A case study on modern marketing
Examples from how Marketo drives our own business
Examples of our innovative customers driving their businesses
Covers content marketing, generating new business, marketing automation, analytics and more for B2B and consumer marketers alike
Meant to inspire and educate
Share best practices between the B2B and B2C worlds
Not a commercial for Marketo!
Don’t have to do this all at once – we built this over years
Marketo’s success is based on a philosophy, based on a belief that the way digitally empowered people buy products has changed dramatically. And therefore we need to change the way we need to market and sell to these buyers must also change.
And this should be pretty obvious to us. Just think about how you bought a car 10 or 15 years ago…
I am always blown away by the fact that Google was founded 7 years AFTER I graduated college. And before anyone starts cracking jokes, I’m not really THAT old.
Not that long ago, there were few 3rd party sources of information – information scarcity – which meant that a buyer had to get most of their information from sales.
In this world, it made perfect sense for marketing to pass all leads over to sales. It also meant we lived in a world of attention abundance, with fewer channels competing for a buyer’s attention. Traditional marketing, characterized by Mad Men-style marketing, grew up in this era.
But now, there is an explosion of readily available information… According to IBM, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data
— so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.
This is a recent phenomenon…
When Marketo was founded in 2006, the iPhone didn’t exist, Twitter had not launched, and Facebook was only for college students.
All this data = buyers today are more empowered. The Web provides them with instant information gratification. They can access detailed specs, pricing, and reviews about goods and services 24/7 with a few flicks of their thumbs. Meanwhile, social media encourages them to share and compare, while mobile devices add a wherever/whenever dimension to every aspect of the experience.
Result: Forrester Reports that 65-90% of buying process is complete when consumer is walks into store/branch/dealer, or contacts sales
Requires deep changes in how we market to consumers.
That’s how we approached our marketing process at Marketo.
And yet most marketing today just annoys people. The data shows that people are continually tuning out marketing, either subconsciously or very consciously
Because it’s impossible to blast messages out there on any channel and have it resonate with the majority of recipients. Yet that’s what people do! I can show you these three pictures and you can tell that these people are different, probably with different wants and needs. And some marketers will use demograhpic data to “target” these people differently.
But real success doesn’t come from slightly better targeting. Real success comes from a guided journey – a journey guided by MARKETING - for each person as they interact with your company.
With this change, marketing has the opportunity to seize the day and take a much larger share of revenue – since Marketing is responsible for that 70%. Requires Marketing to think as rigorously about their process as Sales typically thinks about theirs.
Here’s Marketo’s…. Let me explain.
Doesn’t end with the customer buying… continues as we deepen and develop relationships.
Most marketing that evolved from the Mad Men era is all about renting the attention that someone else has built. The superbowl is a perfect example. They get all these people to watch the game, and they rent out people’s attention in 30 second slots for $4.5 M
An ad on the side of a website is rented attention. Even a booth at a tradeshow. You’re physically renting space on the floor, and getting people’s attention as they walk by. Now, renting attention is fine, and we still do plenty of it…BUT, it is becoming less and less effective, and harder to do well, in the age of information of abundance, so what you need to in addition, is to own your own attention, and that means publishing your own content.
We stopped doing a lot of 3rd party tradeshows and only did the big ones, and took that money and put it into our own events. Get 100 people in hotel room for $20K and have them listening to our story for 3 hours, and then give them drinks and food. We’re getting their undivided attention. So for the price of a crummy booth at a tradeshow, we get their undivided attention for 3 hours. Again, we get to own our own attention.
Let’s talk about where all these targets come from. How are we generating our targets. This is a report pulled right out of our analytics, with real actual data, and It shows which channels are generating targets for us at the top of the funnel. This is a screenshot out of Marketo, so across various channels, what are the number of targets generated, what is the investment per target for that channel (and I am only counting program dollars there, so not counting people’s time).
The % opps, or the % of the targets that become opportunities. The index tells us how efficient each channel is at creating opportunities.
Index is simply the % opp number presented as an index versus the average. So take the inbound web channel. The 2.5 index means that targets generated from the inbound channel are 2.5 times more likely to become an opportunity as compared to the average across channels.
And then days to opp is how long it take them on average, how long do I have to nurture prospects from each channel, before they become an opportunity.
