MarketingAutomation.net

Your prospects are social, are you? Using social data and sources like Twitter is one way to get involved in the social media revolution. Another way is to make your company and your marketing campaigns more social-friendly.

A recent study featured on eMarketer gives some insight into how marketers are using – and planning to use – social media as  part of their marketing initiatives, specifically email marketing. The top way to integrate social and email? Adding sign-up forms to social media profiles like Facebook. This is a great way to make sure you’re keeping in touch with customers and prospects who are already engaged with your brand. Coming in at a close second were broadcasting blog posts to subscribers via email and using “follow me” functionality within email campaigns to recruit new social followers.

Everyone is abuzz (atweet?) with talk of the best way to use social media, whether it be to promote your brand, promote yourself or engage your customers. For today’s B2B marketer, there are a many ways to benefit from social media interaction and the information it provides. One site that provides an immediate business value is Twitter, where users provide short messages and status updates to their network. A feature that distinguishes Twitter from many other social networks is that most users allow their updates to be publicly viewed, unlike networks such as Facebook that revolve around a more exclusive social group.

Using Twitter for Marketing
Twitter can be a useful venue for promoting your brand, especially through the use creative or value-added techniques such as contests, discounts or free content like a webinar or ebook. It is also a great way to share your recent blog posts, announce exciting new features and highlight company accomplishments. Just remember not to toot your own horn too loudly without providing something of value, or you may start to lose followers.

Tracking social media interaction can be tricky, but using distinct URL structure to promote content on Twitter can help you track interactions. Marketing automation tools can help you pull in statistics from Google Analytics tracking links and tie the source to individual prospects. Some systems also provide a URL shortener that can provide in depth statistics on clicks.

Using Twitter for Sales
If the marketer is out there using Twitter to “talk” to potential customers, the sales guy should be out there listening. When you’re about to make a sales call, it can be helpful to check out a prospect’s latest Twitter updates. Sometimes this gives you valuable insight into their research process, even revealing what other competitors may be involved in the deal. In other cases it may just give you a few talking points.

Using Google Alerts or programs like Tweet Deck to track what people are saying about your competitors and key industry terms can also help you scout out new leads that you may not have otherwise discovered. This is an opportunity to engage with someone when you know they are actively looking to make a purchase.

For those on the marketing side of the house, one of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is that it frees you from depending on the IT department to launch marketing initiatives. Many times, especially in a smaller organization, the IT team can be stretched thin, and making sure the network is running smoothly and the office has its needs taken care of tends to be higher priority than uploading that new logo or creating a new landing page. The same struggles can take place when marketing tasks are outsourced to an agency, who likely will bill you for any small changes that need to be made to your digital marketing materials. In walks marketing automation, putting the power back in the hands of the marketing department.

Here are three ways a marketing automation solution can free you from IT hassles:

1. Easy Email Campaigns
   Marketing automation tools help simplify email creation – from start to send – while integrating the emails with the rest of your marketing efforts. Usually you have the option to use templates for guidance, create emails with a visual editor or, for the HTML whiz kids, drop in your own content. Besides easy email creation, you can generate lists, set up sending rules, link emails to forms and prospects actions and view your email statistics all within the same interface. Marketing automation tools will also manage your opt outs and sync up the information with your CRM system automatically.
2. Custom Landing Pages
   Similar to the email features described above, with a marketing automation tool you can generate landing pages from templates or create your own branding with a visual editor. These pages are hosted within the marketing automation system and can have custom, branded URLs that are created within the system, so no more requests to IT for a new landing page from within your content management system.
3. Form Hosting
   You can also easily create sophisticated, hosted forms from within the marketing automation system. Drag-and-drop builders and easy-to-create custom fields make launching a new form a snap. You can create custom before and after content for your forms, set up your autorepsonder emails and put in redirect information all within a simple, wizard environment. These forms can be used on a hosted landing page, or you can insert them on your website using an iframe (ok, you may need IT help here, but just think how grateful they will be that you’re bugging them much less often than you used to!).

An added benefit of marketing automation – which actually comes in handy for all three of the items discussed above – is the ability to host content in the system. You can upload all the graphics you need, plus key collateral items like white papers and case studies, within the marketing automation system. This puts all of the resources you need to create a well-rounded campaign right at your fingertips.

