Tag Archives: leadous

Obsessed With Marketing Automation

Choosing the Right Vehicle for Your Strategies

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Your car is an integral part of your day to day life. You use it, you maintain it, and you have to fuel it. You are intimately familiar with it. Unless you are blessed with a limitless budget, when you are ready to look into buying a new car you have to balance what you want in your new vehicle versus what you need. This is a big purchase, and new cars are very complicated machines. 

What features are going to deliver on your needs? How many of your nice-to-haves can you get? Perhaps even knowing how to tell the difference between a want and a need is too far out of your element. What do you do? You go to your “car” friend, an expert, for advice. When that big purchase is a marketing automation platform instead of a car, think of Leadous as your expert friend, and we will show you how to get the most out of your budget.

The Leadous Evaluation Motor™

Using our Evaluation Motor™ model, the team here at Leadous breaks your marketing automation down into four key areas: Vision, Strategy, Features, and Resources. Think of each as a component of the engine that will drive your marketing initiatives. Our experts will work with you to understand how you currently use and plan to use automation in your marketing. Then we identify the platform best suited to your needs.

We start with your Vision. What are your goals? Do you have a roadmap for reaching your goals? Vision leads to Strategy. What portions of your business come from B2B and from B2C? Are you currently trying to break into new markets?  We can help you determine which of your channels needs development. Once you have a Strategy, we can help you identify the Features of a marketing automation platform required to implement your decisions. Finally, your Strategy and Features will inform what Resources will be needed to run your department, both human and technical. Do you have the database to support the initiatives you have planned? Do you have the man hours to realistically launch and maintain them?

Our discovery process will entail working with you, and you will need to be honest with us and yourself. Some people feel they absolutely must have a big pickup truck when they actually live in a downtown condo and do not even so much as dabble in manual labor. In reality, having the truck is a want. Sometimes those people need a trusted advisor to be honest with them, especially when it comes to budgetary discretion. If your only plans for marketing automation are to schedule email sends, then think of some of the more powerful (and expensive) platforms as more “car” than you need.

Committing to a marketing automation platform is not a trivial investment, just like committing to a contract for a new car. Changing platforms or implementing a company’s first venture into marketing automation usually involves more man hours than you think it will. So having to continually disrupt your operations is typically not the smartest way to go. Instead we will make sure our recommended platform can handle your plans. Alternatively, we can help you scale back your plans if you have to for budgetary reasons. We can show you what exactly you have to reconsider.

Car Enthusiasts Drive Nice Cars

You probably know Leadous is an Adobe Gold Partner. We believe in and use Adobe’s Marketo Engage as our marketing automation platform. You expect a car enthusiast to have a nice car. That said, we are still objective enough to help you decide if you have the need and ability to justify going to the top of the line solution. 

If you do decide to use Marketo Engage, the Leadous team will be able to guide you through the whole implementation. Our team can help you take your Marketo instance from a blank canvas to a high performance engine that drives global, multi-channel initiatives tracking every moment of your leads’ journeys through your fully customized sales life cycle.

Reach out today for expert guidance!

Obsessed With Marketing Automation, Uncategorized

Making the Switch to Marketo Engage – Let Us Lead You

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Making major operational decisions about your company’s marketing stack is not an easy undertaking. The logistical effort of having to transition to new marketing automation software can seem like reason enough to just stick with the status quo. However, with the proper partner, you can actually make the transition a benefit in and of itself. Yes, you will need to put some work into the project, but it will also be an opportunity to reevaluate your strategies and make other cutovers that would normally go undone due to the disruption they would cause. Let Leadous be the kind of partner that makes you stronger for having decided to use the Marketo Engage platform.

Navigating the Logistics

The first task you’ll need to tackle is to catalog your assets and current programs. Leadous has been helping our clients through this process for years. Without a plan and end goal in mind, just getting started with this often proves overwhelming to companies at this early stage. We have developed documentation and processes that will help you manage what would otherwise seem to be a daunting task. We know you need to sort through everything from your landing pages to emails to specific audience groups. 

Once you know what you have, the next step is to determine what you want to keep. This will require your team to review your inventory. While Leadous and our experts can not make these sorts of calls for you, we can provide you with guidance about what you’ll need specifically to transition to your new Marketo instance. We can also advise on your broader marketing strategies which may influence the continued use of other assets.

