Where Are You on the Marketing Maturity Curve? [Report]

Author: Adrienne Whitten

I love data. As a marketer today, you can’t really function without it, and as far as I’m concerned, the more you have, the better. 

When I started at Marketo last fall, I was excited to see how data-driven this company is. We are awash in reports, analytics, spreadsheets, charts, and graphs…which is great! So, I was particularly happy when I learned that we were fielding a benchmark survey to gather insights on how our customers from different company sizes, functional areas, and industries are moving along their own paths to digital transformation.

2017 Marketing Benchmark Report–North America 

As our own CMO, Chandar Pattabhirim says: “The future of marketing relies on our ability to engage with people in a personal and authentic way.” But, the question is–how exactly are marketers doing this today? So, we asked them, and we are proud to offer you the first of what will be an annual survey to give you marketing benchmarks from some of the best marketers in the world.

The report is rich with useful data, so I won’t try to capture it all here, but as a preview, there are six sections to the report:

1. Marketing Organization & Technology
2. Usage & Effectiveness
3. Multi-Channel Strategy
4. Lifecycle Marketing
5. Metrics & ROI
6. Opportunities

How Marketing Technology Is Making an Impact

My favorite section of the report is the one on marketing technology since I’ve been marketing various kinds of software throughout my entire career, and I’m fascinated by how technology continues to both improve and disrupt business processes across the organization, particularly in marketing.

The question I had on my mind, that I now have an answer to is:

How many types of marketing technology does it take to make an impact?

Based on our survey of over 1,300 marketers, the most common answer was 6-10 different technologies. And more than 60% of marketers surveyed have that or more. What’s even more interesting to me is that larger companies don’t necessarily use more technologies. In fact, it was the mid-sized companies (by a hair) that were using more technology. Perhaps they have more pressure to grow, or to be efficient? 

What we do know is that size doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to building a marketing technology stack. Even with small businesses, the majority had more than six technologies. And I actually wonder whether the marketers who said they had five or less were just leaving out pieces that they hadn’t integrated yet.

One thing’s for certain: if you’re using more than six technologies for marketing, you’ll definitely need a hub for a 360-degree view to bring it all together. We, of course, use the Marketo Engagement Platform as ours, and many of our customers also have Marketo at the center of some very impressive marketing stacks.

The great thing about benchmark data is that you can draw your own conclusions and sometimes justify new investments or shifts in strategy.  If you’re in the minority that’s using one or even (gasp!) zero marketing technology, perhaps this survey will help you start a discussion with your manager. There are more than 3,800 companies offering marketing software, according to Scott Brinker at Chief Marketing Technologist–at least until he updates his Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic for 2017!

So, dig into our 2017 Marketing Benchmark Report–North America and let us know what you think and what questions you still have about marketing organizations, technology, strategy, channels, metrics, or anything else. 

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Where Are You on the Marketing Maturity Curve? [Report] was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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3 Ways to Make Controversial Content Work for Your Brand

Author: Andrea Lehr

Most brands avoid controversy like the plague, in large part because on the surface it does seem ill-advised. Who would want to associate their name with something Merriam-Webster defines as an “argument that involves many people who strongly disagree about something?”

However, there are some who choose to stir the pot because they know something others might not fully understand yet. Controversy attracts attention because it triggers an emotional response, which is essential in generating massive engagement. It encourages audiences to click, read, and share the content.

One of the most difficult parts of controversial content, though, is execution. In this post, I’ll introduce three ways you can approach controversial content and how to determine which one is right for your brand:

3 Types of Controversial Content

The first thing you need to understand is that controversy for the sake of controversy is not going to provide value to your brand or target audience. To get big results, your content needs to get people talking in a way that can still benefit both your brand and consumers. Below are a few different approaches to controversial content along with examples that show how each type can positively relate back to a brand:

1. Disprove an easily held assumption by offering surprising or unexpected content. 

These ideas typically force audiences to rethink a common belief or rely heavily on a shocking visual. Consider “Hotel Hygiene Exposed,” which we created for our client Travelmath. A few members of our team went visited 9 different hotels in order to gather 36 samples from various surfaces. We sent the results to a third-party lab and found out that the nicest hotels are actually the dirtiest–driving more than 700 media pickups and 24,000 social shares.

What made this campaign work is that although the results are controversial, the content still relates back to the services offered by the brand–specifically any visitors using Travelmath to find hotels for a future trip.

2. Take advantage of our innate interest in taboo subjects. 

These ideas center around topics that aren’t often discussed, which is why this type of content typically does incredibly well. A great example is the Ad Council’s incredibly successful “Love Has No Labels” video. The idea was quite simple: Using an X-ray machine, passersby saw different sets of skeletons showing various signs of affection to one another before revealing their sexuality–forcing viewers to rethink any unconscious biases they might have.

The video worked because it connected directly to the organization’s mission, which is to “produce, distribute, and promote campaigns that improve everyday lives.” And the ability to take a closer look at someone else’s differences–an often taboo subject–helped the video generate more than 57 million views on YouTube, becoming the second most-viewed community and activism campaign of all time.

