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In just five years, there are now 11 times more B2B organizations using marketing automation1. Yet, when it comes to marketing automation, 85% of them are not reaching their full potential2. Part of the difficulty is keeping up with the hyper pace of change. In fact, 22% of marketers state they are not confident they can stay up to date with the best marketing automation practices3.
This means that to stay ahead of the competition, you must know and implement the latest and greatest practices that make sense for your business. As such, this e-book is designed to take you beyond the basics of marketing automation. In my first e-book, “The 3 Musts of Marketing Automation”, we provided baseline tips to help you and your business grasp the main concepts of marketing automation. In this second e-book we are breaking down the layers and providing three advanced tips that will help your business go to the next level of marketing automation. These advanced tips include: 1) keeping the customer top of mind, 2) creating a plan, and 3) tracking your customers for success.
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Digest...
Consider one of the most common workflows that MAPs and CRM share: lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is often based on the automated enrollment of an individual into a pre-set series of communications (emails). A person may be enrolled into a nurture marketing program in a variety of ways, including when a value changes in their record from the CRM system. There are many other examples such as… • Weekly/monthly product updates – Drip Campaigns • New client onboarding communications – Nurture Programs • Client Satisfaction Surveys – Landing Pages/Surveys • NPS (net promoter score) Tracking – Surveys • Customer events – Event Management ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert ◄
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Basic/ Excerpt...
About two-thirds of respondents to a recent study [download page] from Regalix indicate that it takes at least 6 months from the time of implementation to realize the benefits of using marketing automation. What are those primary benefits? The survey – fielded among 348 senior marketing executives, practitioners and business leaders from around the world – finds that improved lead management and nurturing (86%) is the most commonly-cited benefit, with many also pointing to enhanced targeting and personalization (66%). __________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Advanced/ Digest...
The black fly in the chardonnay, however, is that narrative is disconnected from reality. Marketing and technology are simply changing too rapidly. The scope of marketing is expanding exponentially by the day, as its responsibilities grow from customer communications to customer experiences, spanning the entire customer lifecycle. To pretend that a single software vendor will master all of that — and be able to keep up with all the innovations blossoming in a thousand directions across the industry — and somehow make that all stable and useable is, in my humble opinion, a fantasy. To be fair, many of the major marketing systems out there have laid the technical groundwork for this. They’ve provided APIs for third-parties to connect their applications. They’ve established partnership programs for those third-parties. You can probably find a list of those partners somewhere on their website — although for some vendors, it’s actually quite hard to find them. Instead, [Marketo is] acknowledging that these other marketing experience software companies bring tremendous value to the table. They’ve committed to make it easier for marketers to pick and choose from that incredible cornucopia of marketing technology solutions and seamlessly integrate them into their environment. And they’ve committed to give third-parties deep access into their platform’s data repositories, workflow capabilities, analytics, and more. At the risk of overplaying my hand, I’ll make two more predictions: First, marketing software developers will embrace Marketo in return. An open platform with large adoption provides a terrific vehicle for other marketing software vendors to accelerate their adoption by becoming plug-and-play solutions on top of it. Second, other major cloud/hub/suite vendors will tack to platform strategies too. This will be easier for some than others — not so much due to technical barriers, but due to barriers of politics and pride. But most will overcome those barriers because they cannot cede victory in the coming “marketing platform wars” to Marketo by sitting this out. They need to win third-party/ISV share. They cannot afford to become Blackberry while their competitors become iOS and Android. ____________________________________________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Intermediate/ Digest...