Though many marketers still rely on outbound efforts, such as email campaigns, to bring in new leads, an increasing amount of leads is coming directly from search engines. This is good news because it means people are seeking out your product or service. It also means you have to make sure you, not your competitors, are the one getting found.

In an article on Search Engine Land, three different types of searches are described.

Ad-Hoc Search is the most common search type. This is when you’re doing a very broad search, usually for some type of research. Example: digital cameras, digital camera reviews

Known-Item Search is when someone knows what they are looking for – usually because they’ve been there before or heard about it from someone – but they aren’t sure how to find it. This is a slightly more specific search. Example: official Star Trek site

Named Page Search is an even more specific search. The person knows exactly where they want to go but maybe they can’t remember the address and don’t want to search through the site to find it. This type of search is probably less common for small and medium sized businesses, as typically they have less complex websites. It could still apply, though, if someone is searching out a pricing page, a free trial or a customer log-in page. Example: google adwords keyword research tool.

Because prospects search in different ways, you want to make sure you’re putting yourself in their shoes and optimizing for different types of searches. Using key words and phrases can help you optimize both your corporate site and your landing pages. Marketing automation tools provide a way for you to start understanding how people reach your website through search reporting. You can tell not only which searches are the most popular, but also start to see pattens in which searches lead to qualified prospects and meaningful interactions.

Online marketing, especially marketing automation, is great because it allows you to track all that insightful lead activity, right? So you don’t want to lose a single opportunity to see how your potential prospects are interacting with your site, content, email and all the other great stuff you’re putting out their on the web.

When it comes to emailing out proposals, white papers, case studies and other materials, skip the attachments and instead send a link to a hosted file. This makes it easy for the recipient to view (no downloading, locating the file, dealing with network security). More importantly, it allows you to track the link clicks. Did a prospect request a white paper but never get around to reading it? Did they open it right away? Did they revisit it after a few days time?  All of this information can be very helpful to sales reps when they make a follow up call.

In most cases, files can be uploaded and hosted within your company’s website content management system. If that sounds like a hassle, look for a marketing automation system that offers file hosting. Not only can you upload your marketing content, like white papers, but you can also upload any images you use for emails or landing pages, allowing easy access during the design process.

In our previous posts, we discussed what to look for in a new prospect and how to determine interest vs. intent. Once you’ve outlined what qualifies as showing interest and which actions show a more serious intent, the marketing team and the sales team should work together to define a marketing qualified lead (MQL). This means that you set a threshold at which you both agree a lead should be passed on to sales.

You may have a few different levels for your MQLs. For example, you may agree that someone who requests a test drive or fills out the contact me form should instantly be assigned to sales. You also may have a certain level of interest-based activities that push a person to sales, such as viewing three white papers, viewing both a white paper and a case study or returning to the website within a certain time period. Even things such as search terms can help play into your definition of a MQL.

The most important part about this definition is that both marketing and sales agree on the criteria. This will prevent sales from complaining about ‘junk leads’ and also give marketing a solid platform for assessing campaign success. Once the plan is set in place, it can also be helpful to set up an internal service level agreement (SLA) regarding how new leads should be handled. This would include communication standards on the sales end, usually tied to a time line like, “Sales will follow up with all new qualified leads within 48 business hours.” It may also specify the process for rejecting a lead to marketing as unqualified or putting leads in a nurturing campaign if they express they aren’t quite ready to purchase at this time.

Creating a common goal helps unify sales and marketing throughout the entire sales cycle and results in a more efficient, less leaky sales funnel.

In our previous post, we discussed some basic lead qualification measures, including using a combination of explicit and implicit factors to determine your best leads. Now, lets take a closer look at a particular aspect of implicit lead qualification – judging interest versus intent.

This is how you being to separate the leads that are in the research phase, and may require more nurturing, from the leads that are sales ready and need to be called on immediately. The standards are going to be different for every company, but you should start to develop a system based on the types of collateral that you offer. Most companies have a variety of conversion opportunities and marketing materials available to potential customers, including items like white papers, webinars, case studies and contact forms.

Things like white papers or time spent browsing on the site would be early indicators of interest. This person is starting to learn about your industry and becoming familiar with the benefits of your product. They may not be ready to enter the sales process yet and bombarding them with aggressive sales calls could turn them off to your product. When you have a new lead that is showing a tentative interest in your product, place them on a nurturing campaign to help them along in their education process.

