Why Titles Can Make or Break Content

Posted on June 8, 2011 by in Email Marketing, Landing Pages

For most B2B marketers who create content for various marketing and sales initiatives, titles can make or break the content. Whether the goal is to push or pull, users generally make their decision based on the title of the white paper, subject line of the email, headline of the blog post, and so forth. For this reason, it is essential to appropriately name your content to make it both appealing for users and easy for them to find.

Each type of content has a different set of titling guidelines that reflects the formality and flexibility of the content.

White papers are versatile content because they can be pushed out through various marketing channels or  made available on the website to pull leads in. But they can also be very time-consuming and require an investment from the reader. Therefore, their titles should get straight to the point and give the user an idea early on of what to expect. For example, a white paper on The Four T’s of Effective Email clearly informs the reader of the benefit to be gained from a read.

Case studies help companies demonstrate the value of their product through the real-world success of a client. Ideally, a prospect will read a case study that most aligns with their situation to gain an understanding of how they can benefit from the product. The right title can help match a prospect with the appropriate case study. Give your case studies titles that reflect the client’s previous situation and then the bottom-line improvements that resulted.

Blog posts allow for the most freedom and flexibility of  the content available. The typical blog post requires less time and resources to produce, but suffers from minimal investment from the reader. For this reason, developing the right title for a blog post means creating a great hook to catch the attention of the reader. Your title should reflect the content of the post while stirring up interest and curiosity.

An important factor that exists across the board is to keep SEO in mind. A strong, keyword-rich title can add more value to your content as search engines discover it and users share it. This can result in more back-links and an improved online presence for your company.

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Optimizing Landing Pages with Multivariate Testing

Posted on May 26, 2011 by in Landing Pages

Testing

Find the pefect formula for landing page success

The new MarketingSherpa report on landing page optimization concluded that two factors are the most important when it comes to building the perfect landing page:

Headline and Call to Action

The good news is that these are two of the simplest factors to test. Using a marketing automation system that offers multivariate testing, you can set up a custom link that will alternate incoming traffic between different landing pages. Because the traffic is coming from the same source, you don’t have to worry about outside factors like where you are advertising, you just get to see which page is leading to more conversions.

A smart testing tip is to test only one item at a time. So you may want to start with one factor – like determining your top performing headline – and then take that headline and use it on the pages where you will test your call to action. Keeping things separate allows you to attribute your success or failure to one particular factor, at least as much as it is possible to attribute it to any element that you control.

Other areas suggested as important for testing include images, body copy and form layout.

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Get Personal with Variable Fields

Posted on May 18, 2011 by in Email Marketing

Get your foot in the door.

Personalization can help get your foot in the door.

Consumers are becoming aware of the technology at a marketer’s disposal and can spot an automated email a mile away. The impersonal nature of these emails is generally off-putting and frustrating for the customer. People want to feel as though a company is grateful for their interest and is engaging with them as a real person rather than as a number or a nameless opportunity for money.

However, at the same time, it is difficult for businesses to maintain efficiency while personalizing emails for customers. Ideally, an online marketer can use an automated solution that sends personal emails. This reduces the workload for the marketer and pleases the consumer.

The solution to this problem is variable fields – data tags in an email. By getting personal with customers through the use of variable fields, you are able to connect with them by name, job title, and company.

How Variable Fields Work

When creating an email template or sending a new email, you can select variable fields to be placed in the email. These fields are placeholders for content and are populated with information from your database. Offering various content on your website can help capture information for your database. Using variable fields, an automated email can be sent out to each new prospect addressing them by name and signed by their rep. Here’s an example of the most basic use of variable fields:

Dear [first_name],

Thank you for showing interest in our product. Please let me know if I can pass on any further information that may be of interest to you.

Regards

[sales_rep]

In the email above, the automated email addressed the recipient by first name and appeared to come from the sales rep. As opposed to most automated emails that are addressed as “Dear Satisfied Customer” or even worse, “Dear Interested Buyer.” Marketers can create lead nurturing programs in the same vein that appear personal to the prospect and require no effort from the salesperson. Once a prospect responds to an email during the lead nurturing, the salesperson can engage and start at the right point in the sales cycle.

Getting Your Foot in the Door

Studies show that the best way to convince someone to purchase your product through email marketing is to get past the “delete” threshold. Many people will delete an email that looks too much like an advertisement straight off the bat. Therefore, sales and marketing often work together through to construct automated emails that don’t look like advertisements. If a lead clicks the email and likes what he or she sees (a direct address, understanding of who he or she is, recent purchases, etc.), that lead may decide to make the plunge and make a purchase.

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Start at the Shallow End

Posted on May 5, 2011 by in Landing Pages, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring

Diving Board

Don't dive in too deep when you're just learning to swim.

