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Win more customers with an integrated marketing communications and
automation strategy
Author: Dr Dave Chaffey (Smart Insights)
Part of the Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Toolkit
Reference
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Win more customers with an integrated marketing communications and automation strategy © Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please go to www.smartinsights.com to feedback or access our other guides. 2
CONTENTS
About the authors ...........................................................................4
Introduction .....................................................................................5
Success factors for integrated marketing and sales engagement ................... 5
About this guide .............................................................................................. 6
Step One: Define your opportunity ...............................................8
Review current customer journeys and lead funnel ........................................ 8
Model lead improvements for business case .................................................. 9
Define sales process governance ................................................................... 10
Martech platform ............................................................................................. 10
Step Two: Set engagement strategy ............................................12
Segmentation and targeting strategy .............................................................. 12
Content strategy .............................................................................................. 13
Marketing and sales contact strategy .............................................................. 14
Step Three: Implement action plan .............................................17
90-day implementation plans .......................................................................... 17
Measurement and optimization ....................................................................... 17
Applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) ................................................................... 18
Summary .......................................................................................20
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FOREWORD FROM YOUR SPONSOR: SALESFORCE
Let’s journey back for a second. Your sales rep leaves the company, taking with him all
that valuable information about your customers and, ultimately, those relationships.
This is how customer relationship management, or ‘CRM’, became such a critical system
for businesses – to keep customer relationships safe within your company and empower
all sales reps with the right customer information. This is why Salesforce developed the
world’s leading CRM.
Today, in the world of proliferating digital channels, it’s no longer enough to simply store
essential information about a customer. Companies need to do more to meet customer
expectations, which means data on customer interactions needs to be recorded and
leveraged to create the experiences that will keep them coming back.
Right now, there’s a gap between perception and reality. Our research shows 80% of
companies believe they deliver “super experiences” but only 8% of customers agree. In
other words, companies have a long way to go. Even the smallest change can have a big
impact on customer satisfaction.
In our Win & Grow Customers ebook, we shared recommendations for improving the
buying experience and unlocking long-term customer value – specifically how to use
deep customer knowledge to deliver personalized, seamless buying experiences, both
to bring in new customers and to effectively retain, cross-sell, and upsell existing ones.
Our work with Smart Insights recognizes the important role that having a coherent content
strategy plays in the overall experience. We hope you find the recommendations useful
when refining your approach to creating experiences for your prospects and customers.
Salesforce
http://Win & Grow Customers ebook
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Dr. Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of digital
marketing management advice site Smart Insights. He is author
of five best-selling books on e-commerce including Digital
Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice and was
recognized by the Chartered Institute of Marketing in 2004 as
one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape
the future of marketing.
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INTRODUCTION
Success factors for integrated marketing and sales engagement
The new B2B buying journey
Today’s B2B customer journey is the most complex ever. There are multiple potential
touchpoints that can support contact nurturing to increase conversion to sale, as our
customer lifecycle visual shows.
Customer lifecycle touchpoints. Source: Smart Insights
Optimizing each touchpoint to improve the relevance and experience for each prospect
gives great opportunities to grow the volume of leads into your sales pipeline. By combining
the power of automation and Artificial Intelligence, you can increase communication
relevance and use insights about your audience engagement to improve effectiveness
and improve lead quality.
Whether you apply these marketing and sales enablement automation techniques for
tactical campaigns or always-on lifecycle marketing, you have to acknowledge the complexity of the modern funnel. Delivering on this opportunity means you must consider
the success factors and use technology to orchestrate integrated communications across
these touchpoints. We will explain these success factors in this practical guide.
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INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS IT? ALWAYS-ON LIFECYCLE MARKETING
Continuous investment in paid, owned, and earned digital media to engage prospects and customers to meet purchase intent as they research products through search, social media, and publisher sites. Successful implementation should include Marketing Automation via email, personalization, and ads to nurture prospects who show interest in products when they visit your website but don’t buy straight away.
