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Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Star: Allison MacLeod

Allison MacLeod is the latest of our Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars. As Senior Director of Demand Generation & Marketing Operations at Rapid7, Allison has a wide range of responsibilities and has both the blessing and the challenge of growing demand for a business that recently received $30M in investment to accelerate its growth(!).

Zak: What is the target audience you are marketing/selling to?

Allison: Rapid7 provides IT data security data and analytics solutions and we market and sell to information security professionals. That includes the CISO (Chief Information Security Officer), security managers, directors and VPs, penetration testers, security analysts, and incident responders.

Zak: With that wide range of roles, how do you segment your audience?

Allison: We segment by customers and prospects, but mostly our segmentation strategy is based on relevance.  We have three different solution areas – threat exposure management, incident detection and response and security advisory services. It is important that we deliver and provide relevant marketing resources to people based off of their need and interest, as well as their role. A security admin looking to scan their network likely wants different content than a CISO who has just joined an organization trying to measure the maturity of their security program. Right time, right message, right person is critical!

Zak: Absolutely. Part of that right time, right message is well defined lead stages, how have you approached that area?
Allison: We follow a Sirius Decisions model, but with a bit of our own Rapid7 twist on it. We measure each stage of the funnel and are pretty maniacal about it to make sure we are staying on top and achieving our goals.

Zak: What does your “technology stack” look like?

Allison: Our stack includes marketing automation, CRM, predictive scoring, customer advocacy, online community, analytics platforms, as well as a few onsite conversion tools.

Zak: That’s outstanding. What aspect of demand generation do you see as particularly ‘hot’ over the next year?

Allison: There are a few different areas – predictive analytics and scoring, account based marketing, personalization and customer focused marketing.

I definitely think we’ll see more of a need for predictive analytics and scoring. Being able to better identify high quality leads and increase conversion is something all of us marketers want as well as the ability to focus on quality over quantity.

I also think personalization will be big in the next year. Being more relevant and targeted in messaging and content is important. Our customers and prospects want what is relevant to them not to be served up a ‘one size fits all’ type of campaign. The better marketers are at this, the more successful they’ll be. But like others have cautioned in this blog series, you have to have enough of the right data to get it correct!

And lastly customer marketing and advocacy is another hot area. We LOVE our customers at Rapid7 – and customer advocacy is really important for us. We get our customers involved in our product programs, events, webinars, blogs and our own customer-only conference UNITED.  I’ve seen a lot of marketers start to focus more on their customers and I think this will be an area that will see a lot of growth in 2015.

Zak: Jon Miller of Marketo has talked about behavior targeting being an area he expects more marketers to get their head around in 2015. Are you doing any form of behavioral targeting or triggers and what?

Allison: This is definitely important and an area I’d like to focus on. Stay tuned.

Zak: We all know content creation is critical to demand generation? How does your marketing team approach content creation? Who owns it? Who contributes?

Allison: We approach content generation based off of the needs of our audiences, what is new and trending in the industry and relevance. We try to be very agile – so for example if there is a big security vulnerability discovered in the industry -- take your pick from 2014 like Heartbleed, ShellShock or Poodle -- we act as quickly as possible to deliver content that is educational and actionable, whether that is a blog post, video, webinar, or eBook.

Content is managed centrally out of our Marketing Communications team, but we have a lot of contributors throughout the organization. Our Community Manager is responsible for our blogs strategy, and we have many contributors to overall content including PR, product marketing and management, engineering, demand generation, our services group, and research.

Zak: What are the top social media platforms you’ve found to reach your audience?

Allison: Twitter and LinkedIn are best for our audience.

Zak: How did you get your start in marketing?

Allison: In college I knew I wanted a career in Marketing, so decided to get my Master’s in Integrated Marketing Communication. While I was working on my M.A., I got a great gig at a small marketing and advertising agency in Boston where I got to wear many hats, mainly product marketing. After I finished grad school, I started at a marketing consulting company where I worked with a number of different clients on their marketing automation and email programs. My first assignment was creating a data dictionary for the CRM and automation platforms for the client’s marketing team. I thought I had wanted to be more on the creative side, but that job was definitely a great intro into demand gen, data and analytics.

Zak: That is so cool. What do you most enjoy about marketing and demand generation?

Allison: I love working across many different departments in the organization. I get to work with sales, all teams in marketing, products and services teams, IT, Finance and more. There is nothing more exciting than knowing that the campaigns or leads you have been responsible for have led to opportunities and won business.  I also love working on integrated campaigns and using new technologies to reach customers and prospects. It’s a job that gets you exposed to a lot of different areas, and no two days are the same which is something that keeps me on my toes and thrilled to keep doing it!

Zak: What skills do you see as most important for a demand generation marketer?

Allison: Data driven, analytical, results oriented, and creative are key skills. More specifically, I think having a natural curiosity about results, being able to create and design programs that are relevant and elicit interest, creating strong alignment with a sales organization, and the ability to change course or alter your programs based off of performance.

Zak: What advice would you give to any aspiring demand generation marketers?

Allison: I’m in demand gen, so of course I think it is one of the most important and exciting functions in marketing.  For those aspiring demand gen professionals out there, I’d suggest joining a company where you can try many things to see what suits you best and round out your experience. Get to know how marketing ops uses technology and data to drive strategy, understand how the digital team creates awareness and fills the top of the funnel, do a stint in customer marketing, content or campaign creation. One of my first roles was focused on marketing operations and it gave me a great foundation to get more involved in the creative side of demand, and ultimately responsible for both.

Zak: Where can we find you on social media?

Allison: You can find me on Twitter @allib1121 and on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/allisonbmacleod

Zak: Thank you Allison.

Enjoyed this interview? Meet all of the Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars

Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Star: Adam Barker

Next up on our list of Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars is Adam Barker. I previously profiled Adam and 12 best practices he shared at a MassTLC Demand Gen group.

So since you have that article already and since Adam’s company is a little bit security conscious, we’ll keep this brief.

Adam has a rock solid demand gen background first at SmartBear Software and now as Director of Demand Generation for Continuum Managed Services.

Zak: What is the target audience you are marketing/selling to?

Adam: Managed IT Service Providers

Zak: We all know content creation is critical to demand generation? How does your marketing team approach content creation? Who owns it? Who contributes?

Adam: The Demand Gen team owns content creation. They involve the entire company gathering content from all our internal SMEs. It’s a team effort. We also enable our customers to contribute for items like blog series and webinars.

Zak: Interesting, you don’t always get that clear ownership of content from the demand gen team. Now on a related topic, Jon Miller of Marketo has talked about behavior targeting being an area he expects more marketers to get their head around in 2015. Are you doing any form of behavioral targeting or triggers and what?

Adam: A good tactic is to organize your site pages by pain point and place visitors in pain point buckets as they visit. Targeting these buckets with tailored messaging increases email success three-fold.

Zak: OK great. So as I mentioned we have a bunch of tips already from your MassTLC presentation, so let’s shift to more about you. How did you get your start in marketing?

Adam: I started as a graphic designer, but my early roles were on VERY small teams so there was a huge need for me to learn more and more marketing channels and mediums. This instilled a passion for all aspects of marketing in me. 

Zak: What do you most enjoy about marketing and demand generation?

Adam: Helping my team learn and succeed. 

Zak: What skills do you see as most important for a demand generation marketer?

Adam: We look for “T-shaped” marketers, meaning marketers who have deep knowledge in one particular area (writing, email marketing, SEO), but they also have smaller skill sets and  (and maybe more importantly) a desire to branch out and learn other skill sets. In general, a team full of T-shaped people makes your team immensely  stronger and more efficient than a team full of “I-shaped” marketers.

Zak: What advice would you give to any aspiring demand generation marketers?

Adam: It’s a skill to be  able to “think scale” for every program/request. The ability to look at projects through the lens of customer AND cross-departmentally with how it  relates to the larger picture that we as a company are trying to achieve.

Zak: Where can we find you on social media?

Adam: @abarks99 on Twitter, or on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/abbarker/en.   

Zak: Thanks Adam.

Enjoyed this interview? Meet all of the Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars

Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Star: Rachel Weeks

Rachel Weeks is the latest of our Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars. As Director of Marketing at HealthcareSource, Rachel drives the strategy and leads the team responsible for demand generation, marketing operations, and corporate communications.

Zak: What is the target audience you are marketing/selling to?

Rachel: HealthcareSource provides talent management software and educational content to U.S. healthcare organizations, so we target a very specific market. Within this market, there are a number of different segments that we target.

Zak: OK so how do you segment your audience?

Rachel: While our target market is very specific, the roles within each organization vary significantly depending on the type and size of organization. While the majority of our audience is hospitals, HealthcareSource also sells to acute care centers, physician practices, and continuing care organizations which include long term care communities, home health agencies and hospice providers, so these organizations may vary in size from hundreds to tens-of-thousands of employees.

Within these organizations, the talent management function includes professionals focused on employee recruiting, performance management, compensation, education, and organizational development. Our products align with these functions in the areas of Recruiting, Retention, and Learning, and within each function we segment by individual contributors/managers who are typically the users and directors/VPs/ CXOs who are typically the decision-makers accountable for the budget.

Our messaging, sales tools, marketing campaigns and calls to action are specific to each function and level within the organization, because often the software purchases for each function are decentralized and we need to be sure we are working with all of the appropriate contacts within an organization.

Zak: Interesting – I think that’s the widest net of personas I’ve heard so far from the all-stars. With so many potentially on the buying team, what is your approach to lead stages?

Rachel: HealthcareSource has adopted the waterfall approach designed by Sirius Decisions which gives us visibility in to each stage of our lead funnel from response through closed won deals. When responses come in via inbound or outbound marketing campaigns, they are dispositioned one of 3 ways: 1) sent to Sales for immediate follow-up 2) sent to BDRs for further qualification 3) entered in to a nurture campaign that is targeted by the respondent’s function and level in the organization.

Depending on the disposition, each response eventually follows the path to lead -> opportunity -> closed won deal. At each stage of the funnel, the response may be dispositioned out of the funnel. The Sirius Decisions waterfall approach gives us visibility in to the volume of leads that are moving through each stage, as well as the conversion percentage. By monitoring the funnel on a regular basis  -- for us it’s monthly, depending on your sales cycle it may be different -- we are able to identify areas where the leads are getting stuck and not moving through the funnel and areas where leads are getting dispositioned out of the funnel. This enables us to target specific funnel stages that need improvement in order to achieve our overall goals.

Zak: What does your “technology stack” look like?

