We’ve created a monster! Demand generation and revenue goals and expectations continue to rise, stretching marketers to create and deliver more and more content. Help is at hand: Powerful marketing tools give small marketing teams new muscle to create and deliver broad-reach marketing programs. Learn how the right combination of marketing automation and content management tools help you pick up the pace and publish content quickly, reaching the right customers faster.
Join Alexis Karlin and Jeffrey Linton as they discuss tips to help you harmonize and leverage your content management and marketing automation for increased efficiency and greater results.
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But the Buyer’s Journey has Changed…
Buyers are doing more research before they call you
– 78% start the buying process with a web search
– 50% turn to social media and peer reviews
Source: DemandGen Report
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than in their own c.r.m.
85%
Source: social123
of sales reps trusted their data more in
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…say digital and word of mouth is most trustworthy
…of consumers trust peer recommendations
…of salespeople who use social media outsell
their peers
78%
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Content is Key to Engagement
Develop a curriculum and content plan
that matches a buyer’s journey.
Become a trusted advisor by
educating before selling.
Get found by optimizing your content for
search engines.
Use paid advertising to bolster organic
search.
Reinforce content across multiple
channels.
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Impact of Lead Scoring
of survey respondents said that their
primary reason for implementing a lead
scoring system was to achieve added
revenue.
Source: GleanSight Lead Prioritization Report, Gleanster Research
84%
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Lead Scoring
• Automatically give
points to leads based
on behaviors or profile
attributes
• Allows marketing &
sales to sort and
prioritize leads
• Marketing can nurture
leads with lower scores
before passing off to
sales
• Learn what’s working
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Intelligence
• Use every engagement
opportunity to learn
more
• Build a profile that
combines demographic
and behavior information
• Gathering intelligence will
save you time and make
you look smarter
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Impact of Lead Scoring
Source: MarketingSherpa - Jan 2012
The average lead
generation ROI for
organizations using a
lead scoring process is 138%
In comparison to:
lead generation ROI from
those surveyed who were not
using a lead scoring process.
78%
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Engagement & Insight
Multiple Channels | Multiple Touches
Continuous Engagement with different Content
Nurturing: Follow the Buyer’s Journey
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Whitepaper
Download
Confirmation
Email with
link to asset
Recorded
webinar on
same topic
eBook on
similar topic
Corresponding
Infographic
Nurture Campaigns
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Insight
• Use the intelligence gathered
to understand your prospects
needs
• 80% of the prospects
deemed “bad leads” by
sales go on to buy within
24 months
• Look for patterns and
understand what they mean
Source: Sirius Decisions
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Change the Process & See the Results
LEADS OPPORTUNITIES CUSTOMERS ENGAGED
CUSTOMERS
ADVOCATE
& FAN
Marketing Responsibility
Sales Responsibility
Engagement throughout the customer lifecycle
26. Let me tell you a story….
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27. Why does everyone hate their CMS?
•CMS are traditionally a development platform
•Not agile
•Need for developers and IT department
•Hard to use
•Not future forward
•Too expensive to leave
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28. Biggest Pain – Why We Needed a CMS
Click Staging
Link
Receive Email
with Staging
Link
View Staging
Click Publish
Link
Receive Email
with Zip of All
Website Files
Unzip & Save
Files to
Desktop
Copy Files
FTP
View Live
Pages
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30. What is LiveFirst?
"LiveFirst is a comprehensive website migration
capability. It allows a website theme to be
migrated, not just pages, making it unique in the
Web Content Management market.”
Jim Lundy, CEO of Aragon Research
32. Time to implement best practices…
• Conduct a content audit
• Generate personas
• Create a content schedule
• Engage your stakeholders
• Keep it simple
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33. Creating Compelling Content
• What does your brand stand for?
• Where should you go for content?
• Who will create the content?
• Where will you publish the content?
• What next?
34. Lessons Learned
• Social and mobile marketing efforts put into silos
rather than a component of the company’s overall
digital strategy, companies ended up picking one
or the other to tackle
• Security is everything
• You don’t have to do everything at one time.
