Marketing 415 Midterm
Steps in Personalization
-Data -Segmentation -Targeting -Personalization
Marketing Automation Best Practices
-Practice database hygiene -Validate/verify your data -Align your sales team -Don't overreact -Be transparent -Be careful -Strengthen review processes -Put strategy first -Continually educate yourself
7 Trends Shaping the Market Today
-Rapidly changing buyer -Exponential growth in data -More channels and platforms -More revenue responsibility -Doing more with less -Need for speed and agility -New tools and technologies
Vendor
A business from which merchandise is purchased or supplies or other assets are bought.
Campaign and Program Metrics
As you think about all of your various marketing activities, you'll need to report what the results were. Sometimes called vanity metrics, these are meant to provide context to the success of a campaign within a certain channel. And because you can attribute conversions (and ultimately revenue) to them, they're not just soft metrics. If you are undertaking any of the following activities, you'll want to report on their associated metrics in order to show results and trends over time. Here are some of the most common campaigns and metrics; you'll want to report at least quarterly and year-over-year trends. Choose the metrics that are most important to your goals; it's simply not possible to report on all of these. Paid Search, Trade Shows, Social Media, Public Relations, Organic Search, Video Analytics, E-mail, and Webinars. As you plan your marketing programs, think about what your goals are, how you will measure success (what are your benchmarks?), and how you will quantify your programs' impact on the business. The idea is continuous marketing optimization—where can you make adjustments for better metrics over time?
More revenue responsibility
Meanwhile, these new channels are critical in delivering new prospective buyers who could, in turn, deliver net new revenue to the business. As B2B marketers find the channels, tools, and data sources to reach, acquire, convert, engage, close, and retain customers, they are becoming increasingly responsible for a portion of a company's revenue. This is an incredible shift in accountability from the past when marketing could come up with creative campaigns and not worry about the contribution to bottom-line results. Today, we're being called upon to account for a specific percentage of revenue delivered, the return on marketing investment, and customer acquisition costs and lifetime value—all made possible by the real-time, data-driven nature of the Internet.
E-mail Marketing
This is truly the bread and butter of marketing automation—the ability to create and send e-mails, either one-to-one, to a list, or from an automated campaign. There are many dynamics of a successful e-mail marketing program that we'll review in Chapter 9, "Programming, Part 2: Demand Generation." To help you execute e-mail marketing, you'll want to look for a marketing automation platform that offers the capability to carry out these tasks: -Easily create, design, and edit HTML and text e-mails -Analyze e-mails for browser compatibility and spam potential -Create e-mail templates for reuse -Schedule delivery -A/B test content to see what recipients prefer -Create e-mail preference centers so that prospects and customers can manage their list subscriptions or unsubscribe altogether
Marketing Analytics
Although web analysis is a great start in figuring out how your online marketing programs are doing, you'll want to take a closer look. There are two main ways to derive marketing analytics: 1. Campaign and program metrics, which measure the effectiveness of your various initiatives across channels (also known as channel analytics) 2. Revenue attribution, which quantifies marketing's contribution to revenue
Exponential growth in data
As buyers research options, they are leaving bits of data about themselves and their activities all over the Internet, which are being fed back to vendors via various tools to inform their marketing decisions. Data is nothing without analysis to understand what it means to buyer behavior and why it's important to the buyer journey; only then can companies harness the power of its data to improve the experience. The question becomes how to use data to recognize preferences across channels and devices. But that's difficult when the amount of data can be overwhelming, because it comprises, at a minimum, the following: -Personal data -Demographic and firmographic -Behavioral ■Onsight ■Offsite ■Campaign When used correctly, this data can be used to improve the relationship between the potential buyer and the company by personalizing communication, digital experiences, and content. But two problems quickly arise with so much data: 1. Information can live in many different places within a company, from the CRM database, to Excel spreadsheets on sales executives' desktops, and even to filing cabinets. That means data is siloed and not shared across the company, with different departments having a different view of prospects and customers, depending on what information they're keeping. 2. Data can quickly become out-of-date (leading to what is known as "decay"), which leads to another problem: data hygiene, in which a database devolves over time to contain unmailable contacts with out-of-date records, incomplete records, duplicate records, or even false records. Clean data, created by ongoing data maintenance, is the key to the successful execution of marketing campaigns.
