Tag Archives: marketing automation progression model

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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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The Marketing Automation Progression Model: Phase 0 – Experimental

In our last blog post we covered the Marketing Automation Progression Model, detailing the phases advancing marketing teams go through when leveling up their marketing strategy. 

For this post, we’ll dive into Phase 0, which often starts before any automation even comes into play: Experimental. 

Often organizations come to us with a vision and a reality check. The vision is marketing dominance, with a clear dotted line showing the influence of a specific marketing campaign to closed business. The reality? Something far murkier. 

Sometimes it’s misaligned sales and marketing teams getting in the way. Other times it’s processes that do not tie into systems across the full MarTech stack. Sometimes it’s simply a lack of clarity around strategic direction or a lack of understanding of the tools and tactics to get you there. 

Whatever the challenge, in order to progress to advanced marketing automation, you need to get your teams aligned under a more efficient, strategic approach. That means your marketing leadership needs to commit to moving beyond batch and blast campaigns, aligning goals with sales leadership, and investing in the technology you need to drive demand.

Once that commitment is there, you’re ready to get started with the experimental phase of the model. You’ll start by outlining 6 items:

              1. Goals
                Your team needs to align, across marketing and sales, with what success looks like for your marketing automation campaigns.
              2. Belief in the Possibilities of Automation
                Automation is going to power your more advanced marketing campaigns, so you’ll need to make sure you have the internal commitment (in budget, time and resources) to get the foundations built.
              3. Team with Technically Curious Marketers
                The people behind the process and technology are arguably the most important piece to successful marketing automation. Without the expertise and muscle to drive your strategy and tactics, you won’t be able to bring advanced marketing campaigns to life.

              4. Campaign Initiatives
                Start with an idea of what you want to achieve in your marketing programs on a campaign level for more detailed campaign KPIs.
              5. Content Strategy
                In order to fuel the success of these campaigns, you’ll need to map out content that aligns to your sales funnel and overall goals.

              6. CRM Database and/or Target Accounts and Customer Lists
                Without an audience to target, you’ll have no one to send your campaigns to, so a clean CRM database and/or target accounts list is key.


If you are new to marketing automation or lack marketing automation experience on your team, make sure to secure a partner to navigate through the experimental phase so you can lay a strong foundation for the rest of your marketing automation journey.

In Leadous’ Marketing Automation Progression Model, we support your team through this phase with key services including Campaigns On-Demand and Automation Evaluations to give you the strong foundational components and data driven metrics to build a strong case for the investment in automation that will measure the success of your demand generation efforts and create ROI. 

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

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The Marketing Automation Progression Model: Going from 0 to 100 Digital Marketing Execution

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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.