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.

Freelance Marketing Automation Consultant

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This week I’m finishing up my day job as Sr Marketing Manager at Backbase, and will be available full-time for Marketing Automation Consulting. If you have Marketing Automation challenges, I’d love to hear from you (leadsloth email address or toll-free 1-888-4A-SLOTH).

I have hands-on experience with Marketo, Market2Lead, Pardot, Hubspot, Salesforce.com, DemandTools, various Email Service Providers, multiple CMSs (WordPress, Drupal), and a range of other tools. Because I understand Marketing Automation in-depth, I can usually get up to speed quickly with any other tools that you may have.

In the next three weeks I’m getting married and I will move from San Francisco to Durham, North Carolina. June 8th I will officially start as a full-time consultant. Around that time I will also pick up blogging and Twittering again. See you then!

Top-10 Demand Generation Vendor Blogs

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UPDATE 7/14/09: I’ve now put all marketing automation blogs on a single page.

In my previous post I listed the Top-10 Demand Generation blog by marketers and consultants. Today I’ve put together a list of vendor blogs. Most of these vendors blogs really get ‘online marketing’, so they talk about best practices rather then just touting their products, and they post regularly.

In alphabetical order:

Sorry, can’t help it: every time I try to make a top-10, I end up with 11 and find it impossible to choose which one should go. So 11 it is :- )

Again, let me know your suggestions for other blogs. I’m pretty sure I still have to discover lots of cool blogs.

Top-10 Marketing Automation Blogs

UPDATE 7/14/09: I’ve now put all marketing automation blogs on a single page.

A couple of people recently asked me which blogs I’m frequently reading. So here’s the list. Please send me your favorite blogs, because there must be lots of great Marketing Automation blogs that I haven’t found yet!

BTW 1: Some of these blogs are more about lead generation, demand generation or inbound marketing, so maybe the title of this blog post is not ideal. But regardless of the terminology, these are the blogs that I enjoy most :- )

BTW 2: I have not included vendor weblogs: I will put those in a separate post.

In alphabetical order, these are the blogs that I read most frequently, and that I can heartily recommend.

(oops, that’s 11 blogs)

Let me know your favorite blogs, so I can put them in a follow-up post. Thanks!

Review of FormAssembly Form Builder

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On this blog I primarily write about integrated Lead Management systems, rather than small tools. However, in a previous post I wrote about a project in which I’m replacing a full-blown Marketing Automation system with tools that add on to Salesforce.com. One of the key tools is a form builder: and that is exactly what FormAssembly provides.

I was impressed with FormAssembly: they have a cool-looking form builder that has lots of advanced features in a user-friendly package. You can simply add form fields to the form, position or group them, and get a live preview. You can edit the properties of the form fields, and set the advanced features (such as label placement or calculated fields).

Once you are done with your form you can copy-and-paste the form’s HTML code to your own website or you can run it from the FormAssembly server.

formassembly form builder

Advanced Features

You can send a ‘thank-you email’ immediately after form submission, and also get a notification yourself. You can create conditional questions, such as showing a ‘state’ field only when ‘United States’ is selected as a country. Also, you can pre-fill form fields by putting parameters in the form URL (e.g. http://website.com/form.html?field1=value1&field2=value2) However, it does not automatically recognize repeat visitors, like most marketing automation systems.

Submission of the Form

On the submission side of things it is very flexible too, but it takes more knowledge to set it up properly. You can submit straight into Salesforce.com, but it supports only limited deduplication: based on email address it can overwrite all other fields. So if an email address matches an existing Salesforce.com record, the information in the form will overwrite all information in Salesforce: I find that a little scary. Therefore I’ve used their HTTP Post functionality to submit the form to Ringlead, which does more elaborate deduplication.

Salesforce.com integration complexity

The setup of this part is more complex than in most marketing automation systems. You have to:

  • Manually map fields to the right Salesforce.com fields, based on naming conventions
  • Re-create select boxes (e.g. a list of industries)
  • Add several hidden fields, for example to link the form submission to a Campaign

Once you’ve figured this out once, you can easily copy the settings for additional forms.