Put strategy first
As mentioned in Chapter 1, "The Evolving Marketing Landscape," technology does not solve problems; strategy solves problems. Technology only serves to worsen the problems you already have—and it's just as easy to automate bad marketing as it is to automate excellent marketing. After you have the right strategy in place, examine your people and processes. Do you have the right staff? Are the right goals, roles, and procedures in place, and are they properly communicated? Only when you answer these questions should you look to technology to help you.
Continually educate yourself
As with most other marketing tools, you'll never stop learning about marketing automation usage and best practices. Don't underestimate how much time it will take to learn what you need in order to maximize your investment in the new system—and then commit to taking that time to educate yourself, regardless of how difficult it is. For example, in the two months I spent implementing Pardot at SiteSpect, I spent five to ten hours a week attending webinars, reading the vendor knowledgebase and user forums, and participating in user groups. In addition, I spent another five to ten hours working in the software—understanding features, uploading lists, creating e-mail templates, creating connectors with other tools, building drip marketing campaigns, configuring settings, adding users, and so on. Twenty hours a week is a lot of extra time on top of a normal work week, but it's worth it. What you will learn will keep your marketing skills fresh and pave the way toward accomplishing much more success in much less time moving forward. But don't just invest time in the beginning—continue to research functionality, best practices, and upcoming features, and you'll stay on top of your game when it comes to this and any marketing technology.
Don't overreact
Avoiding overreacting is particularly important now that your sales team has visibility into who is visiting your website. Make sure they (or anyone else) are not sending e-mails that say something like this: I see that you came to our website from an e-mail sent by our marketing staff last week and just downloaded the XYZ Whitepaper. In fact, it looks like you've visited a lot of our pages in the past week—are you interested in receiving pricing on our product? As the unfortunate recipient of many e-mails like this after I've simply downloaded a whitepaper, I find this approach intrusive. Just because you have the knowledge of someone's on-site behavior does not mean it's always appropriate to use that knowledge to act; sometimes, just observing behavior over a period of time can often yield more complete insights.
Business-to-Business Marketing (B2B)
Businesses selling at scale to buyers in other companies. In doing so, B2B marketers must define their target market, target accounts, and ideal buyer; create products and services to meet the needs of those buyers; and correctly position, price, and promote their products and services in the marketplace. If only it were as easy and straightforward as it sounds. Marketing supports sales, and in the B2B world, these sales can be large, complex deals that involve multiple buyers, users, and influencers across several departments, including legal, procurement, and others, making the process convoluted and complicated. Meanwhile, marketing is tasked with several key roles within the organization: Strategic Partner—Guiding the company in making the best decisions to market its products and services Brand Protector—Monitoring usage and enforcing guidelines Revenue Creator—Generating leads that turn into net new revenue Service Provider—Supporting other departments with creative and editorial services On top of that, today's B2B marketer is dealing with forces that make successful planning and execution even more difficult. To provide context, this chapter examines the following trends shaping marketing today: A rapidly changing buyer An exponential growth in data, often siloed and out-of-date More channels and platforms, splintering reach and confusing strategy A growing responsibility for revenue The ability to do more with less: an increasing scope of functional responsibility, typically without additional personnel or budget The need for speed and agility in creating and deploying campaigns and producing results New tools and technologies, evolving more quickly than professionals can adapt It adds up to a very complex environment in which to market—made all the more so by the pace of change along so many different fronts. Let's look at each of these forces at work.
Personalization
E-mail Personalization Your e-mail marketing program is a likely beneficiary of personalization, perhaps even more so than the company website. For example, every time you use a variable tag, such as in the salutation "Dear %%first_name%%," you are personalizing the experience based on what you know about the recipient. So how else can you personalize e-mails? At a minimum, you could personalize the following: -Subject line -Layout -Copy/Content -Images -Sender And based on the segment you are targeting, you could experiment with many variations, such as these: -Copy variations based on title, industry, or company size -Subject line variations based on recent history, product interest, and content consumption -Layout based on mobile versus desktop browser -Event invitations based on location or interest The combination of segments and the elements of what you are personalizing (e-mail, website, or ads) is truly limitless. The more finely you can segment your lists (starting with the criteria listed under "Segmentation Strategies" earlier in this chapter) and better use dynamic content, the more relevant you can make the message. Advertising Targeting and Personalization Making sure your ads are displayed to the correct prospects is key in successful advertising, and it happens because of targeting. There are many ways to accomplish this; let's take Google AdWords as an example. When you set up your text ad campaigns on the Google Search Network, you have the option to target by these factors: -Keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to your company's offerings. When potential buyers search for those keywords on Google, your ad will be triggered. -Geography and language so that you can target your ads to specific countries, regions, or cities. -Mobile devices so that your ads are displayed based on device type, time of day, and location. Another option in search advertising targeting is a service such as ReTargeter Search, which enables you to target ads based on search behavior such that your ads are displayed only to people who are already looking for information on your company and products or your competitors. If you are using the Google Display Network, you have even more options: -Con
Strengthen review processes
Following that scenario, we put into place much more stringent review processes such that nothing would ever get cued up again that hadn't gone through a rigorous and systematic editing and QA process. That might sound like status quo, but you'd be surprised by how much can happen with all the moving parts in marketing automation, all the different people touching the system, and all the content being generated—something is bound to be overlooked. For example, I recently looked at another company's live landing pages created by a marketing automation platform and noticed that they weren't rendering correctly; it happens all the time.
