Download CREATING TARGETED, RELEVANT CAMPAIGNS

CREATING TARGETED, RELEVANT CAMPAIGNS
As a marketer, you want to be
empowered to communicate with your
audience in a personalized, highly
relevant way—at scale. Your marketing
automation solution should allow you to
easily target the right person, with the
right message at the right time
across channels.
As you evaluate marketing automation,
you’ll need to consider each solution’s ability
to segment your audience, and to nurture
those segments to become customers.
14 l How to Evaluate Marketing Automation
CREATING TARGETED, RELEVANT CAMPAIGNS
SEGMENTATION:
Segmenting your communications with
buyers is essential to your marketing success.
Traditionally, marketers have segmented
their databases using demographic and
firmographic criteria, such as job title,
company size, industry, region, language,
and more.
Some marketing automation solutions can
also segment your audience by behaviors.
On the basic end, some solutions can
segment by behaviors like “clicking on
an email” or “filling out a form.” On the
more advanced end, other solutions can
segment based on cross-channel behaviors—
including those that occur on social
or in person.
Which of these ways will you want
to segment your audience?
nn By firmographics (job title, company size,
industry, etc.)
nn By simple behaviors (such as “clicking on
an email” or “filling out a form”)
15 l How to Evaluate Marketing Automation
nn By cross-channel behaviors (such as “visiting a
tradeshow booth” or “sharing content
on Facebook”)
Here are some examples of segments you
might want to target within marketing
automation:
nn Leads or contacts from a specific industry who have
visited the company website in the last 60 days
nn Leads or contacts at companies larger than 1,000
employees, who have clicked a specific link in an
email in the past two weeks
nn Leads or contacts who have shared content on a
social network in the last two weeks
nn Leads or contacts who have participated in a
social poll in the past 30 days
nn Customers who have visited the company’s
knowledge base more than three times in
the last week
nn Prospects (not customers) who have
visited the company booth at a
tradeshow in the last 90 days
nn Prospects (not customers) who have
visited the company’s pricing page
on the corporate website two
times in one day
CREATING TARGETED, RELEVANT CAMPAIGNS
LEAD NURTURING:
FEATURE: MULTI-CHANNEL LISTENING
“Lead nurturing” refers to the way you
engage potential buyers over time,
encouraging them to become customers
using timely, relevant content and
powerful messaging.
While “drip nurturing” allows you to listen at
a very basic level (i.e. you know that an email
wasn’t opened), many marketers want to listen for
behaviors across multiple channels. Advanced,
cross-channel listening gives you a complete
picture of your prospects and customers.
To create a lead nurturing campaign, you
simply set up a series (or “stream”) of
content that you’d like to deliver, and your
marketing automation delivers it in the
order you specify. Solutions with only the
most basic lead nurturing (often called “drip
nurturing”) will typically follow a process
like this: send an email, wait, send another
email, wait again. If an email does get
opened, the system sends a new one. If an
email doesn’t get opened, the system simply
sends that email again.
But as you consider your own lead nurturing
requirements, you might decide that the
ability to “listen” to leads is important to your
business. Do you want to know how leads
are engaging with your content? Evaluate
potential solutions in the following areas:
16 l How to Evaluate Marketing Automation
YOU NEED MULTI-CHANNEL LISTENING IF:
nn You want to consider cross-channel behaviors
when sending nurture emails—for example,
if someone engages with a certain product
on your website, you can automatically start
sending them emails relevant to that interest
nn You want to consider demographics,
firmographics, and behaviors when
sending email
nn You want to co-ordinate your marketing
across channels—for example, a
customer responds to an SMS message,
and then you follow up
with a related email
CREATING TARGETED, RELEVANT CAMPAIGNS
FEATURE: INTELLIGENT
CONTENT DELIVERY
Content is the fuel for your lead nurturing
strategy. The right content at the right
time is often the difference between an
“unsubscribe” and a “tell me more.” That’s
why, if you’re continually creating new
content, you’ll want to easily add it to
campaigns, and ensure that the right people
receive it.