Migrate first…
• Scalability is important
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35. Tying it all Together
1. Set your goals…
2. Write out what you can live with now and what
you can do later
3. Select the appropriate system for you
4. Migrate
5. Create a content plan tied to personas
6. Implement the changes you want
7. Produce content at a rapid pace
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Q&A
Alexis Karlin
Digital Marketing & Operations Manager
Percussion Software
alexis_karlin@percussion.com
@akarlin
Jeff Linton
Sr. Mgr, Product & Field Marketing
Act-On Software
jeff.linton@act-on.net
@jeffreylinton
Hinweis der Redaktion
Evolution of Marketing & SalesToday’s Buyer’s JourneyNext-Gen Customer Lifecycle
Just a few short years ago, the business world was a very different place.Traditional marketing focused on brand building, name recognition, there was some lead generation, catalogs, direct mail, billboards, coupon strategies they also hired agencies to create radio, television, magazine, and newspaper ads packaging and point-of-purchase displays conducted focus groups and testingTraditional sales on the other hand focused on conducting their own prospecting, dialing for dollars, logging time on the road they also conducted cold calling – dialing strangers or just walking – it was endemicKey Point: There was a distinction between the sales and marketing departments, which had different concerns, different responsibilities, different lexicons, and different ways of measuring success. They were operating in silos.
Today – it’s WE and not them – For successful companies – Marketing and Sales is a WE process:We own the leads, We own the events, We use the content, we manager the CRM, we generate Revenue!We hit the number!!! – True Alignment -
Today more than ever people are searching for content – learning on their own – they can not get enough….What we are here today to share with you is the importance of Content why it’s important how to use it, and how to manage it..
As I was saying, the process has changed – no longer does marketing or sales dictate the buyer Journey, Marketing creates content to inform and educate the buyer and it’s our job to disseminate, manage, score, and track the buyers journey – then pass that data to Sales so they can do what they do best…CLOSE.
Integrating marketing and sales systems creates interdependency. Sales and marketing personnel work closely together at every stage in the customer lifecycle, from the nuts-and-bolts of lead scoring to the nuances of creating and applying personas. This technological revolution allows sales and marketing key gains that were for the most part unthinkable even ten years ago.These gains can be broken down into the four categories of – Insight, Intelligence, Engagement, and Inspiration
How are you creating content? Why have a content strategy? Who is your customer? What channel should you be communicating in? Content is your best friend – get to know it well.
ChallengeB2B marketers say webinar is their most effective content marketing resourceAudiences says - they seek out webinars for valuable information.Solution – use Progressive Case Studya source of rich, useful content that can feed campaigns for weeks / monthsExtract most interesting snippets to create blog and/or social media posts - link back to the archived event.Extended content marketing campaigns - white paper, live webinar, and continue with blog and social media campaigns.
Include what to score in talk track:Email clicksWebsite pages visitedWebinars registered for/attendedPhysical eventsVideosWhitepaper downloads
Intelligence. Think of this as aggregate data for reporting and trend watching, and aggregate data on an individual that indicates next steps.Campaign Results and Conversions – Marketing automation reports on campaign results and conversions help marketing become accountable for a portion of sales revenue. Traditionally silo’ed form sales, Marketing is now part of the profit continuum.Inbound Marketing – these features can track AdWords conversions, providing intelligence and guidance for media buys, budget establishment, and keyword optimization for organic search.Marketing Database Access – Salespeople can access entries in the marketing database (from their sales force automation dashboard, so it’s not disruptive) to see aggregate data including demographic and behavioral, search terms used, etc. Seen holistically, the data provides intelligence the sales rep uses to take the next step – including knowing when the customer is ready to buy and it’s time to close the deal.
Insight. Think of this as insight into individual behaviors and customer needs. As examples:Marketing Automation – gathers information at the individual level, both explicit (someone’s title) and implicit (the web pages they visit), and appends these observations into the individual’s history profile.Lead Scoring – Characteristics and behaviors can be scored, and leads that pass a scoring threshold can be passed from the marketing system to the sales system automatically, perhaps making it onto a prioritized list for the salesperson if the score’s among the highest that day or hour.Nurturing Program – Cold leads can be seen and acknowledged as cold making it a candidate for a nurturing program. But it also keeps them in the marketing bucket and out of the sales rep’s part of the lead funnel. Sales is spared wasting time on leads that won’t ever be sales-ready.Website Visitor Tracking – this of course captures visitor tracking, identifies who visits which pages and from that, sales can get real-time visitor- or page-triggered alerts for follow-up.
Where to start:Build multi-stage assets—10 Steps/5 Keys/7 SecretsTie related offers together in a logical progression to educate and accelerate prospects through the buying cycle
Today I would like to tell you a story about how. At my previous job, I ran the entire global website experience. After spending 9 months trying update the homepage on a homegrown CMS I said enough was enough it was time to look for an easy to use, affordable, and future forward product.