Rachel: At HealthcareSource we use Salesforce.com for CRM, Marketo for marketing automation, and Google Analytics for web activity reporting – pretty standard stuff. We also use a product called Litmus for testing our emails on various browsers, we use Brainshark and Slideshare for content creation, we use Beep! directed voice mail for lead gen, and we try to experiment with as many tools a possible to stay in top of the latest trends, in fact we’re just about to pilot a tool called SproutSocial to further leverage social media for lead gen activities and we’re really excited to see how it’s going to impact our results.

Zak: What aspect of demand generation do you see as particularly ‘hot’ over the next year?

Rachel: The effective use of social media to generate leads will continue to gain traction. I specifically say “effective use” because many companies are using social media to share content and engage with their audience, but I’ve encountered very few that know how to quantify its value. That’s something I’m excited to dive further in to this year.

Personalization and behavioral targeting are the other areas that interest me particularly. There are so many new technology solutions emerging that address these areas, and it’s a significant investment of time to research and evaluate all of the various solutions and determine which one is the best fit for our business, but it’s something I am hoping to focus on at some point in 2015.

Zak: We all know content creation is critical to demand generation? How does your marketing team approach content creation? Who owns it? Who contributes?

Rachel: Content creation is a huge part of our marketing strategy. We have a content marketing specialist on the team who is responsible for the HealthcareSource blog, white papers, PR articles, and leveraging contributed content from HealthcareSource clients, partners, and staff. She works with product marketing and sales to prioritize content creation in response to client and prospect requests, and develops a quarterly list of topics. Depending on the topic and whether or not she wants to include input from clients or other contributors, she will determine what type of asset she will create and what channels she will leverage to distribute it. We almost always distribute all of our content via the blog -- if the asset is a white paper or an article, for example, she will write an excerpt for the blog and link to the full asset -- and our key social channels. She launched a guest blogger program from which we’ve published blogs by HealthcareSource staff, clients and partners, so that has been extremely successful, and our blog offers a great balance of educational content and fun content. Shameless plug inserted here: http://education.healthcaresource.com. We also leverage email for content distribution. 

Zak: Hey, you’ve earned the right to do shameless plugs, so go right ahead. What are the top social media platforms you’ve found to reach your audience?

Rachel: We have both experimented with a variety of social media platforms and surveyed our audience to understand where they are doing their social networking and we’ve found LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to be the most popular platforms. It’s so important to know your audience and engage them where they are already spending time – we post to Twitter through Buffer, our social media management platform, but our audience isn’t really on Twitter so we don’t spend too much time thinking about how it impacts our social media strategy overall. Other audiences will have different preferences for their social networking.

Zak: Switching gears to the personal side, how did you get your start in marketing?

Rachel: I was an English major in college, so I’ve always been a writer. My first job was at a start-up medical device company and while I was primarily the receptionist/office manager, executives would come to me for proofreading and editing because of my background. Eventually my role evolved in to working with print vendors on product collateral and packaging, which eventually lead to my first job in marketing communications. I think start-ups are a great way for new professionals to get exposed to a wide variety of tasks and functions and figure out what career path to pursue for the long term.

Zak: What do you most enjoy about marketing and demand generation?

I love working with cross-functional teams, so marketing is a great way to do that. While we primarily support sales for demand gen, we work with product marketing and management, professional services, HR, and the executive team regularly on lead gen campaigns and branding initiatives. Marketing, to me, has always felt like the hub of every company I’ve been at, perhaps because most marketers are very social by nature and get to plan corporate outings and events!

Zak: What skills do you see as most important for a demand generation marketer?

Rachel: Marketing is much more analytics-driven today than ever before. There are so many great tools that enable marketers to dive deep in to the data of campaigns that the science of marketing has superseded the art. Creativity is still important – both design and content – but now more than ever success in marketing requires a data-driven mindset and the ability to drive activities and results based on supporting data and analytics.

Zak: What advice would you give to any aspiring demand generation marketers?

Rachel: Based on my experience and personal preference for smaller companies, I advise all new job seekers to work in a small company early in their career. Small companies offer so much exposure and opportunity to learn about all aspects of the business whereas larger companies tend to silo people and departments in to very specific roles. In addition to the company size, the company culture is so important. Job seekers can learn about a company’s culture by visiting sites like Glassdoor for employee reviews, doing research on LinkedIn for mutual connections, and asking questions about training and professional development opportunities, mentoring philosophies, what the company does to recognize and reward employees.

Specific to aspiring demand gen marketers, I would suggest leveraging the myriad of great resources that exist online to learn as much as you can about marketing best practices, marketing automation, marketing analytics, and new and emerging technologies from places like SiriusDecisions, LinkedIn professional groups, MarketingProfs, the list goes on and on….

Zak: Where can we find you on social media?

Rachel: Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pub/rachel-weeks/0/80/1b7/en

Zak: Rachel, thanks for your very insights here – very thoughtful and comprehensive.

 Enjoyed this interview? Meet all of the Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars

Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Star: Lauren Brubaker

Lauren Brubaker is latest of our Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars. Lauren is Director of Demand Generation for NetProspex whose innovative approach to marketing data management was recently recognized with a $125M acquisition by Dun & Bradstreet. Lauren is also the owner of a great Twitter handle – B2BLauren.   

Zak: What is the target audience you are marketing/selling to?

Lauren: I’m fortunate to be marketing to my own persona. NetProspex sells to demand gen marketers at high-growth companies, especially those who work in the tech space. We are looking for marketers that care a great deal about being innovative, ahead of the curve, and understand that they can no longer put off investing in marketing data management.

Zak: Yes I am envious – you’re a demand gen marketer marketing to demand gen marketers. So how do you segment “us”?

Lauren: We segment our audience based on persona and stage in the buyer’s journey. We have three different personas that get filtered into MOFU/TOFU/BOFU nurture programs. These nurtures offer a mix of content mapped to their respective stages, along with incentives to push people to the next stage. We also have a customer nurture program that is split between one-time purchasers and our subscription customers.

Zak: What is your approach to lead stages?

Lauren: We follow the SiriusDecisions waterfall method, tracking people at Inquiry, MQL, SAL, SQL, through to Closed Won. MQLs must be accepted and move to SAL within two business days, although ideally they are touched within the first hour. SALs are allowed to remain at that stage for three weeks, as our SDR team tries to book an appointment for a sales rep. Once an appointment is set and there is mutual interest, what we call a “qualifying opportunity” is created. The sales rep then has two weeks to move that opportunity into the discovery stage and associate a potential dollar amount with it. We like to manage momentum as much as possible, by encouraging things to quickly move through the funnel, or return to a nurture program. If they do get returned to nurture, their lead stage is set to RTN, and we evaluate how long it takes for them to pop back up as an MQL.

Zak: Excellent – what I love is the handle you have on the timing, and presumably SLAs, attached to each stage. That’s a best practice right there. So you need to feed those MQLs into the waterfall -- what aspect of demand generation do you see as particularly ‘hot’ over the next year to help you do that?

Lauren: Of course people are buzzing about predictive analytics right now, which is great, but I’m more interested in seeing the evolution of cookie pool data, particularly how it gets paired with firmographic/demographic data for display ads and retargeting. And of course, I’m personally hoping that more B2B marketers begin to see marketing data management as “the new hotness” for their demand gen engine.

Zak: Great stuff. I did recently blog about both predictive lead scoring and retargeting tools so those are on my mind as well. So what does your “technology stack” look like today?

Lauren: We use our own Workbench data management solution to clean and enhance the data that lives in Salesforce and Marketo. We use Triblio for social listening/sharing, and just recently inked a deal with Influitive to create a stronger customer advocacy program. We’re also big fans of Litmus to make sure our emails are rendering properly across key devices.

Zak: I should have known NetProspex was part of your toolset! What technology are you considering that you might add in the next 12 months?

Lauren: I think we will take a look at tools like Invoca to gain better insight into our inbound leads, especially as we increase our inbound efforts over the next six months. We haven’t done a great job creating video content, so we will start looking tools to help with that early in Q2.

Zak: I’ve mentioned to others in these interviews that Jon Miller of Marketo has talked about behavior targeting being an area he expects more marketers to get their head around in 2015. Are you doing any form of behavioral targeting or triggers and what?

Lauren: Our nurture programs are all based around behavior. Any new person that shows interest in NetProspex starts in our top of the funnel nurture stream. We give them background on NetProspex and what we do, and then every few emails, we introduce more middle of the funnel content. If someone downloads, they are bounced to our MOFU nurture program, where we try to get them prepped to talk to an inside sales rep. This process repeats through all our stages of the buyer’s journey. I like to think of it as marketer’s “Choose Your Own Adventure” program.

Zak: What’s a marketing program that you’ve done in the past year that has been particularly effective or innovative?

Lauren: Direct Mail is back! We typically do at least one high-value, highly targeted meeting maker campaign each quarter, and we always get fantastic results. Our sales team picks the folks they haven’t been able to get a meeting with, but they know this is the right buyer for us, and we’ll send them FedEx boxes stuffed with something cool… iPads, spa gift cards, and even a New England clambake for six. I almost hate sharing that, because we have such great results from the program.

Zak: We all know content creation is critical to demand generation? How does your marketing team approach content creation? Who owns it? Who contributes?

Lauren: Our Director of Product Marketing owns content, but he and I work closely together… we even moved our desks so we could sit next to each other for better alignment. We work off the “content pillar” approach, creating one large piece of content per quarter that can be easily broken down into smaller, snackable pieces. For example, this quarter we are working on our annual State of Marketing Data Benchmark Report, which is a 10-12 page PDF. We take that, and then break it down into blogs, webinars, tweets, tip sheets, and more. We’re still a relatively small marketing team (but we’re hiring!) so we need to maximize ROI for our time. I then take the content and insert it into our demand calendar for social, display, email, etc.

Zak: I’ve seen a lot of success with the content pillar approach – Kapost did a nice job of summarizing content pillar in this post. So then as you are promoting that content, what are the top social media platforms you’ve found to reach your audience?

Lauren: We primarily engage with our audiences through LinkedIn, Twitter, and our blog. Triblio has been a big help in showing us where the key conversations are happening.

Zak: Shifting to the personal side, how did you get your start in marketing?

Lauren: I started in marketing when I was pretty young, getting my first job as a marketing assistant at 19. Email marketing captured my attention immediately, which is great, because Atlanta feels like the marketing automation capital of the world (Marketo, Silverpop, and Pardot all have huge offices there.) It has been incredible to see the changes in the technology over the past ten years. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next ten bring. 

Zak: What do you most enjoy about marketing and demand generation?