About this guide
How will this resource help me and my business?
With today’s new B2B buying journey, success depends on delivering the best content
personalized for each prospect in the right context during their buying decision and
facilitating human interaction via sales.
The aim of this guide is to walk you through the success factors needed to deliver on the
promise of automation for your business.
It goes beyond discussing the benefits of automation to give you a process framework
that combines a roadmap to improvement, together with strategy recommendations and
practical tips.
Who is this guide for?
This guide will help sales and marketing leaders who are reviewing how to leverage
technology to improve the quality of their processes for customer acquisition. It is relevant
for both B2B and B2C audiences.
The guide is aimed at helping these roles:
þ Marketing directors and CMOs
þ Sales directors and sales managers
þ Business owners reviewing improvements to their marketing and sales processes
þ Marketing technologists including CIOs responsible for integrating marketing
applications and data
How is this resource structured?
This guide is in three parts, each including three key strategy success factors. Together,
they give you a simple structure to plan how you make the business case for automation,
create a communications strategy, then implement it using marketing automation
technology.
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INTRODUCTION
In this guide, we prompt you with questions around key decision points and examples of
how to achieve success, including:
þ Content mapping to define the best quality content to support each step of lead
nurture and consultative selling.
þ How to create a better buying experience through relevance – through smart segmentation and targeting.
þ Sales and marketing alignment to redesign new business processes.
þ Insight about interactions to support Artificial Intelligence and creative optimization.
Each part includes success factors, questions to ask partners, and practical tips.
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DEFINE YOUR OPPORTUNITY1Review current customer journeys and lead funnel
r Q. Is the gap analysis showing improved opportunities for increasing micro-conversions?
The size of the opportunity from automation will depend on the maturity of your use of
content, email marketing, ad retargeting, and website personalization to nurture leads.
Your team or partners should perform a contact strategy gap analysis to visualize current
touchpoints against potential touchpoints where content isn’t used.
WHAT IS IT? CONTACT STRATEGY GAP ANALYSIS
You can visualize the touchpoints at a high level during the planning process by comparing ideal touchpoints (such as those shown in the introduction) against current touchpoints like those shown below.
Gap analysis of customer lifecycle showing currently managed touchpoints
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5 TOPIC1 DEFINE YOUR OPPORTUNITY
Marketing Automation tools like Salesforce Pardot Engagement Studio, which we
use at Smart Insights, enable you to visualize the sequence of touchpoints during
implementation.
Model lead improvements for business case
r Q. Have you modelled the cost benefit of improving content effectiveness?
Modelling the commercial returns can help because investment in new content and
sales processes is significant and low-quality content won’t get the cut-through you need
against competitors. This will align your automation initiatives to support the business
growth objectives for customer acquisition and retention, modelling the incremental
improvements to the inbound marketing and sales process to justify sufficient investment
in new content and sales processes.
! STRATEGY RECOMMENDATIONCreate a conversion-based funnel model to make the business caseImprovements in acquisition should be based on modelling increases in visits via organic search and social media, and increases in conversion from improving sales and marketing steps. Changes in funnel performance can then be reviewed within your automation system, as with this example:
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5 TOPIC1 DEFINE YOUR OPPORTUNITY
Define sales process governance
r Q. Have you reviewed how to improve marketing and sales alignment?
In businesses of all sizes, there are often different people responsible for marketing and
sales. While it’s logical to work towards the same goals using a communications strategy
agreed to provide a seamless experience from marketing through to sales, this doesn’t
always happen given the focus on business-as-usual campaign activities. Deploying
sales and marketing automation technology gives a great opportunity for teams to work
more closely together and design an improved customer experience and content strategy
that will boost conversion.
! STRATEGY RECOMMENDATIONAlign marketing and sales communications to reduce time to valueAutomation enables you to provide more relevant content and services throughout the customer lifecycle. From the first marketing-led prospect touchpoints through to sales qualification by sales to customer on-boarding, automation can enable a smoother process where the next-best content is provided to your audience at each point. This will help them learn about your solutions and establish credibility to start using your service.