3. Stir up a debate. 

Most controversial ideas would fall under this umbrella, with a majority of these campaigns presenting data from both sides of the fence so that readers can drive the discussion. A great example is real estate research site Adobo’s “America’s Most P.C. and Prejudiced Places” analysis, which revealed which areas have the most politically and non-politically correct tweets. The idea was controversial, but it worked because it answered one question everyone has when looking for a new place to live: Will I get along with my neighbors? This helped ignite a discussion that drove more than 620 placements and over 67,000 social shares.

How to Make Controversy Work for Your Brand

Although it sounds counterintuitive, most brands would be foolish to rule out controversy entirely. However, the examples above prove that these types of campaigns walk a very fine line. To maximize results, you want to stir the pot without having everything boil over since research has shown that too much controversy actually discourages engagement.

In one of their earlier studies together, researchers Jonah Berger and Zoey Chen analyzed more than 200 articles to see how controversy impacts engagement levels. Their results revealed that while low-level controversy encourages discussion among audiences, anything beyond a moderate level of controversy actually decreases the likelihood of high engagement.

So how do you determine which type of controversy is right for your brand?

Remember that all of your marketing efforts support a consistent image, and controversial content is no exception. Not every brand is edgy, so you’ll want to figure out what your audience wants before moving forward with any polarizing idea. Below are a few questions you’ll want to answer pre-production:

• Does your audience expect controversy from you? This isn’t necessarily a yes or no question; instead, you want to figure out whether or not your audience is looking for something different. Have you seen a dip in traffic, for instance, on your blog? This could be an indicator that your content is becoming too predictable.
• Have your competitors done anything controversial before, and if so, did it work for them? If you’re not ready to take the plunge into controversial waters, see what your competitors have put out there. Tying back in the Abodo campaign, although some brands within the real estate vertical might think they’re only limited to conservative content, the massive amount of engagement from the P.C. campaign prove otherwise.  
• Is the proposed content authentic? Your brand shouldn’t produce something to play devil’s advocate simply for shock value–if you voice opinions you don’t hold, for instance, understand that you will be held accountable to them later. To avoid this mess later on, you should simply let the content speak for itself.

With so much information readily available to audiences across the web, some brands don’t have the luxury to take a conservative approach to content marketing for every campaign–particularly if their goal is to generate high levels of awareness. By offering authentic, balanced, and somewhat surprising content through a controversial campaign, your brand can invite engagement from both familiar faces as well as new audiences–a strategic move that will bring you a whole new level of exposure.

Have you ventured into the world of controversial content? Share what other tips and tricks would you recommend in the comments below!

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Welcome to Marketing In The Engagement Economy

Author: Steve Lucas

You’ve heard it a thousand times: digital transformation has shifted the way companies do business. As a part of this shift, buyer expectations have changed. As a marketer, there are dozens of ways to reach your customer, but the trick is finding out how, when, and why they want to be engaged. Now, a thoughtful, personal, seamless, experience is what customers crave.

The Engagement Economy

That is the idea behind the “Engagement Economy”—a digital future where everyone and everything is connected. It embodies the fundamental shift in the relationships between buyers and sellers, but extends across an entire organization to include customers, prospects, employees, and partners. What’s important for you to know is that if your company does not embrace and adopt transformation in the Engagement Economy, it won’t be long for this world.

Companies that don’t transform risk being outpaced by new, digitally native brands who are able to give customers the experiences they crave. Think of Blockbuster Video. They had a huge brand presence, with over 10,000 physical locations in the U.S. alone, but when Netflix came on the scene, Blockbuster couldn’t adapt to the new model of renting videotapes, DVDs, and music. In 24 months, Blockbuster was gone. Why? Because Netflix offered the customer an experience they actually wanted! And, that’s just one example of a digital native organization. Think of some of today’s most talked-about brands: AirBnB, Uber, etc. We love them because of the experience they provide us, yet neither of them own any real estate or cars.

But not every company is a digital native. In fact, most aren’t. If you’re like the majority of companies out there, you are racing to implement a digital infrastructure that enables you to listen to, learn from, and engage with your customers. So how do you do it?

Drive Wantedness

Success in the Engagement Economy hinges on, well, engagement. Imagine that! Digital transformation, is not about processes, technology, or even sales and marketing—it’s about transforming your organization at its core to create experiences that feel real and human and are founded on trust and care.

In the Engagement Economy, it is all about building personalized, authentic relationships with your customers and driving the idea of wantedness. Wantedness is a really compelling concept based on research by Wunderman, and it’s the degree to which a brand proves their commitment to earning a customers’ business across every touchpoint—across the entire customer journey. In a me-centric world, where consumers expect us, the marketer, to

understand and communicate to them when they want, how they want, on the right channel, and at exactly the right moment. Being wanted is essentially the result of driving an authentic buyer experience.

Digital Transformation with Impact

So where do you go when you’re faced with the need, or maybe paranoid fear, to digitally transform your organization to drive wantedness and participate fully in the Engagement Economy?

You find a partner to lead you through the intense, vast, and complex tangle of data and point systems. Not only are market pressures great—from customers and your competition, but so is the internal pressure from leadership, like your CEO. The partner to help you drive an impactful transformation in your organization is a platform that is built from the ground up—one that is, at its core, built to orchestrate end-to-end marketing engagement.