AdWords Landing Pages

I’m using AdWords to drive visitors to one of my landing pages. I’ve tagged the advertisement so the link contains the search keywords and Ad Group. I’d like to save this information in Salesforce.com too, so I can see which keywords and Ad Groups generate the most business. Some marketing automation systems capture this information automatically, but with FormAssembly I had to write some PHP code to read the information in the URL and put it into a hidden field. It would be great if FormAssembly could make this feature standard: I bet a lot of people are using FormAssembly for AdWords landing pages.

Conclusion

Overall I feel that FormAssembly provides excellent value a low monthly fee ($34). And if they would improve Salesforce.com deduplication I would happily three times as much, and even more if they support AdWords tagging.

Abandon Your Marketing Automation System!?

I’m working on an interesting project right now: moving away from a marketing automation system. The plan is to go back to using only Salesforce.com with some cheap add-on tools for email, form submission and data quality. Smart or foolish? I’d love to have your input on the potential pitfalls (and benefits) of this approach.

Background

The company in question has used a comprehensive marketing automation system for about 2 years. In the early days it was used to sift through hundreds of new B2B leads per day to identify the valuable leads. This changed over time: now the focus has shifted to pro-active outreach to a handful of executives, instead of targeting thousands of software developers. In addition to cost savings, the thinking is that a full-blown marketing automation system just makes less sense with the new strategy.

How to Replace a Marketing Automation System?

My first reaction was: no way, you should not want to do without any type of marketing automation system (for simplicity sake, I use this term as synonymous to demand generation and lead management). However, when I started looking into Salesforce.com and the wide variety of add-ons, I was less convinced. The Salesforce.com database has some big issues (e.g. the split between Leads and Contacts), but many 3rd party tools are addressing these weaknesses.

What is easy to replace?

Email marketing that integrates with Salesforce.com is provided by many vendors, like VerticalResponse, Boomerang, ExactTarget, Genius, Lyris and more. There are also some relatively affordable registration form vendors, like FormAssembly and OnDialog. Basic lead scoring features are built into Salesforce.com, and data quality tools are available from vendors like Ringlead, CRM Fusion and Datatrim. Notifications of companies visiting your website are available from Leadlander, Netfactor, LEADSExplorer and DemandBase. You can create reports and dashboards in Salesforce.com to provide analytics. So there are lots of useful add-ons available at a nominal price.

What Is Going to Be Missed…

Some Email Service Providers can send email on behalf of the record owner or can handle drip-campaigns, but those are exceptions and you sometimes pay quite a bit more for these advanced features. Unsubscribe handling is typically done via a generic page, rather than via branded page.

If you use a basic form vendor, you have to manually map the fields, and put the form on a landing page yourself. You may want to pre-fill the form, or send a thank-you email or the start of an email drip campaign: this is not always possible. Also, some form vendors are not able to append to existing records (resulting in duplicates) or to link new registrations to a Salesforce.com campaign.

Lead scoring based on attributes (e.g. job title) is built into Salesforce.com, but that does not include activity-based scoring, such scoring based on website visitors, clicks on links in emails or form submissions.

Even though you can get reports on anonymous visitors via stand-alone tools, it’s much more work to set up notifications of website visits by known users, and even more challenging to sync that information with Salesforce.com.

Then there are specific usage scenarios that are automated in a marketing automation system, such sending a reminder to non-registrants for an event: with the new approach this needs to be done manually, which takes a lot more time.

Most marketing automation systems replicate the Salesforce.com database with their own database: in the new situation everything is stored in Salesforce.com (or at least: that’s the goal). That is great for manageability, but – if you have the habit of qualifying leads before sending them to the CRM system – you now have a database full with unqualified leads.

What Is Your Take?

This project is still in the planning phase, so I’m still compiling a list of all the pros and cons. One thing is sure: in the new situation the monthly cost will be about $200, down from well over a thousand dollars. That is a significant savings.

But how much more time will it cost to manage the new situation? Are there specific features that create revenue, but simply cannot be implemented with the new approach. What is your take on this?

ActiveConversion Review – SMB Lead Management

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From Web Analytics to Demand Generation

ActiveConversion first became known for its sales-focused Web Analytics, such as identifying companies that visit your website (similar to Leadlander). Therefore I initially called them a ‘niche vendor’. However, the product has evolved into a fairly complete marketing automation suite for SMB companies. So the people behind ActiveConversion gave me a demo to show they are more than a niche player.

