor’s perspective. The customer pays money for the service, but can opt-out at any time in the 2-3 months of the trial. Even if they abort the trial they get useful deliverables, so it’s not waisted money. However, it serves a different function from a free trial: at the free trial stage, prospects are typically still comparing multiple vendors. With a paid trial the customer has already chosen a solution. So from the customer’s perspective a paid trial is not a good alternative to a free trial.

Other Ideas: Demos & Training

Other possible trial replacements that are not mentioned in the DemandGen article are recorded product demos and live product demonstrations. It may not be as “real-life” as working with the system yourself, but it still gives a good idea of the features of the product.

One strategy that has worked well for me is offering affordable online product training. Prospects pay a fairly low fee to learn the product. I believe we charged $400 for 10 hours of training. The fee covers the cost of the trainer. We simply used the revenue to pay our consulting department to deliver the training. And for highly qualified prospects we sometimes waived the training fee.

And If You Still Do a Free Trial…

In addition to making the product as user-friendly as possible, you could consider to provide sample projects, so prospect don’t have to set up the system. They can start playing right away.

Another suggestion is to do a manual qualification before granting someone access to a free trial. Prospects with the right skills and knowledge are more likely to be successful with a demo.

I also like Norm Bellisario’s suggestion to measure how far prospects get with the trial. If there are signs they got stuck (e.g. they didn’t login for a couple of days) you could kick off a lead nurturing program or send a notification to the sales and support teams.

Conclusion

Reduced attractiveness of free trial offers is a big issue for SaaS companies. There are many alternatives, but not all proposed solutions are a full replacement for trials, both from the vendor’s and the prospect’s perspective. But I hope that some of the suggestions in this article are useful for you. Let me know what you think!

Are You Old Enough for Inbound Marketing?

The tech industry is known for inventing new names for existing things, mainly to promote their own company. Great for them, but bad for customers: there’s always so much confusion about these new terms (earlier I wrote about the confusion around Demand Generation and Sales 2.0).

The newest term on the block is “Inbound Marketing”. I’ve already written several posts about Inbound Marketing, but I wondered if the average B2B marketing manager has any idea what it means. So I created a non-scientific poll on LinkedIn asking:

“Do you use Inbound Marketing for B2B Lead Generation?”

Are you using inbound marketing for b2b lead generation

LinkedIn showed this poll to randomly selected marketing professionals who work in the Tech Industry.

Overall Results

The overall results were pretty good: almost half of the respondents is already actively using Inbound Marketing. Although 25% has no idea what it is.

overall results of inbound marketing survey

Are You Old Enough for Inbound Marketing?

If you then zoom in on the demographics, the ‘age’ graph gives some interesting results:

inbound marketing survey results by age

The older the respondent, the more likely they are to know about and use Inbound Marketing. I though Inbound Marketing and Social Media would be a Generation Y thing!

Seasoned Marketers Know the Trends

If you then zoom in on the job level of respondents, we find a likely explanation. “Older” usually means markers in senior positions. And senior marketing executives have a helicopter view: they may not know the details, but they are good at spotting new trends and taking advantage of them.

Inbound Marketing survey results by job title

Is “Inbound Marketing” Approved?

I’d say “yes”. It clear that many B2B marketers know what it means, and many are already actively using it. Of course, the survey biased. LinkedIn users are more likely to know about Inbound Marketing than the average marketer, because LinkedIn is one of the Inbound Marketing tools. And people who don’t know what Inbound Marketing is could have simply skipped the poll.

For me personally: this blog is mainly read by innovators, so I should be safe to use Inbound Marketing as a well-known term. What is your take?

Use this link for the full results: Inbound Marketing Survey results

Social Media for B2B Lead Generation

Earlier this year Jame-Ane Ervin wrote a great post about the results of promoting her webinar via Social Media. She got a 400% increase in leads! Now that’s effective use of social media.

A couple of weeks ago I met one of the founders of the site Social Media B2B: Jeff Cohen (@dgtlpapercuts). We started talking and he asked me to write a post about using Social Media for B2B Lead Generation, as LeadSloth has done a fair bit of work in that area.