Martech platform
r Q. Do you have integrated technologies in place to implement engagement strategy?
Consider the range of on-site and off-site touchpoints that need to be harnessed to
achieve time to value. These include website-based interactions via forms, personalized
content and live chat, email marketing, push messaging, social network interactions,
and display ad retargeting to name just some of the options available. Now consider the
collection of interaction data for each touchpoint; insight can be gained at each point. An
integrated solution is needed to deliver on the promise of automation.
! STRATEGY RECOMMENDATIONSelect an integrated solution to deploy cross-lifecycle integrated communications and insightWith over 7,000 martech solutions catalogued by Scott Brinker in his latest Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, there certainly isn’t a lack of choice of technology solutions. However, many solutions only focus on part of the lifecycle, making integration difficult or expensive. Use this simplified table of six types of martech functionality to assess against different capabilities needed from A through D:
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1 DEFINE YOUR OPPORTUNITY
Martech Function/Channel
1. Paid media 2. Earned and owned media
3. Website and mobile experience
4. Email and automation
5. Analytics 6. Multichannel integration
A. Core broadcast
communications
Direct ad platform management
Social media Content or commerce management
Email broadcast Website analytics Sales
B. Personalized individual
communication
Retargeting platform Outreach Personalized messaging and mobile push
Retargeting or contextual platforms
Tag management Customer service and support
C. Optimization Programmatic Creative testing Landing pages and CRO tools
Creative optimization, rendering, and AI/Machine Learning
Customer Data Platforms and ID management
Sales optimization
D. Insight Customer data platform Social benchmarks Survey tools Intent Segment and campaign reports
Attribution models Call tracking
Simplified categorization of martech tools needed for integrated comms
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SET ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY2 Segmentation and targeting strategy
r Q. Do you have a layered targeting approach to deliver relevance?
You’re likely already actively emailing your prospects and customers. If so, here’s a
question for you: how many different target audiences do you mail to? Be honest. Our
experience and data from many surveys tell us that many marketers still send ‘one-size
fits all’ untargeted emails despite the options in Marketing Automation systems for
sending different targeted emails or using dynamic content with different creative/offers
to different audiences.
WHAT IS IT? DYNAMIC CONTENT INSERTION
Rules used within email creative to tailor subject lines, images or copy to the needs and interests of different audiences.
! STRATEGY RECOMMENDATIONReview your targeting capabilitiesTo improve response and ROI with the need for budget increases, we recommend you assess potential layered targeting approaches as shown in the table below where each email you send can be tailored depending on the targeting criteria which are most likely to boost relevance and context for your audience. Consider how readily your platform supports targeting based on multiple criteria. AI-based approaches can help here.
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2 SET ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY
Layered targeting technique
B2B example B2C example Commentary
Profile demographics Role, industry or solution application
Gender, age or geography Disclosed on profile – can also be persona based or psychographic based
Value Lead grading based on potential deal size
Value of purchases against future potential value
Inferred
Product interest Products or content browsed on-site
Product categories browsed
Inferred (sometimes disclosed on form)
Activity Lead scoring based
on level of activity, e.g.
number of whitepaper
downloads
Browse or basket
abandons
Inferred
Lifecycle position Prospect vs customer and
degree of engagement
Number of products
purchased and level of
activity
Inferred
Examples of layered targeting options
We find that if businesses use targeting at all, it is often based on disclosed, profile-based
data entered into forms. More mature companies also use inferred data, based on insight
collected about interests inferred from content interactions. They combine multiple
targeting criteria into a single email based on dynamic content insertion.
Content strategy
r Q. Do you have relevant top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel content for prospect nurturing?
To help simplify decisions about how content can best be used to support prospects on
the path to purchase, it has become common to review opportunities for top of funnel
(TOFU), middle of funnel (MOFU), and bottom of funnel (BOFU), as shown in the table.