The Marketo Engagement Platform enables marketers to listen to, learn from, and engage with their customers at scale. And scale is critical when you look at how a strong infrastructure can support and surround your customer to drive wantedness. With the scale, reliability and openness of the Marketo Engagement Platform, marketers are able to partner with integrated solutions to deliver orchestrated experiences.

Looking for a few examples of how partners and customers are thinking about the Engagement Economy? Check out this video:

The Engagement Economy is here. Your partner is here. Now is the time to transform your organization and your marketing to drive success and win the hearts and minds of your customers.

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Hubcast 125: YouTube Marketing, Facebook Ads, & Hubscotch Returns

The Hubcast: HubSpot Tips, Tricks, Inbound & Content Marketing News & Sales Info every week. Are you ...

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Google Removed 1.7 Billion Bad Ads in 2016

Google more than doubled the amount of ads it took down in 2016 from its platform compared to 2015, removing over 1.7 billion "bad" ads. Why take down so many ads? "Ultimately, bad ads pose a threat to users, Google’s partners, and the sustainability of the open web itself," said Scott Spencer, Google's Director of Product Management for Sustainable Ads.

"We have a strict set of policies that govern the types of ads we do and don’t allow on Google in order to protect people from misleading, inappropriate, or harmful ads," noted Spencer. "And we have a team of engineers, policy experts, product managers and others who are waging a daily fight against bad actors. Over the years, this commitment has made the web a better place for you—and a worse place for those who seek to abuse advertising systems for their own gain."

Google's Strategy for Taking Down Bad Ads

In 2016 Google expanded their definition of what a bad ad is in order to remove any ad that is misleading or deemed to be predatory. In July, for instance, they started banning ads for payday loans, which are considered a bad deal for the end user who often are poor to begin with. Google said that in just 6 months since implementing the ban over 5 million payday loan ads were removed.

Google also improved their bad ad technology. "We beefed up our technology so we can spot and disable bad ads even faster," said Spencer. "For example, “trick to click" ads often appear as system warnings to deceive users into clicking on them, not realizing they are often downloading harmful software or malware. In 2016, our systems detected and disabled a total of 112 million ads for “trick to click,” 6X more than in 2015."

More Key Bad Ad Actions Announced by Google

• Disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations.
• Took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling.
• Took down nearly 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.
• Detected and disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads.
• Took down 7 million bad ads for attempting to trick our detection systems.
• Suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking, pretending to be news.
• Took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.
• Took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software.
• Disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.
• Suspended around 6,000 sites for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods.
• Took action against 340 website owners impersonation news or other entities.

"While we took down more bad ads in 2016 than ever before, the battle doesn’t end here," says Spencer. "As we invest in better detection, the scammers invest in more elaborate attempts to trick our systems. Continuing to find and fight them is essential to protecting people online and ensuring you get the very best from the open web."

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3 Steps to Reduce Churn and Increase Revenue

Author: Rick Siegfried

Customer churn, or churn rate, refers to the pace at which customers leave your company in a given period. The ideal churn rate would obviously be 0% (i.e. 100% customer retention), as a high churn rate indicates not only a loss of customers but an underutilization of your existing customer base. Any company that is losing customers is also losing out on valuable cross-sell and upsell opportunities—it is essentially hemorrhaging revenue.

As frustrating as a high churn rate can be, there are ways that you can you improve customer retention, all the while identifying post-sale opportunities. More than salvaging customers who might be on the brink of leaving, customer marketing maximizes the opportunities you already have. Here are three steps to getting your customer marketing campaigns up and running:

Step 1: Align Marketing and Sales Objectives

Finding misalignment throughout an organization is easier than picking up fish from a barrel (trying to be politically correct). It doesn’t take much for different functional groups to become opposed due to distinct departmental goals and measurements of success. However, they are all working toward the same objective: make the organization successful. A key to this is improving the customer experience to reduce churn.

A prerequisite for better marketing and sales alignment includes three necessary tasks:

• Define goals: Whether you’re in marketing, sales, customer success, support, or product management, you’ve got a common goal–increase revenue. You may know that growing revenue is the common goal, but everyone else doesn’t always know that since revenue growth comes in many shapes and sizes. Goals that lead to revenue growth for marketing do not look the same as those goals for sales, for example.
• Map out the customer revenue model: New business and install base focus on different areas of the customer lifecycle. The first phase in the customer cycle is enablement. The next phase is adoption, during which a customer starts using your product and its many features and capabilities. During this stage, marketing should start educating the customer on how to successfully adopt and use the product. As the customer’s usage of the product broadens and matures (this can vary depending on your product), you can start introducing complementary products to them for cross-sell or an upgrade to their current product or service.
• Outline processes: It’s important to determine not just where your customer lifecycle begins and ends, but highlight the stages that connect marketing and sales efforts. Leverage lead scoring across demographics, firmographics, and behavioral data to prioritize your best customers who are in the market for additional products or an upgrade. Then, determine the scoring threshold for which customers should be handed off to the sales team for qualification as marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and eventually as sales qualified leads (SQLs) once their interests are validated. Just as important is determining how customers should be recycled back to marketing if they’re not sales-ready.