Some solutions make it easier than others to
put the freshest content in front of prospects,
add content to nurture campaigns, and
avoid sending too many nurture emails (or
duplicates) to your database.
LOOK FOR THIS FUNCTIONALITY IF:
nn You continually create new content to
share with your database
nn You have time-sensitive invitations/
promotions that you want to easily add to
nurture streams
nn You’re concerned about over-sending to
your database (or sending the same
content twice)
17 l How to Evaluate Marketing Automation
INTELLIGENT NURTURE STREAMS:
Delivering fresh content to prospects and customers
is always a challenge. If a prospect downloads a
piece of content from your website today, you’d
hope that your marketing automation wouldn’t
send that same content in a nurture email a
day later.
Unfortunately, most solutions wouldn’t
suppress that content—at best, you might
be able to manually suppress the content
by programming conditional logic into
your campaigns. Solutions with intelligent
nurture streams, on the other hand, can
automatically suppress content an
individual has already seen.
CREATING TARGETED, RELEVANT CAMPAIGNS
REAL TIME PERSONALIZATION
LOOK FOR THIS FUNCTIONALITY IF:
Marketers spend a lot of time and energy
to be targeted with their email content, but
what about personalizing other channels?
Real time personalization allows you to
create a customized experience across
email, web, ads and mobile—not just for
known prospects and customers, but for
anonymous visitors as well.
nn You want to serve up different content when different
types of visitors come to your website (e.g. a visitor
from the healthcare industry might be shown a
different report than a visitor from financial
services; or a customer might be shown an invite
to an appreciation dinner, while a prospect
is shown a demo)
nn You want to identify behavioral attributes of your
website visitors (like product interest, buying history,
site browsing history, number of visits, search terms
used, and price sensitivity) and serve up content
based on these attributes
nn You want to identify profile attributes of your website
visitors (like place of work, size of company, revenue,
industry, and geo-location) and serve up content
based on these attributes
nn You want to personalize with content you already
have in your CMS, or content management system
(note: some solutions are only compatible with one CMS, so
look for solutions that can be used with any CMS)
ALIGNING MARKETING AND SALES
Don’t just deliver names to the sales
team—deliver qualified leads who
are ready to engage. Your marketing
automation solution should be able to
“score” leads based on their readiness,
nurture leads until they reach a high
score, and help the sales team prioritize
the names you’ve worked hard
to acquire.
LEAD SCORING
Lead scoring is one of the core tenants of
sales and marketing alignment. The process
of lead scoring defines and assigns scores
to your leads, which indicate their readiness
to buy—and therefore their readiness to be
handed off from marketing to sales.
Basic marketing automation offers
rudimentary lead scoring capabilities. Using
generic scoring criteria to judge a limited set
of behaviors, these systems simply assign a
single score to each name in your Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
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On the other end of the spectrum, more advanced solutions
let you use multiple scores for multiple products, score
website visits and form-fills based on their relevance, score
based on complex behaviors, and separate interest from fit.
To pass along only the most qualified leads to sales, which
of these lead scoring features will you need?
FEATURE: MULTIPLE LEAD SCORES
If a lead is very interested in Product A, but not
interested in Product B, a single lead score
will only tell you that they’re generically
interested—not which product they’re
interested in. Multiple leads scores
allow you to measure interest in multiple
products, and also allow you to set up
workflows triggered by those scores.
YOU NEED MULTIPLE LEAD SCORES IF:
nn You have multiple product lines
nn You have multiple business units
nn You want to create automated
workflows specific to one product or
another
ALIGNING MARKETING AND SALES
FEATURE: CUSTOM SCORING
CAMPAIGNS
Generic scoring campaigns allow you to
score behaviors like “filling out a form” or
“visiting your website,” but they can’t take
the relevance of these forms and websites
into account.
Most marketers want to assign different
scores to different forms—for example, a
form fill related to a sales inquiry should be
scored more highly than a form to unlock
an early-stage ebook. Generic scoring also
can’t score visits to different pages on your
website differently—for example, a visit to
your pricing page would be scored the same
as a visit to your jobs listing page.