Segmentation
Let's look at some of the ways to segment an audience. Ideally, these segmentation strategies will be based on characteristics from your buyer profile (discussed in Chapter 7, "Planning"). These characteristics describe the ideal buyer for whom you are personalizing, and help shape the messages and content on your website as well as the campaigns driving traffic to your website—and the more targeted and personalized the content, the more engaging and relevant it will be. The idea is to target content based on these segments and experiment to see what works and what doesn't in order to create the optimal experience. This is typically performed via an experimentation platform, a marketing automation platform, or an advertising network, and analyzed via those tools' reporting interfaces or analytics tools to understand the impact that targeting and personalization produced. Some ways to segment your audience data include these criteria: -Job Title—Group the titles of buyers, users, and influencers separately so that they receive only the information that is useful to them. -Functional Area—Segment by department; for example, Marketing, Accounting, Human Resources, and so on. -Seniority—Group the titles of buyers, users, and influencers by level, such as Vice President, Director, Manager, or -Specialist, in order to further refine content by level of expertise. -Company Size—Group companies by size; for example, SMB, mid-market, or Fortune 500. -SIC or NAICS Codes—Use these to segment by vertical industry. Targeting via multiple criteria such as job title, company size, and industry is considered a best practice in reaching the ideal buyer. -Product Interests—Segment by declared interest in products, solutions, use cases, or services. -Geographic Location—Segment by sales territory, states, countries, or geographic regions. -Language—Target by preferred language. For example, if most of the prospect base is in France, there's no point in sending e-mails written in English or producing web pages in anything but French, right? -Sales Stage—Consider segmenting and personalizing content based on where prospects are in the sales stage; for example, from lead to marketing-qualified lead all the way to closed b
Doing more with less
Make no mistake—marketers are being asked to do all of that without added staff or extra budget. Before the advent of the web 20 years ago, B2B marketers mostly relied on just a few channels to connect with buyers: media and analyst relations, direct mail, print advertising, and trade shows. Now, the same-sized team is expected to: -Create and maintain prospect databases and lists -Create and keep up-to-date web and mobile sites and apps, landing pages, blogs, and microsites—and make them all search engine-friendly -Create and maintain social profiles across multiple platforms -Produce and execute social media marketing campaigns across multiple platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, SlideShare, and YouTube, among others -Create vast arrays of content in many formats, including white-papers, e-books, infographics, webinars, and videos -Build, monitor, and update online advertising campaigns across multiple platforms -Create, run, and measure e-mail marketing and lead nurturing campaigns -Learn content management systems, web analytics tools, testing and targeting tools, marketing automation platforms, pay-per-click advertising, and social advertising platforms such as Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Bizo (now part of LinkedIn), and others -Handle traditional offline activities such as media and analyst relations, direct mail, print advertising, and trade shows and events It seems pretty overwhelming, doesn't it? Although cloud-based technology has made it possible to do all of these things faster, with a smaller staff, and for less cost than traditional methods, there are a couple of inherent traps in doing more with less. First, marketers are not being remunerated commensurate with the vastly higher throughput and successful outcomes that technology enables. Second, although today's executive teams expect marketing to turn to technology to do more with less, there is often no plan for how that technology supports strategy, no plan or support for training, and no plan for what happens when the technology fails to deliver or even be properly integrated. That, in turn, is a recipe for burnout and, ultimately, employee retention issues. One way to mit
Be transparent
Make sure website visitors know what they are getting themselves into when they register for something on your website; don't automatically add them to your newsletter list if they did not ask to subscribe. Similarly, ensure that you are following the best practices for the countries in which you do business. For example, if you use cookies and you have European visitors, make sure that your cookie use policy is somewhere on your website. Also, in August of 2014, Canada enacted the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL), which makes it unlawful to e-mail or social message anyone who did not expressly opt in (as opposed to the U.S.'s opt-out CAN SPAM law). Many marketers joke that the U.S. CAN SPAM law means that you can spam as long as you provide a mechanism to the recipient for opting out, a physical mailing address, and a subject line that correctly describes the content of the e-mail—but many recipients do not know these details and might accuse you of spamming just because they received an unwanted e-mail.