Lauren: I love the fact that I can help sales close a deal, without actually having to close a deal. Asking people for money gives me serious anxiety… but I love being able to contribute to a company’s bottom line in a measurable way. I have such respect for sales people and the work they do. The rejection they face on a daily basis can be so discouraging, yet they are still able to come in again and do it all over again. If I can help them hit their commits each day, I’m happy.

Zak: What skills do you see as most important for a demand generation marketer?

Lauren: I think they are many of the same skills that help people succeed in any role in the startup/tech world. Grit, willingness to roll up your sleeves, and a general hustler’s attitude will help you go far. Toss in a love of analytics, and you’ll be set.

Zak: What advice would you give to any aspiring demand generation marketers?

Lauren: Get your hands dirty! There’s nothing like real-world experience to teach you the ropes. Learn the basics of email marketing, get comfortable with simple tools like Constant Contact, and work your way up. There are always local businesses that need help getting their message out there. Once you’re more established, two things are crucial: 1. Make friends with your sales team immediately. They won’t always love you, but if they know you’re genuinely working (and working hard!) for their best interests, the alignment is much better. 2. Find a way to connect with the folks in the C-Suite. It can be through your metrics, your mutual love of scotch (shoutout to Mike Bird!), or helping edit their blog posts. Just find a way to connect. It will help you understand the overall goals of the business outside of demand gen, and give you an avenue to share your (hopefully) awesome results.

Zak: Where can we find you on social media?

Lauren: I can be found on Twitter @B2BLauren, talking about my love of sports, connecting with my fellow marketing nerds, or tweeting with my mom about how she wishes I still lived in Atlanta.

Zak: Lauren this has been great, thank you.

Enjoyed this interview? Meet all of the Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars

Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Star: Jonathan Burg

Jonathan Burg is latest of our Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars. As senior director of marketing and customer acquisition for Apperian, Jonathan is instrumental in the growth of the company defining the mobile application management marketplace. We had a few minutes to sit down with Jonathan and learn about some of the keys to his demand generation success.

Zak: What is the target audience you are marketing/selling to?

Jonathan: We target both IT and Business leaders who own the success of critical employee mobile apps. Our solution helps organizations securely deploy mobile applications to their BYOD employees.

Zak: How do you segment your audience?

Jonathan: We primarily segment our audience by use case and the persona who is trying to solve the challenges associated with a specific enterprise mobility environment.

Zak: What is your approach to lead stages?

Jonathan: We follow a version of the SiriusDecisions lead waterfall that is aligned to the unique demands of our perpetual demand generation framework. The important part of the waterfall is that it is looked as a communication framework and part of an overall customer journey / lifecycle.

Zak: What does your “technology stack” look like?

Jonathan: We invest in technologies that help us optimize the customer journey. Our stack is made up of solutions that make our web properties easier to find and more sticky, help with data governance and streamline lead processing, drive marketing automation and CRM best practices, and facilitate customer communications and advocacy.

Zak: That’s very comprehensive – nice. Are there any technologies that you may add over the next 12 months?

Jonathan: We are currently working to understand if predictive marketing is right for our technology. We will also be looking at account based marketing tools that align to early, middle, and late stage demand generation.

Zak: What aspect of demand generation do you see as particularly ‘hot’ over the next year?

Jonathan: I think the development of customer advocacy, account based marketing, and predictive marketing tools are going to be hot. Customer marketing and advocacy is a pivotal component of efficient demand generation. By learning from your customers, organizations are also better able to target and predict future customers, that is where account based marketing and predictive marketing will come into play.

Zak: Jon Miller of Marketo has talked about behavioral targeting being an area he expects more marketers to get their head around in 2015. Are you doing any form of behavioral targeting or triggers?

Jonathan: Yes. Because we target by use-case behavior targeting is very important. Based on the type of content our subscribers are interacting with we only send them content that is applicable. We are also boosting our efforts to segment our customers based on how they are using mobile app management so that we can help them become more successful.

Zak: I gotta believe that puts you in the top percentile of marketers of terms of really taking advantage of what’s possible with marketing automation. What’s a marketing program that you’ve done in the past year that has been particularly effective or innovative?

Jonathan: We had an extremely integrated program that pulled nearly every lever - Social, Search, Email, Events, Advertising, teleprospeting, and Direct Mail. We anchored the program with the theme of MobilityPro. We launched the MobilityPro survey and sweepstakes that people could enter via social channels as well as being interviewed live at the events we were attending. We also used an important piece of analyst research to fuel survey responses. Not only did it help increase our Klout score, but we generated significant awareness at our events, received 300+ survey responses helping to create our 2015 Mobility Report, and created a pool of people who wanted to learn how we could help them solve their unique mobile app needs.

Zak: Now that is integrated marketing – congratulations. For the social media component, what are the top social media platforms you’ve found to reach your audience?

Jonathan: Twitter is our social platform of choice to interact with influencers in our market. We do a lot of work on LinkedIn and are starting to build out Facebook strategy.

Zak: We all know content creation is critical to demand generation? How does your marketing team approach content creation? Who owns it? Who contributes?

Jonathan: Our go to market is governed by campaigns, which are messaging frameworks that fuel the development of content created for personas that are focused on specific use cases. We have programs and tactics that align to these campaigns. Our department heads meet to kick-off the campaigns and together outline what content is needed for early, middle and late stage programs and tactics. We assign a lead on each piece of content and support each other to make sure it is completed by the time it is needed. This approach has proved to keep alignment between teams and enhance efficiencies.

Zak: How did you get your start in marketing?

Jonathan: Coming out of an MBA I entered into a marketing leadership development program. I had an affinity for demand generation and creating high functioning teams focused on generating qualified sales pipeline. I haven’t looked back since.

Zak: What do you most enjoy about marketing and demand generation?

Jonathan: I love the challenge of having to think strategically at the c-level one-minute, and being responsible for executing that strategy the next. The changes in altitude required and the diverse challenges encountered every day make the job fun!

Zak: What skills do you see as most important for a demand generation marketer?

Jonathan: The ability to create team cohesion across functional groups is key. Having an understanding of how aligning people, process, and technology can achieve higher-level organizational goals is key. Grit. I’ve not met a successful demand generation pro who doesn’t have fun working hard.

Zak: What advice would you give to any aspiring demand generation marketers?

Jonathan: Focus on the customer experience, whether that’s the customer of your company or an employee you’re working with. If your always focused on the customer you will design programs that make a difference and will motivate your colleagues to accomplish them effectively with you.

Zak: Where can we find you on social media?

Jonathan: You can find me on twitter at @jonmburg or LinkedIn.

Zak: Thank you Jonathan, really insights and you had a really nice example of an integrated program, congrats again on orchestrating that.

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Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Star: Ellie Mirman

Ellie Mirman is latest of our Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars. After climbing through the ranks in marketing team  at HubSpot, Ellie has taken her Demand Gen prowess to Toast where she is VP, Marketing for a company redefining restaurant management software.  We had a few minutes to sit down with Ellie and catch up on how she is applying her phenomenal track record at HubSpot to her newfound challenges at Toast.

Zak: At HubSpot you were marketing to a wide range of audiences. Now at Toast who are you targeting?

Ellie: Toast is an all-in-one restaurant management platform meant for all different kinds of restaurants - from cafes and bars to full service restaurants and fast casual chains.

Zak: How are you segmenting your audience?

Ellie: We're still ramping up our marketing efforts, but there are already a few key ways to segment that are emerging. Firstly, we have a few different audiences: prospects, customers, partners, and resellers. Secondly, there are different types of restaurants with different needs - a cafe or bakery may value different benefits than a full service restaurant would.

Zak: In your early state of building out your marketing, how are you approaching lead stages?

Ellie: Our funnel progresses from leads who are just looking for educational content to leads who are actively looking for a solution to opportunities who are evaluating our software and then, ultimately customers and evangelists.

Zak: And what does your initial “technology stack” look like?

Ellie: HubSpot for marketing, Salesforce for CRM. We're a lean team and use free tools like Google Docs and Trello for other tech needs.

Zak: Are you considering any new marketing technologies in the near future?

Ellie: We're a lean team and I think stating we'd add certain technology in the next year is only going to invite cold sales emails so I'll refrain from saying more.

Zak: Fair enough. How about demand gen more broadly -- what aspects do you see as particularly ‘hot’ over the next year?

Ellie: What isn't hot about demand gen??... said the marketing geek. I will say that one of the interesting things about doing demand gen right now is figuring out how to cut through the increasing noise online. Online marketing, inbound demand gen, social media marketing... these things aren't new anymore, and simply being online isn't enough. 

Zak: Jon Miller of Marketo – one of your former competitors—has talked about behavioral targeting being an area he expects more marketers to get their head around in 2015. Are you doing any form of behavioral targeting or triggers?

Ellie: I agree that this has become more common - as well as more possible, given all the data that exists about user behavior. Retargeting and behavioral segmentation are likely the starting places for us as we start to ramp up our nurturing efforts. However, I must warn that this only makes sense when you have enough data and a large enough audience before diving into this area.

Zak: What’s a marketing program that you’ve done in the past year that has been particularly effective or innovative?

Ellie: While at HubSpot, we implemented holistic lead nurturing - expanding beyond the classic email nurturing into social, retargeting, and even some offline campaigns - which was one of the successful initiatives that significantly improved the lead to customer conversion rate.

Zak: We all know content creation is critical to demand generation? How does your marketing team approach content creation? Who owns it? Who contributes?

Ellie: Everyone contributes to our content creation efforts. That includes everyone in marketing as well as content contributors from other departments because they bring great expertise to showcase on the blog. We also have someone on the marketing team who "owns" content creation - from strategy-setting to editing to creating a significant portion of the content.

Zak: What are the top social media platforms you’ve found to reach your audience?

Ellie: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are our biggest networks so far.

Zak: Let’s move a little bit to the personal side -- how did you get your start in marketing?

Ellie: While getting a liberal arts degree in college, I started thinking about what I wanted to do when I graduated. I ended up taking a marketing internship one summer and fell in love with it. Through my marketing internship experience, I landed a job doing marketing at an up-and-coming startup - HubSpot. That turned out to be an exceptionally good choice early in my career.

Zak: What do you most enjoy about marketing and demand generation?

Ellie: The variety - there are so many facets of marketing that leverage different skills. I love being able to do analytical and creative work and work on a variety of things every day. It keeps things interesting and challenging all the time.

Zak: What skills do you see as most important for a demand generation marketer?

Ellie: Analytical - able to make data-driven decisions, test, analyze, prioritize.

Agile - able to stay on top of what's happening in the industry and in the sales funnel to adjust as necessary.

Communicator - able to communicate well, whether in written form or verbally, both internally and externally.

Curious and creative - able to get new ideas from unexpected places and explore new opportunities.

