Tag Archives: Demand Generation

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Preventative Maintenance for Your Marketo Instance

Everyone knows you need a trusted mechanic. We all trust this person to diagnose and maintain the vehicle we use to navigate our lives. We can often take for granted how complex the machine we depend on daily actually is. Everybody can relate to the frustration and helpless feeling when your car breaks down unexpectedly leaving you stranded. So, you go to your trusted mechanic for preventative maintenance to try to make sure you are not caught stuck on the side of the road, right? Speaking of complex engines we too often take for granted, when was the last time you had a Marketo Certified Expert audit your operation? Let Leadous take a look under the proverbial hood.

An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure

Just like with your car, you need to make sure your Marketo instance is running efficiently. It’s worth the time and effort to catch a problem before it becomes a mess that needs to be dealt with. So, a platform audit starts from the bottom and without assumptions. From the basic technical setup to the general state of marketable records in the database, the Leadous team wants to make sure the foundations of your instance are sturdy and ready to support your lead gen initiatives. This includes checking that your website uses Marketo’s Munchkin tracking code, making sure you are using custom domains for your landing pages and emails, and analyzing the health of your database. 

From there, our experts will familiarize themselves with your instance. That means looking through your workspace(s) at how your programs and campaigns were built and how they currently operate. We can analyze how your habits compare to industry best practices. Even if you think everything is running well, an engine can usually use some form of tune up.

A Full Diagnostic Check

Does your instance have a center of excellence? Do all of your programs follow a best practice folder structure? Do you even have a consistent folder structure, much less one that follows industry best practices? A Marketo instance has so many moving parts, it can be difficult to make sure everything everywhere is working at its top capabilities. 

Leadous will look your instance over from top to bottom. Any area where we see room for improvement, our team of experts will lay out a plan to get your company to the top of its potential. We will then take all those various recommendations based on immediate, short-term and long-term priorities and the benefit they would bring, and work with your team to refine everything into an action plan tailored to you and your goals. 

Upgrading the Engine Parts

Maybe you are looking for more than a tune up. You decided you need an expert’s help to increase the power of your machine. Once we know what’s going on in your instance, we can recommend the typical next steps to continue leveraging the power of the Marketo Engage platform. When we compile our list of recommendations for improving your current build, we will include new processes you can introduce that will enhance your marketing efforts.

The Marketo Engage system is a hugely powerful and expansive tool. Leadous has developed a phased progression model with benchmarks that build toward a full Marketo implementation for a true global, omni-channel approach that is tracking and analyzing your contacts’ journeys through your lifecycle. Think of it like putting higher and higher performance parts into the engine getting more and more power out of it. 

Our platform audit goes a long way toward understanding where a new client is on that model and what steps they can take to reach the next phase. As a company works their way up the progression model, they will see greater personalization in their campaigns, more thorough reporting, and improved return on marketing. 

Everyone Needs Some Help Sometimes

Even the most savvy at-home gearhead eventually runs into a problem that’s better solved with some professional help. Maybe the shop has an expensive tool that is not worth personally purchasing. Leadous and our staff of experts can be your trusted answer for when Marketo requires more resources than your team can currently bring to bear. 

Sometimes a company just lacks a resource for a specific project. Leadous can certainly help finish out whatever project you have planned. Other times, your company needs to learn a new set of skills. The Leadous team is well equipped to train your staff with the knowledge they need. Even a very Marketo-savvy company sometimes just needs some reinforcement of man hours for a large project. Whatever we uncover in our platform audit, the Leadous Team can help your company get the most out of your Marketo engine.

Click here to reach out to a Leadous expert today.

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The Marketing Automation Progression Model: Phase 4 – Global

In our last blog post, we walked through the steps in the Advanced phase of the Marketing Automation Progression Model that marketing teams take when bringing predictive engagement into the marketing funnel. 

For this post, we’ll dive into the fourth and final phase of the model, the Global phase, which provides the necessary strategic planning that ties marketing spend back to revenue and the backdrop for marketers to tell the story of how marketing is truly impacting revenue – across regions. 

The global phase of marketing automation progression is all about analytics. If you’re in this phase you already have the foundation of a solid martech stack, multi-channel marketing strategies, clean data across the funnel, and a clear predictive strategy. 

From there you need the full analytics picture to apply those strategies globally across the enterprise. 

