Heidi Bullock, VP of Demand Gen at Marketo, presents how to create a solid planning strategy for 2015. She discusses how to handle any challenges you may face next year, secrets to success, and great ideas for marketing programs.
Over the next 30 minutes or so, my goal is to walk through some best practices around creating your plan for 2015.
Key topics I will cover:
Challenges
Success Secrets
And lastly we’ll go through some ideas for programs
Things that come to mind….
Budget is cut – or goals go up and your team stays the same
Ensuring you hit your goals
Success Secret # 1 – Agree on definitions ---for what metrics matter ---and what key stakeholders need to see.
**Let me provide a simple example of why this is so important.
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Success Secret #3 – focus on decisions that improve marketing.
A key part of your planning process is to identify up-front what decisions you need to make to drive company profits, and then build your measurements to capture the right information.
This means you should measure things not just because they are measurable – but rather because they will guide you towards the decisions you need to make to improve company profitability.
Like the dashboard in your car, three to five metrics are all you really want. Think about the contrast with a dashboard in a 747 airplane --- there are so many measurements it’s hard to quickly ascertain the most important ones.
Here is a nice way to think about the right metrics. It can serve as a helpful taxonomy when you are developing your benchmarks or even if you want to improve on your current set.
1. Performance metrics – answering HOW DID YOU DO?
2. Diagnostics metrics – what is working, how can we improve
3. Lastly, there are leading indicators – these should help you forecast how you will be doing
Success Secret # 6 – Set your goals upfront with key stake holders. Addresses challenge one – getting buy in from key stakeholders.
It is very important before you even start on the event (signing the contract, etc.) to make sure that the team is aligned on objectives and outcomes.
I have an example illustrated here for a tradeshow.
I suggest setting up a meeting with key folks – may be your VP of Marketing, CEO, head of sales, head of product
Review the reasons why you think the event has value and how you propose looking at success over time.
The timing element is an important one because most likely you will not see closed won deals the day after the tradeshow.
So here you can see there are pre-event goals, during event, and post event goals.
Once you have identified what the goals look like, you need to figure out how you are going to measure success.
Success Secret #7 is to design your programs to be measureable.
This is really important because if you do not have a way to measure impact – it will be nearly impossible to report back on your goals.
Using Marketing Automation like Marketo, it is very easy to look at metrics like I am showing on this slide.
For a webinar, I can look at early metrics like ‘attended’ all the way to pipeline – which ultimately is the most important.
Success Secret #8:
Some systems are simple, but require manual repetition of basic tasks, over and over again. In Marketo, not only are campaigns launched rapidly, they can be replicated in a matter of seconds, as only Marketo offers the ability to clone a campaign, including all of its assets, in a single click.
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.
Tactics are just the vehicles that deliver your content and message. If you content is not optimized (i.e. right stage, offer, message) then regardless of what channel you use, you will not have as good of results.
Keep in mind, content is not just white papers or eBooks!
Can be simple and short blog posts, 4 minute videos, infographics, etc.
Repurpose like taco bell
Map your content to the right buying stage.
Before we start on tactics – this is just a reminder about form length. Make it easy for people!!! We have data that shows the shorter, the better conversions. A key top of funnel objective is bringing in new names, so make sure you think about your forms.
***Data appending technologies
Example: reachforce
Now let’s start with a few tactics for top of the funnel.
SlideShare as many of you know was acquired by LinkedIn in May 2012, and is the world's largest community for sharing presentations, like PowerPoint, videos and webinars. It boasts 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million page views, making it one of the most visited sites on the web today.
Here are some SlideShare Tips:
Make sure the content you select is in an area where you (or your company) has expertise.
Make sure it looks good!!!
Use both paid and earned media in your promotion strategy.
Leverage the ability to present the viewer with a form (as you can see here on this slide)
Let’s say you come to our site from a company that uses a competitive marketing automation tool, we’re able to identify that based on their IP address, or based on who they are, and change the page to present them with a more relevant message…in this case “our solution works with any marketing automation solution”.
One thing we also do for our Twitter is the 4-1-1 rule. This is a good one to keep in mind and it works like this:
For every Self serving tweet you do,
Retweet one relevant tweet and then
Share 4 pieces of content from others
This helps your twitter feeds stay interesting and engaging – and will hopefully help you acquire more followers!
Now let’s move to Facebook.
It is important to strike that critical balance of offering content that is relevant and adds value – with content that entertains. At Marketo, we like to ask two questions before every Facebook interaction we plan:
Does this help our brand's likeability?
Is this interesting, engaging, useful content?
This slide shows a few examples of some of our promoted posts.
We found the magic formula for promoted posts to be this: Clever messaging, with a fun visual, all tied back to a strong offer or piece of content. The timing is important as well. (We have found that posting on Tuesday mornings tend to have the best results.)
Native retargeting
Pro tip: Don’t include any links or hashtags in the tweet copy because you want to limit which links your audience can engage with. No one wants to pay for clicks on a hashtag. #moneydoesntgrowontrees
Think about your blog. Do you have a good methodology for collecting names? By adding the sign up for email updates we saw a nice lift.
From average 14 a week to 145/week - 10X growth!
So how do you nurture those 98%? Saying the Right thing to right person at RIGHT TIME!!
How do we do it? How we do it is through relevancy
-The right piece of content to the right person at the right time
-Determining who are your audiences and how do we speak to each of them because a message that works for one person doesn’t mean it will necessarily work for someone else
-To be relevant you need to segment
the most part is a simple concept. –