Strategy First
Marketers experiencing problems should not look to technology to solve them until they fully understand what is happening, why, and all of their potential solutions—because technology solves nothing on its own in the absence of marketing strategy. For example, let's say you have a problem managing leads. If you just purchase a marketing automation platform because the vendor promised it would make managing leads easy, you'd still have a problem after implementing because you did not create a strategy to fix the problem—you merely bought a tool to automate the problem, probably making things much, much worse. In this case, you should sit down with the sales team, understand the sales cycle, and agree on the following: -The ideal buyer profile in order to properly grade leads -How important specific actions are (such as registering for a webinar or downloading a whitepaper) in order to properly score leads and accurately measure their interest -What score and grade make a lead qualified enough to pass to sales -The preferred method to pass leads to sales -What happens when a lead is not qualified enough and needs to go back to marketing for nurturing, and the preferred method for doing so -How to report progress as leads move through the pipeline After you do that and create a lead management strategy, you'll have a much better sense of what you need in a technology solution to help manage it.
Align your sales team
Marketing automation affects the processes and agreements you have with your sales team, so you need to have a conversation about the upcoming marketing automation implementation and how you expect the new platform will change previously standardized processes. For example: Will it change the way leads are assigned? Will it change the volume of leads assigned? Will or should automated drip marketing take the places of sales outreach for inbound leads? If so, when and how? How will marketing partner with sales to create customized lead nurturing programs and personalized outreach campaigns? What else can your departments do together to maximize the success of the marketing automation program? You'll have many more questions than these to answer, and the discussion will be different for every company. The bottom line is to make sure you do your homework before implementing marketing automation, because your sales team will pepper you with questions, and they will expect answers, even if you don't have them yet.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation enables closer relationships with potential buyers by automating the creation of marketing campaigns and tracking results across several channels, including paid search, social media, events and webinars, and the corporate website, which helps marketers to better understand buyer behavior and content preferences, as well as better track marketing return on investment. Marketing automation is simply automated processes via technology that help you identify, nurture, and convert prospective customers. With the rising popularity of marketing automation in the past decade, B2B marketers are now benefiting from a closed-loop, automated demand creation and management system. For example, marketing automation can tell you the following on a prospect-level basis: What keyword someone searched on What lead source they came from (Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) What pages they visited What e-mails they opened or didn't open What links they clicked What content they consumed—either downloaded or clicked What lists they belong to What events or webinars they've registered for and/or attended Whether they've bounced or unsubscribed Whether they're a good fit for your business (grade) Whether their activity signals a readiness to engage with sales (score) Because of this information, marketing automation makes it much easier to build relationships with prospects, personalize content for them, and understand their behavior. Your marketing automation platform will help you discover and understand your individual prospect and customer behavior across several channels, including paid search, social, events, and your website, among other things. Because of this, marketing automation enables agility in responding to buyer behavior, which triggers relevant content, segmentation (and therefore better targeting), and more customization of messages and how those messages are delivered. It gives you a centralized, trackable way to manage your marketing messages across channels and send those messages directly to your prospects and customers. And it helps you measure results—the impact that your marketing has. More than anything, marketing automation helps you improve productivity and do so much more t
Customer Analytics
Marketing's job is to acquire and retain customers, and analytics is one of your best helpers toward that end. This data also helps you identify your best customers, predict future customers, and show you where there is an opportunity to sell more deeply into an account. It all starts with what you already know about your customers, usually stored within your CRM system as a record for each contact: Descriptive data—Declarative information captured via forms or filled out by sales reps, company attributes (size, location), and any other demographics or firmographics Activity data—Information about the products and services they use, billing information, and contracts Engagement data—Content consumed, pages visited, e-mails, and phone call logs Sentiment—Survey data, product feature requests, social media sentiment, direct feedback, and Net Promoter Score With a keen eye on these four types of customer data, you can segment customers just as you do prospects (see Chapter 6, "Targeting and Personalization"). Which of your customers are using just a basic offering and might benefit from increased use of your product? Which industries are you most represented in, and would it make business sense to develop special features just for that vertical? What did your customer register for, and based on that, what other kinds of personalized content should you send? Data is information, and analytics is the process by which you transform that information into actionable insight—in this case, retention of the account as well as possible up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. So how can you do this? The first place to start is surveying your customer base to assess a general sense of satisfaction. This could be a combination of internal scoring from employees who work with customers and external surveying of the customers themselves. When you look at that information in combination with sentiment analysis from social media or e-mail communications, you can then start to assess how satisfied they are. This kind of customer insight will help you understand what your customers need and where those needs might not be currently met. You'll want to have a process in place to review this information regularly. Another indicato