Creating harmony between marketing and sales does more than make everyone feel all warm and fuzzy inside—it affects your bottom line in clear and demonstrable ways. In fact, our research has shown that alignment extracts as much as 208% more from marketing, all while causing 108% less friction.

Step 2: Run Automated Campaigns Throughout the Customer Lifecycle

Providing the right content at the right time is the key to drawing customers to a level deeper than just an initial transaction. By creating automated campaigns to deliver content to customers based on their behaviors, actions, and stage in the customer lifecycle, you can not only retain them but grow their lifetime value.

Here are a few different types of customer marketing campaigns you may want to implement:

• Cross-sell and upsell campaigns: Create post-sale opportunities by offering logical additions or improvements based on your customers’ previous purchases. At Marketo, we map specific product offerings based on particular demographics and/or stage in the customer lifecycle. For instance account-based marketing for B2B customers or advanced analytics for someone who has been using Marketo for at least six months.
• Customer satisfaction campaigns: Gauge just how satisfied your customers really are. Tracking information from customer satisfaction campaigns will provide insights about why you might be losing customers. You can set up a recurring survey campaign to start collecting this data, and it’s easy with a survey tool integration.
• Product and service improvement reminders: Make sure that all of your existing customers are aware of new features and optimizations. Current customers too often don’t return because they don’t know you have anything new to offer. Our product releases are on a quarterly cadence, so we keep a fairly consistent cycle of product communications. We’ll send out an email outlining the new features about a week prior to release, then have a live webinar a month later with our product management team who demos the new features.
• Post-sale engagement: The simple act of following a sale with an email requesting feedback or offering support creates a hugely favorable customer experience and helps to generate future opportunities. Don’t try to sell more, but offer your support. Use the opportunity to create that relationship with your customer so they know that you’re a problem solver and can continue to assist throughout the relationship.

There are plenty of other potential campaigns you can run, but the important thing is to communicate with current customers in ways that speak directly to their situations. This humanizes your company and turns customers into loyal brand ambassadors and advocates.

Step 3: Measure and Optimize

Bringing your churn rate as close to 0% as possible requires constant measuring, analyzing, and restructuring. It requires being as fluid and adaptable as the people that use your product.

It’s important to have a framework and a timeline for measuring the results of your campaigns, and there are two sets of metrics you may want to consider:

• Engagement metrics are tied to your campaigns and help you understand their early impact so you can optimize as needed. Some of these metrics include:
  • Campaign successes: The number of people who take the desired action of your campaign (e.g. downloads or attendance)
  • Click-through rate (CTR), click-to-open rate (CTO), unsubscribe rates
  • Act Nows: An action demonstrating high buying intent and requiring immediate sales follow-up
  • Call Nows: An action demonstrating engagement in a mid- to late-stage campaign, which may indicate buying intent so follow-up is recommended)
• Revenue metrics, otherwise known as late-stage metrics, are critical for understanding how your campaings contribute to revenue, which demonstrates marketing’s contribution, gives you credibility, and drives budget decisions. These can’t be measured immediately since it takes time to mature and include:
  • Pipeline
  • Opportunities
  • Revenue won

It’s not difficult to convince anyone that customer retention and post-sale engagement are high priorities, but how you retain customers and grow their lifetime value yields a long list of potential solutions.

Don’t take my word for it. Discover how to win in the world of digital marketing at the 2017 Marketing Nation Summit in San Francisco this April. Register here to throw your name in the hat to win a VIP experience at Summit!

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Restaurants Creating Crave on Instagram

According to a post on the Instagram Business blog the number one driver of visits to restaurants is the act of craving. In advertising this simply means making people hungry for what your are selling. Restaurants love Instagram because of its visualness, its frequent use of video in posts and probably most importantly, its primarily consumed on a mobile device.

A 2015 study showed that 53% of frequent diners and 41% of occasional diners use their mobile phone to decide on a fast-food restaurant. You have to assume that's just as prevalent with restaurants in general. Instagram says that for restaurant goers on mobile, 23% take a photo purely to remember the experience, and 15% share that experience on their social channels. They report that after seeing friends’ photos and videos of fast-food restaurants on Instagram, 66% of frequent diners want to visit.

Interestingly, Instagram users that follow restaurants are 1.4 times more active on Instagram than average, indicating that they use the platform for more than just posting photos. Instagram reports that they like 4.5 times more content, post 3 times more than the average user and comment 7 times more frequently than typical. That's amazing. One wonders if there is some other common variable other than liking restaurants, but we'll go with that for now.

Since Instagram was launched food has been a big part of the app, with people posting millions of photos and videos of what they were about to eat. Restaurant have taken note of this posting fetish and thought, what can we do to feed into this without becoming another unwanted ad? That's where the concept of crave comes in. Restaurants are focusing posts and ads on making people hungry, using Italian music when showing a video of a pizza being made, showing extreme closeups of a Ruby Tuesday hamburger so that people can almost taste it, in the case of Fridays showing a very satisfied person eating their ribs. The point is to focus on the food in order to create the crave.

