When Marketing Automation Shouldn’t Be Used

I am a big fan of marketing automation.  It has a lot of great uses to streamline your marketing efforts, get you a wealth of insight and help you tailor the right messages at the right time to the right people.  But as with everything, there are exceptions.  One big exception is using marketing automation tools when you are trying to reach a C-level audience.  The typical CEO or other C-level person is extremely busy trying to run their business day-to-day.  The last thing they are going to do is read marketing emails or surf the web in search of information about a particular solution set.  And if they do, they certainly don’t want a vendor calling them up and trying to sell them the latest widget to solve their problem.

C-level people are best reached through live interactions or interruptive marketing techniques such as a slick direct mail package.  These are not the type of techniques that you can automate or score on.  I am hard-pressed to tell you how you can use marketing automation at all when reaching this audience.  The only way I can think to take advantage is to use marketing automation to reach the people that will sell you internally to their C-level.

The bottom line is that every technology has a time and place.  It is probably best to back away from the technology when you are trying to sell into most C-level audiences.  There is no shortcut to reach that target audience.

 

Quick Asset Creation Success Factors

You know that you need lots of assets to support your demand generation efforts, but now you are facing the challenge of creating those assets with limited time, budget and staff.  This task can seem daunting, but a few basic principals will help you accelerate your production of new assets such as white papers, webinars, videos and case studies to support your lead generation and nurturing plans.

First, viewing the content (i.e., headline, key messages, detail) as separate from the format (e.g., white paper, webinar) will help you create two distinct workstreams that can feed each other.  Subject matter experts are needed to create the content.  But once the content is created and approved, publishing the content in a variety of formats and channels should be under the complete control of the marketing team.  Creative teams, agencies and contractors can be used to manage the formatting and publishing.

Second, one piece of content can and should be published in a variety of formats.  No need to look at one whitepaper or one webinar as its own distinct project.  One piece of content should be the scope of the project, with many assets that come out of that.  Re-purpose that whitepaper into a webinar, podcast, blog postings and newsletter article.

Finally, don’t constrain yourself to a single workstream managed by a single team.  Hire dedicated or contract writers to help create a constant stream of content.  Use your own creative team as well as agencies and contractors to create the assets.  You should have one person or small team managing the strategy for the assets, but many people can be involved in the creation to help you accelerate your results.

 

Social Media – Just Another Way to Have a Conversation

A lot of marketers are still intimidated by social media.  There doesn’t seem to be a lot of clear direction out there for how to use it, how to track it and how to make it effective.  It doesn’t have to be that difficult.  Think of social media as just another way to have a conversation with your target base.  These conversations used to happen only in a coffee shop, with the stranger seated beside you on an airplane or in your backyard as you chat with your neighbor.  Social media just provides a way for people to connect with a larger group of people with similar interests or backgrounds and have those conversations more broadly.  If you approach social media as a marketer the same way you would if you just happened to be seated by one of your targets on an airplane, it should be very clear what to do.

First, have a conversation.  A conversation implies give and take, not one-way broadcasting of messages.  And not canned elevator speeches.  A conversation is a two-way communication about something of value or interest to both parties.  Provide some interesting information or valuable stats to your targets.  Ask them for their input or experiences.

Also, it should be obvious, but don’t just sell them.  No one wants to be stuck beside the used car salesman who is trying to sell them a car they don’t want on a 4 hour plane ride.  If I find you have a genuine need for what I can provide and offer up information about it – that’s different.  You would be interested in discussing that.  But to find that out, you first have to find out more about the other person.

Finally, you need to make sure you are being either relevant or entertaining in some way to keep their interest.  How long would I stand and talk to you if you droned on about a topic of no interest to me?  Attention spans online are even shorter, because I don’t feel the need to stand and nod politely while you talk – it’s much easier to walk away.

Hopefully this gives you some food for thought as you continue to navigate the murky waters of social media.

