Joseph Patterson, Author at Mediaramp.io

What Is Marketing Automation Software?

Marketing automation software can improve marketing productivity and increase lead quality. Here’s what you need to know before adopting a marketing automation platform.

Marketing automation software has become an integral part of today’s digital marketing department — whether for a small local business or a large enterprise. As digital marketing channels have evolved, so have marketing automation platforms. Ironically, by automating certain marketing functions, it’s possible to create a more relevant, engaging and personal experience for your prospects. In this article, we look at B2B marketing automation software, which we’ve defined as:

A campaign management system that drives prospect interactions with the brand, measures prospect response to marketing programs, and delivers prospect information to sales representatives through the company’s CRM. When used effectively, marketing automation systems will deliver a continuous flow of qualified leads to the sales team, as well as the data needed to close sales with those leads.

What Does Marketing Automation Do?

Most marketing automation platforms have their roots in one or two core competencies (e.g., email, CRM) and subsequently added capabilities (either through acquisition or organic growth) as new marketing channels have emerged. Virtually every B2B marketing automation platform provides the following core capabilities:

Email marketing and landing page development.
Website visitor tracking.
Lead capture, scoring and nurturing.
Centralized marketing database.
Native CRM integration.
Data analysis and reporting.

From there, vendors differentiate by providing additional tools — which may be add-ons or included in the base price — that offer the following advanced features:

Dynamic content generation.
Multichannel campaign management.
Mobile optimization (i.e., responsive design).
ROI and revenue reporting.
Built-in independent software vendor (ISV) app integration.

What Are The Benefits And Challenges Of Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation can provide several benefits for a busy marketing department:

Increased marketing efficiency. The software can improve productivity by automating time-consuming manual tasks around content creation, management and personalization, campaign scheduling and execution, data hygiene (i.e., fixing duplicate or inconsistent data residing in various silos), communication with sales teams and lead nurturing.
Enhanced ability to generate more — and better-qualified — leads. Marketing automation combines multiple criteria, such as demographic and behavioral data (pages visited, downloads, filled-out forms) with a lead scoring system, to identify leads that are ready for the sales team to contact. You know more about your targets and can deliver a more relevant message.
Multichannel view of prospect behavior. Today’s marketing automation platforms can integrate multiple channels (e.g., email, social, website) to create more comprehensive prospect profiles and more holistic views of prospect behavior.
Better alignment of sales and marketing goals. Marketing automation software can help to align sales and marketing efforts to ensure that sales reps are working with sales-ready leads. By working cooperatively to set scoring parameters and define qualified leads, sales and marketing become one team. Marketing works on building relationships with early-stage leads to enable sales to focus their efforts on the most highly qualified prospects.
Improved lead conversion and ROI. According to Forrester Research, B2B marketers that implement marketing automation experience a 10-percent increase in their sales pipeline contribution.

Adopting and implementing the software is not without its challenges:

Training, onboarding and implementing take time. Identify who on your team will be using the software, and negotiate with the vendor for ample training hours to get the team up and running. Expect a learning curve, and allow time for transition to the new system.
Underutilization of the platform. Marketing automation platforms can end up being expensive email systems if not used to their fullest capacity. Training is key, as is buy-in to use as much of the system’s capability as possible. Attend user conferences and participate in forums to keep up with new capabilities.
Integration with existing marketing technology can be complicated. While the vendor may describe integration with other applications as “seamless,” integrating the new marketing automation platform with your existing marketing technology may hit some speed bumps.
Marketing or sales staff resistance to changing marketing processes. Change can be difficult in any organization, and the adoption of marketing automation software can be disruptive for some team members.

How to Select a Marketing Automation Platform

Once you’ve determined that your organization needs marketing automation software, the next step is to do your homework and find out which vendors might be a good fit. Are you looking for an enterprise-level platform or something at the SMB level? What type of budget do you have? Pricing is often based on the number of contacts in your database, the number of emails sent per month or the number of users within your organization.

For an overview of the marketplace and profiles of enterprise vendors, check out B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide, published by our sister site, Digital Marketing Depot. It’s free in exchange for some registration information.

David Raab’s VEST report ($795) dives deeper and scores 23 vendors on 200 data points. It’s worth the investment if you are serious about adopting an enterprise-level marketing automation program.

Once you’ve narrowed it down to four or five vendors, it’s time to schedule a demo.