Instagram says that Ruby Tuesday ran a series of 5 video ads and saw a 22-point lift in ad recall—outperforming similar campaigns by 96%. They say it also drove a 10-point lift in purchase intent among 45-54 year olds—which outperformed nearly 75% of similar campaigns for the same demographic.

"TGI Friday’s developed a two-phased campaign that used video and carousel ads, as well as local awareness ads on Facebook, to promote its ribs and encourage people to enjoy them at a physical location," noted the Instagram ad team. "The six-week company not only drove a 3-point lift in purchase intent, but more than 50,000 restaurant visits were attributed to the campaign."

Dairy Queen's Instagram campaign reach 20 million people, driving an 18 point lift in ad recall among 25-34 year olds. They say it also drove an 8 point lift in awareness of its “Upside Down or Free” promotion and a 3 point lift in purchase intent. Not much in purchase intent but it definitely drove the crave.

"We wanted to build up our presence on Instagram and occupy the currently sparse dessert space," said Jenell Lammers, Digital Marketing Manager, Dairy Queen (View photo at top). "We’ve done just that with this campaign, which further proved that Instagram is not only great for organic posts but can really drive results."

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Government Can Speed Up Implementation of IoT Technology

Government around the world play a key role in whether IoT becomes a mainstream technology sooner rather than later according to Cisco IoT expert Maciej Kranz. Kranz recently posted an excerpt of his book Building the Internet of Things on the Cisco Innovation blog.

IoT Adoption is Key to Regional Competitiveness

"Governments around the world are beginning to realize that IoT adoption will be one of the key factors defining the competitiveness of their cities, provinces, countries, or regions and that IoT can help solve many of the chronic problems plaguing their economies and their environments," says Kranz. "Thus, governments at various levels have a number of key roles to play."

"There will be competition for bandwidth and other resources; there will be ideas that may conflict with public policy; and there will be IoT-based ideas that need to be regulated to ensure public safety and privacy," noted Kranz. "Think drones. In these and other ways, government regulations can help direct and align the industry."

Kranz offered a few examples of U.S. legislations and related impact:

• The Energy Act drove the need for energy monitoring, including smart meters.
• The Rail Safety Improvement Act specified the requirements and the deadline (since extended) for adoption of Positive Train Control on main U.S. railways.
• The Food Safety Modernization Act drove the requirements for IoT-based systems, including quality control and source tracking, across the food supply chain to prevent food safety issues.
• Most recently, the Drug Quality and Security Act requires the adoption of a system to identify and trace prescription drugs.

Kranz believes that government funding priorities may drive the future of IoT. "Through their spending power, governments can drive the focus and accelerate the adoption of IoT technologies and solutions. In aggregate, governments represent a huge global market. Their priorities, what they choose to buy, and what problems they choose to address can drive the roadmaps of IoT technology and solution providers."

He lists these additional government roles:

• Supporting training and education
• Supporting development of startup ecosystems
• Supporting standards efforts
• Supporting basic research and development
• Enabling competitiveness and openness of the country’s markets
• Promoting best practices and modern business models

Why the IoT is Important to Our Future

Kranz' promo video for his book says this about the amazing future predicted for IoT technology, impacting not just consumers but manufacturers and really... everybody.

"The wheel, printing press, the airplane. It's impossible to imagine life without them and soon it will be just as impossible to imagine life before the Internet of Things! IoT is already happening and the growth and opportunity it provides isn't just big, it's huge. Wheel, printing press and airplane huge. Billions of connected devices, trillions in revenue."

At its core, Kranz said on his website, "it's about business outcomes and people; it is about new ways of doing business, talent and change management; it is about migration to open technologies and open business structures based on co-development and ecosystems of partnerships; it is a multi-year, multi-phase journey."

Here's a recent interview that Maciej Kranz gave explaining IoT to investors:

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How to Build a Social Media Dream Team

Author: Ellen Gomes

Social media is one of the most powerful ways to reach and engage with your buyers today. Because it’s almost universally used—by consumers and brands—it’s one of the most effective (and perhaps cost-effective) channels to connect with your audience.

Social media marketing offers marketers a vast opportunity to engage with their buyers, across the entire customer lifecycle, on the platforms they actively tune in to for information. So, it’s critical that, as a marketer, you know how to leverage social media marketing to build your brand, drive demand, and engage your buyers.

But let’s get real, social media is probably one of the most instantaneous ways that you can represent your brand—from voice, to promise, to personality—and with that capability comes a ton of responsibility. Social media, like many roles that manage customer- and public-facing properties, can sometimes get input and scrutiny from across the organization. We’ve all heard the saying, “Everyone is a marketer,” but I’d venture to say that even more people subscribe to “Everyone is a social marketer,” since many of us manage personal social accounts.

So, if you’re running a marketing function or looking to improve your social media strategy, it’s critical to build the right team to appropriately resource this critical function. This blog will look at three essentials of a social media dream team, from the team members you may want to hire to processes you should put in place. 