For organizations ready for a global marketing automation approach this usually means 2 key things: 

  1. Advanced Revenue Analysis
    By analyzing the revenue cycle marketers can gain a clear picture of the customer journey. From there you can streamline campaigns to close new business, as well as upsell customers.     
  2. Custom Training and Management Services
    Failing to plan is planning to fail. Knowing where you need to beef up the expertise on your team, or what views you’re missing into your data is the first step. From there you can work with a partner to augment those lacking areas and start to build out the full picture you need to see for real-time, omni-channel campaign insight and optimization. 

Leadous provides key services including Custom Training, Revenue Acceleration Analysis, and Campaign Mentor services to help organizations achieve the global phase of  the Leadous’ Marketing Automation Progression Model and get a clear picture into marketing campaigns across the enterprise. 

For more information on our Marketing Automation Progression Model, contact Leadous!  

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The Marketing Automation Progression Model: Phase 3 – Advanced

In our last blog post, we walked through the steps in the Expanded phase of the Marketing Automation Progression Model that marketing teams take when planning, building, executing and managing complex campaigns. 

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 more information on our Marketing Automation Progression Model, contact Leadous!  

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The Marketing Automation Progression Model: Phase 2 – Expanded

In our last blog post, we walked through the foundational building marketing teams need to execute in the Foundational phase of the Marketing Automation Progression Model in order to set the stage for advanced marketing automation programs. 

For this post, we’ll dive into Phase 2, the expanded phase of the model, which starts to take your marketing into the more complex world of optimization. 

If you’re following the steps of Leadous’ marketing automation progression model, by now you have implemented a marketing automation tool, you’ve worked through your integrations and set up some initial basic campaigns, and now you’re ready to dig into more complex multi-touch campaigns.

For our customers, this often means implementing new strategies for tracking and improving lead quality, implementing more advanced conversational marketing tools, and achieving true sales and marketing alignment. 

During the expanded phase of the model, you’ll start planning, building, executing and managing complex campaigns in platform to ultimately impact these 4 areas:

Lead Quality Management
Once you dive into more complex marketing automation programs, the goal becomes less about the quantity of leads (how many MQLs did we drive this quarter?) and more about the quality of leads (how many MQLs did we convert into SQLs this quarter?). By optimizing your campaigns across channels for conversion rates, we can better drive the right kind of leads over to your sales team.

Behavior and Demographics-Based Lead Scoring
A key component of more quality-driven demand generation is passing over the right kind of leads to your sales team. This means prospects who are a good fit for your business and ready to commit to a purchase. Marketers use behavior and demographic lead scoring to signal to sales when leads are sales-ready. Developing a comprehensive scoring model that highlights for sales when a buyer fits your ideal profile and is an active research or demo-ready phase ensures you’re passing higher quality leads over the fence.

Streamline Lead Management and Sales Alignment
Lead quality management and lead scoring tie back to our overall goal of true marketing and sales alignment. Knowing the actions a prospect takes before they book a demo may be a marketing’s responsibility, but knowing the ideal buyer and buying committee is definitely sale’s responsibility. By staying in lock step alignment, marketing is able to better build a program that will cater to sales’ needs, delivering higher quality, better converting leads.

More Advanced Technology Integrations
Finally, with more complex marketing programs comes more complex technology implementations. In this phase of marketing automation progression many of our customers come to us looking for a chatbot to implement, personalized email and web content, or maybe the beginning phases of evaluating an ABM tool. Integrating advanced tools into the tech stack takes time and a comprehensive, strategic approach to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth out of the tool. 

The expanded phase of the marketing automation progression model is an important phase that often takes a year or two to fully achieve by methodically building out increasingly complex campaign structures on top of the foundations you’ve built in the previous phases of the model. 

Often our customers come to us during this phase to “take their marketing up a notch.” They know they’ve got the basics down, but they need the strategy and training for their marketing automation teams to implement more advanced tools or techniques to take their demand generation to the next level. 

Leadous provides key services including Custom Training and Lead Scoring to support organizations in this expanded stage of  the Leadous’ Marketing Automation Progression Model to accelerate marketing advancement and improve lead conversion rates.   

For more information on our Marketing Automation Progression Model, contact Leadous!  

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The Marketing Automation Progression Model: Phase 1 – Foundational

In our last blog post, we level set the pre-adoption steps marketing teams take in the Experimental phase of the Marketing Automation Progression Model in order to prepare for the next level of marketing automation. 

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.   

For more information on our Marketing Automation Progression Model, contact Leadous!  

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Is Lead Generation as a Service Right for Your Organization?

Are you considering outsourcing a portion of your marketing automation operations? You’re not alone.

According to a study conducted by Marketo & Ascend2, 75% of successful marketing automation software users outsource a portion of their marketing automation strategy.

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.