Archive | ROI RSS feed for this section

Using Marketing Automation to Manage Events

Posted on September 14, 2011 by in Lead Nurturing, ROI

Many marketers use events as a part of their overall marketing plan – whether it’s hosting events for prospects and customers or sponsoring industry events and trade shows for lead generation. Though there are many tools built for for managing events, marketing automation can also step in and help out in a few key areas. Here are some examples of how to effectively use your marketing automation tool as a part of your event marketing strategy.

Promote your event and send reminders.
Using the email tools in a marketing automation system, you can schedule emails for future dates. This is handy if you want to promote ticket sales for an event set up a series of reminder messages for those who have already purchased tickets.

Use forms for contests and lead capture.
Some marketing automation vendors offer cookie-less forms, which are different than traditional online form. Most online forms track visitor activity after they fill out the form, but by using cookie-less forms, you can collect an infinite amount of data using a single form without any messy tracking results. This is ideal for capturing people’s information at a trade show booth and also works well for running a state-of-the-art sweepstakes. One of the best parts about using a form to collect information is that you can instantly send out auto-responders and even begin a drip nurturing campaign to try to drive future brand engagement.

Track ROI
By simply tagging prospects with the correct campaign in your marketing automation system, you can easily track the ROI on your event investment. Prospects can be tagged with multiple campaigns so that even if you’ve interacted with them over a long period of time, you can still see that your event had an impact during the buying cycle.

 

Attending Conferences When Shopping for Software

Posted on April 28, 2011 by in CRM, ROI

If you’re thinking about implementing a new tool like marketing automation, it can be helpful to attend a relevant industry conference to learn more about your options, see latest and greatest technologies and speak with users of various systems.

It’s become a norm for marketers to become extremely busy during conference season, as the events present an opportunity to learn a lot in a short period of time. Aside from networking and getting to know people in related industries, software is changing so quickly that attending a few conferences can help you understand the latest technologies.

The Value of Attending a Conference

Let’s take the example of a marketer who’s looking to purchase a marketing automation tool to streamline their workload and improve their campaign ROI.

Because marketing automation is a growing field that’s closely related to CRM (customer relationship management) tools, if you plan on utilizing elements of marketing automation in your business, you can expect to learn a lot from attending a CRM conference, particularly if your CRM vendor holds their own annual users event. Whether it’s gathering ideas from current users or a talk on best practices by one of the top minds in the field, you’ll come away with innovative ideas for implementing marketing automation and also get a clearer picture of what to look for while shopping for a vendor. Whatever conference you attend, be sure to speak with as many marketing automation vendors and users as possible. This way, you can get a good view of your different options and what features each vendor offers.

If you’ve narrowed down your choice to a few specific vendors, you may want to stop by a marketing automation user conference or users group. Here you’ll see a lot more talk about specific techniques and technologies.

At an event, you will learn everything you need to know about the latest products and technologies. You can learn best practices for each product and get a sense of different company cultures. Conferences are great for those involved in the decision making process as well as those who’ll manage the technology because they are can inspire users to head back to work and improve internal processes.

Convincing Your Boss

Ok, so you’re on board, but there’s the tiny matter of budget. If you know why you need to go to a conference, it should be easy to convince your company to sponsor your trip. Quite simply, the things you learn will improve your company’s productivity and will eventually add value to the bottom line. If you miss out, your company may be left behind by competition utilizing practices that you don’t know.

Be sure to do your research regarding which conferences are most valuable to attend before asking your company to pay for you to go. It is much more likely that you will be given clearance to attend a few of the major events than if you ask to go to every conference you can find.

The Sales Team is Key to Marketing Automation Adoption

Posted on March 18, 2011 by in CRM, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, ROI

Sales Advocate

Make Sales your #1 Fan

When implementing a new system, it is important to get buy-in from other users. Often in the case of marketing automation, the purchasing decision is made by the marketing team. In order for the implementation to be successful, it should be emphasized that the tool may be called marketing automation, but the sales team will see great benefits as well.

If you take the approach of just dumping a new tool in the lap of your already busy sales reps, they may be a bit overwhelmed and feel that they don’t have time to learn a new system. Instead, you should hold a collaborative meeting and explain the benefits of the new system and how it will make the sales process easier.

Sales benefits of marketing automation include:

  • More detailed information in the CRM, including a record of prospect activities
  • Daily and real-time alerts on active prospects
  • Anonymous visitor tracking to see who’s surfing your site
  • Automated nurturing emails to take education and follow-up out of the hands of sales
  • Lead scoring and grading to show a rep the hottest leads
  • Improved reporting to help identify the source of the best leads
  • Less junk and fewer duplicate records in the CRM

Gaining champions in the sales department will help ensure that your new investment is embraced across the organization.

Components of an Inbound Marketing Campaign

Posted on September 3, 2010 by in Conversion Rate, ROI, Social Media

Sales used to be all about cold calling from a list and large-scale events like trade shows. Today, many marketers are moving toward a strategy that relies heavily on inbound marketing. While the old tactics are tried and true, collecting leads through inbound channels means the prospects are already interested and warmed up to the idea of your product or and how it can solve a problem they are experiencing.

