marketing automation playbook 2014 · marketing automation playbook although marketing automation...

MARKETING AUTOMATION PLAYBOOK 2014

© Madison Logic. 2014

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© Madison Logic. 2014 2

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Marketing Automation has gotten a lot of recognition lately and for the right reasons. Marketers should be asking themselves, “Do we implement a Marketing Automation system? And how do we get the staggering results that others are seeing?” Madison Logic has put together this whitepaper to get marketers thinking about the history of Marketing Automation, the key components, and what you could be doing to improve your existing sales process. Marketing Automation as a technology has revolutionized the sales cycle and has changed how marketers think about existing and new customers.

This paper can be used as a guide for companies considering implementing Marketing Automation or for those that wish to improve upon their existing platform. You will receive information about the market leaders and what components should be most important to your organization. Furthermore, with the following best practice tips, you will see how the right system for your organization will help you scale your business and increase your overall revenue.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. History of Marketing Automation

2. Marketing Automation by the Numbers

3. Key Players in Marketing Automation

4. Key Components of Marketing Automation

5. Where Marketing Automation Comes Up Short

6. Solutions

7. Conclusion


Marketing Automation Playbook

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MARKETING AUTOMATION PLAYBOOK 2014

Modern marketing has been around since the early 20th century, focusing on print media to reach a wide audience. Shortly after, the telephone, television, and radio were invented, and marketers slowly began utilizing these channels for the same purposes as print media. However, telephone, television, and radio could only reach a limited audience — those who could afford such a luxury. With the introduction of the Internet, the world of marketing quickly changed and new technologies were introduced. With the Internet came new forms of marketing, including Email Marketing in the late 1990s, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in 1995, and eventually Marketing Automation in the early 2000’s.

History

Marketing Automation was created because marketers were faced with the challenge of reaching prospects across their customers’ ever-increasing variety of channels, which includes personal computers, tablets, and smartphones. With their variety of channels, marketers needed an easy and seamless way to reach their target audience and those who may potentially be in market in the future. Marketing Automation gave marketers the ability to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content which helps convert those potential prospects into customers. With Marketing Automation, it has become much easier to nurture leads by their fit and behavior, allowing marketers to get a much better idea of where leads are in the buying funnel.

The above timeline represents a 30 year span of the constant and rapid change in marketing.



The above chart depicts the complexity of multi-device, multi-channel, and multi-content that marketers face. So let’s review some data points to see how successful marketing automation is.

Definition: Marketing Automation is about making sure that you are delivering appropriate messages, engaging customers, and driving revenue for all of your marketing team’s efforts across your multiple channels.

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Marketing Automation has been proven to work and more and more marketers are using it to refine, target, and optimize program initiatives. By doing this, marketers are able to improve their knowledge of buyer’s behavior, which allows marketers to align with sales, increasing revenue performance, and allowing the business to grow. However, just don’t take our word for it, the numbers really don’t lie!

There are currently over two hundred marketing automation technology providers in the space.1

25% of B2B Fortune 500 companies already use marketing automation, as do 76% of the worlds largest SaaS companies.2

70% of the buying process is now complete by the time a prospect is ready to engage with sales.3

Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.4

Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.5

Marketing Automation by the Numbers

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25%

70%

20%

50%



Raab Report has indicated that marketing automation is expected to grow 60% over the next year reaching revenue figures of $1.2B during 2014.8

Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.6

3. SiriusDecisions

4. DemandGen Report

1. Frost & Sullivan

2. Pardot

5. Forrester Research

6. Gartner Research

7. The Annuitas Group

8. Raab Report

9. http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/marketing-technology-lumascape/

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Revenue in the marketing automation industry is predicted to grow by 60% in 2014. That’s up from 50% annual growth in 2012 and 2013.*

Since these data points show that Marketing Automation really works, you will probably want to know who will be the best providers for your organization’s needs. This can be tricky depending on what exactly your sales and marketing team is looking for. Over the past year or so, technology and software giants such as Oracle®, Salesforce®, Adobe®, and IBM®, have been placing large wagers on marketing automation cloud services with their high profile acquisitions of automation companies. LUMAPartners9 has done an incredibly good job of showing who does what in the marketing world. We broke down one of their “LUMAscapes” to give you a closer look at who the key players in Marketing Automation are. (see figure below).