Marketing automation covers a lot of territory, and the possibilities for improving your bottom line can be overwhelming. As a growing field of business technology, it seems like a new methodology or technique is being created every day. If you’re just starting out with including automation techniques in your online marketing campaigns, it doesn’t make sense to utilize every aspect right away. Start small, dipping your toe in the shallow end, and work your way up from there as you get comfortable with the techniques. Remember that poorly executed advanced marketing automation is much less effective than correctly executed simple marketing automation.

Lead Nurturing

The most complicated area of marketing automation is probably the practice of lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is how you convince potential customers to become paying customers, and automation programs allow you to do this on a large scale. If you’re just starting out, consider using simple drip programs for lead nurturing. A basic drip program will follow a straight path and consist of emails with pauses in between. As you get familiar with the system and start segmenting and understanding click actions, you can branch off a little more, but try to rein in your excitement and keep things straight, or you could find yourself in the deep end of the pool, unable to swim.

Scoring

Most MA programs have a default scoring system which should be adequate for anyone starting out. The urge might be to try and customize your scoring system, but remember that making changes will effect your entire database and can be difficult to reverse if you make a mistake. Certain changes are more and less valuable, so the best way to go about adjusting your own scoring system would be to change point values gradually and see what happens to your inbound leads. This way you can get a feel for what actions are more valuable.

Landing Pages

Smart forms and multivariate testing can be great tools for capturing lead information on your website, but inexperience can lead to landing pages that drive leads away. The key is to start with simple forms on your landing pages that ask just the minimal required amount of information to be useful and avoid being intrusive. Over time you can begin A/B testing to determine the right copy for your landing pages and fields for your forms.

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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.

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Peek Into a Prospect’s Past

Posted on April 18, 2011 by in CRM, Marketing Strategy

Past and Future signMany times when buyers are doing their initial research and preparing to buy a new product, they may visit many websites and browse different offerings. At this time, these “lurkers” may not be ready to fill out a form to be contacted – or even to give their email address in exchange for a white paper or product information. They want to do their research on their own time and become comfortable with a brand before they are ready to engage with a sales rep.

Many companies use a software solution that will track visitors on their website, allowing them to see the company or location of a “lurker.” These same companies also tend to use a CRM solution to manage their interaction with prospect during the sales cycle. But what’s missing is the link between these two phases. At some point, the person is ready to connect with you. They may request a call or download content from your website. If your systems aren’t tied together, you will have no visibility into the pre-conversion activities a prospect may have completed.

By using a marketing automation system, you can tie together the anonymous viewing activities, which are saved in the system, with a newly converted prospect. That information can the be connected with a lead record in the CRM. This allows sales reps to take a peek back at the full history of a person’s interaction with the brand. It also allows the marketing department to pinpoint the true origin of a new lead (perhaps a Google search from 6 months ago). Using a marketing automation system, you can effectively travel back in time and gain a more complete understanding of your prospects. By understanding their history, you can more easily offer the best solution to create a relationship that will last long into the future.

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What if I Were the Prospect?

Posted on April 4, 2011 by in Landing Pages, Lead Nurturing

By default, marketing automation encourages marketers to develop campaigns and programs to best generate leads and create opportunities. They have control over the amount of emails sent by a lead nurturing program or the information requested in a contact form. Unfortunately, most of the decisions are made from the viewpoint of the marketer and not the recipient – the prospect.  To achieve the most success with marketing automation, it’s important to assume the role of a lead and work through the content. Just ask yourself, “What if I were the prospect?” (WIIWTP).

Here are some areas to apply WIIWTP:

  • Email Frequency – How many emails do you receive per day? Chances are that it’s more than you can handle / would like to receive. With this in mind, think about how often you are reaching out to a prospect by email. Like you, most prospects don’t want to have their inbox flooded with messages from the same company. Consider, as a prospect, how often you are willing to receive emails from another company to determine the appropriate frequency. WIIWTP? – I would want the company to keep in touch with relevant information twice a month, but not overload me with emails.
  • Email Content – In general, most emails come off as marketing messages or personal emails. Although both types of emails can be successful, they have their own unique goals to accomplish and shouldn’t be used interchangeably. For instance, a full HTML email is great for announcing new features, whereas a personalized, text email helps the salesperson better engage the prospect. Do you prefer to be contacted by your sales rep at the company or by the general account? By using dynamic content, the emails used in a nurturing program can be general text emails that come off as personalized. WIIWTP? – I would want the receive the correct kind of email based on my stage in the buying process.
  • Contact Forms – These days, forms are the gatekeepers of information.  Companies use them as a means to gather information about a prospect and leads fill them out to unlock content. It’s a win-win situation as long as there’s balance. When companies get greedy for details, then prospects get deterred and don’t fill out the form. To keep this from happening, the marketer should approach the form from the perspective of the prospect to determine the amount of information needed by the company that the prospect would provide. As a visitor of the website, would you be willing to give your job title to download a white paper? Maybe not at first, but the company can use progressive profiling to slowly build a complete profile as new content is accessed. WIIWTP? – I would want to fill out a simple, non-invasive form for content.