YOU NEED CAPABILITIES BEYOND
GENERIC SCORING IF:
nn You want to score certain forms more
highly than others
nn You want to score visits to certain web
pages more highly than others
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FEATURE: SCORING BASED ON BEHAVIOR
Basic marketing automation solutions can score a
small selection of web and email behavior—form
fills, landing page visits, email opens, and clicks.
But buyers today are multi-channel—they also
engage with your brand on social networks, and
at in-person events. The most basic lead scoring
also can’t take timing into account—it can tell that
someone has visited your website three times, but
it can’t differentiate between “three times in one
week” and “three times in one year.”
This kind of information could make a huge
difference in the urgency of a sales follow up.
LOOK FOR A SOLUTION WITH
BEHAVIOR-BASED SCORING IF:
nn Your audience engages with you on
social networks
nn Your audience engages with you
at in-person events
nn You want the frequency of a prospect’s
engagement with your website to affect
their score
ALIGNING MARKETING AND SALES
FEATURE: SCORING BASED ON FIT
Knowing that a potential buyer is interested
in your company is important, but to
accurately score them, you need to know
they’re actually a good fit—before your sales
team pursues them. That means you’ll want
to take into account both demographics and
firmographics.
For example, if you sell SaaS solutions for
enterprise businesses, a person who lists his
job title as “student” might not be a good fit,
even if he’s very engaged with your website.
Very basic lead scoring can’t distinguish
between a member of your core audience,
and a person who’s highly unlikely to buy.
FIT-BASED LEAD SCORING MAY BE
NECESSARY IF:
nn You want to target specific people with
specific demographics
nn You want to target companies with
specific firmographics
21 l How to Evaluate Marketing Automation
nn You’re concerned about passing the highest
quality prospects to your sales team in a prioritized
fashion
Sales Insight
In the era of “Big Data,” you’re probably collecting more
information about prospects than your sales team can
actually use. But while sales doesn’t need to know about
every email open, form conversion, or webpage visit by a
prospect, you do need a system for filtering and presenting
them with the most useful, relevant prospect data.
If your marketing automation solution doesn’t provide that
system, you’re back to square one—potentially bombarding
your sales team with meaningless, isolated activities.
As you evaluate marketing automation, ask how each
solution gives sales the insight they really need.
FEATURE: PRIORITIZED LEADS AND ALERTS
Every organization has a unique sales cycle,
which is why sophisticated marketing automation
solutions allow you to define which leads are
most qualified, and which activities should
trigger alerts to sales.First, find out whether
potential solutions can prioritize your leads by
who is most likely to buy.
ALIGNING MARKETING AND SALES
Some solutions can prioritize leads by their
score (which ideally takes demographics,
firmographics, and behavioral criteria into
account), before delivering the list to sales.
YOU’LL WANT THE ABILITY TO PRIORITIZE
LEADS AND ALERTS IF:
Next, consider alert prioritization. Alerts are
typically sent the sales team when a lead
completes a relevant activity—for example,
you might create a unique alert for when
someone visits your website’s pricing page
twice in one day. But basic marketing
automation can only employ generic alerts.
nn You want your sales team to consider
lead score when deciding who to contact
These solutions can alert the sales team when
any piece of content is downloaded, but you
wouldn’t be able to prioritize one piece of
content (like a product-specific demo) over
another (like an early-stage ebook).
22 l How to Evaluate Marketing Automation
nn You want your sales team to target leads
with the most buying potential first
nn You have a variety of content, ranging
from early-stage to late-stage
nn Visits to different pages on your website
might indicate different levels of interest
nn You want to create unique alerts for your
sales team
UNDERSTANDING WHAT WORKS
One of the biggest wins for today’s
marketers is the ability to prove their
ROI (Return On Investment). While the
success of marketing campaigns was
once difficult—if not impossible—to
measure, marketing automation has
empowered marketers to definitively tie
their activities to won deals.
