Growth and scalability. The two concepts go hand in hand for marketers looking to up their growth game, without the ability to invest increasing dollars and headcount to gain every percentage point of growth.
But how do you factor scalability into your marketing growth strategy?
That’s where many marketing teams turn to automation. Instead of working harder, with radically increased teams and budgets, work smarter with the team and tools you have using automation.
You’ll hear directly from the marketers making the growth calls, including Tracey Ellis, CEO at Leadous; Melissa Day, Global Digital Marketing Leader at Chemours; and Cyndie Chon, Director of Commercial Growth Sales at Adobe.
Walk away with best practices, and behind the scenes stories on how top marketers are executing more strategic, efficient marketing strategies, including the four key elements of a scalable marketing automation for growth strategy: people, process, technology and patience.
People – The right staff with the right mixture of competencies to support the technology and process.
Process – A clearly outlined process for the handoff between your MarTech stack systems and the different teams that support those systems.
Technology – The right technology to support your company’s ever-expanding needs.
Patience – The runway to properly measure, report on, and continually improve your marketing processes.
Join this virtual event to learn more about the people, process, and the automation technology to level up your business’ growth.
All posts by Kelsey Moen
As our world grows increasingly virtual, now more than ever healthcare organizations are turning to new tools and technologies to better the patient experience. People have quickly adopted new ways of communicating and reimagined standard procedures like a doctor’s check up or a new consultation.
So how else can we use digital technology to improve the patient experience during our new virtual reality and beyond? Without the in person office visits, can we still connect, communicate and re-engage patients in a healthcare setting?
It turns out the healthcare industry can borrow some of the same marketing automation best practices we see in other industries transforming operations to better serve the needs of their customers.
Here are 3 marketing automation best practices healthcare organizations can adopt from other sectors to improve the patient experience:
Survey and understand your customer’s concerns and priorities
The first rule of marketing and communications is knowing what you want to say and why. As you start to tailor your marketing strategy to your patient’s needs and priorities, it helps to ask them directly what those priorities are. Whether it’s needing a reminder email before an appointment, a follow up text with instructions on how to take a prescription, or even ongoing wellness tips sent to their inbox, you won’t know what kind of information your patients are looking for unless you ask!
Personalize campaigns to the customer’s experience
Now that you’ve surveyed your patient base for the type and theme of content they’re looking for, personalize your future campaigns to those needs. You wouldn’t give health tips on staying active after retirement to a new mom! Likewise, you wouldn’t give newborn care best practices to a new retiree. Segment your patient base so you can tailor and personalize content to their needs.
Stay consistent and respectful with timing
As your patients come to expect more communication from you, make sure you’re staying consistent. If they opt in to a monthly health and wellness newsletter, keep up your monthly cadence! By giving them a consistent experience, you give your customers something to look forward to and expect.
Marketing automation requires a significant amount of time and effort to plan in the healthcare sector, and even more to execute (and execute well).
Critical to improving the patient experience for healthcare organizations, marketing automation is the cornerstone of successful integrated marketing strategies that reach and engage patients at the right time, with the right message for their needs. For more information on how you can build your marketing automation strategy for healthcare, contact Leadous.
All posts by Kelsey Moen
If you’re an avid Marketo Engage fan (which we all are here at Leadous of course) you may have heard or even seen that Marketo Engage is getting an updated look and feel in 2020.
Here’s everything you need to know about the next generation Marketo Engage experience, and how it will help your marketing team work faster and smarter.
What’s changing in the Marketo Engage User Interface (UI)?
The new Marketo Engage experience brings together the look and feel of Adobe Experience Cloud. You’ll be able to seamlessly toggle back and forth between the current and new UI on every screen for easy adoption.
The flagship change includes a more intuitive navigation header with easy access to different product areas and global search. There’s also a cleaner menu tree with a simplified icon set and advanced filtering options.
Benefits and Features of the New UI
Marketo designed these changes with your efficiency and workflows in mind. Here are some of the benefits Marketo has listed from the updated experience:
Streamlined program and asset creation with the ability to create a local asset within a folder
Consistent design for easier navigation across Adobe Experience Cloud applications
Updated and sleek iconography
A faster, more performant tree
Ability to easily collapse all folders in the left-side tree menu
Ability to apply multiple filters at once to narrow down your search
Find any campaign, asset, etc. across Marketo Engage with Global Search
More intuitive global navigation to move around Marketo Engage quickly
And of course, there will be no changes to your ability to build programs or access to the application!
When can you use the updated UI?
Marketo is updating customers’ experiences via a phased rollout extending through the rest of 2020. If you’re interested in getting access to the new UI right away, contact your Leadous representative!
For more information on everything included in the new Marketo Engage experience watch this On-Demand Webinar from Marketo or contact your Leadous representative to learn more.
For this post, we’ll dive into Phase 3, the advanced phase of the model, where predictive engagement takes center stage.
In truth, not many marketing teams are in an advanced level of predictive automation, because it’s hard to achieve. Your martech stack needs to be fully implemented, your data needs to be clean, your funnel needs to be clearly defined, and your marketing operations team needs expertise across a growing, complex tech stack.