Need for speed and agility
New technologies enable agility in campaign creation and deployment as well as ease in measuring outcomes, both of which are a welcome respite from the manual methods of the past, which will save you a lot of time when done right. Moreover, agile, data-driven marketing creates relevant experiences for prospective buyers, helping you to acquire them more easily and convert them into customers. But this environment also creates the expectation of instant results, ever more successful results, and a never-ending pressure to learn, improve, and move on to the next campaign. That's just as much of a trap as doing more with less. Doing things faster just because you have the tools to do so is another easy way to burn out. Ensuring thoughtful, creative, effective marketing takes time, and that time is your ally in brainstorming and producing fresh ideas. The key here is balancing expediency and efficiency with strategy and results.
Rapidly changing buyer
Not so long ago, buyers had fewer choices to make and smaller problems to solve. Today we see that B2B buyers are affected by the same ground-shifting complexities that impact vendors: ○Buyers are trying to fix big problems ○Buyers have many options ○Buyers can research their options before contacting the vendor ○Buyers are increasingly mobile ○Buyers expect two-way communication ○Buyers are connected with each other (social media) Because of this evolving B2B buyer behavior, marketers today have to be more technically adept, be more sensitive to context (for example, understanding the differences between mobile and desktop ads, e-mails, and websites), and offer a truly differentiated product via messaging that resonates with buyers. Marketers must bring a keen emotional understanding of the job of personalizing outreach such that it is appropriate 100% of the time—which is not an easy thing to do. And marketers are expected to listen to the social media conversation at all times in the hopes of gleaning insight into the wants and needs of the marketplace, understanding sentiment about their industry, and using that information to add value.
Predictive Analytics
Now that you've aggregated your web, marketing, and customer analytics, you can use that information to help score and grade new prospective customer leads, determine potential interest in your products and services, and also understand exactly who is not ready to buy so that you can put them into the appropriate lead nurturing/drip marketing campaign. This activity is accentuated by the quickly growing number of cloud-based predictive analytics solutions for B2B marketers. Predictive analytics starts with a company's CRM and marketing automation data, draws on a multitude of additional data points used as buying signals, and shows the probability of each prospect and account converting. This can be used for more accurate lead scoring, better insights into customer needs and accounts that might be at risk, and discovery of more profitable market segments. Imagine if you could predict which channels will convert best and which campaigns will provide the best return. That's where marketing is going: becoming more data-driven and scientific in its approach to finding the best customers for its business and providing them with the best product match. Although we've used historical data to assume what would work in the future, predictive analytics will tell us. So how can you take advantage of predictive analytics right now? To find new prospects, consider running predictive lead scoring on your database to discover which prospects are most likely to convert. This is particularly useful for companies with large databases of several hundred thousand records or more. Predictive lead scoring will take your database, enhance it with data from hundreds of sources, and compare the results to current customers to find the best matches. Look at offerings from vendors such as Infer, Lattice Engines, and Mintigo, among others.
More channels and platforms
On top of massive amounts of data, new channels and platforms are also proliferating rapidly. Although they can be useful for reaching new prospects and customers, their usage can come at a cost: the time needed to learn how to use a new platform, hire someone else to do it, or find an outsourced resource to help. For example, social media encompasses a broad array of possibilities, but what is the appropriate mix—and is it even possible to learn every platform? You might use Twitter and LinkedIn, but should your company also be on Pinterest and Instagram, which weren't even around a few years ago? What about YouTube? And what will be new tomorrow that needs to be added to the mix? This never-ending channel proliferation takes time, money, and effort to learn and feed with new content, and should be evaluated over time to ensure that chosen channels are still relevant to buyers. This puts enormous pressure on B2B marketers to continually learn, evaluate, and maintain new channels and platforms. It's one thing to be responsible for the company's website; it's entirely another thing to be responsible for the company's website, LinkedIn page, Facebook profile, Twitter page, Google+ profile, YouTube channel, AdWords campaigns, Bing campaigns, LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, retargeting campaigns, analytics reporting, experimentation program, automation platform, targeting and personalization efforts, content marketing, and e-mail marketing, among other things. That's a lot to learn, master, keep up with, feed, evaluate, and report on, but if you want to be where your buyers are and create the best experience for them, it's what you have to do.