I decided to limit myself to Blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter. I could only use 1,000 words, and in my opinion Blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter are the powerhouses of social media for B2B lead generation. Just some excerpts from the post:

  • “Always include a clear call to action at the bottom of older blog posts (…) this call to action does magic for lead generation”
  • “Twitter is getting more popular every day. That’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s great that the audience is growing, but the average Twitter user has a hard time actually reading all those tweets.”
  • “The benefit of LinkedIn is that it is a business-focused social network, so it’s usually a source of very qualified leads.”

You can read the post here: Increase B2B Lead Generation with Social Media

Let me know what you think!

SEO Optimization – 3 Steps to Success

In the last years I’ve done a lot of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) projects. What keeps surprising me is that most people think it’s some kind of black art. Basic SEO is actually quite straightforward: hence my 3 steps to SEO Success. Agreed: I had to simplify some things, so please don’t bash me on that. My goal is to expose the basic principles of SEO, not to provide a comprehensive cookbook.

Side note: I mainly write about Marketing Automation, but I’ve come to believe that Inbound Marketing (which includes SEO) should go hand-in-hand with Marketing Automation. Inbound Marketing adds more leads to your database, and Marketing Automation manages those leads.

How Search Engines Work

All search engines have approximately the same approach: they rank based on relevant content and page popularity. Relevant content means that the keywords from the search query appear frequently on the page, and in the right places (Title, URL, Headings). Popularity means that many other sites link to this page, ideally using the same keywords in the link text. So let’s look at the 3 steps.

3 Steps to Improve your Search Engine Ranking:

(1) Choose your keywords wisely
(2) Create exactly 1 page for each keyword or keyword group
(3) Get links to these pages

(1) Choose the Right Keywords

First, pick approximately 10-20 keywords that you want to optimize for:

  • Choose keywords with enough search volume, but not too much. Too little volume means only few people will see your site, too much volume means that it’s going to be hard to get on page 1. You can find keyword search volume with the Google Keyword Tool. This tool also provides keyword suggestions
  • Choose keywords that are relevant. For example, for a company selling Portal software the term “web portal software” is more relevant than “news portal” (= people looking for a news website)
  • To start, choose keywords that are relatively specific. “Web Portal Software” rather than “Business Software” and “Web application usability” rather than “usability”. This ensures that you have a reasonable chance of getting on page 1 of the search results, and that you attract the right audience. Later on you can optimize for more generic terms.

(2) Optimize Your Website

Once you’ve created your keyword list, you can start optimizing your site:

  • Just to be sure, check if the search spiders can find your site. Type the following into the Gooogle search box: “cache:http://www.yoursite.com” without any spaces (click here for an example). You can use SEO Browser to see how Google sees your site: check that all content and links are visible in this text-only view. Do this for each page.
  • If pages are not indexed yet, make sure that other pages are linking to this page, and avoid JavaScript-generated links (search spiders don’t read JavaScript)
  • For each keyword term, create exactly 1 optimized page (or choose an existing page)
  • For each of those pages, put the keywords in the TITLE, URL, H1/H2 and in the content itself (example: a page optimized for “SaaS Analytics“); in the URL, use dashes (“-“) to separate words; if your website doesn’t use <h1> and <h2> tags (do a ‘view source’ to find out), ask you web developer to add them.
  • Use unique content on each page: if you use the same or similar content, you run the risk that the Search Engines think they are duplicates (and only show one of them)
  • Add an ‘elevator pitch’ in the META description tag, so Google will display this as a summary on the results page. Example: search for ‘Good Data’ and Google shows a summary written by Good Data’s marketing team: “Good Data brings easy, flexible, affordable analytics within reach of every company”.