So let’s talk about some of the findings and insights from the data.
The first is just how important content is to our content generation. All the checked channels rely on content as the core driver for capturing new targets.
And if you look at the numbers, you can see that the performance of the inbound web channel is phenomenal. Those prospects are by far the best ones we can get. Best conversion rates, fastest velocity to opp.
And so you might think, well, we should do more and more inbound, and we do. And with it, generate more and more content. But the reality is that you can only scale this so much. There is a point where having that next white paper isn’t going to move the needle that much. In other words, you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns.
So we start thinking about how we can generate better inbound performance in different ways.
Map content to the buying stage {keep it short}
Most companies focus on late stage content – for us, that’s reverse. We want to generate as much awareness as possible
And this is more important forever. With any considered purchase, a car, a house, a gym membership, or a B2B sales cycle, people are doing more research online.
Result: 65-90% of buying process is complete before customer walks into store/branch/dealer, or contacts sales
Requires deep changes in how we market… marketing needs to own much larger portion of the revenue cycle.
That’s how we approached our marketing process at Marketo.
If you look across all sorts of studies, you’ll find that people today are somewhere between 50 and 90% done with their buying process before they want to engage with a company. They have so much access to information, that they are actively resisting sales interactions until they feel they have equal information to what the sales person has.
So at Marketo, what we said, “ok, if the buyer doesn’t want to talk to sales until let’s say they are 2/3 done with the process, then Marketing needs to step up and “own” that 2/3 of the buyer’s journey.
Sales still has the last 1/3, but marketing has to have a more explicit role in the revenue process. In the old days, maybe marketing had about 10% and then sales took over. Today it’s a very different process. “Marketing needs to step into the void.”
So everything we do at Marketo is based on this foundation of don’t pass leads to sales people until they’re ready, and in the meantime, marketing owns the relationship until that happens.
This data is from RainToday. It’s a few years old, but it’s still very relevant. And this data is across many companies, not just Marketo.
What it shows is when you generate a target, what’s the likely disposition of those targets. And on average, 25% are sales ready, 50% need more nurturing, and 25% are essentially junk. So that’s what the averages are.
But if you look at Marketo, because are top of funnel is so wide and so broad, only 2% of our new targets become leads in the first 30 days.
So lead nurturing is a really important idea, and is central to everything we do at marketo. And it is a complicated topic. In fact, we’ve written books about it, and you can find them on our website.
Don’t blast – that doesn’t “feel good”. It hurts.
Because in most cases a “blast” will miss the mark. Hence, 20% open rates.
Need to LISTEN
Therefore, strive for these three things!
So how do we segment at Marketo. Well, first of all, we do it across 2 primary dimensions on a regional basis. One dimension we use is the buying stage, which maps really well to our overall revenue model, both to the high level funnel stages, TOFU, MOFU and BOFU, and also happens to map to the way we segment our content, EARLY, MID, LATE and CUSTOMER. The other dimension is the buying profile, which we typically define by personas.
And by the way, we’ve kept it to 2 because even moving to 3 adds an exponential level of complexity. For instance, if we have 4 buy stages and 3 profiles, that’s 12 segments. If we add a 3rd dimension to segment off of, and that dimension had 3 options, now all of a sudden your taking your original 12, and muliplying it by 3, and now instead of 12 segments, we have 36.
So how do we segment at Marketo. Well, first of all, we do it across 2 primary dimensions on a regional basis. One dimension we use is the buying stage, which maps really well to our overall revenue model, both to the high level funnel stages, TOFU, MOFU and BOFU, and also happens to map to the way we segment our content, EARLY, MID, LATE and CUSTOMER. The other dimension is the buying profile, which we typically define by personas.
And by the way, we’ve kept it to 2 because even moving to 3 adds an exponential level of complexity. For instance, if we have 4 buy stages and 3 profiles, that’s 12 segments. If we add a 3rd dimension to segment off of, and that dimension had 3 options, now all of a sudden your taking your original 12, and muliplying it by 3, and now instead of 12 segments, we have 36.
One of the ways we increase relevance at Marketo is to focus on segmentation, which then allows us to send messages that are relevant for each segment. For example, a VP of Sales and a VP of Marketing would fall into two separate segments, and we would therefore be able to send a different, more relevant message to each.