The number one concern? Whether existing marketing staff have the right skill set. More than 55 percent of companies are concerned “whether we have the in-house skills to effectively implement” marketing automation, according to the survey. That makes sense given a recent Adobe survey that suggests most traditional marketers don’t have the skills needed in today’s tech-dominated marketing world — and don’t know how to get them. Perhaps just as concerning to marketing automation vendors, however, would be a concurrent worry that marketing automation won’t deliver on its promises. 54 percent of respondents said they weren’t sure that investing in marketing automation would produce real results. Cost is a third major concern. Even though a significant number of very inexpensive marketing automation systems exist, if you’re going to hit the top of the market with enterprise solutions like Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, or Eloqua, you’re going to spend thousands if not tens of thousands pretty quickly. Mid-market solutions will run in the high hundreds and low thousands monthly, and that doesn’t include any additional personnel costs or software/data integration costs. ____________________________________________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Marketing automation is a hot area in digital marketing and brands are embracing it at a really fast pace. Check out this infographic that shows how customer wins increased with the usage of marketing automation systems.
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This global marketing automation software (MAS) market study discusses the drivers and restraints to growth, market trends, and technology trends. Global and regional forecasts are included.
Advanced/ Executive Summary...
• Marketers need intelligent tools to meet the demands of today's customers who are part of a reverse phenomenon wherein they expect brands to know them instead of the other way around. Marketing automation software (MAS) empowers marketers with tools to manage customer information and intelligently leverage it to acquire, nurture, and retain customers. • Although growing, it is in many ways a nascent market, with rapidly changing technology and solid growth potential. • This is not yet a concentrated market. Almost half of the 2013 market was dominated by 3 top competitors—Marketo, Eloqua, and Silverpop. • However, the next tier of vendors such as Infusionsoft, Act-On Software, and Hubspot is far outpacing the market in terms of growth, indicating that the landscape will change dramatically if the top market competitors do not strive to expand their respective slices of the pie. That said, Frost & Sullivan expects growing mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity as vendors strive to provide complete solutions for all end-user marketing needs. • Regionally, NALA—home to nearly every market vendor—dominates with over 80% of market share. Vendors are just expanding overseas into EMEA and APAC. • The low barrier to entry for new vendors encourages market growth. Many emerging vendors are taking advantage of the enormous demand in small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) by implementing low-end basic solutions that can be immediately adopted and used, and by experimenting with their pricing models. • Demand analysis of the end-user experience with MAS indicates that the functionality of marketing automation is ahead of the market. While the urgent need for marketing automation is understood, a gap exists between marketer skills and toolset complexity. • Lead nurturing and lead scoring are examples of 2 crucial yet highly underused features of marketing automation; users are not ready for analytics-driven marketing just yet. This skills gap has given birth to a complementary market that is adept at providing technical and consulting services to help businesses succeed using MAS. • Small businesses have just started entering the data-driven marketing model, but it is the largest potential segment in the long run. • After high-tech and business services, financial services and healthcare look promising. Retail and travel industries are ready to use MAS; education and non-profit will follow suit. __________________________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Intermediate/ Digest...
The reason that most of these hares are on the side of the road is because of a lack of slow, deliberate planning. Specifically, they did not build two or more of the following: A marketing strategy: Marketing automation can do a great job of advancing a marketing strategy but if there is no marketing strategy integrated with marketing automation, then you just have an expensive tool that cannot get a compelling return on your marketing investment. A content marketing strategy and framework: Content is the fuel for your marketing automation engine. You are not going to get very far without a content marketing strategy. Marketing and Sales alignment: If Marketing is going to address lead qualification, scoring, and handoff as part of marketing automation and a connected marketing and sales funnel, it has to do it with the involvement of Sales. Too often marketing departments set up lead qualification without input from the sales teams. Realistic deployment expectations: Too many companies underestimate the implementation of marketing automation. Marketing automation has technology and processes that are new for most companies. The integration of these processes and various technologies may take more time than you expect depending on your company. A skills transfer plan: Many companies underestimate the amount of employees they need to truly leverage all the benefits of marketing automation. The problem is that marketing automation and digital marketing skills are in great demand. __________________________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Are your sales and marketing teams always at odds? Do the tensions between your reps and marketers resemble those between House Stark and House Lannister? If so, you’re not alone.