Only then can you start to move your marketing automation into the predictive realm. In order to apply predictive engagement tactics, it’s important that the foundational data you’re basing your predictions off of are sound, otherwise your results start to get murky.
With predictive engagement, you can start to build out optimized ABM campaigns, predictive website personalization, full marketing attribution, and better funnel visibility. Here’s a bit more on each of those areas of advanced marketing automation:
ABM Optimization
In the advanced stage of the model for organizations taking an accounts-based marketing approach, optimizing your campaigns using intent data and predictive models based on your current customer journey, will help optimize your ABM campaigns.
Web Personalization
Once your tech stack is ready for advanced personalization, you can start to scale mass-personalized content across emails, landing pages, and your website, so that every experience is tailored to the audience consuming it.
Attribution
With advanced marketing techniques, proving marketing’s impact on the business becomes more important than ever. As you optimize campaign spend for conversions, tying back revenue to marketing programs should show clear ROI for your marketing automation strategy.
Funnel Visibility and Lead Lifecycle
All of your marketing campaigns in the advanced stage should map to your marketing funnel and customer journey. Fully understanding the lead lifecycle of your customers and where they fall in the funnel helps you to better tailor the predictive model for future customers as well.
Advanced marketing automation is not for the faint of heart. And it’s definitely not for an inexperienced marketing team to just try and see where you end up. Don’t be afraid to engage with a partner with proven experience across the predictive realm: ABM, intent search, web personalization, revenue attribution and lead lifecycle management.
Leadous provides key services including MarTech Stack Roadmapping and Automation Platform Audits to support organizations in the advanced stage of the Leadous’ Marketing Automation Progression Model to fully optimize across the customer lifecycle.
For this post, we’ll dive into Phase 1, the foundational phase of the model, which revolves around integrations.
From your CRM data to your marketing automation tools, a central tenant of marketing automation is automating the flow of data between each of these systems. In order to scale up marketing programs, your systems need to be able to talk to one another, otherwise you’re still manually managing systems that need to be automated to progress to more advanced channels campaigns.
But integration isn’t just a flip of the switch. For your data to stay clean and your campaigns to be both efficient and successful, you need to take the time to map out the workflow and the buyer journey in your systems.
That’s where the marketing automation progression model comes in. During the foundational phase of the model, you’ll build the groundwork for successful marketing automation integrations by outlining your strategy in 7 areas:
Establish Target Audiences
The first foundational step in your marketing automation program is defining your target audience. Will you kick off with campaigns to new prospect audiences? Upsell campaigns to customers? Stick with a clear direction of who your target audience is so you can more easily define the following steps.
Align Content/Messaging to Your Audiences
After you have a clear idea of who you’re marketing to, outline what you’re saying to them and what content you have (or need) to support that message. Will you need additional thought leadership to supplement your campaigns or do you already have the white papers, brochures, case studies, and so on to provide the backbone of your programs?
Map out Organized and Repeatable Automated Campaigns
Now that you know who you’re marketing to and what you’re saying to them, it’s time to map out clearly defined, repeatable campaigns. Whether it’s a welcome email nurture program to new email subscribers, or a regular upsell campaign to customers who hit certain milestones in your database, consider the data you need to signal when and how the campaign will start running to new audience members to remove as much of the manual process as possible.
Data Hygiene
As you start to build out automated campaigns for your database, data hygiene will need to be a constant feedback loop. Ensuring that the fields you use, the information and signals you gather, and the new audience members you add to campaigns are tying back between your marketing automation and CRM systems is vital. For example, if you launch your first marketing nurture and someone unsubscribes in your marketing automation system, will they be marked as unsubscribed in your CRM? How will that affect sales outreach to that lead? Which system is your source of truth and how will that data flow between the two? These are just a few of the questions you need to think through as your campaigns get more and more complex to build out.
Tracking Sources
Another important element in the integration process is to think through how you will track and assign the marketing campaign sources to your leads in your marketing automation and CRM systems. Will you use UTMs? Will you consider the first touch campaign as the “converting” campaign for a lead or the last touch before the lead passes to sales? Determine your process for tracking lead sources and campaign attribution early so you don’t have to unravel this later.
Tracking Costs (ROI)
Another element that’s easy to set up in the beginning and harder to unravel later is your campaign ROI. Get into the habit early of assigning and tracking costs with your campaigns so you can later dig into campaign ROI and the lifetime cost of a lead or opportunity.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
All of these steps tie back to one key area – sales and marketing alignment. If the sales team is not informed on where their leads are coming from (sources), what certain fields mean and their triggers (data hygiene), or even who you’re marketing to and how that aligns with their sales goals (audience) – your campaigns are going to have a much harder time succeeding.
The foundational phase of the marketing automation progression model takes time, patience and strategy to build to completion. Make sure to consult with a partner through this stage if you lack an advanced marketing automation team to guide the initial strategy setup.