The Demo: What To Look For, What To Ask

Set up demos with your short list of vendors within a relatively short time frame to help make relevant comparisons. Make sure that all potential internal users are on the demo call, and pay attention to the following:

How easy is the platform to use? Ask for a trial period (even if just a few days) after the demo, to see if you can replicate some of what’s shown to you on the demo call.
Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs? It’s important that you take the time to explain your business, why you need marketing automation, and how you expect to use it. This is something better done before the demo, either in an RFI (request for information) or in initial discussions with vendors.
If we ask a specific question, can they demonstrate the answer on the call? If the sales rep can’t answer your question, don’t wait for an email explanation; schedule a call with someone who can answer the question.
Are they showing us our “must-have” features? Make sure you are satisfied that everything you need is there — if you don’t see it, ask. Again, if the rep can’t show you, ask to re-schedule a call with someone who can.

Ask for a demonstration of the specific capabilities that you have identified in your preliminary discussions with the vendor, or in a more formal RFI/RFP process. Consider requesting product demos of basic tasks and core reports, such as:

Create and edit a new email from scratch.
Import a contact list from a CSV file.
Create and edit a new landing page from scratch.
Execute a simple campaign with an email, mailing list and landing page.
See a report showing email opens and click-throughs.
See a report showing web traffic and/or specific leads from an email campaign.

Finally, in addition to the product itself, ask about related services and product roadmaps:

How easy is it to integrate this software into my organization?
What is the onboarding process?
How long does implementation take?
What kind of support and training are included in the base price?
How do I maximize adoption in my organization?
Will we have a dedicated account rep available to us?
Do current customers utilize the full functionality?
What new features are you focusing on for the coming year?
Can we do a test run for a few days on our own (i.e., a free trial)?

Once you’re satisfied that you’ve found the right software, ask the vendor for some customer references. Assuming they pan out, next step is to negotiate the contract and be on your way to a new and improved approach to marketing!

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5 Critical Strategies for B2B Public Relations

It’s hard to think of a profession that has changed more in the past 10 years than Public Relations (PR). In today’s world, PR is a business that progresses in real-time. It’s new ‘technology backbone’ has quickly evolved the B2B PR ecosystem and has created more opportunities for engagement. PR professionals can now feed valuable information in a timelier way to influencers, while at the same time, develop long-term relationships with their audience and other businesses from even greater distances. In order for PR professionals to fully pursue a future with PR, it will require a different approach to thinking. To help you get started with this pursuit, I would like to briefly introduce 5 critical strategies for boosting your B2B PR efforts.

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1) Integrate PR within your digital marketing planning process

The future of PR will require a new thinking paradigm. Rather than simply thinking about press releases and media communications, think of ways to integrate PR within your overall strategic digital marketing planning process.

2) Integrate PR across multiple marketing channels

PR is a vital tool that can be integrated harmoniously within multiple marketing channels. With this thinking, planning and strategy, you will be able to better reinforce your communication needs within your critical market segment and help generate increased awareness, credibility, increased share of voice (when compared to your largest competitors), as well as more leads and subsequent conversions to a sale.

3) Collaboration across the PR team is critical to success

To get the best work out of your team, you must be motivating, inspiring, generous, helpful and genuine. Encourage them to operate in real-time and to be digitally interested and invested. It may be hard to find these people, but once you have them, encourage them to try new things, form new ideas and take risks. Help them in their pursuit of continuous learning.

4) Organize your influencers into tiers

Every market has an ecosystem of influencers. The best PR programs organize their influencers into tiers. For each tier, they design a communication program specific to that group–-frequency of communication, message type, and method (face-to-face, email, video conference, social media, etc.). It used to be that the influencers were a fairly concentrated group. Today, almost anyone can quickly become an influencer if they have a well-respected blog, newsletter, conference, or consulting practice. It’s critically important that you understand that your influencers are not all the same, and that you must make your PR communication programs specific to their differences.

5) Don’t simply look at PR as a way to generate leads

Many of the most successful companies never use PR to generate leads. They use PR to generate awareness, change perceptions, and build the top of the funnel. In addition, when evaluating PR initiatives, you should be looking at web traffic, number of inbound links, ratio of new to repeat visitors, branded searches, fans, followers, tweets, retweets, comments to posts, likes, etc. From my experience, the most important part is consistency of measurement. When you use the same metrics over many periods in a consistent way, you can see patterns and trends that lead to better insight into what’s working and what isn’t. Furthermore, it is important to use measurement not to assign blame, but for learning purposes. I have learned more from mistakes than from successes. It’s important that you can tie measurement to your specific goals and keep coming back to them as time moves forward.