Key Players in Marketing Automation



As you can see, there are multiple providers for Marketing Automation, but the key is finding the solution that best meets all of your needs. Research firm Frost & Sullivan® has reported that Marketo®, Eloqua® (acquired by Oracle®, 2013) and Silverpop® (acquired by IBM®, 2014) own roughly 80% of the marketing automation market share, leaving the other 20% for vendors such as Hubspot®, Pardot® (acquired by Salesforce®, 2013), Neolane® (aquired by Adobe®, 2013)Act-On® and Infusionsoft®.

Marketing Automation platforms offer a vast collection of tools and resources. We’ve aggregated and defined the most popular functions for a quick-reference guide. Keep in mind that while each individual component is important to the marketing process, it may not be the best fit for your specific company. The current leaders in Marketing Automation each offer different solutions, so it is best to get as much information about the various components in order to make an informed decision when your organization decides to implement or upgrade your existing Marketing Automation platform.

Key Components of Marketing Automation



Visitor Tracking on Website – Is a way to track who is doing what across your site. It will provide you with a full set of statistics to help you monitor and track visitors while also collecting statistical data about your visitor traffic and aggregates the data into meaningful reports.

Lead Nurturing (via Email) – Is a way of building relationships with potential clients even if they are not currently looking to buy a product or service. This is done by sending an occasional email letting the client know about updates to a product or service. It is also a way of keeping your organization on that client’s radar for when they are eventually ready to buy.

Lead Scoring – Is a method of ranking prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value of each individual lead represented to the organization. This score is used to determine which leads will be engaged with by departments in your organization.

Blogging & Social Outreach – Is the act of posting content regularly on a personal/organizational website or through social media such as Facebook®, LinkedIn®, Twitter®, Instagram®, etc. Through these efforts you can reach a wider audience, while also sharing important updates or news regarding your organization.

Lead Flow Capacity to Sales – Is the maximum amount of generated leads that are passed on to sales as “sales ready.”

Marketing Asset Management – Is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience. The objective of this is to drive profitable customer action, while continuously creating content to inform clients about new processes within your organization or within the industry.

Reporting / Analytics – Reporting is the process of organizing data into informational summaries in order to monitor how different areas of a business are performing. Analytics is the process of exploring data and reports in order to extract meaningful insights, which can be used to better understand and improve business performance.

Lead Generation – Is the process of collecting names and contact information about qualified prospects that will be contacted by the salesperson for generating orders. It usually involves direct response advertising and telemarketing.

Landing Page Creation / Optimization – Is a part of Internet marketing specializing in conversation rates of potential prospects who visit your designed landing page through pay-per-click ads or banner ads. These pages are optimized to display relevant content that targets a specific group of customers.

Campaign Testing (A/B Testing) – Is a method of measuring the effectiveness of one advertisement variation over another. Two version of the same ad are randomly presented to a subset of users, where version A differs from version B in only one isolated respect. For example, version A would have a red call to action button while version B would have a blue one. User interaction and engagment activity is then tracked to identify which ad garnered a higher conversion rate. Always remember, you can not improve what you can not measure.



Although Marketing Automation has proved to be an outstanding resource for marketing teams of all shapes and sizes, it has its limitations. Below is a collection of some of the common pitfalls that a marketer may encounter while using or implementing an automation platform into their marketing process.

Where Marketing Automation Comes Up Short

Not enough leads in the pipeline to warrant a full-scale Marketing Automation platform.

While Marketing Automation excels at nurturing, scoring and qualifying leads, it requires a healthy stock of leads to maximize effectiveness.

1.

Not enough lead data.