So I went on a hunt. After widdling it down to 2 systems, Percussion and another system. I found that percussion suited my needs Perfectly. I was looking for a solution for my biggest pain points. That honestly aligned with why everyone hates their CMSAnimation on website, CEO 2 years ago came in and wanted to change the experience. The Wikipedia promise has been serviced through custom development not a product. Nothing like iTunes, install upgrades. Everyone hate
One of my other pains… was that I was unable to get content to the web fast enough. This diagram here is the process I had to go through every single time that I wanted to publish a single web page.
So we had a choice, to blow up the website and start from scratch which if we did it on a homegrown system would have taken past 9 months to so. Or migrate to a new system, have a foundation that works and build from there. As a digital marketer it was highly important for me to own the system. And most people can’t even get out of what they use today because of the migration. And this is where Percussion Solves that problem. So one of the biggest lessons I learned was go live First then worry about changing the website.. You want to set the foundation then work on updating your system….This is why an easy migration is important… With Percussion we have a patent pending technology that allows you to live in half the time of most CMS migrations because they are done manually…LiveFirstWhat the patent is, being able to import IA without the loss of content, importing 1,000 pages per hour. We are redefining go – live. We don’t believe go live should be an 18 month process your website might end up as shelfware.
With our patent pending technology LiveFirst you can.Import and publish as is. - Import and apply to new design. Import create new design or templates and drag and drop content to new templates. Then keep making change without cost. Needs cleaned up we provide options. One thing to note is that you don’t even have to wait for a redesign….Meaning u don't have to wait for a redesign. All u need is the design and a little CSS and your done. So if u want to do a redesign great but u don't have to wait to empower your team with the ability to get content to the web faster. Regardless of when u will or won't be doing a redesign we believe that u should always be able to make changes to your site and thus all u need is a little CSS.
Once live and good to go. This is when the real work started. Now that I had the tools in hand I had to think about how I was going get content online faster….
The best place to start is implementing the following best practices.Thanks to LiveFirst your site audit is done. This will help you with the content audit. So you know how many pages and assets you have. From there create a spreadsheet of all the content you have, who it targets and how well it’s working.Once you’ve done this, work on Personas. This will help you understand who your target audience is and then start mapping your content schedule to your personas. And last but not least. Keep it simple. If you go insane with a 40 page document on personas and an 12 month plan of content you not only will overwhelm your stakeholders you will lose them at first sight of the document. And get approval and get it often.
What does your brand stand for? Answer this question well, and you have an actionable plan towards content marketing success. Content needs to stem from a cohesive and well thought out strategy, which in turn starts from what your brand stands for. Make this document the base for all content creation efforts.Where should you go for content? Armed with the brand persona, the next step is to figure out where you need to go to get the basic material to address your content marketing needs. This is an internal process where teams from marketing, sales, operations, fulfillment, product, customer service etc., need to collaborate to generate enough information on sales, target market, offers, promotions, targets etc.Who will create the content? Writers of course, but will you outsource it? Or search for writing talent in-house? Do both! Use both sources wisely for maximum output. Turn inwards to create unique perspectives on your brand that only a team on the ground can create. Turn outwards to generate infographics, trends, social conversations, and research to give fillip to your content marketing plans. Where will you publish the content? Hate to say it, but it depends! It depends on what your brand stands for, where your target market/prospects are, the content marketing expertise you have, and finally the ability of each channel to convert.What next? Creating a compelling content marketing plan is an ongoing and never-ending process. Reevaluate, redefine, and rewrite.
Having laid out what I’ve been through and how I’ve made it work I think it’s important to share with you the lessons I’ve learned. Don’t tackle social and mobile separately. Think of your site as one entity that should work on all platforms. Make sure you look for a CMS that allows you to go responsive and share updates via social media. If you end up with a system that does one better than ever you end up constantly trying to catch up in the other areas and its not worth the effort. And one essential part is to remember that security is everything. Make sure you select a secure de-coupled system that allows you to separate the content on your CMS from the content you have live. So if your CMS goes down, your website doesn’t go down as well. This is essential. With recent hacks of free Content management systems you have to remember that protection of your system is Key. This will make IT happy to hear a CMS that you are looking at is secure.Tying into what I talked about earlier, just remember that selecting a CMS is not all or nothing situation. You don’t have to blow up and start from scratch. Go LiveFirst and then improve your website.And last but not least, what I like to call a Future forward system. Scalability is important. Marketing is changing every single day. And if you go with a system that isn’t agile you end up with shelfware and this will leave you in a stalemate.
1 – Both 2 – Alexis 3 – Both 4 – Alexis 5 – Both 6 – Jeff 7 - Alexis