The idea of inbound marketing is that prospects seek you out, rather than you pushing information out to them. Some ways to get started with inbound marketing include:

Blogging – Creating a blog that not only discusses your product, but also discuss best practices and key trends in the industry is a great way to build keyword-rich content. This content can then be discovered by new potential customers through search engines or through links from other popular industry blogs. You can also share your posts through your social media channels.

Social Media – Having an active Twitter account, Facebook page, LinkedIn Group or online community are all great ways to provide valuable information that can attract future clients. You can start building a relationship with your followers before you even enter the sales process.

Paid Search – Paid search is a bit of a compromise between the old and new ways of marketing. You’re still paying for an ad, much like you may have in a magazine or trade publication in the past, but the prospect only sees your ad when it corresponds to a term they are researching. Because you’re delivering highly relevant solutions to what they seek, paid search very often provides great ROI.

The key to inbound marketing is developing highly relevant, interesting content that keeps readers coming back for more. Positioning yourself as a leader in your space will ensure that your company is top-of-mind when prospects are ready to enter the buying phase.

Are Facebook Fans Really Worthless?

Posted on July 16, 2010 by in Analytics/Reporting, Conversion Rate, ROI, Social Media

A recent article from Forrester Research’s Augie Ray carries the rather scandalous title “What Is The Value Of A Facebook Fan? Zero!” Of course, Ray doesn’t really think Facebook fans are worthless. But he does raise a crucial question that deserves serious consideration in our brave new world of social media-driven marketing.

Ray discusses the valuation of Facebook Fans and concludes that it is impossible to put a dollar figure on the ROI of such followers. He emphasizes that when it comes to getting a real return on social media investments, having followers in and of itself is not nearly so important as what a company does with those fans. In other words, your conversion rate is really what matters.

Marketing guru Seth Godin touched on this same topic in another recent blog. His conclusion nails it: “Commitment is the essence of conversion.” Becoming a “fan” requires little commitment and more or less amounts to being a digital spectator. But marketers don’t just want a bunch of spectators — they want participants, because participants are where you get your return! Accumulating spectators shouldn’t be an end in itself, but it does lay the foundation for conversion. The more spectators you collect, the more potential participants you could have on your hands.

But it’s ultimately up to you, the marketer, to convert those spectators into active participants.

Enhance Paid Search with Marketing Automation

Posted on July 20, 2009 by in ROI

According to ZenithOptimedia, paid search will grow 20% this year in the United States.  Marketing and advertising teams are cutting back on traditional advertising mediums and now moving the focus to the internet.

The most popular form of paid search is Pay Per Click advertising. Because Google is the most used search engine, it is also the best place to put your ads.  Google AdWords enables you to create pay per click ads, which will appear on Google’s search results.

Marketing automation then integrates your paid search campaigns into your system to allow for easy management.  AdWords campaigns will automatically and continuously be updated within your marketing automation solution.

Marketing automation also makes it simple to report on the ROI of your paid search campaigns.  Reporting tools allow you to go beyond the typical cost per click.  Other measurement indexes track data to compare costs and find the true cost of a prospect.  The reporting tool calculates:

  • Number of clicks
  • Cost per vetted prospect
  • Cost per opportunity
  • Cost per sale
  • Cost per campaign
  • Marketing ROI

Marketing automation continues to be ahead of the curve by providing solutions to marketing complexities in one easy-to-use location.  The integration feature of paid search, a growing marketing initiative, adds another benefit to the solution.

Top 5 Reasons to Start Using a Marketing Automation Tool

Posted on July 14, 2009 by in Marketing Strategy, ROI

Marketing automaton is still a relatively new technology. Many companies overlook the benefits it provides and it is often the last thing included in the budget, especially when the higher-ups making budgeting decisions may not know about the value marketing automation offers. What they don’t realize is that most companies are using multiple tools to do what ONE marketing automation system can do. When it comes down to it, marketing automation can save you time and money.

Here are the top five reasons to start using marketing automation:

Productivity – Marketing automation makes marketing and sales teams more productive. The sales team will receive more qualified leads and can spend less time educating prospects and more time closing deals. The marketing team benefits both from seeing which campaigns are most effective and from automating daily tasks, like email responses and lead assignments, that used to be performed manually.

Integration – Integration with a CRM system continuously syncs data between the two systems and allows the sales team to view updated information of prospect activity from within the CRM system. Integrating with familiar systems means less barriers to company-wide adoption and also makes day-to-day use easier.

Greater ROI – The ability to track a prospect from the point of origination gives companies the capability to see what efforts in converting prospects are working and therefore spend more time and money on techniques that are generating profit.

Simplify – Instead of using sometimes upwards of 10 tools for lead-scoring, e-mail, landing pages and more, a marketing automation system puts it all together in one place. It is much easier because data and marketing tasks are consolidated in a single tool, and you don’t need to worry about what is where and having access to all of the different systems.

Relationship Building – These systems make nurturing easy, helping build the relationship with both current and future customers. They allow you to determine exactly what the customer wants, based on their tracked activities, and enhance that data with tools like a Linkedin connector. Marketing automation also makes segmenting and personalizing emails easy, giving a personal touch to emails that were sent out in an automated blast.

I have listed the top five reasons to begin using a marketing automation system, but there are many more. The features that many of these systems offer, from customized drip marketing to lead scoring will provide your company with many added benefits and make it more productive environment.