In Leadous’ Marketing Automation Progression Model, we support your team through the foundational phase with key services including Implementation and Onboarding and Migration to give you the baseline foundation and metrics to build and measure the success of your demand generation efforts.
Every business needs to start their digital marketing journey somewhere. Maybe you’re just dipping your toe into marketing automation by procuring a tool like Marketo. Or maybe you’re on the opposite end, with too many tools, and too much complexity across marketing systems.
No matter where you are on your journey, Leadous has put together a Progression Model to help you increase efficiencies and drive opportunities in your pipeline.
Successful businesses know that in order to execute with focus and effectiveness, you need to know two key things about your marketing journey:
Your base level marketing performance (where you’re coming from).
Your strategic marketing and sales goals (where you’re going).
By establishing these two things, you’re well on your way to more strategic, efficient marketing campaigns. We call this journey the marketing automation progression model, and here’s more about what that looks like.
The Leadous Marketing Automation Progression Model
PHASE 0 – Experimental – Prior to Adoption
The journey to leveraging the power of marketing automation always starts here. Have you been only doing batch and blast emails to one huge email list? This is the place for you. Make your budget dollars go further by driving efficiencies across programs. You’ll need to start by laying the groundwork for automation with your technology stack, scheduling out time to measure and adjust regularly based on the findings, and outlining a strategy for your long-term marketing goals and processes.
PHASE 1 – Foundational – Single-Point Engagement
The next key foundation of your marketing automation progression is integrations. If your CRM and marketing automation tech stack aren’t talking to each other – you’re still relying on manual processes and the whole “automation” piece of marketing automation will fall flat on its face. By building out your foundational CRM integrations, you can then start to build out repeatable basic programs and campaigns leveraging more comprehensive automation technology.
PHASE 2 – Expanded – Multi-Touch Nurture
Once you’ve got the automation machine humming, it’s time to solidify marketing and sales alignment to make sure you’re all marching toward the same goals. Once you’re speaking the same language you can get to work planning, building, executing and managing complex multi-channel campaigns to increase revenue and marketing results.
PHASE 3 – Advanced – Predictive Engagement
After your multi-channel campaigns are in place, you can start to use that information for more advanced, predictive campaigns. Advanced automation takes time and patience to reach. You need to have a solid marketing and sales funnel with data you can trust in order to make actionable decisions. From there, you can optimize your revenue acceleration model using advanced reporting and predictive data to fuel advanced strategies like ABM and predictive web and email content.
PHASE 4 – Global – Omni-Channel
Finally, truly omni-channel marketing programs tie marketing spend to revenue to show the full lifecycle of marketing attribution in your funnel. This phase enables you to use predictive modeling to forecast marketing-influenced pipeline, and better adjust and track marketing KPIs globally across all multi-touch and predictive campaigns.
Next Steps
So how do you go from phase 0 (or maybe even phase -1) to phase 4 in your marketing automation programs? Well, it takes people, process, technology and patience.
People – The right staff with the right mixture of competencies to support the technology and process.
Process – A clearly outlined process for the handoff between your MarTech stack systems and the different teams that support those systems.
Technology – The right technology to support your company’s ever-expanding needs.
At Leadous, we take care of the people, process, and even the automation technology to get you all the way to marketing automation dominance. Contact us for more information on how we can help your organization level up through our marketing automation progression model.
We’re also seeing an increase in email marketing over the last few months, which isn’t surprising. Email is a direct line of communication to your subscribers. Whether you’re talking to prospects, customers, or even employees, your emails allow you to get front and center in the inbox for the chance to have their full attention.
How you take advantage of that position to engage and serve your audience is what we’ve been watching closely. Across businesses, email marketers are rising to the occasion to create communications that provide value to their subscribers, with empathetic messaging, creative and engaging designs that capture attention.
Feather is meeting the moment by providing a very relevant business offering – rentable home office furniture – and packaging it in an easy to digest, fully 100% mobile email that’s downright pretty to look at.
Their email ticks the boxes of empathy and trying to highlight their business offerings that will appeal to subscriber needs. They make a point of highlighting contactless delivery, a discount and the need to serve in the email, making sure that they’re leading the message with care.
In this email, SurveyMonkey is leading with an empathetic message that focuses solely on resources related to the pandemic.
By cutting out any superfluous content and sticking straight to the point on how to stay informed about public perceptions, get templates to survey your own audiences and even receive discounts for customers who may be struggling, they’re making it simple to follow the call to action, while increasing brand loyalty by not coming across as tone deaf.
3 – InVision re-engages customers with helpful product tips
A part of speaking to the moment is making sure current customers understand how to best utilize your product or service during a changing environment. That’s what InVision understood when they sent out best practices and examples on how to use InVision Freehand to collaborate remotely.
Of course, the email is also well structured, full of examples and custom product imagery that tells a story, and short, concise content with simple calls-to-action that also help keep it engaging.
We love a good virtual event, and maybe even more, we love a good virtual event email invite.
Webflow keeps their invite short and to the point with custom imagery that brands the virtual event experience – so you know exactly what you’re signing up for before you’ve even clicked the link.