 

A Day in the Life of a Successful Leader of Revenue Marketing – Part 2

After a successful first half of her day and a good break, Janet is ready to tackle the tasks ahead of her.  At 1 pm, Janet reviews the latest campaign metrics.  She notices that one of her campaigns is not getting good response rates.  She calls the campaign manager into her office to brainstorm getting this campaign back on track.  It is determined that the messaging and offers should be tweaked.  The campaign manager goes off to make the changes and they agree to discuss the results in a few days.

Next she takes a look at the lead scoring results.  She notices many leads in “hot” status.  A quick look in the CRM shows that many of these leads have not been followed-up on by the lead qualification team.  She heads over to talk to the lead of that team.  The conversation is easy because the teams are in close alignment on strategy and incentives.  Everyone is working towards the same goals.  She determines that the issue is around having too many leads in hot status, but when the lead qual team follows up, not many are converting.  She discusses with her Marketing Automation administrator some changes she wants to make to the lead scoring criteria.  The changes will be made by the end of the day and they can review the results in a few days again to see if it helps.

At 3 pm, Janet interviews a couple of candidates for her team.  She is looking for a business analyst who can help with reporting and data quality.  This will be a key role to keep her team supplied with the right information and prospect data to be effective in their campaign efforts.  She is looking for someone who can not only crunch the numbers but also analyze the results and bring suggestions to the table.  She also wants someone who is familiar with data best practices that can keep their database clean and complete.

At the end of the day, Janet looks back at her dashboard to find some campaigns that are working well.  She shoots off some meeting invitations to business leaders to discuss how she might be able to replicate these campaigns with their content.  She updates the campaign calendar based on her earlier strategy discussions and shuts down her computer for the night.  She’s now off to watch her son’s soccer game secure in the knowledge that her marketing department is an effective and efficient piece of the company’s revenue engine.

 

A Day in the Life of a Successful Leader of Revenue Marketing – Part 1

Janet gets to the office around 7 am because she likes to work early to avoid interruptions and be done with work at a reasonable time so she can spend more time with her family.  However, her CFO feels the same way, so this morning she is accosted with questions as soon as she walks in about the effectiveness of her marketing spend.  Fortunately, Janet has this information readily on hand because she has a marketing dashboard that gives her real-time information about closed-loop marketing ROI.  She can tell the CFO exactly how much she has spent and what she has in both closed won and anticipated revenue for the month, quarter and year.

At 9 am, Janet has a meeting scheduled with her CMO to talk about the marketing strategy for the next quarter.  She walks in with information about what has been working for them and what hasn’t.  She also has some ideas about what they could try because she has been quietly testing out new strategies for the past few months and has information about what might work.  The meeting concludes promptly at 9:30 with a clear vision of the strategy for the next quarter and buy-in from the CMO.

At 10 am, Janet chairs a staff meeting where the Revenue Marketing team reports out on the status of current campaign projects.  With simple workflow tools and project dashboards, Janet can clearly see where everything stands and get tasks at risk of slipping back on track.  Everyone on her team has clear roles and understands how they are evaluating campaigns against revenue.

At 11 am, Janet sits down to review the latest content pieces the team has developed.  She has clearly defined personas and buy cycles for her prospects, so she knows what content will be effective in each stage of the decision process for each type of prospect.  That makes her job in editing the content easy.

At noon, she finally gets a break before gearing up for the second half of her day…

 

What if you didn’t jump on the bandwagon?

My first real experience with creating web pages was in the mid-90’s with the Purdue University Graduate School.  They knew they needed a web site, as it was the next big communication medium.  So I took their existing application forms, converted them to PDF, and added all the fields so an applicant could fill it out online, print it out and mail it in.  That seems crazy now, but that’s the best we could think of at the time.  They were just doing what everyone else was.  It’s not really a lot different from how most companies use video, social media and other new media today.

Granted, there are a few companies doing great things with these channels.  And we can learn a lot from watching them.  But until you can create something that is really adding value to your clients and prospects, just jumping on the bandwagon is probably not the right answer for you.  As your mother might say, “just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean you need to.”