Zak: What advice would you give to any aspiring demand generation marketers?

Ellie: Get experience any way you can. That means interning or even testing out demand gen strategies on your own personal website. (If you don't have a personal website, start one!) Results speak louder than any theories you can talk about in an interview.

Zak: For those who want to continue to learn from you, where can we find you on social media?

Ellie: My personal blog is www.elliemirman.com and you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ellieeille.

Zak: Thank you Ellie

Enjoyed this interview? Meet all of the Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars

Introducing the Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars

In my recent post titled Demand generation is about lead generation and oh-so-much-more, I shared what it takes to be a superstar demand generation marketer today.

Now I’d like to introduce the superstar demand generation marketers that I’ve come across. I participate in local demand generation peer groups via MassTLC, the Boston Marketo User Group and SiriusDecisions – and these stand out as the best of the best.

What do they have in common?

  • An innate grasp of the multi-faceted, multi-dimensional approach needed for demand generation today
  • An intense drive for measurement and data driven decisions
  • A commitment to the process within their sales and marketing organizations needed to drive demand generation effectiveness
  • Creativity to produce demand generation programs that stand out from their competitors

For each, click to see our interview with the All-Star to learn about their secrets to success for world class demand generation covering topics including an example of an innovative program, details around their marketing technology stack, their approach to content creation and how they got their start in marketing and demand generation.

And with no further ado, here’s our Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars:

Demand generation is about lead generation and oh-so-much-more

In recruiting for a Demand Generation Manager role I’m finding there’s a lack of universal definition of the term demand generation – it’s not broadly understood – ironic considering every business by definition needs to scale and accelerate their demand generation (at least, if it wants to grow).

I’m finding a set of people who think of demand generation way too narrowly, for example:

  • Some equate demand generation to an outbound calling function (in a previous post on defining Moneyball Marketing I got into the difference between demand generation and lead generation)
  • Others equate demand generation with marketing automation (I thought Scott Vaughan from Integrate did a good job of describing the differences in a recent post)

A successful demand generation marketer massively broadens from these specific functions to truly take ownership of the multiple facets of demand growth for a business. It cuts both wide and deep, but I’ll boil it down to these 10 components:

#1 – Leads (with Definitions)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t list leads first – but it’s also vital to note that gone are the days where leads are the “be all, end all.” Also gone are the days where all leads are treated equal. A crucial first step in any demand generation program is ensuring lead definitions are established, applied and measured so that you can measure both top of funnel engagement (MQIs – marketing qualified inquiries) and throughput of creating qualified leads for sales (MQLs – marketing qualified leads).

#2 – What Happens After the Lead is Generated

Although lead counts are one of the critical KPI for demand generation success, measurement needs to extend beyond leads to sales pipeline and business impact – so opportunities and wins (and the conversions rates to these) are vital. For demand generation marketers, meeting lead goals is table stakes; tracking and improving how those leads convert to meet opportunity and pipeline objectives is where you move from good to great.

#3 – Enabling Teleprospecting and Sales

One of the influencing factors to conversion rates is how you as the demand generation marketer align your programs and equip sales to follow up the leads and the resulting conversations. Part of a successful marketing program include enabling sales in what content to use as part of the follow up and how to use it.

#4 – Aligning All Forms of Media to Drive Demand

Demand creation is not a single role on a marketing team – demand creation is the culmination of the alignment of the efforts of the entire marketing team.  All forms of marketing awareness and engagement contribute to demand generation programs. Demand generation needs to partner with all marketing resources to ensure cross-channel alignment and leverage including:

  • PR
  • Social Media
  • Events
  • Paid Search
  • Publisher programs (which are requiring an increased level of creativity and digital thinking to drive effectiveness)
  • Email
  • Webinars

#5 – SEO & Website Optimization as the Center of Demand

Inbound marketing is vital to any demand generation strategy and becomes especially vital for any business looking to scale to support high volume and low cost per lead. Thus core ongoing activities to improve website performance include:

  • Ensuring the right technical setup for website & blogs
  • Aligning web content to keyword strategy
  • Driving high volume of relevant, engaging content creation via blog(s)
  • Driving quality, relevant inbound link placement in partnership with PR programs
  • Ensuring web resource center serves to engage and educate prospects and effectively capture leads
  • Analyzing website usage patterns and improving website engagement and conversion
  • A/B testing and optimizing various calls to action throughout the website

#6 – A Content Repurposing Machine  

Depending on a company’s structure, a demand generation marketer may or may not be the originator of core content e.g. white papers (I think more often than not, they would not be). However demand generation marketers need to be expert content repurposers, taking core content assets and getting maximum impact from those assets. Some examples include:

#7 - Influencer Strategy

It’s one thing for a business to tell its prospects how great it is – it’s another thing entirely for an influencer to do that. Identifying the influencers and building programs to leverage them is a great way to stand out from the crowd. Influencers should be infused in your demand generation programs and content, and influencers can be the path to the another key to demand gen success – which is identifying which communities your prospects are participating in so that you can contribute to those conversations.

#8 – Marketing Technology Strategy

I’m finding one of the value aspects of a marketing automation system is having a single platform which can then integrate across all of the growing set of marketing technologies in building a demand generation machine. Your marketing technology strategy should result in an integrated approach, with the marketing automation platform as the integration point and including:

  • CRM & closed loop reporting
  • Incoming data enhancement technologies
  • Data append / cleaning technologies
  • Paid search
  • Retargeting
  • Webinar platforms
  • Predictive lead scoring

#9  – Leveraging all Routes to Market Including Partners

For organizations who go to market via partners, supporting partner demand generation is critical for maximizing demand. This includes ensuring an active program to leverage marketing programs and content through the channel, with technologies, process and people in place to help partners maximize their demand and measure the impact of the efforts.

#10 – Customer Marketing (it can no longer be an afterthought)

Customer marketing can no longer be an afterthought and needs to be a core cog in your demand generation strategy. Elements of this include:

  • Programs for nurturing customers – Marketo has recently put out some good content around this focused on customer activation
  • Ongoing customer education e.g. a customer webinar series
  • Customer advocacy – Influitive puts out great content on this subject, which should include a customer referral program

These are some additional articles I found helpful in framing and defining Demand Generation:

This is all to say, demand generation isn’t easy and requires a completely holistic and integrated view (integrated by medium, integrated within marketing, integrated with sales), a digital approach and a tenacity to get results. These are all reasons why great demand generation marketers are hard to find.

I’m going to introduce you to the best Demand Generation marketers I’ve found in an upcoming series Demand Generation All Stars – The Best of the Best.

Finding common ground on closed loop reporting via Boston Marketo User Group

Today’s Boston Marketo User Group (BMUG) featured three presentations and Q&A on closed loop reporting from Paul Green of Extreme Networks, Lauren Brubaker of NetProspex and yours truly and well chronicled on Twitter by many of the Marketing Automation-erati including Jarin Chu, Jeff Coveney, Ed Masson and OpFocus.

The presentations and conversation spanned a wide range of topics and perspectives, but these were my top overarching takeaways:

#1 - EVERYONE is trying to improve their closed loop marketing effectiveness

Companies may be at different stages in their journey towards closed loop reporting, but every business spending money on sales & marketing is trying to better understand the payoff on their investments and how to leverage those investments to scale their business performance.  Many companies are in the early stages and trying to head in the right direction, while the ones who have been working on it for several years continue to strive for more.

#2 – The skills of marketing technologists as in demand as ever

With a room full of some-70 marketing technologists, the conversation was clear that everyone is looking for more talent in this area. It’s a great time to be a revenue marketer and specialized in technologies such as Marketo.

#3 - Closed loop, revenue marketing takes partnership between marketing, sales and IT

This was one of Paul’s summary points but it applied to all of us --- all three of these departments need to contribute to the closed loop engine. IT teams can be a great ally for marketers looking to connect data and systems and ensure they have the real time dashboards and reporting required to enable close loop reporting. In Paul’s case, he also noted that his sales and marketing teams are now seen as a single organization reporting into a Chief Revenue Officer.

#4 - Tracking revenue stages is now broadly adopted

Whereas everyone has different approaches to where data resides, what is tracked and how reporting is performed, and one common denominator between everyone in the room was the underlying fundamental of using revenue stages to track lead progression through their buying process e.g. MQI to MQL to SAL to SQL.

For those who attended (or even if you didn’t), these are some related resources to the topic:

And as there were multiple requests for the slides here is a download of my PPT deck on closed loop reporting:  Closed Loop Reporting Slides

 

BMUG.jpg

Six critical attributes and three must-have metrics for closed loop measurement of marketing programs

Marketers for decades have been trying to answer the question, “How do you measure campaign effectiveness?”

We’ve come a long way since the days of the quote "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”… which has been attributed to many although I believe the true attribution goes back to the 19th century with John Wanamaker.  

Today measurement is more attainable but we have to deal with issues like parent and child campaigns, UTM tracking, first touch and last touch attribution and campaign influence weighting.

After years of evolution, improvement and refinement, I’ve landed on this model for measuring campaign and program performance:

The six attributes I use to slice and dice campaign measurement:

#1 – Theme

Themes are the roll up of multiple programs and last for multiple quarters.

#2 – Program

A program is the intersection of content and a specific media outlet/vehicle over a specific time duration, and has a cost investment attached to it.

#3 – Medium

Medium identifies the marketing channel e.g. website, blog, social media, paid search, email, retargeting and syndication.

 #4 – Media Outlet/Vehicle

This identifies the specific vehicle within a medium. I like to identify major sub-categories for analysis so for example Google splits out into Google Branded Search, Non-Branded Search, Retargeting and Display Network. LinkedIn splits out into Ads and Sponsored Posts. And this also includes specific publishers e.g. Madison Logic, Network World or IDG Connect.

 #5 – Call to Action

This identifies the type of call to action used as the primary call to action in the program so common values include Free Trial, Free Tool, White Paper, eGuide, Webinar, On Demand Webinar, Analyst Report or Case Study.

 #6 – Content Asset

This identifies the specific content asset by title. With the ever importance of content marketing and being able to quantify content effectiveness, this has reached a status of must-have reporting and thus warrants its own field so program effectiveness can be rolled up by content asset.

The three ways to measure campaign effectiveness:

 I was once asked if it’s better to measure first touch or last touch campaign attribution, and my answer is “both”. I use this model, which I call A-I-C for Acquisition, Influence, Conversion.

 #1 – Acquisition Program

The acquisition program identifies the program used to acquire the MQI, which generated the initial interaction.  And (like all of these) carries through to all follow-on performance metrics MQL, Opportunity, Pipeline $, Bookings, etc.  Think of this as measuring “first touch”, and a given lead can only have one acquisition program.