1. Roles and Responsibilities

Social media marketing requires more than randomly posting interesting articles on Twitter or sharing funny memes. It takes real effort, especially if you want to work toward creating an integrated cross-channel campaign strategy. As you craft your social media strategy and define your goals, it’s important to consider your resource allocation. How many resources you will need to dedicate to social media marketing will depend on the following:

• Budget for new headcount
• Strategic goals
• Number of platforms utilized
• Weekly social time commitments
• Content strategy
• Current and future community size

The size of your team and the scope of responsibility will vary considerably based on your organization’s size and structure. In a large, global organization, social media responsibilities may sit across many teams and paid social advertising may be on a separate team.

For a consumer organization, you may have a lean team, but outsource the paid social advertising. Or, for a start-up, your social media headcount could be responsible for other areas of the business and not be able to fully devote their time to social media. With that in mind, here are some considerations, but keep in mind they won’t fit all situations:

• Consider starting by dedicating one full-time headcount for social marketing management. This person will spend his or her time mostly on community management, social messaging, content creation, best practices, and planning.
• Resource permitting, another full-time employee hire should be someone dedicated to creating content and who can serve as the managing editor for all of your content.
• Then, if possible to hire someone or contribute to a headcount of someone on your digital advertising team that is dedicated to driving effectiveness and toward your goals with paid social advertising.

As you can see, based on the first two suggested hires, it’s critical that your social media hire(s) should understand your audience, brand, and help define and uphold your brand voice on social and through content. Matt Heinz recommends looking for specific personality traits that can deliver on this.

However you choose to structure your team, it’s important that you cover the following responsibilities:

• Map to higher-level company goals
• Define social media marketing objectives
• Social channel optimization
• Content strategy
• Social campaign planning
• Social CRM segmentation
• Social scoring/nurturing
• Social analytics

2. Governance Board

In addition to your focused social media staff, you will want to create a social media governance board that is made up of executives, stakeholders, subject-matter experts, and key employee advocates. This is the team that determines your ongoing broad strategy goals and internal training initiatives, makes key decisions around your social media interactions, and serves as a chain of command for emergency situations. Your governance board should meet on a monthly or quarterly basis to reassess and innovate on processes and strategies.

Because social media marketing offers marketers a very immediate and personal connection with their audience, it’s important to remember that it’s all public—and sometimes that can cause concern. While your social media team can do everything in their power to make sure your audience and customers are happy on social media, inevitably you will run into a situation that needs a more immediate response—like an unhappy customer or group of customers. In that case, it’s vital that your social media governance board creates a social media escalation policy which will indicate who should respond and how. Dan Gingiss reiterates the importance of responding to brand mentions, whether they’re positive or negative.

3. Employee Engagement

While your social media team will do the heavy lifting, a strong presence of employee advocates on each channel will help strengthen your brand presence. At Marketo, we embrace social sharing tools to encourage social conversions within our employees’ networks. Our social media team curates content that employees can share with their networks so that our posts aren’t just seen by our followers, but by our employees’ networks as well.

You may also encounter comments or questions that can best be addressed by your own employees. In these cases, it would be a good idea to have a social representative from each team—sales, product marketing, support, customer success, etc.—who can engage in these conversations. These individuals will represent your company as employee advocates, but also bring to the table their unique expertise and experiences.

Social media by its nature is an engaging and collaborative environment for people to share and learn. But with great power comes great responsibility, and as a brand, collaboration is just as important in structuring your team for social media marketing. Ensure that your team and processes drive toward departmental and organizational goals while upholding the standards set forth by the channel.

Do you have a social media dream team? What other advice would you give? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

 

 

 

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How to Build a Social Media Dream Team was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement

Author: Chris Gillespie

There are nearly 17 million Google search results for “marketing and sales alignment”–too many in my mind, given that they all sound pretty much the same.

Most of them beseech marketers and salespeople to “just get along,” but while they advertise “shockingly simple secrets,” most of them are troublingly vague. How, for example, is one supposed to “utilize effective sales collaboration and engagement techniques?” Other than buy a thesaurus, that is. These articles, stripped of their buzzwords, are often little more than empty husks scattered around the base of a genuine and intractable problem.

But this one is different. This article is going straight for the jugular. Today, I’ll share how marketers can achieve alignment by simply enabling sales to close more deals. As a sales leader of mine once said, “When the cowbell is ringing, all sins are forgiven.”

The best way to do that? Create content that’s so good that it becomes the sales teams’ secret weapon.

Here are four assets you can create to enable sales to close more deals:

1. Quick Reference Stats List

Give the salespeople what they want and produce a fast stat sheet! This is the killer asset for salespeople of all stripes and seniority, from SDRs up to AEs, and here’s why: people trust statistics. They just do. Prospects want certainty, and a confident salesperson with access to a lengthy list of well-organized and credible statistics is exponentially more effective.

To see what I mean, compare these two phrases:

A: “Our solution reduces your expenses considerably.”

B: “Research from Accenture shows that software (like ours) reduces expenses by 40%.”

No matter who says the second phrase, they stand safely behind the laurels of Accenture’s credibility and hard facts. Even the entry-level, first-day-on-the-job salesperson can say this and be believed. It gives you instant credibility.