Basic/ Description...
(Pardot is) excited to introduce their newest white paper, “Your Guide to Marketing and Sales Alignment,” which will cover: -- > how marketing automation can improve communication between your two teams -- > the importance of deciding on unified metrics to measure success -- > how to use lead nurturing to prevent leads from slipping through the cracks -- > the benefits of using marketing automation for both sales and marketing teams __________________________________ ► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com. ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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__________________________________ ► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com. ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Digest...
The Corporate Executive Board Reports that on average buyers have completed 60% of their buying journey before reaching out to sales. That means often buyers aren't talking with salespeople until they are ready for price quotes. For most buyers they already have a pretty clear idea of who they plan to buy from at this stage. The ability of the saleperson to influence them is severely constrained. This changes the role of B2B marketing in a fundamental way. Marketing now owns a much bigger piece of the lead-to-revenue cycle. B2B marketers must take responsibility for engaging with the customer through most of the buying cycle. Not only does this take care of the increased workload it also allows marketers to build more sophisticated personalised responses to buyers because marketing automation captures buyer behaviour...and that is a massive boon for marketers. It’s also worth noting that for many firms this is really an untapped opportunity. For those firms who get this there is a chance to create a real competitive advantage. A rare event these days. Marketing automation tells us where customers are finding our content. Marketing automation tells us what they do next. With this data, and the knowledge it drives, B2B marketers can provide targeted content and offers which serve to both improve buyer engagement and increase conversion rates. __________________________________ ► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com. ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Excerpt...
How Much Does A Lead Cost? Main Highlights: -- > CPL (cost per lead) can vary significantly across industries -- > Lead filters do have an expected increase on lead cost (from 20-45% increase in CPL) -- > Custom questions like BANT (see below) have the greatest impact on cost (45% increase in CPL) -- > According to a test, strict filters can prevent reach, increase cost and lower lead quality __________________________________ ► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com. ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Each step in the full marketing funnel tells a story with a set of data behind it. Become more effective at selling your spend to your CEO with these tips from columnist Christian Nahas.
When a CMO can articulate marketing spend in terms of how creative marketing flows down the funnel to become revenue, showing the math behind each step and the ROI of the whole process, the CEO will listen. Turn marketing spend into a data driven business case with a great story to tee it up. That is how you sell marketing spend to a CEO. With marketing automation, based on these results, you can see an increase in sales, revenue, and better lead generation efforts. A more connected and aligned marketing and sales strategy promotes a better, and overall cohesive, message. Consider the following statistics from Demand Metric Research Corporation's 2013 Sales & Marketing Alignment report: -- > 89 percent or more of the firms who report getting most or all the benefits from their marketing systems achieved their revenue goals. -- > 100 percent of respondents that reported getting all the benefits of their sales systems achieved their revenue goals. -- > 70 percent of organizations are using sales technology such as CRM systems, while only 42 percent are using technology such as Marketing Automation systems. _______________________________________________ ► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com. ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Excerpt...
According to the G2 figures, marketing automation users are in fact more enthusiastic about their choices than almost anyone else. CRM in particular has a vastly worse rating, but even email, Web analytics, and Web content management show more detractors and fewer promoters. I’m not sure how to interpret this – is the average marketing automation system really easier and better than those other types of software? Or is something else going on: maybe satisfaction is lowest in the most mature categories, like human resources, enterprise resource management, and accounting, because experienced users are the most demanding? ___________________________________ -Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected). -If you like this scoop from The Marketing Technology Alert (brought to you by iNeoMarketing), PLEASE share by using the links below.
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Condensed...
