automation demystified

AUTOMATION DEMYSTIFIED

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At MozCon my “Digital Body Language” talk was about how you could build a cost-effective customizable Marketing Automation platform and I built it and gave it away for free.

Yep, just quoted myself.

Marketing automation is the cross-section of the skillsets that many of us already know and love.

According to a study by the Annuitas Group marketing automation helps you make it rain. http://bit.ly/1rT8mEw

The Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups, 2013 Lead-Generation Marketing Effectiveness Study, Nov 2013 - http://bit.ly/ZjexL2

I was thinking going back to Philly for the weekend and closed my browser. Then I got an email a few hours later telling me to complete my transaction.

I was thinking going back to Philly for the weekend and closed my browser. Then I got an email a few hours later telling me to complete my transaction.

Personalization has any number of applications, but it’s generally about highlighting what people are most likely to be interested in based on their user signals.

Marketers believe that marketing automation is the best way to improve the ROI of Content Marketing.

86% of consumers believe that personalization has influenced what they purchased. 31% wish their shopping experience was more personalized.

According to Yahoo consumers believe that personalizing advertising is more relevant, memorable and engaging than general ads.

Industry adoption of marketing automation is still low. This is a great time to capitalize.

Alignment of content with user need states and key performance indicators is critical for measurement and effective marketing automation.

Marketing automation is the cross-section of the skillsets that many of us already know and love.

I’ve spoken at length about personas, but in this case we can stop at segments rather than building actual personas, but they must be quantitative by identifiable metrics.

You’ll need to determine which channels you’ll want to be active in with this campaign so you can account for those activities with the right content and tagging.

Organic Search

Paid Search

Referral

Email

Organic Social

With marketing automation you need to plan for cross-channel measurement with regard to KPIs and campaign tagging. In some case your campaign tags are also a trigger for

automation.

Share of Voice for Familiarity Keywords

# Impressions for Familiarity Keywords

# Impressions for Familiarity Creative

# Impressions for Familiarity Creative

# Impressions for Familiarity Creative

# Impressions for Familiarity Creative

Visits to Familiarity Native Placements

Visits to Familiarity Content

Open Rate

Rankings for Familiarity Keywords

CTR for Familiarity Keywords

CTR for Familiarity Creative

CTR for Familiarity Creative

CTR for Familiarity Creative

CTR for Familiarity Creative

Social Shares of Familiarity Native Placements

Time on Site for Familiarity Content

Opens

# Impressions for Familiarity Keywords

Quality Score for Familiarity Keywords

Clicks of Familiarity Creative

Clicks of Familiarity Creative

Clicks of Familiarity Creative

Clicks of Familiarity Creative

Content Downloads # of Links to Familiarity Content

CTR

CTR for Familiarity Keywords

Visits from Familiarity Keywords

Visits from Familiarity Creative

Visits from Familiarity Creative

Visits from Familiarity Creative

Visits from Familiarity Creative

Page Depth

# of Referral Sources to Familiarity Content

Unsubscribes

# URLs Receiving Traffic for Familiarity Content

Content Downloads

Content Downloads

Content Downloads

Content Downloads

Content Downloads - Content Downloads

Page Depth

# Visits to Familiarity Content

Page Depth Page Depth Page Depth Social Shares of Familiarity Content

Page Depth - Page Depth -

Content Downloads - - - Page Depth - - - -

Page Depth

Marketing Automation user flows are largely not linear and can be cross-channel. In planning out MA you must identify specific flows that lead you believe will lead to

conversion.

Figure out the points within the user flow that you want to A/B or MV test for improvement.

A/B test view layout.

Multi-variate test copy options in plans.

Triggers can be user actions or attributes that will inform what features on the site or marketing experience needs to be toggled. Cross-channel these can be campaign tags or

referrers.

Time between visits

Number of Page views

Clicks

Referral Channel

User type

User path

Time on Site

Form Submission

Basically anything you can track or measure

The content needs to respond to a set of rules. You’ll need to determine those rules and then develop specific content

Consideration Version

Loyalty Version Awareness Version

I’ve spoken at length about personas, but in this case we’ll likely have to focus on segments and cohorts rather than personas depending on what your platform setup can measure.

http://bit.ly/1fdLpbo

Using data from Towerdata you can append demographic and firmographic data to your mailing list or userbase based on email address. http://www.towerdata.com

You can do the same thing with FullContact although they focus primarily on the social media profiles of a given user http://www.fullcontact.com

FullContact provides a sheet in Excel that will pull their data down without needing to code.