By connecting a topic that’s currently top of mind – remote work lessons learned – with a catchy webinar theme that also speaks to a need for connection in an increasingly virtual world, Webflow is making sure they stay relevant and interesting to engage their subscribers.
By leading off their newsletter with a personalized note directly from an Asana employee describing their own remote work transition, this email hits all the high notes on making a personal connection with the subscriber. They’re leading with relatability. Asana makes a genuine connection and then follows it up with helpful tips and tricks for remote work.
From there, the email is bright, in brand, and concisely structured so you can skim for the high points and click through to their website.
During unprecedented times of uncertainty, it’s clear that smart email marketers are leading with genuine, helpful messaging.
Ignoring our current situation in your emails is only going to come across as tone deaf when the way we work and live has been turned upside down for the foreseeable future. Taking the moment and using it to deliver something good, or helpful, or just informative will engage your audience far more, and for far longer, than any other quick email fix could.
For more guidance on how to build engaging emails that build community during uncertain times, reach out to Leadous, with our new badge accredited by Adobe as a solution that solves a strategic problem, we’re glad to help.
Advice for teams looking at where ABM fits in their digital marketing strategy
While ABM may feel like the next big thing on the block, Tracey reminds us that we’ve actually been doing ABM for awhile. Most sales teams call it account-based penetration, where they base their sales efforts off a list of top target accounts. The only difference now is we’re plugging marketing into the equation earlier and more often so that before sales can even reach out, the accounts are warmed up and familiar with your brand story.
Just getting started with ABM? Start here
We say it often on the blog, you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. Your ABM strategy is no different. Holly suggests starting off your ABM strategy with a serious audit, including:
What are the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing programming? For your weaknesses, do you have the budget and buy in to level those up?
Is your marketing funnel working?
Are you tracking all the way through the funnel? If not, do you have the data and tracking to get you there?
Are you tracking the leading and lagging indicators along the marketing funnel?
Is your database clean? Do you have the contacts you need to make ABM work?
These are just a few of the areas to fortify to get you off to a running start with ABM.
The next step is to assign a sponsor for someone committed to the success of the project. With a clear owner, you have someone ready to take the project all the way forward.
Your sponsor should be pulling together documentation, aligned across both sales and marketing (and ops!) that governs the rules of engagement for leads and contacts through the funnel. Everyone needs to be on the same page about who can be communicated with from your database and at what points during the buyer’s journey before you get started.
Finally, your sponsor will want to clearly lay out what success looks like. Outline clear SMART goals, and make sure you have a plan for what you’ll do in the event of both success AND failure. Both are likely to happen at some point, plan ahead for mis-steps and you’ll be able to recover faster in real time.
For the full podcast, including more tips on preparing your sales and marketing teams for ABM and some of the measurable results Holly and Tracey have seen from organizations implementing ABM for the first time, listen here.
All posts by Kelsey Moen
In our changing work from home landscape, the way we connect (and market) has altered drastically in just a few short months. One of the clearest places we’ve seen incredible change is the rise of virtual events. You probably can’t open your inbox on any given week without getting at least one webinar invite.
So, as marketers we have to ask, are webinars oversaturated? Or are they here to stay?
In On24’s recent Webinar Benchmarks report, they pulled some key statistics on webinar usage year over year. They saw a near 300% increase in webinar hours consumed on their platform in April, with viewers watching more than 168,000 hours of webinars per DAY. That’s a lot of webinar content.
And it seems this increase is here to stay. According to the On24 report, webinar viewers are watching three times more webinar content than in 2019. If you’re a digital marketer this should be music to your ears. Here’s 5 reasons why we think virtual events are here to stay (with good reason!)
Easier on the budget
This one is a no brainer. Take out the travel and expenses from getting to in person events. Or shipping a large booth, and replace that with an entirely virtual event. Your cost savings are going to be huge. And hopefully you still have budget to put into your platform, your promotions, and even your follow up (hello direct mail!)
Get more granular with your topics
Webinars take less time to pull together than in person events, which feasibly if you have the subject matter experts on hand, allow you to diversify your content even further. Get into the nitty gritty with your marketing topics to give more value to your audiences.
Reach more people
Another great benefit of virtual events is the reach. Even at the largest tradeshows, you’re limited by space. With a webinar you can reach entire countries at the same time with your message, as long as your content is intriguing and your promotions are pulling them in.
Spin them out into bigger campaigns
Your webinar campaign doesn’t end when the recording does. With on demand webinars you can turn your content into spin off campaigns in email nurtures, social media posts, blogs, the choice is yours!
Gather more data and analytics
With most webinar platforms you get direct insights into what attendees are paying attention to, what questions they ask, and exactly how they got to your webinar. You can also more easily get them to engage with polls and surveys that would be more difficult to pull off in a booth setting.
And of course we have to mention how easy it is to setup a webinar program that can promote, register, track and follow up with your attendees automatically in Marketo. If you’re interested in building out your webinar strategy and need help with the campaign logic, contact Leadous!