Traditionally, tracking visitor interactions on your website is a fantastic way to gain insights on your leads, however, Marketing Automation platforms only offer first-party tracking, which can be viewed as microscopic in scope, compared to the vast ecosystem we call the internet. You simply cannot create predictive patterns on only one interaction. This problem stems from the fact that marketers can only track user engagement across their own website.

2.

Content relevancy.

You are not a mind reader, nor is your Marketing Automation platform. It would be virtually impossible to predict exactly what piece of content would tickle the fancy of an online researcher. A strategic approach in analyzing behavioral data and creating predictive models is all but necessary to ensure that your leads and prospects aren’t puzzled, or possibly offended, by the content of your marketing emails.

3.

Leads go dormant, but not dead.

The B2B buying cycle is long-term, and recurring. Only one out of every ten leads in a database are active at any one point in time. Many business contracts are on multi-year agreements. Prospects in your database can in fact go dormant during that period, then suddenly reappear as they approach renewal considerations for these contracts.

4.

Dead leads and email opt-outs.

The CAN-SPAM act of 2003 requires all email communications to include a visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism that is present in all emails and for consumer opt-out requests to be honored within ten business days. What does this mean for digital marketers? Once a prospect or lead exercises their right to opt-out from your messaging, you may no longer send them your marketing collateral via email, thus rendering the automated email communication sector of your marketing platform obsolete.

5.



Madison Logic’s Content Consumption Monitoring technology can stream live data feeds to marketers based on the content consumption behavioral patterns of their users. Listening to content consumption can effectively produce less opt-outs, higher campaign performance, more meaningful engagement and a better overall user experience. Furthermore, intent data can be utilized to drive predictive lead scoring, display segmentation, content creation sales alerts and valuable insights into your customer base.

Solutions

Content relevancy

Madison Logic’s Email Segment Builder (ESB) allows marketers to segment their leads based on the specific topics as they are being researched in real-time. This will effectively allow you to send the right content to the right people at the right time.

Creating lead-interaction signals based on content consumption is a great way to keep tabs on prospects and leads that may not be ready to buy just yet, but are actively conducting research for a future purchase.

Display campaigns are a great way to maintain engagement with prospects in a non-invasive manner in full compliance with CAN-SPAM regulations. Madison Logic offers a suite of Display NurturingTM products for marketers to leverage behavioral intent data to effectively segment for display campaigns.

Leads go dormant, but not dead

Dead leads & email opt-outs

Opportunity Solution

Not enough leads in the pipeline to warrant a full-scale marketing automation platform

Madison Logic’s Lead Generation platform generates and delivers qualified leads seamlessly into the Marketo® platform with an easy to use interface for effective lead nurturing as well as Content Consumption Monitoring (CCM) across an entire B2B ecosystem of premium websites, email newsletters and LinkedIn® groups.

Madison Logic offers CCM across an entire B2B ecosystem of premium websites, email newsletters and LinkedIn groups, allowing marketers to effectively listen to the content consumption patterns of their leads and prospect accounts while they conduct research online. This widens the marketing lens on an exponential level from only tracking interactions on a single website to a network of over 450 premium B2B publishers.

Not enough lead data



POWERED BY INTENTNow that you have a broader understanding of the potential of an automated marketing engine, you’re going to need supercharged fuel to keep that engine running smoothly.

Madison Logic helps its clients cultivate the highest quality leads into the highest value relationships every step of the way. Our programs are driven by intent data through our Content Consumption Monitoring technology that identifies and nurtures leads by delivering the right message to the right prospect at the right time. This in turn allows marketers to further capture the Voice of the Customer, in prioritizing their content preferences to further optimize future engagement.

Our technology is powered by intent data that drives relevancy and efficiency, while our nurturing will drive engagement, allowing you to really know your B2B audience. You will see where they go, what they like, and how to reach them most effectively. Conversely, you will find out what is most important for your audiences’ needs, which enables you to get the most out of your target audience.

If you would like to learn more about how you can start leveraging intent data for more effective and relevant marketing programs, please contact [email protected] or call, (646) 937–5851

marketing automation playbook 2014 · marketing automation playbook although marketing automation...

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