Join Ray Coppinger, Online Marketing Manager at Marketo and demand generation veteran as he presents how to achieve better results through smarter marketing and how to analyse the performance of your marketing campaigns with the metrics that matter most.
In this session you will gain valuable insights on demand generation, specifically:
Using content marketing to feed your demand generation engine
Demand generation and the stages of the demand funnel
Leveraging social marketing for demand generation
Best practices for measuring and analysing campaign performance
Digital Marketing Spotlight: Lifecycle Advertising Strategies.pdf
Demand Generation: Tips, Tricks and Tales from the Front-Line
1. Demand Generation -
Tips, Tricks and Tales from
the Front-Line
Ray Coppinger
Online Marketing Manager EMEA, Marketo
@raycop
@marketo
2. TOPICS
1. What is Demand Generation (DG)?
2. DG at the Top of the Funnel
3. DG in the Middle of the Funnel
4. Content Marketing: Fuel for your DG Engine
5. DG Metrics
Hello – welcome everyone. Excited to be here to introduce the Era of Engagement Marketing and how marketers like yourself are embracing technology in today’s dynamic world to rise above the noise to drive engagement with people
I’m one of you, not to sell you anything (small commercial on the back end) , but to talk about some of the cutting edge marketing that members of our Marketing Nation have been able to achieve with some of these best practices.
In the digital era, your customers are your most valuable asset, and only those who successfully engage them throughout the customer lifecycle will succeed at all. And that means that marketers must master an engagement marketing strategy – through a deep understanding of the seven core principles, combined with the technologies needed to act upon them.
This revenue funnel shows the three phases of the revenue process, reflecting the stages along the buyer’s journey – and embraces a recycling process where less sales-ready leads flow ‘backward’ from sales to marketing.
We call the first phase “seed nurturing” – otherwise known as content marketing or inbound marketing. This is the process of helping prospective customers to find your company, often before they are actively looking to make a purchase, and then progressively turning that early awareness into brand preference, knowledge of your products and services, and a buyer’s journey that ultimately leads to booked revenue for your business.
Next up is Lead Nurturing —the process of building and maintaining relationships with qualified prospects regardless of their timing to buy. Prospects may not want to be sold to, but they welcome help and support with their own learning and research process. And buyers do want to build growing connections with the vendors they are considering. Ultimately, the goal of lead nurturing is to connect prospects with salespeople at the moment each prospect is ready to buy, whenever that might be.
Finally, we get to the Qualification to Close phase. Here’s where the rubber meets the road, and the real payoff of RPM is realized. Here, we enable sales to focus on the best, most closeable opportunities. Any complete Revenue Performance Management process needs to embrace the idea of lead recycling. Depending on the company and its industry, an advanced-stage sales lead might represent an invested expense of $1,000, $5,000, or more. If it were a laptop computer of that value, it would probably carry an asset tag and be
tracked by IT throughout its useful life. Yet high-value leads regularly fade into oblivion, taking thousands of invested dollars along with them. With lead recycling sales routinely hands back to marketing those leads that have strayed away from the buying path back to marketing, entrusting their colleagues to take good care of them. In turn, marketing commits to bringing the recycled lead back around to sales if and when the lead shifts from “not now” to “Okay, I’m ready.”
Let’s talk about where all these targets come from. How are we generating our targets. This is a report pulled right out of our analytics, with real actual data, and It shows which channels are generating targets for us at the top of the funnel. This is a screenshot out of Marketo, so across various channels, what are the number of targets generated, what is the investment per target for that channel (and I am only counting program dollars there, so not counting people’s time).
The % opps, or the % of the targets that become opportunities. The index tells us how efficient each channel is at creating opportunities.
Index is simply the % opp number presented as an index versus the average. So take the inbound web channel. The 2.5 index means that targets generated from the inbound channel are 2.5 times more likely to become an opportunity as compared to the average across channels.
And then days to opp is how long it take them on average, how long do I have to nurture prospects from each channel, before they become an opportunity.
Let’s now touch on events. A great event tip is multi –touch promotion. This works well for physical or virtual events.
This slide will walk us through a typical example of what we do for a webinar:
We kick off our webinar series with a Press release
We do a series of emails and interestingly - > it is the third email drives the most registration!!
We then have a confirmation process:
When someone registers, we send a confirmation email, then a reminder 2 days prior.
We also use a phone message service called - Boxpilot – and this helps us improve our performance
There is a reminder 1 hour before – include calendar – (ics file) so folks can add the event to their calendar
Lastly, for our follow up process: we send out slides within 45 min, then the recording.
The most critical tips for all events is to Follow up FAST! This is one of the most valuable things we do here at Marketo. You can see the data on the right hand side that the organization that gets their follow up out first has a much higher click to open rate.
My favorite are paid email campaigns. This is when a third party sends an email out on your behalf. Paid emails (when done well) can be VERY effective.
Here are a few considerations:
Work with Good vendors – make sure they update their house lists, are flexible and are willing to negotiate. Good vendors will inform you on their database sizes and also will work with you on what lead gen package is best for your business.
Another very important point is GOOD Email design – soup to nuts – this is critical - to the right is an example of one of our emails. It has a prominent button above the fold, a clear CTA, and provides a quick over view of the asset.