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2 SET ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY
Automation rules can be put in place to recommend the ‘next-best content’ for a prospect
at each stage with distributing content at relevant points by email and web personalization.
REACH ACT CONVERT ENGAGE
Content type
and aim
TOFU
Awareness
Engagement
MOFU
Evaluation
Engagement
BOFU
Purchase
Engagement
ROFU
Retention/Advocacy
Engagement
B2B examples - Hero lead-gen for cut-through infographics
- 10X content
- Webinars – education
- Case studies
- Datasheets
- Independent reviews
- Webinars – demos
- ROI calculators
- Business case download
- Career development
- E-newsletter
Typical
distribution
options
- SEO
- Social
- Pop-ups and inline content
- Email welcome
- Email nurture
- E-newsletter personal
- Web personalization
- Livechat
- Emails from sales (automated)
- Webinars
- E-newsletter
- Web personalization
Techniques for using content across the customer lifecycle
We like this simple approach because it can help sales and marketing teams and their
agencies review content selection strategy at a high level, assess current gaps in content,
and prioritize new content. For example, do you have sufficient BOFU content? It can help
marketing and sales alignment because the marketing promoted content typically lies in
the Reach and Act stages, while content used to support prospect sales engagement is
used in the Convert and Engage phases.
Content formats
An alternative framework for visualizing the gap of current against future content is the
Smart Insights Content Marketing Matrix. This covers the level of engagement from awareness to purchase from left to right, as with the previous table. It also adds the
dimension of content engagement by considering more emotional against more rational
content. Use this framework to assess whether you are exploiting the rich range of
content types available.
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2 SET ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY
Content Marketing Matrix. Source: Smart Insights
Marketing and sales contact strategy
r Q. Have you defined a comprehensive marketing and sales automation sequence to maximize conversion?
Once content types to support nurture have been initially defined, you can turn to more
detailed specification of the sequence of communications.
It’s easiest to start with automated emails triggered by events such as email registration.
You can then use this type of layout to specify your messaging goals against content,
copy, and creative to engage and nurture your audience. Additional fields should be used
to identify how content blocks are targeted.
Example content strategy
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2 SET ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY
A similar approach can be used to improve planned communications that are part of
sales processes, which are often known today as sales cadences, indicating that you need to define the typical frequency or velocity at which a sales conversation should
happen. Rules are defined for when reminders are sent to engage audiences with
relevant content.
Sales cadence example. Will develop a new one version to included assisted sales
WHAT IS IT? SALES CADENCE
A sequence of interactions that a sales representative has with a prospect to engage with and form a connection. It defines a typical schedule for a sales process, supported by relevant content, for sales reps to follow up with each prospect via phone, email, and social media channels.
Rules-based approaches are still core to specifying marketing and sales enablement
sequences, but there are challenges with this because we don’t often know the optimal
content, message or frequency to deliver it. This is where Artificial Intelligence can help,
as we will see later in the report.
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IMPLEMENT ACTION PLAN3
90-day implementation plans
r Q. Are you using 90-day planning to phase implementation and make optimization?
With the number of great options available for targeted communications across different
channels, some common questions we get are “where do we start?” and “how do we
optimize our nurturing process?” In either case, we recommend using a 90-day plan to
decide which new communications you deploy each quarter and which you optimize.
! STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION Use a test-learn-refine approach to optimize your communicationsWhile you can plan for a ‘big bang’ launch where you plan your entire prospect nurturing sequences from the start before implementation, a phased approach can work better because you can adjust your approach based on insight from initial deployments. For example, you could start with a relatively simple three-email nurture sequence which is untargeted and then add targeted versions.
Measurement and optimization
r Q. Do you have a process in place to optimize targeting, frequency and creative?
There are many variables to your communications which can be used to boost response.