As you evaluate solutions, consider the type
of reports you’ll need to draw clear links
between campaigns and revenue. The more
clearly these links are drawn, the easier it
will be make data-informed decisions about
how to spend future budget, and to base
your spending decisions on what has (and
hasn’t) led to new business.
Here are some of the core features
that will help you tie revenue to
campaigns:
FEATURE: PROGRAM ROI ANALYTICS
To understand which channel, program type,
or specific vendor works best for your
23 l How to Evaluate Marketing Automation
business, you’ll need to be able to sort and compare
different campaigns.
You’ll want access to important metrics (like revenue,
pipeline, investment, new names generated, SQL’s
generated, demographic fit, etc.) for each program,
and you’ll want to be able to view that information by
channel, type, and vendor.
You also may want to compare different content offers.
For example, you might be running a content syndication
program or a sponsored email list with an outside vendor,
giving you access to a database of leads who fit your
criteria. Sophisticated program reporting can tell you
which content works best for each database.
LOOK FOR PROGRAM ROI ANALYTICS IF:
nn You use multiple vendors to run marketing
programs, and you want to know which to renew
nn You run marketing programs on multiple
channels, and you want to know which
channels work best for new names,
opportunities, and pipeline
nn You run paid programs (like content
syndication or sponsored email), and you
want to know which content works best
for each
UNDERSTANDING WHAT WORKS
FEATURE: MULTI-TOUCH (MT) REPORTING
Today, it typically takes between five and
ten touches from marketing (such as an ad,
a webinar, an email, a piece of content,
etc.) to close a deal with a new customer. If
that’s the case in your organization—or you
suspect that it is—you’ll want a
solution with what’s called “Multi-Touch”
revenue attribution.
Basic marketing automation solutions only
allow you to see the first or possibly last
touch from marketing that influences a deal.
For example, if a potential customer clicked
on a display ad, downloaded a report
from your website, attended an in-person
event, watched a demo, and then bought
your product, only the display ad would get
credit. This is known as “First-Touch” revenue
attribution, and while the first touch is
important, and it doesn’t tell the whole story.
The same is true for “Last-Touch” revenue
attribution—it’s good information, but
it’s incomplete.
24 l How to Evaluate Marketing Automation
Multi-Touch revenue attribution, on the other
hand, would give credit to every campaign in the
scenario above—your display ad, your report,
your event, and your demo would all get credit
for the deal.
MULTI-TOUCH REPORTING IS CRITICAL IF:
nn You marketing team touches prospects multiple
times before they become customers
nn You want to give credit for closed deals to
each marketing touch
nn You want insight into which programs drive the
best results so you can make the best decisions
for future programs
nn Your executive team wants specific data on
how marketing investment drives results
EXPANDING THE VALUE OF
MARKETING AUTOMATION
Two other areas to consider when
looking for a marketing automation
solution are the ecosystem you’ll
inherit and the expertise the vendor
will provide.
For example, you might be looking for a
webinar provider who is familiar with your
solution, or you might need translation services as
you go after a new geography.
Look for a platform with a large ecosystem of
partners who have marketing solutions that extend
the capability of your marketing automation. If
you’re new to marketing automation, you’ll want the
vendor you select to have a variety of resources and
support, as well as the ability to connect you with a
community of like-minded marketers.
CONCLUSION
As Raab and VentureBeat discovered
in their survey, marketing automation
is not a one-solution-fits-all technology.
The most successful, satisfied users
were those who took the time to identify
their own unique needs, and to find a
solution that could actually meet them.
Start with the five guidelines outlined by
Raab—take your time, do your homework,
focus on features, plan ahead, and deploy
quickly. As you evaluate, use our framework
above to decide what you will need to
be successful—whether it’s being able to quickly
replicate programs, do sophisticated segmentation,
or gain deep insights into your marketing’s ROI.
Finally, ask yourself how your needs will change
in the future. Migrating to a new system is painful,
so don’t underestimate your future growth. What
kind of capabilities and functionality will you need
six months, one year, or five years down the line?
Select a solution that not only has what you need
now, but can grow with you into the future.
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