#2 – Influence Program

Influence programs measure all leads who engage around a program and follow-on performance. This is ideal for program comparison (plotting program performance and identifying top performers and low performers)… it should NOT be used for summation to measure total marketing impact as there would be double counting across program. A given lead can and should have multiple influence programs. Since it counts “all attribution”, it’s strongest use is identifying low performers (that have clear non ROI) and for identifying top performers that stand out relative to other programs. A future evolution here are influence weighting system enabled by companies such as Full Circle.

#3 – Conversion Program

The conversion program identifies the “last touch” program prior to MQL conversion, and all follow-on metrics. A given lead can only have one conversion program.

These three sets of metrics provide a complete picture around campaign/program performance, and should be used in combination to provide perspective and measurement when analyzing effectiveness of investments

Seven articles dripping with insight for Moneyball Marketers

I find myself consuming content all the time - the tipping point was over a year ago when I finally gave up my circa 1999 flip phone for an always-on iPhone. I’m now consuming content even more than before – Twitter feed, LinkedIn feed, LinkedIn emails, vendor emails, you name it.

These are some of the better posts I’ve come across of late - and you know they're good when you not only share them but you find yourself going back to read them time and again.

#1 - The Content Marketing Imperative – Some nice visuals and stats on the WHY of content marketing from Michael Brenner. My favorite part is slides 19-26 which was a mini before and after case study for Michael’s work at SAP – inspirational! After that you are welcome to tune out as it turned more into a commercial for Michael’s current gig at NewsCred.

#2 – Why Content Marketing Fails – First off all, Rand Fishkin rules. He was the highlight for me at the HubSpot INBOUND conference this past year. This is also inspirational and my single favorite slide is the insight from Slide 85 where he says: "The Price of Success is Failure after Failure after Failure" and "Hopefully each of those failures provides an opportunity to learn. We as marketers need to commit – great results take time to develop, and the single biggest source of lack of performance is stop/starts or constant change in direction without ever seeing a set of strategies through to completion."

#3 – On Challenger Marketing – This one resonated with me big time and contains key insights for any brand trying to unseat the “main player” in their space.  Read the Q&A on Commercial Insight which has impacted my approach to webinars – I want all webinar topics to align to this approach.  “First and foremost, commercial insight must be grounded in a set of unique capabilities and strengths that set your company apart from all possible competitors (including the status quo). Ultimately, whatever you teach your customer about their business has to lead back to something you can help them do better than anyone else”. And, “Commercial Insight isn’t about the supplier. It’s about the customer.”

#4 – Why Sales People Shouldn’t Prospect – This is a classic from David Skok covering Aaron Ross’s Predictable Revenue approach. I often refer to the four specialized functions of sales that Ross recommends  - Inbound Lead Qualification; Outbound Prospecting (Business Development); Account Executives / quota-carrying reps who close deals; and Account Management / Customer Success. Lots more insight in this article.

#5 - Presenting Value of Marketing to the Board – Nice blog post from John Neeson of SiriusDecisions with some good tips on how to communicate the value of marketing at the senior most level. I find this a helpful read when preparing for any senior level presentation and helping to “keep the conversation high.”

#6 – How to Get a Job at Google – In all of my roles building a team via recruiting and  hiring has been central to success. There are some good tips in this New York Times article which I’ve also followed in my career including the prioritization of cognitive ability, humility and ownership over a specific skill or expertise.

#7 - Don't Just Curate Content, Harvest it – Content operations is an increasingly important function within marketing teams to support content marketing execution. Jim Burns and Mark Gibson provide four key fundamentals to support a content marketing operation – constant acquisition; content headers; harvesting contents; and managing content source. This is a must read.

Five Powerful Metrics to support your Closed Loop Marketing in an Inbound Marketing and Lead Nurturing World

The first challenge of closed loop marketing is getting a system and process in place to enable your closed loop reporting. I’ve covered how to do that in multiple posts and most succinctly you can read about that in my CMO Essentials article “Six Essentials to Setting up a Closed Loop Marketing System.”

Once you done that, you’ll encounter a new set of challenges --- how do you navigate through a set of metrics and reports and use the ones that are the most important? Reporting for the sake of reporting helps nobody – the key is identify the right metrics that help you measure against your strategies and indicate if you are headed in the right direction or have issues that need to be addressed.

In a world where inbound marketing and lead nurturing are critical to building a high volume and repeatable demand generation machine, these are five metrics I’ve found to be particularly useful:

#1 - Active Marketing Database

Your active marketing database represents your ‘cookied population’ of MQIs whom you are using nurturing programs to try to advance to MQL. A growing active marketing database is a signal that your top of funnel inbound programs are growing and your nurturing practices are not serving to turn off your audience. Active marketing database grows each month based on adding additional MQIs, and falling out each month are unsubscribes, bouncebacks who have not been matched to a new email address and those who have not engaged with you via a web page visit in over 12 months.

#2 - MQIs by Medium

This measures how each of your mediums are contributing to MQI growth. One of Adam Barker’s best practices is that each team member owns a metric, and these are key metrics to have ownership by team members. The most scalable MQI mediums to grow are Inbound (Website, Blog, Social Media) and Digital (Paid Search, Retargeting, Email). As a side note I am at a point where I don’t even want to consider content syndication leads as MQIs because of the massive quality difference between syndication MQIs and those from inbound & digital channels.  

#3 - % of MQLs that “graduate” from MQIs

This metric give you a single measure of the performance of your MQI-to-MQL nurturing programs… how much are they contributing to your MQL production? A higher number indicates you are driving performance out of your active database, whereas a lower number indicates prospects are identifying themselves to you for the first time as they visit your website for a later stage call to action such as free trial or contact sales – which signifies a missed opportunity to have more influence as they move through their buying process, or cast a wider net. The best in class number for this percentage for mature demand generation organizations is 50%.

#4 - Of MQLs advancing from MQIs, what were the MQI Lead Sources?

Building on the concept from #3, the next question becomes which sources are yielding MQIs that are then after nurturing graduating to MQLs? This should help to identify which sources to spend more time on driving volume to scale your MQL numbers.

#5 - MQL to Opp Conversion Rate by MQL Source & Medium

As you scale MQLs you also need to keep an eye on quality, and a key quality metric is the conversion rate from MQLs to Opportunities.  Monitor these rates to ensure you don’t see any red flags. The most common red flags to watch for are quality issues within paid search particularly the Google content network and that if you are using scoring programs or content triggers to pass leads to sales, that sales team has everything they need to best convert those MQLs to Opportunities.

How HubSpot can improve its tele-program through the principles of inbound marketing (they did invent it after all)

I didn’t appreciate the interruption on my cell phone – especially when I found out WHO had interrupted me.

On the other end of the line was HubSpot – the company who literally wrote the book defining Inbound Marketing and trashing interruption tactics such as cold calling. Yes, it was a HubSpot tele rep calling me on my cell phone on this Friday afternoon – to me, the epitome of disruption.

I pointed out the irony to the rep – “Is this really representative of the HubSpot brand, the company that Brian and Dharmesh built?” I asked.

The conversation drove  me to Tweet this –  when HubSpot chooses to interrupt me on my cell phone, I hold them to a higher standard:

True story: @HubSpot tele rep interrupts me with call to my cell phone, I said this isn't #inboundmarketing is it?

The funny thing is that it wasn’t the disruption that bothered me the most  - it was the low quality of the touch from HubSpot.

HubSpot, with all of their means and resources – and content – and all the rep had to offer in terms of conversation was: “It would be great to take you through how we compare to Marketo.”

A feature / function comparison – no thank you.

The issue cuts deep – the principles of inbound marketing upon which HubSpot has built its business (and a $100 million IPO and now near-$1 billion valuation) – should not be limited to the lead acquisition phase upon which HubSpot initially brought their focus.

These are five ways HubSpot can improve its teleprospecting program – through applying its very own principles of inbound marketing to the middle stages of the buying process.

#1 - Lead with insight

The same principles of inbound marketing apply to touches from teleprospecting – insight is the currency. Reps should establish credibility and earn the right for deeper conversation through sharing insight that establishes they have a subject expertise in an area of importance to their prospect.

#2 - Appeal to problems/issues/pain

The feature/function proposition from the HubSpot rep was not something that I had interest in going deep into. If he had focused the conversation on solving issues that were of high priority to me, that would have been a much better way to start a conversation and convince me that further conversation could be of value to me.

#3 - Be relevant based on content consumed

Perhaps most striking – I’ve been consuming HubSpot content for years – so there should be some strong clues around topics of interest to me – but there was no attempt from the rep to make such connections. That tells me either the HubSpot product isn’t oriented around that, or the company’s thinking around helping buyers doesn’t naturally extend from an inbound lead to a tele lead. 

#4 - Incorporate social media research

If you are reading this you know that I’m not a hard person to find on social media. The best teleprospecting reps incorporate social media intelligence to their conversation. This can either be done on a 1:1 basis, or part of where the predictive lead scoring vendors are going is doing this at scale by helping customers incorporate social intelligence into their lead scoring and the data passed to sales as part of a lead handoff.

#5 - Add value by organizing content for your buyers

HubSpot has contributed to building a world overloaded with digital content – and most buyers are challenged by how to organize that content for themselves and their buying teams.  Teleprospecters can add value through personal pages organized around content as they reach out to customers (see more on this in example #2 in this article), or offer to help a prospect to organize content based on a specific issue – and the content that they then deliver and how they organize it can then help them earn the right for the next conversation, the next positive touch. Tools such as Postwire are worth looking at to help reps deliver content to buying teams – and in fact a HubSpot or Marketo or Pardot would benefit from adding that functionality to their repertoire as it sits at the intersection of content marketing and sales enablement which is where the marketing automation vendors should be headed next.

For more resources on how to create a winning teleprospecting program:

"Everyone on the team owns a metric" and 11 other best practices to support a data-driven, high velocity marketing process

Marketing is a team sport. I’ve come to admire and relish being part of marketing teams that operate as a team – where team members excel in their roles and support each other, and the team evolves and improves and ultimately creates market impact “greater than the sum of the parts”.

One such team is a group of modern Boston-area marketers who are now on their third venture together – first an initial group at HubSpot, then a larger group at SmartBear Software and now at Continuum Managed Services.

You have to figure that if the team has stayed together over the years through multiple company moves (from Cambridge to Beverly to Boston), the recipe must be working and they must have figured out plenty of best practices along the way.

So when I learned that Adam Barker, the Director of Demand Generation at Continuum, was going to be sharing his best practices around reporting and marketing process at the MassTLC Demand Gen Peer Group, that meant “Must Attend” for me.