All posts by Kelsey Moen
We’re well into months of remote work from the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite all the uncertainty of what will happen next, it’s clear the old way of doing business, and really business globally, will likely never be the same.
As we all shift to our “new normal” ways of work, one constant that our team has been relying on, along with the marketing teams we support, is email. As a platinum-level Adobe partner and a Specialized Marketo Certified Partner, we found ourselves leveraging email more than ever to communicate, offer support, and simply connect with our existing customers in new, personal ways.
After looking at some of the data that has come through on email marketing in the times of COVID-19, it’s clear we aren’t alone in our reliance on email. After digging in, here’s a few trends we found.
Email sends increased during the early stages of the pandemic.
We’ve seen a huge spike in emails related to the coronavirus pandemic during the first few weeks of stay-at-home orders in the United States. Just look at this chart from Sparkpost showing the increase in coronavirus-related subject lines:
Email engagement increased.
The good news is that mapping to that increase in sends, we saw an increase in email engagement. According to Grit News, some email marketers have seen anywhere from a 5% open rate increase to a 30+% engagement increase. One of our clients successfully sent 4X the number of emails monthly which has led to 300X the previous engagement level among their audience.
Messaging has become an even more delicate balance.
With or without a pandemic, the golden rule of email still applies. Send relevant content to the right people at the right time. During times of crisis, there’s a lot more pressure on what relevant content (and good timing) will mean to your audience. In recent research from MarketingCharts, they found that 79% of marketers were somewhat concerned (52%) or very concerned (27%) about “making missteps that may harm their brand image.”
No one wants to be the brand sending tone-deaf messages to an audience already going through impossible circumstances because you forgot to turn off a smart campaign or didn’t adjust next month’s newsletter content to fit our current realities.
Thankfully, we’ve seen some great examples of thoughtful, engaging communication in the last few months. They’re empathetic and clearly composed, and they offer real value to the audience.
Deliverability challenges were rampant.
Understandably with uncertainty, some businesses overshot and sent too many messages to audiences they may have not communicated with in a long time. Marketo and other providers did send out helpful guidance on managing your reputation and inbox placement during unprecedented times of email volume. Much of this was spurred by quick changes in team members and emails hard bouncing.
Depending on whether you are on your own or shared IP, there are risks in sudden spikes or dips in email volume. Now is a good time to familiarize yourself with your email deliverability situation and make sure you have a strategy and are staying consistent. And as always, you should have an email strategy to weed out people who have not engaged with your email content for some time. Leadous does offer a special program focused on this process specifically.
What’s Next
As we enter the next phase of the pandemic in the U.S., we’re likely to see new trends in email and marketing as a whole. However, it’s reassuring in a time where not much is certain, that email is here to stay and the guiding principles remain the same:
Be empathetic in your messaging
Understand who your audience is, what they’re looking for from you, and how that aligns with your brand goals
Don’t overstay your welcome in the inbox
Keep those in mind through every campaign to make sure you’re providing shared value to your audience. And as always, if you’re looking for more insights into developing your email strategy now and in the future, contact Leadous.
All posts by Kelsey Moen
Marketing and sales often get the most attention when we talk about cross-department collaboration in marketing. Although we love our sales friends, and even specialize on making the marketing and sales teamwork tick here at Leadous, we know that marketing often collaborates with many areas of the business outside of sales.
From product, to customer service, to IT, marketing teams need to constantly work across departments to gain insight and meet their different audience needs to ultimately drive revenue.
For our next Deep Dish event on February 6th, we’re going to dive deeper into one of those cross-collaborations: marketing and customer service.
Marketing and customer service share one overlapping goal: gain and retain customers. There are many ways that the two departments can better work together in order to achieve this goal.
From tag teaming social media inquiries, to sharing data and insights that inform new content and messaging, both teams are serving the customer along a different stage in the customer life cycle.
During our event, we’ll take a closer look at the opportunities available when better aligning marketing and customer service. We’ll spend the morning discussing:
What customer service data is important in marketing?
How does customer service represent branding and up-sell opportunities?
How can you align marketing and service goals to provide a better customer experience?
What technologies serve as the best integration points?
Join the discussion (and enjoy free breakfast!) as we share strategies that result in happy customers and revenue – something both customer service and marketing can agree is a good thing. Learn more about the event here.
All posts by Kelsey Moen
It’s no secret that today’s marketers are constantly being asked to do more with less. As consumers get more and more savvy, the demands on businesses to provide increasingly personalized, tailored experiences continues to grow.
But the hard truth is there’s only so many hours in a day. Marketers can’t be expected to create personalized experiences that will speak to the situation of every potential consumer. We need a way to work smarter, not just harder.
That’s where Artificial Intelligence (AI) steps in. According to Marketo, Marketing AI “advances and accelerates marketers’ ability to transform from one-size-fits-most marketing, to delivering value through deeply personalized communication at an individual level instead of volumes of interruptions that leave consumers exasperated.”