Now, you might be late to the party, but don’t worry. It’s very likely that your sales team has already started to create this list on their own. In my past sales roles, our team built a communal Excel spreadsheet that was sorted by industry, product, and challenge, and we wove them into our calls, emails, and presentations to great effect.

What we could have used, however, was some expert guidance from someone who knew what they were doing. As a marketer, you can not only do it better and save your sales team time but also weed out troublesome, sketchy third-party statistics that have no place being shared publicly.

2. Story-Driven Case Studies

Help your sellers sell with story-driven case studies! Whether you know it or not, if you’re writing case studies, you have some secret admirers on the sales team. All salespeople engage in the act of storytelling to get their prospects to understand why others have purchased from you and how they’ve been happy. For their stories, they turn to your case studies.

Essentially, salespeople want prospects to view or hear them and go through this train of thought:

1. That company is like mine.
2. Their problem is like mine.
3. They solved their problem with this company’s product.
4. This might work for me, too.

Do your case studies mimic this flow? Do they end in credible but impressive statistics rather than loose phrases about “joint success?” If not, it’s time to revise. For a good example, check out how FunnelWise, an analytics software, organizes theirs.

Case studies that are purposefully written will not only be shared more widely, but the sales team will learn them by heart and recite them to clients. Few things enhance their credibility more than being able to rattle off the name of similar clients who had excellent results. Great sales teams will even incorporate them into their sales onboarding.

For maximum impact, make your case studies easily searchable. Solutions like RO Innovation and Influitive can help.

3. Create Well-Produced, Bite-Sized Videos

Video now accounts for 74% of all internet traffic, and 59% of executives would rather watch a video on a product than read text. Videos are thus extremely valuable for salespeople in snagging executive attention.

Create bite-sized videos (1-3 minutes max) that succinctly whets prospects’ appetites to learn more. These are ideal for salespeople to pepper into email or social outreach because watching video is a passive activity. The barrier to entry is lower than if you ask them to read a case study or visit a website. For an example, here’s a Marketo video testimonial from GE that can be shared on different channels.

While you’re at it, go for gold and produce a series of videos that are segmented by vertical, company size, product, and use case to make them even more targeted and effective. This small arsenal of verticalized video content will improve sales outreach.

4. Deliver Competitive Intel

Salespeople are always dying to know what’s going on with competitors: What products are they planning to release? Where do we compare favorably? Sometimes, they hear so many things that it’s hard to know what’s true and what isn’t. As a marketer, you can make them more confident and informed by assigning or hiring a competitive intelligence liaison to sales.

This person’s job should be to take all the research that marketing has already done and package it up for sales. This includes competitive one-pagers that outline competitor weaknesses and company strengths, deep-dive decks on their products, suggestions for sales landmines, and links to customer complaints or unfavorable reviews about the competitor. This material should reflect sales sentiment: produce whatever sales needs.

The result of this, in my experience, is a once-a-week meeting that salespeople eagerly attend which opens a much-needed channel for feedback wherein the teams can collaborate. Or, dare we say, align?

Marketers and salespeople may have different responsibilities, but their bottom line is the same: drive more revenue. By creating content that’s so effective that it becomes sales’ secret weapon, you can ensure for happier teams and better alignment.

What other assets would you add to this list? Share in the comments below!

 

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4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Where to Put Marketing Videos on Your Website: 7 Places to Consider

Assuming you have the right content approach and the videos have been produced, you may be wondering as to the best places to put videos on your company website. If this is the case, here is a list of some potential...

The post Where to Put Marketing Videos on Your Website: 7 Places to Consider appeared first on The Sales Lion by Marcus Sheridan.

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How to Leverage Intent Data to Drive More Revenue

Author: Travis Kaufman

As key drivers of the revenue team, marketing and sales are constantly looking for the next innovative method to get a competitive edge—particularly in generating revenue for the business.

One method that continues to pique interest is intent data.

Having created numerous products that leverage massive volumes of data in the marketing and sales space, we get asked many questions about how to best leverage intent data. In this blog, I’ll walk you through what intent data is, how to use it to drive revenue, and how to evaluate a vendor:

What is Intent Data?

Intent data is behavioral information collected about an individual’s online activities, combining both topic and context data, which I’ll explain in more detail below.

Topic Data: When you search for something or visit a website, you are expressing an interest in that topic. For example, people who read this article are expressing some level of interest in “intent data.”

There are several different categories of topic data:

• Anonymous 1st Party Behavioral: People visiting your website who are identified by their IP address, which is then mapped to their company’s name. You can use solutions like Demandbase and Marketo Web Personalization to leverage this information to personalize the content displayed.
• Known 1st Party Behavioral: People visiting your website who have also filled out a form online. Because they provided their contact information, they are considered “known.” Using a marketing automation platform, you can then track their page views.
• Anonymous 3rd Party Behavioral: People visiting other websites that you don’t own, but indicate some relevance (e.g. Forbes.com for business professionals). Their IP addresses are collected by vendors like Bombora and Big Willow.
• Known 3rd Party Behavioral: People visiting other websites who have also filled out a form on that site providing their contact information. In this context, they become known to the website owner, and vendors like TechTarget make that information available to marketers.