If and when that growth does occur, it will be fueled by positive experiences of previous users. But the news on that front is mixed: a survey by one of the industry’s best analysts, Jim Lenskold, found 60% of marketing automation users reporting increases in the key value measures of lead quantity and quality. That’s a happy majority, but it also means that about 30% found no improvement or even a decline. Questions about satisfaction give a similarly ambiguous result: just over two-thirds of users in a Winsper Group survey reported themselves satisfied with the business value of their system, again meaning that nearly one-third were neutral or actively dissatisfied. Even more scary (and just in time for Halloween, if you're still looking for a costume): yet another survey, this by Holger Schulze, found that 31% of current marketing automation users anticipate changing their system within the next two years, nearly always because they want better or different capabilities. ___________________________________ -Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected). -If you like this scoop from The Marketing Technology Alert (brought to you by iNeoMarketing), PLEASE share by using the links below.
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Excerpt...
Marketing automation is a hot topic as more B2B marketers are adopting the technology to generate more and better leads, improve marketing productivity, and increase conversion rates. But what are the current trends, challenges, and success factors for marketing automation? We conducted a comprehensive survey, leveraging the combined wisdom of over 50,000 B2B marketers in the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn to get answers to questions like: - What are the biggest barriers to marketing automation adoption? - What marketing automation benefits do marketers expect? - How do marketers evaluate marketing automation vendors? - How do marketers measure ROI of investments in marketing automation? We received over 900 survey responses and distilled the survey findings into this easy to digest, information-rich report. Please feel free to share this survey with your colleagues. Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey!
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The Mouth of the Funnel blog is brought to you by LoopFuse - the leader in on-demand Sales and Marketing Automation.
Excerpt...
Key takeaways: 1. Most marketers, at this point, understand that email marketing must be part of their playbook. Newsletters, bulk email campaigns, etc. 2. As you work from right to left, capabilities become more advanced and adoption becomes less so. This is the land of lead nurturing (rules based email campaigns), lead scoring, and dipping into the land of social media. 3. Innovators are trying and seeking tools that allow them to better identifies “signals” of demand and want to used advanced analytics to tap the promise of predictive data. 4. We cover this curve from end to end including our ability to do email campaigns to our Nearstream social campaigns pieced designed to identify and engage around social demand signals. We are doing some additional things around activity streams and predictive analytics that will see the light of day soon as preview features. ___________________________________ -Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected). -If you like this scoop from The Marketing Technology Alert (brought to you by iNeoMarketing), PLEASE share by using the links below.
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Marketing automation solutions alone cannot get you the marketing performance transformation you’re hoping for - you need to get the company culture and skills aligned with it for true success.
Condensed...
Appoint cross-functional project teams By having a project implementation team that’s not just made up of marketing and IT then you can raise the new solution’s profile from the start and have evangelists sharing information about how great it is outside of your structured communications plan. Follow the template in this article from Marketo to assign the right roles to everyone in the team, which should be made up of: -Decision makers. -Executors. -Supporting players. Ensure relevant staff get the training they need The way your marketing team has worked in the past means they won’t have the skills needed to make the most of the marketing automation system, so as well as the solution training they’ll need to master the system itself. They’ll need some digital marketing training to develop new skills to surround it: -Inbound marketing skills: check out these posts. -Marketing analytics skills. -Social media marketing skills. -Content marketing skills. Cultural transformation By paying real attention to these three areas as you make your plans for the move to marketing automation you should see: -Excellent adoption rates. -Healthy ongoing engagement rates. -Improvements to your marketing-generated sales pipeline. ___________________________________ -Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected). -If you like this scoop, PLEASE share by using the links below.
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Digest...
Content Manager Make sure you have an individual who can create a steady stream of great content. Ideally, this person will have some writing in his or her background. Marketing Operations Manager You will need someone who enjoys mechanics. Setting up integrations, key reports, segmentation, and flows in the system are just some of the activities a good marketing operations person will do. Nurturing Manager This role makes sure you are squeezing the juice from the orange. They will work with your content manager and make sure their programs have the right content mapped to the buying cycle. It is also a very critical role because when done well, since nurtured leads can produce a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. It is ideal to have someone in this role who understands your buyer and user personas, and also is very good at thinking through the right workflows.