Here are three ways AI can empower marketers to better personalize your outreach, without taking up all of your waking hours.
Bucket consumers into the correct programs
By inputting your criteria and goals, AI can bucket your broader consumer base into segments that fit their stage.
Personalize your content
AI can help to tailor the content themes and messaging to each individual, so the right message is being received at the right time on the buyer journey.
Maximize your data
By gathering, and learning from, your audience data, AI will continue to improve on personalized experiences. This means you’re continuing to optimize your marketing processes without all the manual work.
As customer expectations continue to grow, marketers need a way to work smarter. AI takes the manual work out of campaign optimization to make sure you’re exceeding customer expectations by providing the right message in the right channel at the right time.
So you can focus on providing insights and tracking campaign success, instead of the manual program tweaking that takes up much of the marketing automation strategist’s time.
If you’re looking for more guidance on implementing Marketo AI in your marketing automation strategy, drop us a line! We can help make your Marketo campaigns work smarter for you.
All posts by Kelsey Moen
Leadous is proud to be one of the first Adobe solution partners globally to achieve the Marketo Engage Specialization (read the full press release here).
Adobe specialized partners must demonstrate trusted expertise, tested skills and customer success to be considered. Specialized partners are certified by Adobe for their proven capabilities and successful implementations — the best of the best in the partner ecosystem.
“Our team is dedicated to ensuring every Marketo user is successful and becomes an unwavering advocate for the platform. We are proud to be collaborating with Adobe/Marketo to become partners in our customers’ success,” said Tracey Ellis, CEO of Leadous.
As a Marketo Gold Services provider and Adobe Bronze Partner, Leadous serves over 140 clients worldwide, from fast growth companies to large enterprises. We’re excited to continue to bring our in-depth Marketo and Adobe expertise to even more customers!
If you have a question for one of our experts, or are looking to learn more about our Marketo and Adobe services, reach out to Leadous today.
All posts by Kelsey Moen
SEO is consistently one of the top lead generating sources for B2B marketers. And it’s a no brainer why. Without showing up in the top three results on Google, it’s likely your website (and products or services) will never be found by your prospects.
But it’s not enough to know that SEO is important, write a few more blog posts, and call it a day. Integrating good SEO into your wider lead generation strategy is hard work. It takes time to improve your rankings, and it’s equal parts art and science to do so.
In this post, we’ll review a few of the best practices for optimizing lead gen with SEO, to help you start (or continue on) the journey to better demand generation with your SEO marketing.
1) Know your baselines
As with any marketing strategy, you need to begin with an audit of where you’re starting, to know where you’re going. Use Google Analytics for a full picture of what’s working, and what’s not, on your website. Then, go deeper into whether you’re following the SEO basics. Do your pages have meta titles, descriptions, and keywords? Use an audit tool like SEOmater for a quick and easy way to get a picture of your SEO successes (and challenges).
2) Use Pillar Content
You spend a lot of time or resources on content marketing – make sure you’re getting every benefit out of that content! Creating long form content like e-books, blog post series and videos are great for your SEO content. So make sure you’re breaking those up into bite sized chunks like infographics and worksheets that can help you support your lead generating efforts!
3) Repurpose Existing Successful Content
Have a piece of content that did really well at driving leads but is dated? Update it! Re-release it with a “mid-year update” or any other spin on it to refresh for your audience. There’s a reason it performed well the first time and you want to make sure to take advantage of that to again streamline your work as much as possible.
4) Let Your Competition Be Your Guide
One of the biggest barriers to optimizing SEO is the time it can take to build your foundational strategy. Bypass some of the research and go straight to seeing what’s working well for your competition, using tools like SEMrush. Take the best of their strategy and build your own campaigns from those keywords.
5) Align Across Marketing
It’s clear that SEO isn’t just about your website content. It’s also about social, your advertising landing pages, your email marketing strategy driving traffic, the list goes on. Foster collaboration across the entire marketing team (including linking together your agencies) by providing clear, overarching project objectives, using collaboration and project management tools to stay in sync, and reporting on common held metrics so the entire team is driving to the same goal. By combining forces, your lead generation tactics will only be stronger.
SEO marketing is a top marketing strategy for any business looking to amp up lead generation. Looking for guidance on integrating your SEO more strategically into your lead generation efforts? Contact Leadous and let us lead you!
All posts by Kelsey Moen
The landscape of marketing is constantly changing. Being able to keep up with the pace of martech is vital to not only your career success, but the success of your company as a whole! Not a week (or a day!) goes by where we’re not learning something new.
Thankfully, you’re not alone on that journey. In the Minneapolis/St Paul area especially, we’re lucky to have a vibrant community for continued, supportive marketing learning. Supporting these communities and events isn’t only good for your career (hello, future promotion!) but it helps you streamline your day to day, expand your network, and improve your self confidence with your work. It’s a win – win – win!
Here’s just a few of our favorite ways to get involved and start boosting up your marketing education locally.