We know you are likely coming from another platform. As such, we know your plans need to revolve around the loss of access to your old service. Our process will help you make sure you have everything you might possibly want to save before your old subscription ends. As we help you plot out your migration timeline, all of the relevant dates and considerations will be incorporated into your plan. 

Getting Into the Weeds

Once you have your migration plan in place, you will start the actual work of rebuilding programs and migrating assets. Outside of the migration itself, you will also need to start setting up your new Marketo instance. The experts at Leadous pride ourselves on our Marketo expertise. We can either guide you through the process, take it over entirely, or whatever mix of the two that meets your needs.

As Marketo experts, we will help you make sure all of your programs are properly adapted into the Marketo environment. Unless you are migrating between Marketo instances, you will have to rebuild the programs in your new instance. There is no ability to import a program from a different platform. Our experience will help smooth over the bumps that will inevitably arise as you have to “translate” into the new language of Marketo. If you are moving from one instance to the next, you can use the program import tool, but you may still have to do some specific rebuilds manually. 

Expect the Unexpected

An old military adage states no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Even the best laid plans have to be ready to change once the realities of the actual engagement reveal themselves, whatever they may be. When this inevitably happens to you, it will pay to have someone else around to offer assistance and advice. We have assisted with many migrations, and while every situation is unique, our history of service and happy clients means we have probably seen something similar to your current quandary.

Actually, we encourage our clients to take the migration as an opportunity to reassess their strategies and technologies. For instance, did you know Adobe has launched Dynamic Chat? Instead of paying for another 3rd party service, you can use a chatbot included with your Marketo subscription. When you make a realization like this and decide to leverage the new feature, the Leadous team is right by your side to help you understand what those changes to the plan mean for the rest of the migration timeline. 

As your team acclimates to the new platform, you can also engage with Leadous to train your staff. Even if you have to solely rely on Leadous during the migration because you are unfamiliar with Marketo, we have the resources to make sure your team doesn’t have to stay that way. From instructor-led sessions with our training expert to access to our managed learning system, Certous, Leadous can take your staff from novice to expert.

A Steady Hand on the Wheel

Whether you decide to do the rebuilds yourself or you want to offload the whole task, with Leadous consultants available to help, the switch to the Marketo Engage platform doesn’t have to be a strike against making the move. You will have dedicated Marketo Certified Experts working as your consultants during the transition, but you won’t be limited to just them. Through your consultants, you will have access to the entire Leadous Services Team and our entire combined experience. With our knowledge, you can rest easy knowing that any challenges you encounter can be dealt with and overcome.

If you are thinking about making the switch to Marketo Engage, reach out to find out what Leadous can do for you

Tips

Transforming Consumer Engagement using Marketo (and Leadous!)

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Today’s consumer is marketing savvy with high expectations for the brands they choose to engage with. Your business has a limited amount of time to make a good impression, and much of that impression relies solely on marketing.

Most of the research houses estimate that between 60% and 90% of the buyer’s journey is now completely digitally self-guided.

Marketing automation is really the one, efficient way to transform that digital journey and keep customers engaged with your brand. In this post, we’ll talk to Marketo’s consumer marketing solution, and how Leadous can help your business find, engage and retain consumers by implementing a smart, holistic marketing automation strategy.  

Find your people

Any good marketing campaign starts with a targeted list. You need to know who you’re marketing to, where they’re finding your brand, and how they want to interact with you. Once you can figure out where they are (and where they’re coming from) you can incorporate targeted messaging in Marketo to deliver meaningful experiences.

Omnichannel engagement with personalization

Marketo allows you to follow your customer from your website, to social media, through emails, on to content, the list goes on! If it’s a marketing channel, Marketo can track it. By connecting the dots between your various marketing campaigns, you’re able to make sure you’re providing a consistent, cohesive digital experience that your consumers will enjoy and not be annoyed by.

Create brand advocates to increase the lifetime value of the customer

Once your opportunities convert, the journey doesn’t have to stop! Continue the conversation with customer nurture programs to make sure your consumers are becoming loyal brand advocates (and hopefully being inspired to buy more products or services from you as a result!).

Track revenue driving metrics

Data is what keeps the marketing automation machine humming along. With a unified view of the customer, and the marketing activities driving consumer engagement, you’re able to also report on what’s actually working to drive acquisitions, and what the lifetime customer value really is, so you’re able to improve on results as you go.

Looking for more tips on improving consumer engagement and providing a holistic digital experience for your buyers? We’d love to help lead you to better, smarter, consumer engagement campaigns. Contact us today!