You can get your API data directly in Excel with some VBA using Excel-REST.

You don’t have to be a coder to use APIs. Using Postman allows you to test out API calls with no code at all http://www.getpostman.com

Orange is a visual data mining tool that gives you powerful statistical analysis without requiring code or math. http://orange.biolab.si/

K-means Clustering is … http://bit.ly/1qJEKgm

Use Open Refine (fka Google Refine) http://openrefine.org/index.html. Make sure all the data types in your columns matches.

Use Open Refine (fka Google Refine) http://openrefine.org/index.html. Make sure all the data types in your columns matches.

In this case the N/A value must become a non-sensical value 1k-0k and the 0 value

must be 0k-0k to ensure consistency

Use the K-Means clustering method of unsupervised learning to cluster your mailing list based on the features you collect from FullContact.

Tribalytics allows you to cluster by features of Twitter followers. http://www.tribalytics.com

In many cases user flows as seen to be within a given website whereas a journey map is an indication of a cross-channel experience. Build user flows that connect all of the cross-

channel experiences.

This is how you achieve comprehensive alignment for marketing automation.

Specifically align your channels, content and measurement with each of these phases and determine the triggers and user experience for each one

Identifying winning or losing paths in your analytics platform specifically by advanced segments is a quick way to figure out worthy user flows for automation.

Depending on your user segmentation setup you’ll want to define values for the different actions. Your actions should align with your triggers. In this case we have segmentation of

new visitors and repeat visitors.

Website Visit

From Search 10 10

From Social 3 5

From Referral

3 5

Pageview 1 2

Attend Webinar 10 10

Content Download

15 15

Mailing List Signup

15 15

You can define your scoring range however you’d like, but this is a good schema to work within.

<40 – Very Low Engagement; highly likely to not signup 40-80 – Medium Engagement; most customers will contact you, but not signup 80-100 – Highly Engaged; very high signup rate

Alternatively, the Google Tag Manager (see @MikeCP’s presentation) is much better for this.

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent',

‘userEngagementEvents', // category of activity

‘[insert name of engagement event here]', // Action

]);

Your content strategy should specifically speak to the specific segment’s need at this particular phase and touchpoint and how you’ll address that need to move them through

the funnel.

Each channel and touchpoint is different and may require a different tone. You must define that tone to ensure it resonates with the target segment. Check out MailChimp’s

http://voiceandtone.com

You’ll need to define the requirements for the content that will be created for this specific touchpoint and phase. Be mindful that a given page may have multiple options based on

the user’s features and actions.

Since keywords are gone from the referrer in Organic and Paid Search you can only make changes to the overall experience based on the channel and landing page combination.

Landing Page

Associated Keywords

Based on the campaign tagging in links from the email you can identify the nurture track and use these variables to trigger additional experiences.

Campaign Tag

Link Clicked Landing Page

Nurture Track Id

Creative ID

Referral Source

Campaign ID Landing Page

Creative ID

Referral Source

Campaign ID

Cookie Placement URL

Landing Page

Post ID

Referral Source

Landing Page

Campaign Tag

There are any number of tools out there for marketing automation. It depends on your requirements and business goals what you should use.

Many of the marketing automation tools integrate with other data providers and give you high level dashboards.

Undoubtedly, you’ll want a more complete picture of metrics in your dashboards and Klipfolio makes it easy to pull all the data together with APIs. http://www.klipfolio.com

Most of the data sources we as SEOs use are already pre-baked and those that aren’t are easily set up with no coding.

There are lead intelligence and marketing automation tools galore.

Augur is the closest thing out there to what I’ve built. I’ve spoken to the Founder, he’s incredibly smart and has some features that are well beyond Quantum Lead.

If you’re on Wordpress I suggest LeadIn for capturing your leads, forms and user paths easily. http://www.leadin.com

With Augur, LeadIn and a developer you could potentially build everything you else you’ll get out of these other tools.

These are likely the more familiar marketing automation platforms, but none of them offers a “perfect solution.”

Mintigo is a very interesting solution for predictive analytics and lead scoring that plugs into these platforms. http://www.mintigo.com

Personyze has similar drag drop pesonalization functionality to Optimizely and Monetate, but a much lower price tag. http://www.personyze.com

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