Minneapolis Marketo User Group
The Marketo User Group in the Twin Cities meets regularly as a community of Marketo users to share common learnings, collaborate and solve challenges face to face. Not local to the Twin Cities? Marketo User Groups exist in 50+ cities globally. There are even virtual groups you can join!
Hands On Marketo Workshops
If you’re ready to take it a step further and really hone in on the continuing Marketo education, Marketo holds deep dive workshops prepping for their certification exams. A Marketo expert will be in the Twin Cities to lead a 2-day interactive MCSA preparation workshop this summer. Learn how to use Marketo to solve real customer use cases and solution for the future. If you’re already a Marketo expert and are looking to take a dive into advanced uses of Marketo features and functions you should definitely check it out!
BMA Minnesota
The BMA Minnesota is a gathering of local B2B marketers to network, learn from each other and share best practices. They meet regularly around the cities for events, and our very own CEO, Tracey, volunteers as president of the Twin Cities chapter!
These are just a few of the many many ways to take part in building up the community of marketers (and Marketo users) locally in the Twin Cities.
Whether it’s joining the Minneapolis Marketo User Group, joining an upcoming workshop like the MCSA training, saying hi to Tracey at an upcoming BMA event, or even signing up for a Marketo training class at Leadous, we hope you’ll take advantage of the many opportunities to connect, learn and improve on your Marketo skills right here in the Twin Cities.
Are there other organizations or events that you’re a part of that we should know about? Let us know in the comments below, we’d love to hear more!
All posts by Kelsey Moen
At Leadous we love marketing. We love Marketo. And we love our local Twin Cities community.
That’s why we’re so excited to announce our new initiative, Leadous Loves, where we’ll be giving back to our local community, with a twist of Leadous orange.
Leadous Loves
Kicking off in June, our team members are regularly going out into the community to volunteer our time and talents. We’re starting with Hearts and Hammers, which provides exterior home improvement assistance for Senior Citizens, Disabled Adults, and Veterans of the United States Armed Forces or their Surviving Spouse so that they may continue to live independently. Read more about their amazing mission here.
We’d love for you to join us at a future volunteering event, suggest your favorite nonprofit, or just send some positive encouragement our way as we step a little outside of our comfort zones and trade in our keyboards for power tools!
If you are interested in partnering with Leadous and being a part of giving back with a twist of orange love, please reach out today.
All posts by Kelsey Moen
Are you considering outsourcing a portion of your marketing automation operations? You’re not alone.
And it’s no surprise why. In today’s market, it’s difficult to find and retain top marketing talent. It takes serious skill to manage marketing automation operations, and not every organization has the time and budget to recruit and train for those skills.
That’s where Lead Generation as a Service (LG-AAS) comes in.
LG-AAS changes the way marketers look at the world. At Leadous, we partner with Marketo to bring best in class automation into organization’s hands, so you can see results from your lead generation strategy without the headache.
Our LG-AAS process takes a crawl, walk, run mentality. We give organizations the ability to fill all of the gaps, test, refine and plan for an expanded use of Marketo and its powerful features to drive digital demand generation.
What type of organizations see value from LG-AAS?
We work with organizations from B2B to B2C to maximize their marketing automation systems and drive results without the hassle of managing operations day in and day out.
Are you finding it difficult to recruit the right team in your budget to manage marketing automation operations?
Would you like to focus more of your time and efforts on results instead of processes?
Do you need to get tools setup quickly so you can start seeing results?
Are your revenue goals closely tied to your marketing demand generation?
Are you having difficulty scaling up your marketing operations to meet sales goals?
Do you often work with agencies or other vendors and have experience managing them?
Do you want to implement marketing automation, but need to take a methodical approach?
If you’re nodding to one of these scenarios, LG-AAS is for you! The key to success in marketing automation is driving results. So if your organization isn’t in a spot to drive those on your own quite yet, LG-AAS could be a fit.
Let us lead you to better lead generation. Contact Leadous today to learn more about our LG-AAS offering.
All posts by Kelsey Moen
Close your eyes (metaphorically). Imagine your perfect, home run of a customer. The one in that industry that looooves the value you bring to the table. With the size, location, business model, pain points, etc that sit smack dab in the middle of your sweet spot.
Now imagine you had the chance to talk to that prospect, with a message that speaks directly to who they are and their pain points. Seems like a no brainer situation, right? That’s every sales and marketing person’s dream! Making that fantasy a reality is what Account Based Marketing (ABM) is all about, and why it’s become the new hero of marketing strategies.
ABM is a strategy that finitely targets your marketing tactics to your highest value, best fitting, prospects. And it works. In fact, more than 87% of B2B marketers say that ABM sees a higher ROI compared to other demand gen tactics.
So, how can you use tools like Marketo to reap the benefits of an ABM strategy? In this post, we’ll look at four key steps to get you on your way to implementing ABM using Marketo.
1. Select target accounts
ABM centers on knowing and targeting those “perfect fit” customers. Look at your ideal customers and their geographical and behavioral data that you can target. Get finite into industries, technologies, or any other distinct niches. This will help you focus your ABM campaigns with more personalized messages that are likely to convert those leads.