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Suppose one day your CEO, CFO, or COO asked you what they’re getting for the money they spend on marketing automation?
Condensed...
Here’s the part that should hit home: what your execs needs to know about marketing automation that too often goes unspoken: - If you don’t use marketing automation, and your competitor does your business is probably losing ground.
- It takes people — smart people that are hard to find to set it up and get it working right (that last part – getting it right is where I have seen a lot of companies miss the boat)
- Its software that touches all the important moving parts of your business; applications, data, revenue, sales, finance, marketing (yes, that too) and customers.
- If you don’t have your business processes figured out and defined, marketing automation will probably do more harm than good. Automating any businesses process that’s broken or undefined never works—marketing automation is no exception.
- Along the same lines, if you don’t have your basic marketing blocking and tackling figured out, marketing automation won’t do you much good. That means you know your buyers, messaging, markets, strategy, content – all of it.
- Nothing changes faster than marketing, so be prepared to continuously give your marketing automation tool a lot of love, care and feeding and an occasional kick in the pants.
- It’s a really smart way to get more revenue out of your sales because automation continuously surfaces and ranks leads for sale reps. Marketing automation lets you take advantage of volume and velocity, without it you’re flying blind.
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Something is changing in the world of marketing automation. Something big.
Key excerpt...
This shift in emphasis from attributing great marketing results to the raw power of the technology to the people who make it work is a good thing. It’s happening right now because the technology capabilities have advanced faster than businesses can find, hire, train and retain people with the skills necessary to make the systems work right for their business. Marketing automation isn’t about automating your marketing. It’s about rethinking your marketing and its place in your business to take advantage of what these tools offer.
So while the vendors continue to duke it out and consolidate, and while industry experts try to discern which platform is better than the other – watch and listen for where this revolution is playing out today. Pay attention to the everyday marketing heroes who figure out how to drive marketing forward in an era of constant change and no standards.
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To bring some focus to key transition areas of your marketing practice, follow these three steps to help raise the overall excellence of your programs and performance.
Condensed...
To bring some focus to key transition areas of our marketing practice, I recommend these three steps to help raise the overall excellence of our programs and performance. - Map out all key intersections in the buyer's journey. To start, it's a worthwhile exercise to whiteboard all the different ways a customer could enter and move through our buying funnel. In today's digitally connected world, customers can flow through the funnel in many different ways. The goal here is to understand how messaging and follow-up can differ based on a particular buyer's journey.
- Create service-level agreements. Once the stages of the buying process are outlined, we can now better identify where key transitions may happen with a customer. Service-level agreements (SLAs) are a great way to outline what should happen during transition times, including to whom the customer should be passed (i.e., handing off a lead from marketing to field sales, outbound sales to field sales, field sales to marketing, etc.).
- Use technology to enforce accountability. SLAs are great in theory but can be even greater in practice when technology is used to help enforce accountability. By tying transition stages to rules in our marketing automation and CRM tools, we can create alerts letting marketing or sales know when a lead has moved from one stage to the next. And we can create reporting on how we're performing against expectations.
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There is a myth that implementing a marketing technology point solution is a bad idea. Like giving your significant other a bathroom scale as a birthday present is a bad idea. First aid kit sold separately.
Key excerpt...
If you can adopt one or two conglomerate solutions to implement the majority of your marketing technology strategy, that’s terrific. Conglomerate solutions can serve as the backbone of your marketing technology infrastructure. Other things being equal, the fewer different software packages you have to integrate and manage, the better.
However, other things aren’t always equal. There are two reasons why you would want to supplement those conglomerate solutions with point solutions to achieve greater marketing impact: - The capability you want isn’t included in your conglomerate solution.
- The capability you want isn’t differentiated enough in your conglomerate solution.
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Common sense guidance.
From MarTech 101 to Advanced Techniques, marketingIO has you covered. Contact us. #MarTech #DigitalMarketing