Validate/verify your data
One of the ways you can manage bad data before you upload your CRM contacts into the marketing automation platform is to run them through an e-mail appending/verification service. That way, you can identify, update, or delete the bad e-mails before you ever upload them. At the same time, you can append important information that might be missing that will enable you to segment the database into targeted lists, such as company size, industry, and title. Cleaning up your e-mail lists means you will be able to lower your bounce rate when you run your first e-mail campaign, which is important. One of the mistakes B2B marketers make when they are first starting out in marketing automation is to run an e-mail campaign to the entire database to see who bounces or unsubscribes, and then use the resulting e-mail addresses as the master database—but that's not a recommended best practice. Here's why: If your database has a higher than 10% bounce rate, you could face future issues with e-mail deliverability such that legitimate e-mail addresses could begin to bounce. Your e-mail sending reputation for your e-mail domain will degrade and possibly result in blacklisting of the IP used to send e-mail—so, make sure you clean up your records and verify your remaining e-mails through a third party before importing them into your marketing automation platform. There are many e-mail appending/verification services that can help you clean up your CRM, and it's a good idea to use that service even if you aren't considering marketing automation, just to keep your CRM in order. People move, they change jobs, and companies open new offices all the time—leading to questionable data quality. The only way to deal with this situation is to keep up with it. Data.com and FreshAddress are two well-known data appending/cleaning services to check out; there are many others.
Data
So what do you know about your prospects that will help you target them and create a better experience for them? If you are like most B2B companies, you are likely already using forms to capture some information, such as name, title, company, e-mail address, phone number, and perhaps some geographic information such as country or state. That's a start. With just that information, you can create campaigns for everyone within a certain zip code or area code, from a certain company, or with a particular title, for example. Whatever data you have should be segmented into meaningful groups that share similar characteristics—the idea is to segment as finely as possible in order to best target your audience. Although targeting prospective customers has always been important in B2B marketing, functionality within experimentation tools, marketing automation platforms, and advertising networks make it more powerful than ever. When done correctly, targeting and personalization garner long-term loyalty and therefore higher customer lifetime values. When done incorrectly, they create cynicism and exasperation. For example, something as simple as personalizing e-mail can go wrong when the e-mail is addressed to "FNAME," "%%First_Name%%," "firstname," or some other variable tag that doesn't get dynamically generated, in this case because the contact record does not contain a first name in that field. Another example is when the e-mail is addressed to someone else, such as a "Dear Mark" e-mail that recently arrived in my inbox.
Demographic
Such as age and gender, as well as interests. This might seem more suitable for a B2C (business-to-consumer) context, but even for B2B audiences, you might find out something interesting about visitors who convert versus those who don't, based on their demographics and interests. For example, you can see whether men or women bounce more or less, the difference in their number of sessions and content consumed, and the number of goal completions, among other things. Knowing this enables you to better target your website content.
Practice database hygiene
The implementation process itself is one of the most important factors determining marketing automation success, because it's your first and best opportunity to make sure that everything is right, and that means you should clean up your CRM database before implementing marketing automation. Your marketing automation software will synchronize with your CRM, and if you have a lot of duplicates or bad records, you'll have a big problem that will need to be cleaned up in both systems. Let's say someone has come to your site and registered for an e-book, and you've converted the lead to a contact. Without marketing automation, when they come back to your site, they typically register again with an e-mail address, which means the same contact could be in your database (as both a lead and a contact) with multiple e-mail addresses and other contact information. This is unfortunate, because marketing automation platforms match on e-mail addresses, but that doesn't mean they know which e-mail is the best one—that's your job. In addition to deduping, convert all leads to contacts as appropriate, associate those contacts with their known accounts, and standardize all the account names. For example, GE might be in your database as GE, Ge, G E, Gen Elec, General Elec, Gen Electric, or General Electric—but they are all the same account and need to be deduped, merged, and standardized. Other issues with data quality include not only different spellings of a company's name, but also the following situations: -Different e-mail addresses for the same contact -Typos generated when the data was entered -Missing data (no first name, last name, company name, or e-mail address—this is particularly difficult for marketing automation systems, which typically match on e-mail address) -Intentionally wrong information, such as a prospect registering as Abcd Efghijk -Different mailing addresses You must merge, purge, delete, and convert contact records; do whatever is necessary so that the database records you are importing into your marketing automation software are as pristine as possible.