That may seem blasphemous to most marketers today.  You should always be exploring new channels.  But you can waste a lot of time and money doing things just to blend in with the crowd.  What you really want to do is stand out from the crowd.  What if you bucked the trend and creatively used some “older” techniques?  What if you were the only company in your industry sending out hand-written letters?  What if you were the only one taking your product samples door-to-door?  What if you didn’t attend that industry trade show but instead hosted exclusive dinners of your own in cities around the country for those who couldn’t go to the show?

Yes, you need to make sure that you are doing efficient and effective marketing, but you may find that you can stand out more by looking for things that everyone else is not doing.  And if you happen to come up with a creative way to use social media or email to stand out in the meantime, go for it!  Just don’t limit your channel choices to only the latest and greatest trends.

 

Feeling Overwhelmed with Marketing?

As someone who has been on both the consulting and client side of marketing for many years, I know how quickly you can become overwhelmed with everything you should be doing.  Marketing tactics are constantly evolving, technology is moving at the speed of light, keeping up with social media is a full time job and since you know that next marketing department re-org is right around the corner, you are also constantly fighting to make yourself relevant, knowledgeable and valuable to your employer.  And that doesn’t even count doing your day job.  How do you balance all of this and still get some sleep at night?

First, I would recommend that you choose your battles.  You can’t do everything, so you need to decide what is most important.  There are two dimensions to this.  First, what is most important for your employer?  What will help you meet your company’s goals as well as your marketing department’s goals?  What is going to get you the best return, get your company or product’s brand recognized, or sell more?  What are your customers concerned about?  What will make your boss happy?  Second, you also need to think about what is important for you and your career.  Pick an area you love and nurture that.  Maybe it’s social media or technology or data.  Dig into that a bit and you will quickly find new skills that will help you advance your own career as well as give you personal satisfaction.

Second, I would recommend you prioritize your efforts.  It’s kind of the same as choosing your battles, but really it’s more about figuring out how to do one thing well then moving onto the next.  When you know how to do something well, it takes a lot less time and effort than those things you don’t know how to do.  So prioritizing your efforts will help you tackle that list in no time, whereas fragmenting your efforts across too many things at the same time can just lead to frustration and failure for the whole list.

Finally, don’t be afraid to enlist some help.  No one can do all of this alone.  Maybe you need to work together with your marketing team to share the load better.  Maybe you need to hire a person or agency with the skills you are looking for to learn from.  Maybe you need to join a group or go to a conference to learn more.  In any case, take the time to do it and ask for help.  Going it alone will not lead to more fame or fortune for you or your marketing department.  The world is changing quickly and you just can’t keep up with everything on your own.  No matter how much experience or education you think you have, there is always something else to learn.

 

Simplify Your (Marketing) Life

I went to Delta’s website the other day to check on a flight status.  I don’t normally fly Delta, so it’s not a site I frequent.  But I found what I needed within about 2 seconds of loading the homepage and within about 10 seconds I had the answer I was looking for.  Delta knows that there are a few major functions that anyone visiting their site wants to do: book a new flight, login to see/change existing flights, check-in, or check flight status.  They put these options in big buttons right in the middle of the homepage and when you click on one, they ask only for the most relevant information that you would have to get to the next step.

When it comes to getting someone’s attention using marketing or getting them to use something like your website, simpler is always better.  No one is going to spend more than 15 seconds trying to figure out how to navigate your website to get what they need or reading your email to figure out what you want them to do.  Stop right now and count off 15 seconds.  Now imagine that it takes you this long to figure out an email or website – what would you do?

How do you simplify your marketing?  First and foremost, figure out what you want people to do and make everything on your webpage, email, direct mail, etc. point to that action.  Make sure you only put one action in a marketing message.  Simplify text as much as possible – anything over 2 paragraphs in an email or webpage (or direct mail, ad or any other marketing tactic outside of content assets, for that matter) is just driving people away.  If you want them to download a whitepaper, make a big button in the middle of the screen that says “Download the Whitepaper.”  Never ask for information on a form that you already know or can figure out otherwise – 3 field or less forms actually perform best.