Intent occurs when the prospect ‘raises their hand’ and shows specific buying activity when interacting with your materials. This can be in the form of viewing a very specific case study, filling out a contact form, reaching out to you with a question or signing up for your free trial. These people already understand the benefits of your product and they want to know if you’ll be the right fit for them. They were probably already on your radar; Perhaps you met them at a trade show, they previously downloaded some of your materials or you’ve been nurturing them along the way. These are the people that you should assign to your sales representatives immediately, even indicating with a note that they are ready for quick follow-up. The sales team can then use the tracking data you’ve gathered to craft the targeted call that will tell your prospect that this is going to be a the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Remember, these factors are unique to your company and your sales cycle. In some cases, a white paper might be a great sign of buying behavior. You can start to determine the right indicators for you by using your marketing automation data to look for patterns in past successes and using those as a starting point for identifying your best leads.

With St. Patrick’s Day coming up this week, I got to thinking about the luck of the Irish. In the past, the business of sales was a bit like hunting for a four-leaf clover in a vast field of green. Sales people spent time using techniques like flipping through the phone book to find new prospects and if they were lucky, every so often they would strike gold and close a deal.

The new world of inbound marketing and marketing automation tools help give sales teams a map to find that four-leaf clover in record time. Instead of dealing with an abundance of unqualified leads, new prospects enter the marketing pipeline and can be reviewed before being moved over to sales. Leads from websites, trade shows and third-party email campaigns are scored, graded and nurtured until they are sales-ready. This allows sales people to focus their time on what they are good at – closing the deal – without having to waste time on a treasure hunt. Micro-level ROI reporting also helps the marketing team to analyze costly initiatives – if you’ve been investing time in one location with no results, there’s a good chance you’ll never the elusive four-leaf clover in that field! It’s time to move on to greener pastures.

Eat less. Don’t be a prospect glutton! Focus on the quality of your leads and, like the satisfaction that comes from eating a fine meal made of gourmet ingredients, you will be pleased with the results. Your sales cycle will be leaner and healthier, and your team will be more productive when they “cut out the fat” of unqualified leads.

Exercise more. This translates to staying nimble and keeping on top of trends. Social networking came seemingly out of nowhere to become the game-changer of 2009. Marketers who didn’t adopt quickly are getting left behind in 2010. It’s like surfing: You want to ride the waves, not chase after them.

Give up bad habits. Pestering prospects with unwanted emails is a bad habit that marketers need to break. Try to change your ways by focusing on permission-based marketing that provides useful information that potential customers want and find useful. Don’t waste time sending superfluous junk that gets deleted instantly.

Save money. The best way for marketers to keep this resolution is to find and implement a robust marketing automation solution. Not only will you save money, but you’ll also maximize ROI and increase efficiency. You can’t lose!

Make friends. Yes, that’s right: Make friends with your customers. Customers are wary of salespeople and marketers, but they trust friends. Aside from the obvious benefit of reducing their skepticism and building trust, you’ll also learn their wants and needs, their likes and dislikes, and so on — very valuable information for marketers!

Work smarter. Don’t just vow to work harder this year — work smarter. Marketing automation tools are one of the simplest and quickest ways for you to make this happen. It’s not about how many hours you work and how many leads you amass; it’s about how many quality leads you generate, and the effectiveness of your follow-up with these leads. A good marketing automation solution is key to ensuring that you pass only the most qualified leads on to your Sales team, allowing you to focus on lead nurturing with coordinated, automated processes such as drip campaigns.

Another off-label use of marketing automation was related to me by a salesguy at software company who had just gone through a rigorous RFP process like the kind described in the previous post (Part 1). The prospect had not yet announced the winning vendor, and although the salesguy knew his company was a finalist, he was becoming restless trying to figure out whether they’d won the contract or not. He turned to his marketing automation solution to do a little detective work and was ecstatic to find a particularly revealing tidbit: A wave of visitors to his company’s website had found it by clicking a link on the prospect’s website that announced it had chosen the software company as its vendor. Of course, the salesguy had to feign delighted surprise when the new client called with the great news, but armed with this valuable piece of information, he was able to resist requests for discounted pricing since he knew the client had already publicly committed to his solution.

This is a brilliantly out-of-the-box way to use marketing automation to your advantage. Stay tuned for Part 3.