WIIWTP? – This may not be the next big craze in rubber bracelets, but you may want to write it on a sticky note to put at your desk. You’ll always have that reminder of “What if I were the prospect?”

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Spring Cleaning for the Marketing Department – Part 2

Posted on March 28, 2011 by in Analytics/Reporting, CRM, Email Marketing, Site Design

It happens every year – you’ve spent an entire weekend cleaning out your house only to be relaxing on Sunday afternoon and realize the basement hasn’t been touched. Almost immediately your mind initiates an internal debate to decide whether or not it’s really necessary to clean the basement. You may argue that the basement is in decent condition and most guests only see the main part of the house anyway. Is it really necessary?

For the productive marketer, spring cleaning has involved updating the company’s marketing materials (white papers, email templates, etc.) – the main part of the house – to reflect product improvements and service upgrades. But chances are that your marketing automation vendor has also been busy this past year rolling out new features to make your life easier. So, instead of taking Sunday afternoon off, finish up all of your spring cleaning and revamp your marketing automation strategy to take advantage of all of the new features.

Key Marketing Automation Upgrades

  • Compatibility – A versatile marketing automation solution strives to integrate with as much technology as possible. You may have been reluctant in the past year to upgrade your software in fear that your marketing automation solution would be incompatible. Take the time to find out if your vendor has achieved compatibility with the latest web browsers, email connectors, and CRM solutions.
  • Reporting – Given that a huge selling point of marketing automation is marketing ROI, it’s important for marketers to be using the latest tools to demonstrate the value of their marketing efforts. Most vendors know this and are constantly updating their reporting features to let marketers create better tables, charts, and graphs for the higher-ups. Often when you first implement a marketing automation tool, you get caught up in the tactical campaign elements and you don’t spend time understanding how you can report on your data. With the end of the quarter approaching, this is a great time to think about how you can use reports to show that your hard work is paying off.
  • CRM Integration – Most marketing automation vendors are continually improving their integration with the different CRM systems. Because each CRM has its own API and functions differently, the engineers are having to learn each system and figure out ways to implement the new features. This means that little upgrades are constantly being made to better improve CRM integration and you may have overlooked some. Now is a great time to revisit your vendors blog or feature list to find out what new improvements have been made. Often, to take advantage of new features you need to update your integration package, so be sure you’re working with the latest and greatest edition of your tool.
  • Automation – The key to marketing automation is the ability to take time-consuming tasks away from marketers and automate them. Ideally, when you first started marketing automation you handled the basics of automating scoring, grading, drip nurturing, etc. It’s probably time to take automation to the next level and really see what the possibilities are. Think through what other areas of your marketing campaigns you may be able to automate, and work with the sales team to find out how you can use automation to help them as well.
  • Other Features – Luckily for marketing automation customers, the industry is continuing to grow and the landscape is getting more and more competitive. The only way for vendors to succeed is to innovate and differentiate their offerings. Keep tabs on your vendor’s blog and other outgoing news to be informed of the next big announcement. For instance, your company may have recently added connectors to plug in to other marketing resources like a chat solution to sync on-site chats with with prospect activities or a Jigsaw connector to help you find more information about people in your database.

With your marketing automation strategy revamped and your marketing materials refreshed, your company is ready to generate some great leads and exceed quarterly goals.

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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.

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Spring Cleaning for the Marketing Department

Posted on March 11, 2011 by in Email Marketing, Social Media

Spring cleaning is an annual (and often dreaded) task in many households. It’s the time of year that you scrub every nook and cranny, climbing high to reach the ceiling fans and crouching low to dust the baseboards. While it’s not always the most fun task, you feel much better when it’s done and you’re proud to show off your home to family and friends.

So, when’s the last time you gave your marketing materials a good polish? Ideally you’d make updates on a frequent basis, but in a busy marketer’s world, this isn’t always a reality. Over the past year, it’s likely that your product has undergone some improvements, you’re offering new services or the industry has evolved in some way. Here’s a list of items you might want to review to make sure all of your materials are up-to-date.

Spring Cleaning for Marketing Checklist

  • Review your white papers and check for outdated information, new features you can include to enhance the information, new industry research that may be relevant and new images or product screen shots to add.
  • Give your frequently used email templates a once-over and be sure all information – especially links – are up to date. This is extra important if you have “set it and forget it” items like autoresponders that you may not edit frequently.
  • Revisit your social media profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites to be sure they still accurately reflect your product offerings and highlight the latest and greatest features.
  • Audit sales proposals and presentation materials to be sure they don’t contain any outdated product or pricing information
  • Brainstorm new keywords that might help you bring in more paid and natural search traffic, and nix any old or unsuccessful terms

Now, doesn’t that put a little extra spring in your step?

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