However, topic interest alone is not all that actionable without knowing the context of the individual.

Context Data: Context is all about gaining insight into who the person is that’s taking the action in question. For example, if the person reading this blog is a marketing professional, it’s possible they are in the process of evaluating a product that leverages intent data. But if the person is an industry analyst, it may be more likely they are writing a report and looking for more information on the subject.

Levels of context range from higher-level, more general information (e.g. Which company does this person work for? What is their official role within the organization?) to really granular, personal insights (e.g. Does this person have expertise in using technologies or best practices associated with my product? Does this lead and company match with my ideal buyer or could they be an influencer?)

Without this context, you’ll be wasting your time and budget engaging with prospects who may be making all the right behavioral signals but will never become customers (e.g. trying to sell your product to the industry analyst).

How to Use Intent Data

Now that we’re clear on what intent data is, let’s go over some specific scenarios in which you can use it to drive revenue.

1. Personalize your website experience for anonymous visitors

When people visit your website before they fill out a form, their activities are considered to be “anonymous.” This term is a bit misleading because the visitor is not, of course, completely anonymous. With the right technology, you can identify the company and/or industry a visitor represents based on IP address alone. However, that visitor is still considered “anonymous” on a personal level. You don’t know who they are or where they fit within their given company or industry. They could be the CEO or CMO—but they could just as easily be an intern or a student.

After you identify visitors “anonymously” on your website and track the pages they view, you can use web personalization to serve customized content to incentivize them to take a specific action. In most scenarios, anonymous personalization is a means to encourage visitors to identify themselves via a form fill so marketing and sales can engage with them (or not).

2. Prioritize inbound leads based on engagement

With the wide adoption of marketing automation, many companies are already using 1st party behavioral data (i.e. context of the individual) to optimize their lead scoring model. This scoring model attempts to quantify the intent of the visitor based on a culmination of activities. For example, when leads visit your product overview page, their lead score will increase by 5. If they visit your pricing page, indicating an even greater interest in buying, it will increase by 10, and so on. Then, when a lead’s score reaches a threshold agreed upon by marketing and sales, an alert is sent to sales to reach out to that prospect.

3^rd party intent data can be incorporated into your existing lead scoring model as well. Consider the scenario where a lead has researched topics related to your product on other websites, but has not yet hit the 1^st party behavioral scoring thresholds set. You shouldn’t wait for them to then hit the behavioral thresholds (e.g. downloading your whitepaper) before engaging with them. If they’re clearly interested, you want to strike while the iron is hot.

3. Nurture known leads with personalized emails

Nascent personalization and lead nurturing leverage job titles to segment inbound leads. The problem? Job titles in the B2B space are not standardized, change frequently, and often give no real insight into the seniority, buying power, or even specific functions the lead serves within their company. This often results in improper categorization, sending unqualified leads to sales, and delivering “personalized”, but irrelevant content to leads.

To most accurately categorize leads and place them in the right nurture campaigns, you must combine their known 1^st and 3^rd party behavioral data to identify not only the context of who they are and their role within the organization but also the topics they are interested in.

4. Identify potential customers who haven’t yet engaged with you yet

Your prospects’ purchasing decisions are strongly influenced before they even reach out to you or visit your website. For example, people consume content within their social media feeds and read reviews on G2Crowd, which shape their opinions and push them in one direction or another. These activities are considered 3rd party behavioral data.

3rd party behavioral data is highly unstructured and the volume is massive. As a result, very few companies possess the budget or expertise to integrate such data into their existing marketing and sales processes. In turn, marketers have increasingly turned to predictive analytics platforms that integrate with marketing automation and CRM platforms to help them sift through the noise to determine which 3rd party topics are actually relevant.

Anonymous 3rd party topic data can be incorporated into predictive account scoring models to determine prospective accounts’ likelihood to buy. This information is used to identify target accounts for outbound initiatives as well as prioritize new inbound inquiries from leads within high scoring accounts.

Questions to Ask an Intent Data Vendor

It’s all too common that people will buy in on the conceptual value of intent data only to be disappointed that the solution they bought cannot be applied to all of their desired use cases.

To ensure your vendor can support your objectives, make sure they can properly tie topic data to buyer context (i.e. intent) by asking the following questions:

1. What level of context can you provide me about the buyer? Company only? Lead only? Ideally, you want both.
2. Can you deliver the context (i.e. company, person, and topic attributes) used in your modeling process so I can use the information in my existing lead and account scoring workflows? Steer clear of “black boxes,” predictive models which don’t let you look “under the hood” and view the data that informed the model.
3. Can I get set up with a quick win and then grow with your offering into more sophisticated uses of intent data?

If your vendor cannot deliver on the above, it will be difficult for you to leverage intent data to its fullest potential. Instead, you’ll risk putting yourself and your organization at risk of buying a solution that doesn’t help you achieve your business objectives.

Are you leveraging intent data today? If so, I’d love to hear how you’re using it and what you think in the comments section below.

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How to Leverage Intent Data to Drive More Revenue was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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