The document is a case study presentation by Marketo about how they drive their own business through modern marketing techniques. It details how Marketo uses content marketing, lead generation, marketing automation, and analytics across the entire customer revenue cycle from awareness to sales. It shows examples of their lead scoring system, behavioral targeting, dynamic content nurturing programs, and multi-touch attribution analytics to measure marketing return on investment. The goal is to inspire other companies and illustrate how to effectively market and sell in the current digital environment.
37. What Is
Engagement Marketing?
• As individuals
• Based on what they do
• Continuously over time
• Wherever they are
• Directed towards a goal
• With measurable impact
• At speed of digital
Marketo’s marketing is based on the belief that buying has changed forever, and that marketing and sales need to change as well.
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. If marketing geenrated a “lead”, it made sense to pass it to sales – the buyer expected they had to talk to sales, and the sales rep expected they had to talk to marketing.
But now, there is an explosion of readily available information, and buyer’s are using that to delay engagement with sales – example of buying a car.
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: 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.
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.
Many names are not yet our friends
Names are NOT leads, don’t call them leads
Majority of leads NOT sales ready. This is OK since human interaction is part of developing the relationship (nurturing). These Lead are recycled back to Target for additional nurturing until Sales Ready.
Sales does one call, and converts if Opp
This is how Marketing gets paid… carry a quota for Opportunity created.
Only Sales can create the opportunities.
[Requires very solid definitions of what is an opp, since people get paid on it – can’t be subjective.]
In traditional marketing, companies needed to rent (or beg) attention from other people’s media. Whether it’s a display ad on a website, a booth at a tradeshow, or an email sent to a third-party list, companies are essentially “renting” attention that someone else built. This can be effective, but it’s also expensive – and become less effective with attention scarcity.
In contrast, with inbound marketing, companies build up their own audience and attract their own attention.
Marketing needs to become like a publisher. Build your own audience and attention.
Examples: superbowl add, regular tradeshow booth = rented attention. Examples of owning: rockstar tour vs tradeshow booth; blog vs traditional PR; our weekly webinar
Map content to the buying stage {keep it short}
This is our TOP of the funnel… what works for us.
$ per target is ONLY program dollars, not people / time.
% opp is the conversion to opp in 12 months…
Index is same as % opp, but scaled to an average one 1
Days is time to opp…
Check boxes show which channels rely on content….clearly important
Need conversion – that’s where personalization comes in
Take a webinar for example. You’ll have the email invites, registration page, reminders, follow-ups, and more. Once the webinar is cloned, simply change the date, title, description and more, and all of the assets in the cloned campaign will be updated in one fell swoop.
… if all they wanted were names, you could give them the phone book.
They want LEADS!
At most companies, only 25% of new targets re sales ready.
At Marketo, our top of the funnel is so wide it’s only 2%!
And it takes 327 days to nurture.. That’s an average… some fast, some for 3 or 4 years! Need to keep in touch.
Need to LISTEN
This is a conversation over time
It listens
It’s segmented to be relevant
Use dynamic content to be EVEN more relevant
Here’s an example of how Marketo created even more relevance.
Topic of interest nurturing: Nurture tracks based on four different topics that we thought our customers were interested in (email, social marketing, marketing automation, and Microsoft Dynamics). We listen for signs that may be interested in this (events attended, web visits, keywords used etc.), and if so assign them to the specific track nurture track.
If they get to the end of that specific track, we put them back to regular until they do something else specific.
Result: Big lift!
More on our blog about this: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2013/06/topic-of-interest-based-nurturing.html
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).
… and hurt yoru conversion rate.
Better to BUY the data… we use Reachforce, Builtwith, etc.
Latent behaviors – interest
Active behaviors – subset of behaviors that show real buying intent
Good to think about these 3 dimensions…
But that’s hard to communicate with sales… so we took all 3 and came up with “sort score” calculation to deliver a single # that we can use to communicate with sales.
This was better, since easier communication… but kept the nuance behind the scenes.
This is what it looks like to the SDR or Sales rep inside CRM
SLA process… we can see automatically f Rep updated the lead record or logged an activity… and can follow-up accordingly
Doesn’t end with the customer buying… continues as we deepen and develop relationships.
Once someone is is a customer, the process doesn’t stop… new goals, like cross-sell, advocate, renew….
Each get their own nurture track, own scoring process, etc.
Special nurture streams for each nurture goal
For customers. Scoring is primarily about product interest…
Many marketers are perceived as a cost center.
You can’t expect your organization to place value on something you’re unable to quantify. But when you do use the right metrics and processes, there is nothing more powerful to help marketing earn it’s rightful seat at the revenue table.
Here I show you how Marketo does it.
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
Step 1: Important to track all touches
When you add Sara, the CEO, you see a more complete picture
Once you have all the touches, you can spread the revenue out across all the touches…
We do it evenly…. You can debate whether even allocate is best… or if you should weight different things differently (e.g. touches to CXO count more)… but we find that introduces bias and assumption, whereas even is clearly better than just first touch.
Here we see what works for Marketo (over the last 12)…
Explain first 3 columns – again, investment is only program dollars (not people / time).
So inbound good… but also need paid to grow faster than inbound alone
MT Ratio is the ROI…
Given OUR economics as a SaaS business targeting a Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio of 1, >10 is a great MT Ratio.
… but you also need to look at individual programs… e.g. overall tradeshows have a good average, but some great, others stink… need to drill into individual programs
Remember this?
Understanding the funnel is other key part of revenue analytics
Same funnel, but built into our product
Note Success Path and Detours; Inventory and SLAs
Google Analytics for Revenue
Explain the four key metrics: balance, flow, conversion, velocity
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.