And Adam delivered the goods.

These were 12 best practices that Adam shared, that he and his colleagues apply to building and operating their data-driven, high velocity marketing process

1.       Hire “T-shaped” individuals

They look for marketers who can go deep in a specific area of specialty, but also have a breadth of experiences and interests and the flexibility to operate in multiple areas.

2.       Everyone on the team owns a metric

The team is structured such that everyone owns a metric that represents the impact of that particular  marketing area, usually a specific medium. When I asked Adam for examples he said that the team is broken down into owners of:

  • Blog / Organic Web Traffic
  • Paid Search
  • Social Media
  • Events
  • Programs
  • Prospect Emails
  • Customer Emails

These metrics represent approximately 50% of quarterly MBOs tied to individual bonuses.

 3.       Cross-train the team

There are regularly scheduled “lunch and learn” sessions where each team members presents a “how to” in their area, e.g. “writing a great blog post” or “running a PPC campaign”. This serves to both further develop skills as well as build team camaraderie, and is also a component of the MBOs for each team member.

4.       Report on how marketing is doing, not what marketing is doing

This is also a principle I’ve employed, which is reporting on activity alone sends the wrong message – because it’s not about activity, it’s about the results. Adam made the point that reporting on activity can actually serve to cloud or create confusion around performance and take away focus.

5.       Share updates weekly

As part of the process, each metric owner updates the metrics in their area weekly. These metrics are posted to a shared repository, in their case the company Wiki.

6.       Develop automatic repeatable reports & dashboards

Automated reporting is essentially to feed the process. Having now lived through seeing a product line move from manual to automated reporting, I can tell you that many businesses are still relying on manual reporting, and the shift from manual to automated is a true difference maker – in the visibility its bring and the marketing ownership that it enables.

7.       Meet with Sales weekly

Meet with sales weekly and as part of this review the performance results (see #4). Adam’s group refers to these as “Smarketing” meetings – I first heard Mike Volpe CMO at HubSpot use that term to refer to joint Sales & Marketing sessions when meeting with him in 2009 – and I’ve also referred to this as the revenue team.

8.       Share anecdotal updates    

Adam showed an example of an “anecdotal update” e.g. an email to the sales team with info on the success of a recent program. Everyone is likely doing this in some way, but referring back to #4 and what’s noteworthy about this update is it includes brief highlights of the programs e.g. # of leads or how it compares to results of other programs, to reinforce to the sales team that marketing has its eye on the ball.

9.       Operate in monthly marketing sprints

The marketing team defines deliverables as part of monthly sprints, which both ensures alignment and focus on specific deliverables and minimizes distractions getting in the way.

10.   Weekly marketing leadership meeting

The marketing leadership team stays aligned with a weekly leadership meeting.

11.   End of Quarter retrospective board meeting

This quarterly business review asks questions such as “What did we learn?” and “How will it drive our strategy for the next quarter?”

12.   Rinse & repeat

Each of these steps become more effective as team members get comfortable in the roles and their process. So like many things in marketing, it’s important to remain committed and the results will come through consistent application of the process.

Great list from Adam.

For those looking to understand how to setup and operate a data driven demand generation machine, these are two additional resources I've written that go deeper into these topics:

 

 

Why I’m Thrilled that Webinar Attendance Is Down – And What To Do About It (Part 2 – A Framework for Delivering On-Demand Content)

In part 1 of this post I discussed areas to work on to improve webinar attendance. In this post I’ll outline an approach to use to compliment your webinar strategy and take advantage of the growing preference for on-demand content vs. live content.

To explain this will go back to a marketing classic – AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

And to set this up you’ll need a framework that will serve as the underpinning for this program:

  • Identify the most severe pain/problem/issue that an aspect of your solution addresses
  • Create five best practices or insights that advise a prospect on how to address this pain – these insights CANNOT mention your product or service in any way
  • Align each of those best practices to a specific differentiator in your product (doesn’t necessarily need to be a competitor differentiator, could just be a differentiator vs. the status quo)

And with this, we create a on-demand program framework:

  • Attention - Outreach via multiple channels pinging against the pain or issue (e.g. marketing emails, sales emails, social media posts, influencer mentions, text ads, banner ads, website promotion) – links to Landing Page
  • Interest - The landing page starts by stating the Problem or Issue, and then shares the five best practices as insights one can follow to address the problem. There is a Call to Action – a content download (e.g. eGuide) to cover the topic in more depth… there is also a “fast track” conversion e.g. Speak to a Specialist to move the prospect directly to Sales.
  • Desire - After registering for this content, the prospect will receive a series of nurture emails. These emails will take 1-2 of the best practices and map them to how the solution delivers on that best practice -- looking to cement the connection in the prospect’s mind for how this product/service will help them address that core issue.  
  • Action – The emails will offer up to reply and/or a landing page to schedule a conversation with a specialist and/or evaluate the product depending on the preferred buying process.

Unlike a point-in-time webinar, this model is  an “always-on”, evergreen program that you can invest more or less in over time depending on the success that it drives and the relevance of the pain/topic. You can setup multiple programs like this pinging on different pains and see which performs better.

The framework of the pain - best practice / insight - mapped to solution will also make an impactful visual infographic to supplement the program. 

And this story around best practices to address the problem/issue can also be delivered as a live webinar, just without putting all of your eggs in that live webinar basket like you may have in the past. And so we go full circle because to make the most of that live webinar, check out Part 1 of this post if you haven’t already.

Why I’m Thrilled that Webinar Attendance Is Down – And What To Do About It

Webinar attendance is down -- and I couldn’t be happier.

Let’s start with the facts – On24 reports that the average webinar attendance rate is now down to 43% of registrants.

So why am I happy about this?

#1 – It raises the bar for webinar attendance – webinar attendance is now a higher quality metric than ever before. A prospect has to have a significant level of commitment to a topic or company to actually block out the time and show up to a live web event. So attending a webinar on a later stage topic and/or answering webinar questions to indicate readiness are becoming even more effective triggers for marketing qualification.

#2 – It demonstrates there is an increasingly stronger preference for on-demand content – which represents opportunity for marketers who can create programs that align to buying stage and help support buyers move through their buying process.

And, most importantly:

#3 – For those marketers who can figure out how to adjust in this increasingly challenging landscape -- this becomes a massive competitive differentiator.

Which gets us to the “what you should do about it” part.

I’ve grouped this into two sections – steps to take to ensure  your webinars significantly outperform the 43% average, and steps to take to simultaneously take advantage of the strong preference buyers are exhibiting today for on-demand content.

3 Keys to Driving Webinar Attendance and Crushing the 43% Attendee Rate

You need to treat the act of getting a registrant to show up to your webinar after they’ve registered with the same amount of creativity and effort as you apply to getting someone to register in the first place. And to do this, we need to move beyond the 15-year tradition of templated webinar conformation email, templated webinar reminder email without adding intrigue or reasons for that registrant to actually show up to the event.

Here are three strategies to employ to drive webinar attendance and beat that 43%:

1.  Get the registrants invested in attending the webinar

Leverage technology to give the registrants ways to contribute to the webinar programming, and let them know they have done so along the way.

Going to attend just-any-old webinar on a topic? – maybe.

Going to attend a webinar that you’ve contributed to what’s being discussed – much more likely.

This may sound hard to do at scale, but here are two examples of ways to do this – both of which can be introduced in the confirmation email for the event:

  • Invite the attendees to submit questions on the topic in advance, and after they have submitted a question email them two days later to let them know their question will be addressed by the speaker during the webinar
  • Create a section of the webinar which registrants can vote on which topic will be covered… e.g. invite the registrants to choose from 1 of 3 topics that they’d like to see covered at the event (maybe all three end up being covered anyway…).

The more that the prospect feels like he/she is contributing to what is being presented, the more bought in the prospect will be to the event and the more likely they will show up.

2.  Market to your registrants around “Why Attend?”

If like many companies you are using boilerplate copy in confirmation & reminder emails, you are missing a major opportunity to drive webinar attendance. Treat the webinar attendance as a program conversion, and work harder to create value for the registrants and answer the question “Why Attend?”.

Start with the reminder emails -- don’t overdo it, but the reminder emails should include content such as “3 reasons you don’t want to miss this!”.

Also consider alternative ways to reach your audience and get your reminders to stand out from the masses. Do you have a service to map prospects to social media profiles? Send out social media messages e.g. via Twitter the day of the webinar.

And lastly, part of selling the attending is to manage against the concern that “it’s just too much time”. Consider calling your webinars web briefings and let the audience know that (just like TED Talks) they will be 18-minutes in length. If there is an expectation of efficiency, quality and value… you will get more people to show up.

3.  Create an impactful and differentiated webinar experience

We B2B marketers face the same challenge as broadcasters aiming to maximize their advertising revenues via live TV audiences. How do you get someone to watch a TV show live when they can DVR it? The answer to that question is the live experience needs to be unique and “can’t miss”, and we B2B marketers need to do the same. This could take different shape depending on the type of event and your prospect preferences, but areas to consider:

  • Leverage a modern platform such as On24, ReadyTalk, Watchitoo or Google Hangouts to make the online webinar environment as appealing as possible
  • Use video as part of your presentation – does not need to be live video, in fact pre-recorded video will often yield a higher production value
  • Leverage social conversations such as a specific hashtag to make the live event a unique experience
  • Offer webinar attendees something completely unique – a limited time discount offer, a T shirt, whatever it may be – the more unique, the better

The experience here can also be leveraged in #2 as part of the “Why Attend?”, and an improved webinar experience will have a carryover impact of increasing the likelihood that prospect will attend another webinar in the future.

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The specifics here are almost not as important as the essence of what I’m saying – which is to treat the attendance at the event as important as the registration itself…. Which few marketers have (again, if you don’t believe that just look at the blah-blah confirmation and reminder emails that 99% of companies are using).

The act of attending the webinar is a much more significant step forward in a buying process than in the past -- because it is such a significant commitment and fewer are doing it. You will differentiate your brand on the experience you provide during the live event, and you also create the opportunity to ask questions during that live event and get spontaneous answers, to qualify the prospect and where they are in the buying process.

In part two of this post I describe how to create on-demand landing page experiences which can supplement your webinar programs in driving demand with an “always on” approach.

Seven-Step Plan to a Demand Generation Turnaround

As boards, shareholders and executive teams seek predictable revenue, they apply pressure on sales and marketing leaders to drive sustainable growth. Today with buyers  in control and sales organizations increasingly blind to the first two-thirds of the buying process, demand generation teams have moved front and center as the key driver of this growth. And most have a ways to go in putting a demand generation machine in place to predictably drive growth requirements.