Make sure your offer is relevant and vetted for the audience you are sending to
Every send you do is an opportunity to test, learn, and optimize. You can talk to vendors and set up a/bs with your paid sends.
Lastly, have a Back up plan if results don’t meet your goal. If you thought your email was going to bring in 500 new names, but your received 200, make sure to have a plan to make up that gap. If it was not a technical problem, some vendors will work with you on a make up send.
Think about your blog. Do you have a good methodology for collecting names? By adding the sign up for email updates we saw a nice lift.
From average 14 a week to 145/week - 10X growth!
Lastly, I will touch on content syndication. Content syndication is another popular B2B internet marketing strategy used to generate leads online. Content syndication is a method by which pieces of content, they can be articles, white papers, ebooks, are shared with permission from the writer.
Here are some tips for consideration:
1. Use mid-stage content – this way you are selecting leads that are further along in the buying cycle.
2. Gate content – using forms
3. Have system integration. I set up all Content Syndication programs this way to names instantly are updated in Marketo – versus waiting for a vendor to send you and Excel doc.
4. Get credit. What I mean by this, is just make sure your content is branded so there is no confusion about who it is coming from.
5. Double check your names to make sure they are new. You do not want to pay for names you already have.
6. And lastly, check in with your vendors to see how often they get fresh prospects so your content is not circling the drain with the same folks.
Why do we nurture?
-Fast moving leads only represent 2%
-Long term targets represents 98%
-Communicating to 2% ignores a large set of our audience
Brand awareness and preference
Build trust
Improve sales efficiency
*Increase velocity at which leads flow
Engagement Score enables marketers to quickly judge how effectively each piece of content is engaging prospects and customers over time. This proprietary metric takes many factors into consideration, and outputs a single number that gives marketers a fast, apples-to-apples method of measuring content performance…
See trend over time, how updates to program improve engagement.
Lead scoring is a methodology to rank leads to determine their sales readiness.
Can score demographics – for example, for our business VP of Marketing = high likelihood to purchase, will be scored higher, student lower
Other key element is behavior – what someone does – for example going to your pricing page or engaging with a high value later stage piece of content – score this highly
Here is a simple example –
Latent behaviors – interest
Active behaviors – buying intent
Because this presentation is focused on the content aspect – you want to think about how can score your content based on the stage.
If you are not using lead scoring, think about any intelligence you have on where your customers are on their journey and what makes sense for them.
After you have mapped out your persona’s buyer’s journey – you then want to think about the story you want to be able to tell
So it is essential to start with a point of view and be consistent with that viewpoint.
Your customer is the hero – not YOU.
Storytelling is not intended to be a “selling” tool; it’s a method of building strong relationships with your customers and potential customers over time. Your story identifies what your passions are and serves as the foundation for all your future content developments. Think thought leadership not talking about your products and services.
I like to think about it in 3 phases:
Compile your data (should have this from the persona exercise)
Create a narrative
Have a unifying theme- have a point of view- this should be present across all your assets
If you want more details or even templates -> CMI is a great resource
Map your content to the right buying stage.
Ask yourself – is your content findable??? It is like if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" - you can have the best content ever and if no one can find it – so what!
Social promotion
H1 Tag
>2 H2 Tags
Metadata – including title, descriptors, keywords
Links to related content
Alt tags for images
This is a very important topic and something to make sure you or folks on your team are current on.
Keep in mind, content is not just white papers or eBooks!
Can be simple and short blog posts, 4 minute videos, infographics, etc.
Divide and Conquer
Revise & Update
Find your Community
Find internal writers
Hire freelancers
Think about visual content!
Every piece of content should have a limited shelf life
Ask yourself:
How is this content piece performing?
Could we rewrite or redesign?
Obvious content to retire:
Reports that are dated
Assets around an event
Topic is no longer relevant
And as you know, marketing measurement is hard. And it’s hard for a number of reasons. First of all, people who buy Marketo don’t simply respond to one of our marketing campaigns and then buy. Rather, it’s a journey where, on average, they are responding to 7 different campaigns. So maybe they come in via a tradeshow, then download a definitive guide, then watch a webinar, and so on. It takes 7 campaign successes before a purchase is typically made.
Now, the way the CRM works when measuring marketing success is it ties all revenue from a win back to the ‘source campaign’, which means that the first touch gets all the credit for the revenue. This worked great in the age of information scarcity, because as soon as a lead was generated by that campaign, it was tossed over the fence to sales. But we don’t live in that world anymore. In today’s world, those other 6 marketing touch points along that buyer journey may have had as much or more influence on a purchase decision as compared to the source campaign. So taking those other touch points into consideration when measuring campaign performance can be hard.
Further complicating mattes is that there isn’t often just a single buyer. So what if you have two buyers, and both come into the process at different times, through different marketing campaigns. With Marketo, we’ve seen as many as 21 people involved in the buying decision. By the way, we don’t recommend this.
So how do you measure ROI with that sort of complexity. It starts with actually having the data.
I’ve seen situations where sales will close a large deal, and marketers go through a manual effort to figure out, and show the different ways that marketing helped closed the deal, so that they get some credit for it. And that can get crazy pretty quickly….