Anonymous Visitor Identification

ActiveConversion provides reports on anonymous website visitors: they show the company name and activity. It integrates with Jigsaw to show company details like revenue, and available contacts for a specific company: contacts can be bought for $1 each directly at Jigsaw.

There are two ways to identify visitors:

  • They fill out a form on your website
  • They click on a link in an email that you sent them

After that, the (previously anonymous) website sessions are linked to a specific person.

anonymous prospect information by ActiveConversion and JigSaw
An anonymous prospect record

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring works for both anonymous and known visitors: for anonymous visitors the triggers for increasing the lead score are somewhat limited, essentially page views and return visits. For known visitors you can also track clicks from emails you sent them. It’s fairly basic compared to some of the more expensive systems, but effective and easy to use.

activeconversion lead scoring settings
Lead scoring configuration

Form builder

The form builder works different from some higher-end systems that actually host the entire landing page for you. ActiveConversion generates HTML code for you, so you can include it in a page on your own website. As far as I understand it, it uses the JavaScript tracking code (installed for Web Analytics) to also read the form data and save it in the ActiveConversion database, rather than using a traditional form submission. It can also integrate with Salesforce Web-to-Lead forms.

Email marketing

ActiveConversion supports both one-time emails to a segment of the database, as well as drip emails that are triggered after a prospect registers. By default it uses VerticalResponse as the underlying email system, fully integrated in the ActiveConversion user interface. However, customers can also use any of the 10 ESPs that they have integrated with.

Salesforce.com integration

ActiveConversion also integrates with Salesforce.com, although using Salesforce is not a requirement. Typically, new leads are assigned to sales person before they are copied to Salesforce.com: the assignment rules are flexible. Also, when a visitors registers, ActiveConversion will check in Salesforce if that email address is already present, to avoid duplicates. So there is data exchange on demand, but not a full bidirectional synchronization like in most of the more expensive lead management systems. The visitor activity is also exported to Salesforce.com and shown in the lead record (see screen shot).

activeconversion salesforce integration
Website sessions are added to the salesforce.com Lead record

Marketing & Web Analytics

The marketing reporting features allow you to monitor performance of various marketing activities. There are several reports including reports on qualified contacts and website visits as a result of emails, pay-per-click campaigns and other online advertisements. Several reports can also be emailed on a daily or weekly basis.

companies identified by activeconversion
Report on the companies that visited the website in the past 7 days

Basic web analytics is also included, so many customers don’t use additional web analytics. Only customers with specific conversion tracking (e.g. e-commerce websites) typically use a dedicated web analytics product such as Google Analytics.

Conclusion

Based on the demo I attended, I feel that ActiveConversion is a good first B2B demand generation solution for smaller companies. It is easy to use, it has significantly more features than Leadlander (which is cheaper and narrower in scope), it is a notch up from InfusionSoft (which focuses on the smallest companies), and it is cheaper than most other Demand Generation vendors.

If you’re looking for an entry-level B2B lead management solution, check out their 30-trial. If you’ve verified that it has all the features you want, you get excellent value for money, starting at $250 per month.

Have you worked with ActiveConversion? Please leave a comment or email me with your experiences.

MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit 2009

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marketingsherpa logo Today MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit started in Miami. It is focused on advanced email strategies, which is an important part of the demand generation process. Most of the case studies seem to be B2C rather than B2B. The focus is on list- and trigger-based emails and on landing pages, rather than on the full Lead Management Automation functionality. Nevertheless, there are lots of interesting advanced email topics that are just as relevant for B2B demand generation specialists.

Unfortunately I can’t be there, but there is live coverage via Twitter.

Some highlights from the agenda:

Email Strategies

  • Using email in conjunction with social media campaigns
  • Combining List- and Trigger-Based Campaigns
  • Using direct mail with dynamic printing to recover email addresses

Email Analytics

  • Integrating web & email analytics for better conversion
  • Using Artificial Intelligence to predict prospect behavior

Email design

  • Leveraging user-generated content
  • Mobile email marketing
  • Cross-channel: using SMS and instant messaging

Landing page design & Personalization

  • Post-click personalization based on the “wisdom of the masses”
  • Optimization by focusing on specific actions

Testing

  • Using multi-variate testing to optimize conversion and sales
  • Using Email Control Groups for cost justification