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Things You Must Do Before Planning Your Digital Marketing Strategy

As you know, downloadable assets, such as white papers, reports, and insight sheets are an essential part of content marketing and inbound lead generation for B2B companies. By offering content that’s relevant, thorough and that solves a problem, you become a trusted resource for potential buyers. Creating useful content, whether it’s in the form of a blog post or a white paper, takes research, time and resources. So naturally, you would want your content to reach as many people as possible and pack a powerful punch, right? Right…

In my latest series of short articles, I’ll provide some insights you should consider before planning your next Digital Marketing Strategy.

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First off…

Start by listening and observing
The first step in devising a digital marketing strategy is to listen and observe your ‘Social Echo’- the powerful reverberation of conversations that occur across the numerous social networks, blogs and websites where your audience prefers to gather.

Pick the audience, not the network
After you evaluate your ‘Social Echo’, it becomes much easier to understand where your audience is, whether that be LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Unfortunately, it’s best to stay away from making generalizations like LinkedIn=B2B and Facebook=B2C. Furthermore, in light of the considerable time, energy and effort required to support a digital presence, its smart to first limit the number of digital platforms you build & maintain to a manageable quantity. You do not want to spread yourself too thin.

Figure out what your organization does well
This is important because, a strategy must be built that’s appropriate for the sort of content your company is good at producing. This is probably one of the most important factors in determining your ultimate success, because content (whatever form it takes) fuels your digital presence.

Evaluate the Analytics
Another thing I immediately do when planning a digital marketing strategy is to evaluate the analytics associated with a company. You can accomplish this by using a number of free and affordable online analytics tools. The analytics are important because they dig deep into your company’s digital marketing strategy and provides deep insights into what’s working and what’s not working.

These reports will not only help provide you with information on your overall performance and activities, they provide detailed information that will help you better plan your digital marketing strategy.

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If you liked this article, please continue to follow the next to come in this series. In my next two LinkedIn articles, I’ll share my thoughts on executing and evaluating a digital marketing strategy. If you would like to learn more details about my process for planning, executing and evaluating your digital marketing campaign, feel free to send me a direct message.

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How Not To Pitch: What I’ve Learned From Viewing Over 200 Pitch Decks

From 2015 to 2017, I worked part-time for a Venture Capital Fund where I reviewed over 200 pitch decks from startups, entrepreneurs, and businesses looking for VC funding. I usually only reacted favorably to about 5% of these pitches and do to the exposure I gathered from this experience, I’ve learned how to pitch and how not to pitch. In this article, I’ll talk about, “How Not to Pitch.”

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1. Do not pitch 100 investors at once. When you send your email to 100 investors all at once, or do a copy and paste with minor customization, investors can see through this within a second. Always remember, one pitch at a time is the way to go.

2. Do not make it about you. When you want someone to invest in your startup, show them how doing so will benefit them. Do not pitch a story about yourself. Instead, give value before expecting it.

3. Do not tell me you’re special. You’ve got a great startup that does great things for people? Let me guess, your startup is innovative, revolutionary, and disruptive, right? Yeah, that’s exactly what the other startups said.

4. Do not make it long or detailed. The longer your email, the more likely it will be ignored or marked for follow up.

5. Do not follow up too much. Day 1: “Perhaps you didn’t receive my email yesterday, please get back to me soon.” Day 2: “Perhaps you didn’t receive my email yesterday, please get back to me soon.” Day 3: “You probably missed the first two emails I sent, but I’d really like you to read my pitch deck.” This type of pitch will be ignored, or marked as spam, I promise you.

6. Do not act as though you’re doing the investor a favor. Investors aren’t sitting around wondering what to do. They are not disparate, they understand the market and they have plenty of options.

7. Do not use pitch templates. Or if you do, don’t use one anyone else has. There are lists of pitch templates out there. 90% of the pitches I receive are using these templates, so they become recognizable very quickly, and just as quickly they get filtered out. Anything that looks the least bit like a template gets deleted immediately.

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