So this analysis compares how engaging an email is to the size of the send. And to measure engagement, we are using Marketo’s proprietary metric called an Engagement Score, which essentially does what a FICO score does for lending, combines a bunch of data attributes into one number to easily measure how engaging one email is compared to another.
What you see is that there is a direct correlation between the size of the send and engagement. More to the point, smaller sends are typically more engaging than large ones.
Now, we’ve all heard that batch and blast emails doesn’t work. Well, here’s some proof that they are much less effective.
So what we do is, for each segment, send relevant content to them over time. This is what it looks like inside Marketo, with our innovative Customer Engagement engine. In this case, you can see that we have a different stream for each buying stage. With the CEE, it’s really easy to keep these streams fresh because they don’t work like traditional drip campaigns. They are smarter than that. So for example, when the newest Sirius Decisions report on MA was released, we created a mid-stage content offer for it, and simply dragged it and dropped it to the top of the mid-stage stream. And unlike a drip campaign,in which people can only travel one way down the drip, in this case everyone in the stream will get the sieius decisions report next - because we’ve put it at the top and made it the #1 priority. This makes life for a content marketer pretty easy, and allows us to update our nurturing really quickly.
Now, we have another set of streams for each buyer profile, in our case, sales, marketing and an exec. In some cases, we re-use the same content, and maybe the same message. Or we might use the same content, and tweak the message. Or in some cases, the content just doesn’t fit, and we might not use it, or we may use different content.
So this is one way we personalize.
So the results of using behaviors in order to increase relevance are pretty compelling. Here are email engagement statistics for standard nurture versus nurture triggered by behaviors to determine interest. You can see there is almost a 60% lift in terms of open and click to open rates.
And there’s a huge lift for click rate, which is a much more meaningful conversion rate than the open rate, assuming of course there is a call to action in the email. For click rate, we saw around a 150% lift, or 2.5 times better performance compared to the click rate of the standard nurture.
Okay, so we’ve generated targets, we’ve nurtured them, so let’s talk about how we identify which of our targets are ready to be sent to the sales team as leads. And that’s what scoring and lead management is all about.
So lead scoring is how we rank the best ones from the not so good ones.
And we score across 3 dimensions. Fit, interest and buying stage.
Fit tells me, am I interested in you.
Interest tells me, are you interested in me.
So they need to be interested in me (or my company), and I need to be interested in them. Actually, this is starting to sound a lot like dating, and that’s because it is. And in dating, timing also plays a role. So, maybe they are locked into another solution. Maybe they don’t have the budget. And this all relates to where they are in the buying stage.
So when we think about passing a lead to sales, we need to look at fit, interest and timing (or buying stage).
So let’s talk about interests. That’s where we turn to behaviors, because your actions speak much louder than words.
So we look at what emails you click, what web pages you visit, what events you attend, and more.
There are a specific set of behaviors that have been shown to highly correlate with buying intent, things like going to our pricing pages, or filling out a form to watch a detailed demo. So if you want to be guaranteed to get an call from someone at Marketo, go to our website, watch the detailed demo and then visit our pricing page, and then be prepared for a phone call or email.
Okay, now that we have a lead, we need to get it to the sales team in a way that is easily digestible. So we have a sales intelligence tool called Marketo Sales Insight that lives natively within the CRM. We use SFDC. And it essentially provides the sales reps with a prioritized list of leads, with their best bets on top…which is why we call this the best bets list. The more stars and flames a lead has, the higher the quality. Stars measure relative lead score, and the flames is a measure of how quickly the score increased over time, which is essentially telling the rep how “hot” the lead is. So a lead with a very high score that has been doing a lot of research on the website over the past few days is someone that is likely to show up very high on their list.
What happens after the purchase? Well, in most cases, marketers have goals for that too. But many marketers aren’t executing on them. Those goals could be to drive someone to become a repeat purchaser, to become an active user, or to be an active visitor. And in most business, retaining that customer is far more important than capturing him the first time.