This is a seven-step revenue growth marketing approach to provide a measured, well-paced and action-oriented blueprint for the demand gen turnaround that so many businesses are demanding today.

1.       Agree to Lead Definitions

Maribeth Ross covers the key revenue stages in this article; the Marketing Qualified Lead definition is absolutely vital. By establishing a joint MQL definition with Sales, marketers create a quality metric for leads and establish a clear handoff point to the sales team, which in turns helps sales perform better with the MQLs that marketing generates.

I find that most struggling demand gen teams have a lack of clarity around this definition which therefore means there are wild fluctuations historically in lead quality that make results difficult to measure, and also make sales’ job more difficult in following up the leads they receive.  The MQL definition  provides a building block foundation from which to grow.

The second crucial definition that is a consistent Opportunity definition, which will enable you to use the MQL-to-Opportunity conversion rate to identify top quality lead sources. 

2.       Get Quick Wins On Board – Here’s Five to Get You Started

While most of these steps work sequentially, this one should occur in parallel to the rest. As a Demand Generation leader, you want to make short term impact to support the sales organization and demonstrate that you are able to simultaneously consider short term lead and revenue objectives while building long-term marketing strength.

These are five “quick-wins” that can bridge the gap while demand generation fundamentals are being developed

Quick Win #1 – Late Stage Content

In a Demand Gen turnaround you can’t do everything all at once. So I first prioritize late stage content to help identify and move prospects entering a buying process closer to sales. Look to reface or repackage late stage content, feature it on your website as a means to capture MQLs and drive these assets through syndication programs to bring in later stage prospects. Late stage content include vendor comparisons, evaluation guides and product webinars both live and on-demand.

Quick Win #2 – Website Conversions

Your website is your last step in converting leads for sales, so any improvements you can drive there will have immediate impact. Look at forms and user paths to eliminate friction and improve conversion rates. Ensure forms driving MQLs to sales don’t have any extraneous fields or unnecessary distractions.

 Quick Win #3 – Invest in a Paid Search Agency

If you have been running your paid search account in-house, chances are you would benefit from bringing in an agency expert to help you improve performance. I find some marketers are reluctant to pay the 13-15% management fee, however with the ever growing complexity of paid search and varied opportunities within it, don’t be short sighted and rather challenge an agency to double your paid search performance for the 15% investment you make with them.

Quick Win #4 – Align Webinar and Content Topics to the Problems You Solve

Lead Gen webinar topics need to walk a fine line. It’s well understood today that lead gen (earlier stage) webinars can’t be about you and your products… they need to center around compelling topics of interest to your prospects. However I find some marketers swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, whereby the webinar topic will fail to connect it to the problems their company/product solves so therefore it’s ineffective in driving leads for sales. Adjusting webinar topics (as well as other content including PR) to speak to broad topics and connect these topics to the problems you solve should increase yield from these programs by a multiple.

Quick Win #5 – Nurture New MQIs

If you don’t have a lead nurturing program in place to nurture new MQIs, put one in place. Start simple – it can be a series of emails driving to a single landing page or microsite, as having that initial nurture program in place is essential to establish a baseline from which you can grow. You will need lead nurturing in place to extract full value out of your lead gen programs.

3.       Benchmark Performance by Channel

Benchmark your historical performance to create the picture of how demand is being generated today and what metrics need to move and by how much to drive the required business growth. Benchmarks should include:

  • MQL to opportunity conversion rate
  • Opportunity to win rate
  • Website traffic by channel (organic, referral, direct) and conversion rate
  • Size of active marketing database and conversion rate
  • Paid Search account performance, split out by branded & non-branded search, retargeting and display network ads

4.       Build a Revenue Growth Calculator

Using the benchmarks you’ve established, build a revenue growth calculator which shows how these numbers need to move in order to meet the revenue growth plan for the business.  To do this you will also need to know the required future bookings (based on average sales cycle), the average order value and the % of business you are looking to drive from net new vs. existing customer.

Take the current baseline, and create an outward plan showing to where the metrics need to move. Ideally you can do this such that you set metrics that exceed your MQL requirements by 10-20%. This becomes a plan which sales and marketing can partner on with clear ownership and accountability.

5.       Closed Loop Tracking of Lead Stages & Programs

To manage the metrics you set out in #4, you will need a closed loop marketing system to track the effectiveness of programs and lead progression in general. I discussed the ‘how’ around this in a previous article Six essentials to setting up a closed loop marketing system.

6.       Help the Sales Team “Beyond Just Leads”

This is a parallel set of activities which will help in establishing demand generation as “more than just leads” and driving impact on demand at all stages of the buying process. The types of programs are crucial as they can help the sales organization overcome a near term lead shortfall, and as leads grow ensure that are best converting leads into opportunities and wins. 

Areas to consider helping sales include:

  • LinkedIn Coaching – Encourage sales to connect with all customers on LinkedIn so as customers switch jobs the reps are the first to know; this also grows their network so they can best leverage LinkedIn as a prospecting tool; encourage the rep to set up their profile from a consultative, customer-centric standpoint so when prospects view their profile, the rep leaves a strong impression.
  • Personalized Landing Pages for the rep to use with prospects and customers – Build a personalized landing page such as this one which puts the Rep front and center and wraps useful content around the rep. This is a page a rep can use and apply at various stages of the buying process including their own prospecting activities.
  • Coaching on Asking for Referrals – Remind the Reps that they, via the products and services the company provides, add immense value to customers, so asking for a referral is helping and not selling, and part of the sales process should include a follow up process to ask for referrals.
  • Help Sales Improve MQL to Opportunity Rate – Ensure system handoff on MQLs is clean, ensure reps are armed with questions to ask to establish pain and value, and consider automated nurturing programs for free trial evaluations.
  • Help Sales Improve Win Rate – Inventory and improve the content sales uses during the opportunity phase; look at interactive content such as assessment tools to take this to the next level, and also consider web-based tools that sales can use to share content and best support their buyer champion during the opportunity phase.

7.       Drive Towards the Revenue Growth Plan

With the plan via the Growth Calculator established in #4, the tracking of programs in #5 and the holistic view of helping the reps in #6, now monitor and measure performance towards these goals. Identify high and low performing activities through your closed loop tracking – slice and dice including program types, lead sources, calls to action, and segments by vertical, size, geography, job function or buyer characteristics.

As you identify top performers, assess the possibility of shifting investments in time or resources into these top performers. And as you identify low performers, make decisions to either invest in improving these low performers, or drop them.

The metrics based approach and visibility should ensure you get buy-in and support for the steps needed along the way and keep you well aligned with sales as you build the demand generation required to best drive the business.

Predictive lead scoring and your targeting stack – making sense of the options for reaching your target buyer

Targeting. Retargeting. Firmographic… demographic... behavioral… psychographic... targeting.

We see more and more technologies and techniques to reach a target audience emerge, seemingly by the minute.

The crossover between these different options is becoming overwhelming – how are they the same, how are they different, and how should a demand generation marketer figure out which ones to use?

I set out to bring some order to this mish-mosh of targeting options that demand generation marketers have today. And here’s what I got (so far).

Why has targeting become all the rage?

While there at least a dozen solid reasons, here are four I see driving it:

1. Content marketing best practices are demanding it

As companies build personas and target strategies to specific roles and verticals, the next logical step is to build programs that reach those target audiences in the most efficient way.

2. Email isn’t enough

Email is just one marketing channel and has significant limitations, the biggest one being that you can only email those you have in your database. Additional marketing channels are required beyond email to reach new audiences, extend your reach and meet demand generation requirements.

3. Closed loop marketing systems optimize for effectiveness

As marketers build closed loop marketing systems, they can hone in on the elements of what makes their most effective marketing investments. This drives the insights that feedback additional targeting requirements to make future investments more effective.

4. Vendor innovation

VC investments in marketing technologies continue to grow  -- many of the companies mentioned in this article have received significant investments as they look to capture their share of the marketing budget.

What are the different ways to target?

I have split these out as five techniques to reach an external audience, three techniques to target visitors on your website and then a final emerging category all to itself.

External Audience

1. Retargeting Via Cookie

How it’s done:  Visitors to a website are cookied and then targeted with banner ads as they visit other sites.

Advantages: Tend to be cost effective compared to other techniques.

Disadvantages: Limited to those who have already visited your website, so it’s really a method of conversion optimization and not reaching a net new audience.

Examples:

 

2. Targeting Specific Database of Prospects, through Publishers

How it’s done: Provide the publisher with your prospect database and then target programs to those specific individuals. 

Advantages: Can supplement active nurturing programs to laser target those participating in nurture streams with additional content impressions in a credible context – reach your audience where “they spend their time.”

Disadvantages: Limited only to those only in your database, so it’s a method of enhanced nurturing not reaching a net new audience.

Examples:

I could not find specific examples but I have to believe publishers today are offering this by requesting “house databases” from marketers; in addition I wonder if any of the social networks allow for this 1:1 targeting. If you are aware of specific offerings that fit this profile, please share that info in the comments section and I’ll update

 

3. Targeting via Demographic (e.g. Vertical)

How it’s done: Marketer provides target information and programs focus in specifically on those targets to take best advantage of spend.

Advantages: Now we are getting to the sweet spot of this list where the targeting capabilities should offer significant advantages to marketers.

Disadvantages: Not so much a disadvantage, but if leveraging display ads you will need to invest in message/creative for the display ads and the content for the landing page conversion to maximize the effectiveness of these investments.

Examples:

 

4. Targeting Via Named Account

How it’s done: Supply a specific named account list to a publisher, and run programs directly to that set of companies.

Advantages: Phenomenal way to align with sales programs by targeting to the specific accounts sales is going after and supporting outbound efforts – so for example we have a outbound calling/email program targeting the same named accounts supported by targeted display ads to those accounts – integrated with a capital I!

Disadvantages: I haven’t seen these programs offered with a role-based targeting overlay, so they tend to target via company and some level of page content but not guaranteed to be reaching the right roles within your segmentation.

Examples:

 

5. Targeting via Contextual Content

How it’s done: Targeting an audience based on contextually relevant content, Google has been doing this for years with ads through their content/display network, and now the latest fad has evolved to distributing blog & article content via a similar manner.

Advantages: Can be a cost effective way to reach a new, relevant audience. In the case of the contextual content promotion, it provides a means to grow traffic to supplement traditional SEO efforts.

Disadvantages: Google’s content network has long been plagued with quality issues, and that same issues applies to contextual content promotion. Marketers can grow their traffic but is it above your quality bar?