And finally, test test test.  Once you simplify your marketing tactic as much as you possibly can, find someone that knows nothing about what you are trying to do with this tactic and have them test it out.  If they can’t figure out what to do in a few seconds, go back to the drawing board.

 

Never Run a Campaign That Isn’t Successful on Paper

If you knew in advance that your campaign would bomb, you’d never run it, right?  If you are a traditional marketer, you probably know how to evaluate which publications to run an ad in or whether an event is useful to attend.  And you evaluate these things up front before ever investing the resources or money in them.  The same should be true of your lead generation campaigns.

The difference with lead generation campaigns is that you should have a much more specific goal in mind, such as generating a certain number of leads or revenue from the campaign.  The best way to figure this out is by modeling based on past history.  If you’ve done campaigns long enough, you should know your average conversion rates.  But even if you don’t have past history to draw from, there are enough baseline metrics out there for B2B firms, you should be able to find a reasonable set of metrics to model your campaign.

At it’s simplest, here’s what a model might look like to determine the expected revenue of a campaign:

# Inquiries x % Conversion to Opportunities x % Close Rate x Average Deal Size = Expected Revenue

You may also need to add in information about channel performance and number of targets to figure out how many inquiries to expect.  If you tend to market to a lead throughout the sales cycle, these numbers will generally be reflected in your conversion rates, so you are really looking for number of inquiries that this specific campaign might generate.  If this campaign is meant to be one that pushes people through the pipeline, maybe you are more concerned about increasing the conversion rate or speeding cycle time.  Even if you don’t have numbers, you can model out what it might look like if you increase the conversion rate from a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead by even 1%.

If you don’t have a past history, at least create a model with some conservative numbers to track against.  Once you do this a couple of times, you will have that history, but you need to see if your assumptions are reasonable.  So start making some assumptions to test.  Bottom line – never run a campaign at all before you at least take the time to see if it can theoretically meet your goals.

 

The Sales Cycle vs. The Buy Cycle

There is a big difference between a company’s sales cycle and a customer’s buy cycle.  A sales cycle is looked at from the standpoint of the company.  What steps does a company need to walk a customer through before they purchase.  A customer’s buy cycle usually starts well before this.  It usually starts back at a stage of understanding there is a problem and what the possible solutions to that problem might be.  If you are lucky, you get engaged that early with your prospect, but it’s hard to do that.  You really have to be in the right place at the right time.

Which is where marketing comes in.  Marketing can help influence in a number of ways across both the buy cycle and the sales cycle.  But first they need to make sure they have both mapped out and clearly understand how each marketing activity is influencing a specific stage of one of these cycles.  Activities that are meant for all stages are typically not very helpful to either the buyer or the salesperson trying to make the sale.  Marketing materials and activities need to be much more targeted to drive action.

In the early stages of a customer’s buy cycle, educational materials are most appropriate.  These materials rarely talk about products or solutions at all – they are more focused on identifying issues and challenges and educating the audience on what the implications are.  Once a buyer understands the problem, they are usually ready to move onto more specific materials around the products or services you offer and how they might solve their problems.  Once they are convinced they have the right solution, only then are they ready to talk about you as a company and how you stack up to the competition.

From the standpoint of the sales cycle, the sales team needs specific materials to support each stage.  Sometimes this is a case study or competitor matrix to help move the buyer to the next level, but sometimes it is as simple as materials that will keep your company’s name in front of the buyer as they try to negotiate the contract.  The sales team needs you to help demonstrate the kind of value that a buyer might get by becoming one of your customers.

So to summarize, here are your action items to start ensuring you have the right marketing activities and materials to meet the needs of both your targets and your sales team:

• Map your target’s buy cycle and your salesperson’s sales cycle.
• Map your activities and content to specific stages.
• Figure out where the gaps are and fill those in.
• If you have materials/activities that span more than one or two stages, try adjusting them to focus in better on a specific action.