Special nurture streams for each nurture goal
One example of a goal is upsell/cross sell. One of Marketo’s customers, Dropcam, uses Marketo specifically for this purpose. Dropcam sells small video cameras that record directly to the cloud. They have customers who record different amounts of video in the cloud and access it with varying frequencies. They want to upsell a certain set of those customers to a better subscription, and they want to focus on the customers most likely to take advantage of that plan. So they capture this data in marketo and use it to automate their upsell marketing.
One of the things we hear a lot in talking with CMO’s is that their biggest pain point was not so much measuring engagement for their campaigns, but rather, having the ability to PROVE the impact that marketing was having on revenue.
Sales typically does a really good job presenting their forecast, what they expected to bring in in terms of revenue, and the CRM system made it easy for them to convey these meaningful metrics to the exec team. CMO’s that were unable to prove their impact in terms of revenue, often weren’t part of the discussion when talking about revenue numbers. And CMO’s were sick of being second class citizens in this regard. They wanted to earn their seat at the revenue table.
And today, where marketing owns 50% to 80% of the revenue cycle, they should have an equal voice in revenue discussions, and Marketo helps provide marketing with the data they need to have this voice.
Let’s talk about measuring what the CXO cares about..
While you may not be doing all this analysis now, you most likely will in their future. [Be sure to focus on this point a lot so you don’t lose them.]
ROI:
First investment – then revenue
But you know, marketing measurement is hard. And it’s hard for a number of reasons. First of all, people who buy Marketo don’t simply respond to one of our marketing campaigns and then buy. Rather, it’s a journey where, on average, they are responding to 7 different campaigns. So maybe they come in via a tradeshow, then download a definitive guide, then watch a webinar, and so on. It takes 7 campaign successes before a purchase is typically made.
Now, the way the CRM works when measuring marketing success is it ties all revenue from a win back to the source campaign, which means that the first touch gets all the credit for the revenue. This worked great in the age of information scarcity, because as soon as a lead was generated by that campaign, it was tossed over the fence to sales. But we don’t live in that world anymore. In today’s world, those other 6 marketing touch points along that buyer journey may have had as much or more influence on a purchase decision as compared to the source campaign. So taking those other touch points into consideration when measuring campaign performance can be hard.
Further complicating mattes is that there isn’t often just a single buyer. So what if you have two buyers, and both come into the process at different times, through different marketing campaigns. With Marketo, we’ve seen as many as 21 people involved in the buying decision. FWIW, we don’t recommend this.
So how do you measure ROI with that sort of complexity. It starts with actually having the data.
I’ve seen situations where sales will close a large deal, and marketers go through a manual effort to figure out, and show the different ways that marketing helped closed the deal, so that they get some credit for it. And that can get crazy pretty quickly.
Customer version
So, this is how we measure ROI. We also like to look at the aggregate impact marketing is having on pipeline, and that comes back to the funnel that we started with. I know how our deals are moving through this funnel.
We know because we mapped the same pipeline we just saw in our product. This is the revenue cycle modeler in Marketo, and the stages across the green section represent the funnel stages we looked at before, so you see targets, leads and opportunities. Some stages are boxes because people can stay in those stages indefinitely, some are clocks, meaning there are SLA’s. Once this is setup and it begins tracking movement.
Google Analytics for Revenue
Explain the four key metrics: balance, flow, conversion, velocity
We get a complete view of how this deal was won. Marketing was keeping in touch with Sarah before this opportunity was created. And the story behind this deal, which is a real deal we won, is that Sarah had downloaded a DG, gone to an event, and just before the opportunity was created, went to Manny, someone on her team, and asked him to investigate Marketo.
Only when you have a marketing system that can show you all of these touches across the buying journey, can you really understand how marketing is driving revenue.
Here are out actual metrics…
Focus on the very low conversion from MQL to SQL… since we are lose about MQL definition and don’t want to miss any deals…. But strict about what we pass to sales.
We want that 75% SQL to Opp, since you want sales to value marketing leads… if it goes below 50%, sales doesn’t jump on SQLs as fast.
Here are out actual metrics…
Focus on the very low conversion from MQL to SQL… since we are lose about MQL definition and don’t want to miss any deals…. But strict about what we pass to sales.
We want that 75% SQL to Opp, since you want sales to value marketing leads… if it goes below 50%, sales doesn’t jump on SQLs as fast.