New tools and technologies
The marketing technology landscape includes analytics, experimentation, marketing automation, and targeting and personalization, among other tools. But learning these tools, and using them on a daily basis, can max out a marketer's ability to take full advantage of them, even when they're fundamental to the job. As tools and technologies evolve, so must a marketer's ability to learn new features and functionality of the tools they've already deployed, as well as the new tools coming into the marketplace. To take advantage of this new digital reality, think about how you can use these tools to transform processes, rather than as just another interface to log in to in order to get work done. Move your thinking to a higher level. For example, consider these questions: -How can you evolve traditional rote tactics into insight-driven marketing via analytics? -How can you shift from one-and-done programs to continuous marketing optimization via experimentation? -How can you eliminate inconsistent follow-up by adopting programmatic lead nurturing via marketing automation? -How can you move from a single, generalized campaign message to targeted, personalized content across platforms, channels, and devices? You'll get the answers to these questions in the chapters to come. Taken as a whole, these new technologies enable B2B marketers to gain insight into their buyers' behavior, test what content and experiences visitors prefer, automate engaging campaigns to nurture potential buyer interest, and deliver the right message to the right buyer at the right time in the buyer's journey. Let's take a closer look at these technologies before we dive into them in the following chapters.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
The quantifiable metrics a company uses to evaluate progress toward critical success factors. -Your most important marketing metrics are called key performance indicators (KPIs), and the most important KPIs are almost always related to contribution to revenue. For example: -Number of leads -Cost per lead -Lead-to-customer ratio -Amount of revenue sourced by marketing -Percentage of revenue sourced by marketing -Number of new customers sourced by marketing
E-mail marketing
This is truly the bread and butter of marketing automation—the ability to create and send e-mails, either one-to-one, to a list, or from an automated campaign. There are many dynamics of a successful e-mail marketing program that we'll review in Chapter 9, "Programming, Part 2: Demand Generation." To help you execute e-mail marketing, you'll want to look for a marketing automation platform that offers the capability to carry out these tasks: -Easily create, design, and edit HTML and text e-mails -Analyze e-mails for browser compatibility and spam potential -Create e-mail templates for reuse -Schedule delivery -A/B test content to see what recipients prefer -Create e-mail preference centers so that prospects and customers can manage their list subscriptions or unsubscribe altogether
Digital Marketing
Uses all digital media, including the Internet and mobile and interactive channels, to develop communication and exchanges with customers.
Targeting
Website Targeting and Personalization Because your company's website is integral to the B2B buying process, it's critical that the content on it is relevant for multiple audiences. To do that, companies use site personalization to gear content toward specific prospects according to segmentation criteria such as title, industry, department, function, company size, and geography. It's important to know whether you are engaging with your target audience on your website, so more important than the volume of traffic to your site is the actual demographic makeup of that traffic. Are the titles, industries, functional areas, company sizes, and level of seniority of your buyers, users, and their influencers you are targeting engaging with content on your website? You can investigate this by examining your analytics as well as the visitor activity history in your marketing automation platform. Additionally, use the dimensions and segments from your web analytics tool, such as search terms, day-parting, geography, and traffic sources, to analyze traffic. Your experimentation platform should be able to help you target and optimize for each visitor segment based on a number of criteria, such as these: User behavior, such as new versus returning visitors Recency, frequency, and monetary value Location, such as country, region/state, and marketing area (known as Metropolitan Statistical Area, or MSA) Mobile device and capabilities, such as touchscreen versus keyboard Browser and operating system Contextual information, such as referring site, search engine, search terms, paid versus organic, and specific landing page -Day- and time-parting (day of week, time of day, or even time zone, for example) -Language -Externally defined criteria, such as from CRM, user databases, or third-party data sources For example, if you know that a visitor is arriving from Germany using a smartphone after a Google search, you can personalize the experience with the appropriate language, format, and content. Marketing automation also enables you to personalize the website experience through the use of dynamic content, which is simply HTML content on the site, forms, landing pages, and/or e-mail messages that changes based on who is vi
Analytics Best Practices