You can test changes to targeting, cadence (or frequency), creative or offer to boost
response. These optimization tasks should be based on insight from your automation
system of the cadence or average transition times between different stages. For example,
these are moderate to long transition times that can be improved by optimizations which
consider whether more touchpoints are required:
r Visitor to Prospect – 10.3 days
r Prospect to MQL – 4.8 months
r MQL to SQL – 4.6 months
r SQL to Won – 1.3 months
These optimizations can also be planned and reviewed as part of the 90-day planning
approach because you will need to ring-fence time for testing and review, otherwise it
may never happen.
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3 IMPLEMENT ACTION PLAN
This real example, shared with us by a marketer for a company selling glasses online,
shows the value of testing and also the importance of testing on commercial measures
‘beyond the click’ rather than solely on open and clickthrough rate.
Test and KPI Open rate Clickthrough rate
Conversion rate
Average order value
Revenue per 1,000 emails
Original – Name
only
11.1% 9.0% 2.0% £115 £23
Test variant – Name
plus pricing
11.3% 6.7% 2.8% £133 £28
Difference +0.9% -25.6% +40.0% +15.6% +21.7%
Example of variation in performance for A/B test
You can see that if the decision had been made solely on clickthrough rate of the test
variant, this would have been a mistake. When more pricing details about the glasses
are available in the email, this decreases clickthrough rate but sets expectations to frame
pricing so increases the commercial measures of conversion rate and average order
value on the website and overall revenue per thousand emails. This shows that even if
you are offering a B2B service, you must try to determine the impact on the value of your
tests.
Applying Artificial Intelligence (AI)
r Q. Are you using AI to improve communications relevance and response?
AI and Machine Learning are among the hottest techniques in marketing at the moment –
rightly so because these techniques help increase relevance across multiple touchpoints
and gain insight on your interactions with audiences. The capacity for many businesses
to deploy targeted Marketing Automation may be limited by the skills or experience of
people on the team to select the best targeting options and cadence.
! STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION Use commercial KPIs to review optimizationsWhile it is common for marketers to review responses based on clickthrough rates on calls to action for their emails, or their personalization panels, it’s best to look at the bigger picture of an increase in revenue per 1,000 emails where possible.
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3 IMPLEMENT ACTION PLAN
Automation systems that have predictive analytics features like Salesforce Einstein
reduce the need for rules-based configuration and analysis by offering automated:
r Journey insights: Leverage AI to analyze billions of touchpoints across consumer journeys and discover the optimal paths to conversion, including insights about
which channels, messages, and events perform best.
r Engagement scoring: Predict consumer engagement with your email or website, discover insights about why consumers click or purchase, and use predicted
behaviour to segment, trigger journeys, and personalize messages.
r Lead scoring: Prioritize the leads most likely to convert based on your history and past deals.
r Opportunity insights: Know whether or not a deal is likely to close based on customer sentiment, competitor involvement, and overall prospect engagement.
r Account-based marketing insights: Alerts on key business developments pertinent to your accounts such as your customers’ latest news, M&A activity, and
company expansion updates.
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3 IMPLEMENT ACTION PLAN
SUMMARY4We hope this report has helped you evaluate how you can deliver on the promise of
combining the latest Marketing Automation techniques with cutting-edge content
marketing introduced in the foreword. For successful implementation, consider how
you can refine how you deploy automation in your organization through this data-driven
approach.
To summarize, the three most important practical success factors to maximize response
are having a defined and integrated:
1. Content strategy: To maximize engagement and audience time-to-value
2. Layered segmentation and targeting strategy: To boost audience relevance and response
3. Contact strategy: To combine content, targeting with the right cadence to automate marketing communications and improve sales cadence
We have also seen how marketing and sales governance activities will improve time to
value within your business. Key management actions are:
r Creating a business case based on conversion-based engagement models
r Aligning marketing and sales to design integrated communications strategies
r Implementing a 90-day planning process to support a data-driven approach to
optimization
About the authorsIntroductionSuccess factors for integrated marketing and sales engagementAbout this guideReview current customer journeys and lead funnelModel lead improvements for business caseDefine sales process governanceMartech platformSegmentation and targeting strategyMarketing and sales contact strategy
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