Examples:

  • Google’s Display Network – banner ads based on page content
  • Reactor Media – editorial posts as “you might also like” boxes based on contextually relevant content  
  • Outbrain – contextual content promotion via publishers through

 

On Your Website

6. Targeting Anonymous Visitors by Industry or Company

How it’s done: These companies have mapped IP addresses to companies and then categorized those businesses by industry to allow for real-time targeting of content by industry or other company based demographics such as revenue.

Advantages: For a first-time visitor without even being cookie or registered on your site, content relevance by industry can lead to significantly higher engagement and conversion.

Disadvantages: Not so much a disadvantage but a challenge – requires close work with content creators to ensure the right industry-specific content exists to leverage these capabilities. You can create industry-specific versions of your website – messaging, case studies, content and offers all industry specific.

Examples:

 

7. Targeting Known Visitors

How it’s done: This requires a personalization engine to be directly connected to the marketing automation platform holding the lead specific data. So for example, if you had customers identified and wanted to communicate with them a certain way on the website. The possibilities are endless.

Advantages: Truly powerful, only limitation I suppose is that you need to have the individuals cookied via your marketing automation which means having them click an email from you or fill out a form to get the cookie down.

Disadvantages: Again, not so much a disadvantage but with all the possibilities need to have strong internal know-how to prioritize what you are trying to accomplish and manage it.

Examples:

  • Marketo Real-Time Personalization (formerly Insightera and now referred to by Marketo as "RTP") – Individual personalization based on lead record data from the Marketo Lead Management platform. RTP syncs this data to enable real-time personalized website content based on that known lead’s data. (I confirmed this with David Myers, the Product Manager for RTP).

8. Behavioral Targeting

How it’s done: An engine which collects history of click patterns by prospects and connects it to at least one outcome (e.g. Page View, MQL, Opportunity) to then determine relevant related content or next action for future site visitors  

Advantages: Can be a powerful addition to a website to drive engagement based on past data

Disadvantages: Behavioral targeting based on past click patterns (e.g. most popular next content from past visitors to a specific piece of content) does not connect the viewing of that content to a positive outcome, so the most effective engines will also factor in attaining a marketing goal such as MQL or Opportunity.

Examples:

  • Marketo Real-Time Personalization (formerly Insightera) – This can be accomplished both with the content recommendation engine as well as leveraging the RTP platform for targeting rules. For example a targeting rule could be based on behavioral segmetns e.g. clicks, visits, referral, search term or specific page visits - powerful stuff.
  • Evergage – Also Website Personalization- although hard to tell exactly how they do it from their website and what the targeting is based on - need to learn more about these guys.
  • I’m sure there are more out there but I can’t place any right now, so this is another area where I’d welcome feedback

 

Predictive Lead Scoring

9. Predictive Targeting aka “Predictive Lead Scoring”

How it’s done: Such a hot topic that I gave it a category all to itself, these “big data” vendors are collecting some aforementioned data (marketing automation, CRM, website) and coupling that with additional data sources including product usage logs, customer support history and social websites to then predict high probability qualified leads for targeting purposes. At that point, what happens? Most likely the data is then fed into a marketing automation tool to trigger a campaign or program to target that lead or in some cases these vendors own web personalization engine to target web content based on these predictive models.

Advantages: Instead of guessing at a lead scoring model which ultimately misses many key factors, the promise of these systems is achieve the benefits of lead scoring to your demand generation without the pain and hassle of building your own model.

Disadvantages: If these leads are being handed off to Sales or Teleprospecting team, need to build confidence in the “black box” so that these predictive scored leads are pursued with the same belief in the leads as others.

Examples: These companies are all “talking the talk” and at the same time SiriusDecisions is seeing adoption of these technologies accelerating.

Conclusions & key takeaways

Having sifted through this, three key points stand out:

#1 – Options are plentiful, consider your needs and choose wisely

The more integrated your solutions, the more you will be able to ensure you are managing a closed loop system with clear measurement and reporting. It’s okay to use multiple platforms but where you can, standardize on a smaller set of vendors, and ensure you have a marketing automation platform which can serve as the hub of your targeting tools.

#2 - Marketo Real Time Personalization stands out as an emerging player

Looking at the options for web personalization in this way helped show the true potential of Marketo’s Real-Time Personalization platform, formerly Insightera. Tying web personalization to the Marketo database can be a truly unique capability, and on-site behavioral targeting based on content consumption is another area where Marketo can stand out.

#3 - Predictive Lead Scoring will become a must-have for mature marketing automation users

I don’t love the name, but when you consider that these companies can serve as an engine incorporating many of these aforementioned targeting criteria – web history, content consumption, demographic data plus purchase data, product data and social media – the possibilities are powerful. One of the questions I intend to explore here is understanding how these vendors enable targeting actions – is the standard to simply feed information back to marketing automation that indicates the lead is a key target, or do the capabilities extend beyond that? It may turn out the predictive lead scoring systems only specialize in the data processing and predictive targeting, and that information then feeds into the targeting mechanisms we’ve outlined here.

This is a rapidly evolving space, so please leave additional ideas, comments or corrections via feedback, and I’ll continue to update this post with the latest information.

When is a Blog More Than a Blog, Let's Count the Ways

The value of a company's blog in delivering a steady stream of topical, keyword-rich content for a company’s website to support its inbound marketing strategy (and inbound web traffic) has been well documented and is generally well understood.

But it may not be the most significant benefit a business gets from its blog, especially in the early going.

The blog as a vehicle for low friction, high volume content creation is potentially even more valuable, especially in the first 1-2 years where the blogging program will likely not cause a significant spike in web traffic.

TechValidate has done multiple studies on the challenges of content marketing, and top challenges for the creation of content include “takes too much time” and “too labor intensive.” By providing a medium for more “bite size” content without as heavy an approval process, many business have proven they can produce blog content at a much faster pace than other types of content deliverables such as white papers.

So the true value of the blog extends beyond the incremental inbound web traffic to leveraging the blog as a feeder to other content deliverables. These are 4 Ways to Leverage your Blog, Outside of your Blog that you may not be doing today.

1.       Create a monthly “Top 5 Blog articles” for customers or prospects

Instead of investing time in e-newsletters, you can link to “best of your blog” via email and tailor the articles you choose based on the audience. Apply the time spent creating a newsletter to other content creation activities while generating more audience for the blog.

2.       Create a quarterly Journal or Complication of Articles

Although blogs tend to be short form as standalone articles, if you combine 4-8 articles on related topics (e.g. by topic, vertical) you should end up with an impressive overview looking at a core topic from multiple vantage points. Lay this out into a document and then this can become a higher value asset you leverage for demand generation – content syndication, email offer, website resources – that otherwise might take you several months to produce.

Packaging it as a journal or compilation should also raise the perceived value of the content from “just a blog” for part of your audience.

3.       Lead Nurturing Content

Don’t overthink your content requirements for lead nurturing. If you have a blog on a specific topic, that is a great asset type to include as part of your lead nurturing. With the high volume of content required for lead nurturing, leveraging blog articles is a great way to feed the content beast.

4.       Package for Sales

Mine your blog for articles that sales can leverage… e.g. articles that speak to a specific customer objection, or perhaps those that tell the ROI story. The blog can be a great forum for sales to deliver credible content without as high a formality bar… maybe you don’t have a formal ROI model but you have a blog article with an Analyst discussing approach to ROI.

Sales can get immense value from blog articles but they will need to be “spoon fed” to the sales team with clear direction on when to use them.

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So where are you reading this article about ways to leverage your blog, outside of your blog?  If it’s not on-page via an inbound search, now that would be very meta, wouldn’t it?

3 Keys to Making Content Syndication Programs Deliver

At a recent MassTLC DemandGen roundtable, the collective view of a group of 35 demand generation professionals towards content syndication programs was lukewarm. Jonathan Burg of Apperian described it as content advertising (to me implying the impact on metrics like MQLs are much further down the pike), and I’ve heard some of my colleagues describe content syndication as “super top of the funnel”.

Content syndication programs can be very tricky to get right; I have found these 3 Keys to Making Content Syndication Program Deliver as part of a demand generation mix. 

1.       Ensure the publishers are aligned with your metrics

Explain to the publishers you are working with that we have a closed loop marketing system which tracks programs and follows leads through to MQL, SAL and SQL and the opportunity impact, and that the way you determine future investments with publishers is based on the success of the program (hopefully this is the case or you are at least working towards this!).

This immediately aligns the publisher around your business metrics, not their publisher metrics which are typically going to be based on the volume of raw leads they are providing you.

What this also accomplishes is when running into the inevitable lead quality issues, it becomes a very easy conversation to get ‘make-goods’ because it’s in the publishers best interest to provide as much as possible for your program if they know that future investment with them is going to be based on how they perform relative to their peers.

2.       Align topics to those of prospects entering the buying process

For these cost-per-lead programs, publishers are charging you a flat cost per lead, but we demand gen professionals know that “not all leads are created equal.”

It stands to reason that the best way to drive the highest probability of higher quality (later stage) leads with highest probability of becoming MQLs and beyond, is to feature later stage assets for your syndication – Buyer’s Guides, Evaluation Guides, Vendor Landscapes.

These typically are not the first assets that publishers will recommend when constructing a syndication program with you, but that’s where it becomes vital to align the publisher with your objectives. I’ve had publishers say to me “we can use these assets, but we are going to get a lot less leads,” and my answer to that is “that’s okay.” I’d rather run, for example, 5 syndication programs across 5 different publishers that are 1/5 in lead volume but higher quality than a single syndication program of lower quality.

The key is that in a cost per lead program, your goal as the marketer should be quality and not volume. And you’ll unearth more quality with late stage assets than early stage.

3.       It’s okay to use top of the funnel assets but be prepared

If you have a limited budget and short term MQL aspirations, then focus on the late stage asset approach above, but if you have additional budget and looking to build a continuous demand gen program, then add in assets from further up the funnel – but be prepared around what’s happens next for the leads you bring in.

You will need nurture programs for the prospects, and be prepared to closely monitor, measure and evolve these programs. Like many types of programs in marketing, these are hard to get right and you will likely be underwhelmed with your initial results. You’ll want resources focused on continually improving and optimizing these nurture programs to get value out of the top of the funnel syndication leads.

If you can get all three of these pieces in place (alignment with publishers on metrics, a healthy set of late stages assets, and an MQI-to-MQL nurture program), then you can make content syndication a strong contributor to your demand generation. And the good news is you should be able to turn up he dial at that point to drive even more volume through your engine.

How does this compare to your experience with content syndication? Has it be a steady contributor for you and how have your content syndication investments been evaluated?