What gets measured gets managed, and if you want to manage your marketing, you'll have to measure the results. Plan what to measure based on your KPIs, and pick only a handful that truly matter. Some other best practices include the following: -Don't just measure; do something with the data. This is perhaps the biggest challenge in analytics—turning all of your sources of data into actionable insights that make a difference to the business. As you are learning about what works and what doesn't on your website, in your marketing channels, and with your customers and future customers, share that information with the business. Suggest what must be changed or kept the same based on your analysis. -Start small, but plan to grow over time. Many companies start with just web analytics, but that naturally leads into channel analytics (marketing analytics), which then leads to channel optimization, which then leads to more information about customers and prospects (customer and predictive analytics), which then results in a strategic, company-wide analysis program that includes competitive analysis, and other marketplace dynamics. That means you might start your career in marketing as a web analyst but end up in the corporate strategy department as the director of business intelligence. -Report visually. When presenting the results of your web, marketing, customer, and predictive analytics, consider reporting visually via a dashboard or scorecard to help your audience better comprehend the results. The more you can show, instead of tell, the more easily your executive team will grasp the effectiveness of your results. -Focus on results first instead of cost. Although you will need cost information to understand your average cost per acquisition and cost per lead, it's best not to start the conversation with it—lead with the contribution to revenue first, then cost per acquisition and cost per lead, and then total cost. So, when reporting: results first, then cost. -Old data = bad data. Your CRM data decays over time, and you will want to append and cleanse your database regularly. The good news here is that your marketing automation system and CRM is likely integrated with a data verification/validation/updating servi
Be careful
Your e-mail campaigns and landing pages should be written and designed outside of your marketing automation platform. That's because after you have something cued up in the system, it's extremely easy to make it public, whether it's ready or not. I say this from experience; I was just about to e-mail an event landing-page URL to a key client who was speaking at the event when I thought to myself, "I'll just check to make sure the auto-triggered thank-you e-mail is all set." There was no reason for me to think the thank-you e-mail wasn't all set; I was just being super cautious. And good thing too—the e-mail was half-written, with placeholder text and typos galore. But there it was—cued up as an autoresponder to a live landing page!
Web Analytics
Your website is the foundation of your digital presence and online marketing efforts. But how do you know whether those efforts are paying off? The first place to check is your web analytics, which gives you the ability to understand how your visitors (prospective customers) find you and behave on your website—giving you insight into what's important to them and helping you better deliver on what matters to them. It also enables you to understand what's not working on your site—where visitors drop off and what they're not doing that you want them to do, such as viewing important content. So just as much as web analytics measures behavior, it also measures the lack of it, and it's important to look at both what's working and what's not working. All of that information will help you optimize the look and feel, navigation, content, and layout of your site—helping to improve the online experience (and hopefully maximize conversions, such as registering for a webinar or downloading a whitepaper). Analytics is also important because it's a key place to look for improvements to your site that you can then turn into hypotheses to test. We'll investigate that concept further in Chapter 4, "Experimentation and Optimization." You might have a free or paid web analytics implementation, depending on your company's acumen with and dedication to a data-driven business. Even with a free service such as Google Analytics, you will be able to track many important metrics per any time frame, as well as compare two time frames against each other in order to better understand historical trend analysis. You can further drill down by combining metrics; for example, the percentage of visitors who came to the website from LinkedIn and ended up bouncing. Some of the things you can measure specifically in Google Analytics are audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversions. When examining these concepts, it's important to keep your website goals in mind to understand whether these metrics are positive or negative.
Firmographic
descriptive attributes of firms that can be used to aggregate individual firms into meaningful market segments (basically what demographics are to people, but about companies).
Multivariate Testing
experiments with multiple elements and multiple variations of those elements being tested. For example, think of a page with a headline, a subhead, copy, an image, a form, and a call to action—those are six individual elements that can be tested. If you test three variations of each of these six elements, you are performing multivariate testing, the results of which will illustrate which combination of these elements visitors preferred, as well as which specific element(s) influenced visitor behavior (and which didn't).
A/B Testing
is a head-to-head comparison in which one or more new versions of something (a whole page or single element, such as a headline in an ad, a subject line in an e-mail, or an image on a page) are tested against the original version, which is called the control. For example, a new version of a call to action (such as a Download Now button) might compete against the original call-to-action button to see which one visitors click on more often.