2. Establish effective goals
It’s ok to start small with your ABM strategy, as long as you know where you’re going. Make sure you’re working closely with Sales on what success looks like for your ABM campaigns, what data you’re going to collect to tell you if you’re reaching that success, and setting time constraints around that data.
3. Plan out your campaigns
ABM doesn’t replace all of your marketing channels, it enhances them. So make sure you’re thinking through both the personalized content for your accounts, but also what channels you’ll be using to make sure you have a unified, cohesive message that your prospects can’t ignore!
4. Evaluate success and optimize for the future
Check in with your sales team periodically and see if any of your account lists need to be retooled. Use marketing automation tools like Marketo to build, track, optimize and report on results so you can continue to tweak your strategy as you go!
It feels like just yesterday we were at Adobe Summit, traveling back in time to the 90’s ad agency and getting the scoop on the latest and greatest updates coming to Marketo and Adobe. In case you missed it, we’ve compiled a quick rundown of our three most important takeaways from the Marketing Nation Summit!
B2B & B2C are gone, but not forgotten… B2E is where it’s at!
Steven Lucas, Senior VP of Digital Experience at Adobe had a very interesting message for marketers. Traditionally we have looked to B2B & B2C when delivering a marketing experience. Lucas cracked that concept wide open to reframe how marketers create the ultimate digital experience. B2E (Business-to-Everyone) is where it’s at!
We all have work to do that sometimes distracts us from what our real business purpose is, like what our customers REALLY need. It’s crucial to always have our ears and eyes open to purposefully listen to what the market is telling us. Leadous can help you deliver the energy and expertise needed to maximize every one of your customer’s marketing automation experiences with your brand.
Personalization is the ultimate digital experience.
We know that all our marketing efforts center on the customer, but now we have the right tools and much more knowledge to personalize each customer experience with your brand. Marketo has made it even easier to build automated marketing campaigns across all channels, tacking the full customer journey and utilizing Marketo’s innovative AI solution to create a personalized experience.
Looking for more Marketing Nation takeaways? We sent a team of Marketo experts there, drop us a line for more info!
All posts by Kelsey Moen
You’ve (hopefully) seen the emails. Tomorrow, August 15, 2018, Marketo’s updated data retention policy goes into effect.
But what does this mean for you and your Marketo data?
The new data retention policy has two parts, high volume activities will now only be retained for 90 days and then deleted. Other lead activities will be retained for 25 months and then deleted. The only exception to this is new lead activity – you will always be able to see in your activity log when and how a lead was created.
Here is the data that will be deleted in Marketo after 90 days (same as today):
Add to List
Change Score
Change Data Value*
Visit Webpage
Click Link on Webpage
Sync Lead to SFDC
Sync Lead to Microsoft
Sync Lead Updates to SFDC
Update Opportunity
Request Campaign
Here is the data that will be deleted via Marketo after 25 months:
If you need to retain more of this data beyond the specific time constraints you have a couple of options. You can bulk extract the data periodically and store in another system (see here for more information on the bulk extract API). The main limitation to the bulk extract API is a daily export allocation of 500 MB. If you plan to export extremely large files, an upgrade in export size will be necessary. The date range filter also maxes out at 31 days, depending on how far back you want the data to cover.
Your other option is to upgrade to Marketo’s premium Extended Data Retention subscription, which will extend your 25 months worth of data to 37 months.
Overall, the effect of the data retention is two fold. Beyond ensuring that your data is compliant with GDPR, you could see speedier load time in Marketo with less data to sift through. Depending on usage, you may see faster email sends, faster smart list processing, and faster campaign execution overall.
The other area where you’re going to see changes are smart list filters and flow steps where you can filter by an activity within a certain time period – those actions will only apply within the data retention period. Similarly, for engagement programs and smart campaigns, you will only be able to see membership within the data retention period.
To workaround these limitations, think through specific activities you want to record and try creating static lists or trigger campaigns (with custom fields) to update when specific activities occur. That way you can still segment based on this activity after the data retention period is over.
Have questions about how to retain your data? Need help exporting high value data so your reports stay clean? Contact Leadous, we can help!
All posts by Kelsey Moen
Marketing automation has changed the way marketers look at the world. Leadous has Partnered with Adobe to bring best in class automation into the hands of those that are resource and fund constrained to leverage automation for lead generation so that everyone can experience the value of automation.
This model works best for companies that see a vision for marketing automation but want to take a step by step approach to ensuring they have all of the components in place to fully leverage marketing automation. MA-AAS gives organizations the ability to fill all of the gaps, test, refine and plan for an expanded use of Marketo and its powerful features that drive digital demand generation.
The three options below are based on organizational and database size and are priced to provide the resources, time and investment necessary to drive results and prove ROI. *Pricing starting at $15,000 for three months
Includes Marketo Workspace License fee. Does not include content development or copywriting.
Additional items may be added to any of the above packages and will affect the monthly fee.
At the expiration client agrees to rollover their workspace to a stand alone Marketo instance.
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