(3) Get links

The search engines think your page is more relevant if other trusted sites link to it (“trusted” as opposed to “spammy” sites). The key is to write interesting content, and to network with bloggers and site owners so they want to link to your pages. You can still ask them, but an excellent ranking is only attained when other people link to your site without you having to ask for it. That means: create great content that is educational rather than necessarily promoting your products. So in short:

  • Write appealing content, so other people want to link to it. Consider creating “link bait”: popular topic formats are “top 10 rules for…” or a list of blogs or Twitter accounts that cover your space. Always keep in mind: write about the interests of your target audience, rather than pushing your wares.
  • Links (internal and external) should have descriptive link text. Use “business intelligence software” instead of “click here“. Google uses the link text to figure out what your page is about.
  • Ask other people to link, and already give them the HTML code for the link, so you can optimize the link text
  • Add your pages to directories that accept link submissions (e.g dmoz.org or industry-specific lists)
  • If you have a blog, put it on the company domain (http://blog.company.com) and ask other bloggers to add your blog to their blogroll (and do the same for them).
  • On your home page, include links to the keyword-optimized pages, so Google easily finds these pages (example: the links on bottom of Rightnow.com). The link text should be the same as the selected keywords.

Keep Optimizing

As you go through these steps you will find out what works for you. You should monitor the ranking for your selected keywords weekly or biweekly: just type it into the search engine and see if your site pops up. Then check your web analytics tool to see which keywords bring most traffic. If you monitor conversions (e.g. a whitepaper registration) you’ll see that some keywords convert better than others. Focus on link building for the keywords that work best for you, and keep adding new keywords. Also, as your ranking improves, you may take on more challenging keywords: the ones that are really popular.

I hope this article was useful for you: let me know if you have question, or if you want to suggest changes to the approach I described. And keep up the optimization effort: it will take at least a couple of months before you start seeing results.

PS. You may have noticed that I’ve optimized this post for “SEO Optimization”

Demand Generation Blogs Continued

In the spirit of Twitter’s Follow Friday I’d like to finally publish the remaining Demand Generation blogs that I enjoy reading. Earlier I published the Top 10 Demand Generation vendor blogs and the Top 10 Marketing Automation Blogs.

Of course, there were many great blogs that I forgot to include, so here are the remaining ones!

  • B2B Marketing Zone
    This is more of a meta-blog, aggregating a large number of B2B blogs, including this blog. I’ve discovered several new and interesting blogs on the B2B Marketing Zone, so highly recommended.
  • DemandGen Report
    This is an leading online magazine for Marketing Automaton, which features vendor information, news articles a job board and more.
  • Rebekah Donaldson’s “Red on Marketing”
    Rebekah and her team write about demand generation, with lots of good articles on content marketing and social media.
  • Brenda Gelston’ Marketing Momentum blog
    This blog provides a strategic perspective on the demand generation process.
  • Gary Katz, Marketing Operations at Work
    Gary is one of the forces behind promoting marketing operations as a important specialty, and on his blog he writes about this.
  • Ken Molay, Webinar Blog
    Demand generation is not complete without covering Webinars, one of the key lead generation programs. Ken’s blog full of useful webinar ideas.
  • Net-Results blog
    This is one of the newer vendors in the Demand Generation market, focused on the SMB market.
  • Jeff Ogden’s Fearless Competitor blog
    Jeff specializes in helping companies find new customers, he wrote a great e-book about that, and blogs about Demand Generation, primarily from a Sales perspective
  • Upshot Institute
    This is a resource website with information on marketing automation vendors, podcasts, webinars and blogs.

I hope you found some interesting new blogs in this list. And again, if you have any blog recommendations, please let me know: I’m looking forward to discover new thought leaders.

UPDATE: I’ve now put all marketing automation blogs on a single page.

Marketing Automation Introduction

Many posts on this blog are fairly in-depth, so it was fun to write an introduction to Marketing Automation on the Genius.com blog. For easy digestion, I split up the marketing automation process in four steps:

  1. Getting more visitors to your website
  2. Get more visitors to register
  3. Lead nurturing and scoring
  4. Marketing & Sales Collaboration

In addition to the overview article that I linked to above, I’ve written one post for each step. Those will be published this week and next week. The first article about getting more website visitors is already live.

I’ve heard other definitions of the steps that are more catchy, like “pre-click, post-click and post-conversion”. These are the same steps as my steps 1 to 3. I’ve chosen to write out a description of the steps, because I think that’s easier to understand for people who are new to Marketing Automation. And I’ve added step 4 because collaboration with sales is one of the key success factors of marketing automation.

Anyhow, I hope you find the articles on the Genius.com blog interesting, even though you may already be a Marketing Automation expert :- )