Marketing Insights

Your ability to gauge the health and activity level of your contact database is the basis for accurately measuring engagement levels, positively impacting deliverability scores, and effectively projecting campaign response rates. In addition, data quality drives better segmentation, better targeting, better personalization, and of course, more accurate lead scoring. In this 2 minute video Paul Teshima, Eloqua EVP of Customer Strategy and Success, talks about why an organization can increase their lead generation by over 250% when a data quality program is present.

Click to watch now!

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Typically when clients first start with marketing automation they have to complete a data audit where they begin to understand how their data (the good, the bad and the ugly) affects their marketing effectiveness. 

One area I see most often in B2B (businesses that sell to other businesses) organizations is the need for moving from a free form, text field for Job Title, to two drop down fields – Job Function and Job Level.  This allow for consistency and accuracy for marketing purposes. 

By using the Job Function and Job Level fields you can market more effectively to the prospect’s pain points by area of interest and the type of content you’ll need to provide based on their level within the organization.

Some examples of each are:

Job Function

• Marketing
• Operations
• Human Resources
• Finance
• Professional Services
• Information Technology
• Sales

Job Role

• C-level
• Vice President
• Director
• Manager
• Consultant
• Specialist
• Student/Intern
• Other

Keep in mind, Job Title can still be collected as a data point for sales, but for list pulls, triggers to enter and exit into nurturing or scoring programs, you’ll want to use Job Function and Job Level.

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My colleague Greg Lui is located in Eloqua’s Singapore office and is responsible for managing our presence in the APAC region. As you can imagine his day includes interactions with many different languages. In cases where he needs some translation help, he recommends Babel Fish. If you interact with vendors, clients, partners and colleagues from multiple countries you may find this a helpful resource as well. (One thing Greg notes is that it’s not always completely accurate, but it’s usually close enough to give you an understanding of the text.)

Simply enter your text, choose the translation type and click the Translate button and you’re off and running!

Today’s Marketing Master is Larry Stein, Director of Marketing at KACE.

How did you get where you are today?
I have always been interested in the intersection of technology and business. I have held positions in marketing, network planning, technology consulting, management consulting and technical/sales training before settling into outbound marketing for early stage, enterprise-focused startups. From there I specialized in marketing communications, PR/AR, and lead generation with a focus on accelerating the sales process.

What’s interesting in marketing for your space right now?
The tools available to outbound marketing today are astounding. We are truly only limited by creativity and budget in developing and delivering more efficient lead generation funnels. With integrated reporting and systems, we can quickly trial new programs and measure their impact/ROI accelerating the pace of change/innovation in the marketing function.

How do you get good ideas and inspiration?
Meeting with customers, sales reps, lead qualification reps and even attending shows keep me grounded in the current state of affairs in the sales process. Reading online resources detailing current best practices is another great source of ideas. Finally, business books provide a constant source of interesting concepts.

What campaign have you seen recently that really blew you away?
In the current economic environment, simplicity is key. We have developed some great new scripts that came out of simple joint telemarketing calls and brainstorming. The results have been great Our latest marketing automation programs also take their inspiration from watching great sales people and how we can automate some of these great best practices.

If you were a font, which font would you be?
Comic Sans. Simple, clean and fun.

Please share with us a nugget of your marketing wisdom for our readers.
Continually innovate by sharing your results with others and learning from them. There are so many great marketers doing wonderful things – we can learn a lot from each other. We just need to make time to get together and share best practices – and this is not always easy or convenient.

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Last week, I attended the Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit in San Francisco, CA.  It was a pretty active event with Twitter conversations at #sherpaB2B09 and live streaming courtesy Hubspot TV. I just wanted to take a few minutes to recap some of the highlights from my perspective and hope to continue the discussion that we were having on site with this community here.

“It’s just marketing.”
Best quote of the event, courtesy Jeff Taxdahl owner of Thread-Logic. This comment came from his presentation on whether to work with or not work with an agency to manage his PPC Campaign which currently drives 95% of his sales. At the end of the day, there are no tricks. The fundamentals of marketing still apply. Know your buyer; deliver a compelling message to the buyer. And, if it is important to your business, you may be the best person/team to make it happen and you may need to ramp up the knowledge in house.

Continuing this line of thinking – we spent several hours on social media on Day 1. And, I have to say, I am “kinda over” social media. I am tired of us talking about it with shiny penny syndrome and marketers’ utter confusion on “How does it fit? Is it worth it?” It’s just marketing! The fundamentals of marketing still apply. Know your buyer and deliver a compelling message to the buyer. Build the relationships, don’t force the brand.

“Relevance requires major data”
Second favorite quote. This came from Thomas Hayden, Director of Marketing for Sage Systems. So true Thomas, so true. In the way that an in-person conversation requires excellent listening skills (human data processing), an automated conversation demands pristine data quality. Your data quality represents your ability to listen to your customer effectively.

“Be Helpful.”
OK, this is actually a quote from Chris Brogan who wasn’t at the event but I love the quote and it sums up an important theme in terms of content and delivery of that content. I really enjoyed the session that featured Troy Monney from Novell (and not just because they are an Eloqua client) but because they clearly demonstrated how they mapped out content for buyer personas at different stages of their buyers’ evaluation process (v. the internal selling process). I thought all of the sessions on Day 2 that focused on content and buyer personas really helped us to think in the shoes of our customer v. the mindset of just pushing our brand.

“Can you tell us about the ROI on that example? Ummm…”
Many marketers are still struggling with key metrics and demonstrating ROI. Yes, it is a controversial subject in terms of the HOW, but I think that a clear understanding of Campaign impact on revenue is still a struggle for most. It is still a very anecdotal and correlation game.

“Marketing is still from Venus. And, Sales is still from Mars.”
I can’t believe we are still so siloed in our areas of focus on the funnel. Marketing focusing only on “sales ready” with no clear “acceptance/rejection” points along the way to gain objective feedback on lead quality. The one presentation on Scoring seemed to even accentuate this further. To truly drive sales and marketing alignment – there needs to be a clear mapping of process, communication touch points, and responsibilities at every step of the funnel, not just the top.

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In our series about declining email response rates, so far we’ve looked at:

• Cleaning out inactive contacts
• Online reputation measurement
• Follow-up timing

Today we’re going to talk about purchased list. (Hint: Bad Idea!)

Are you buying email lists from other sources and adding those folks into your database? Don’t. I mean it: stop right now. First of all, the success rate on purchased email lists is approximately .001% according to my in-depth research, not to mention that you’re killing your online reputation. If you’ve purchased lists in the past I encourage you to be ruthless and cull those people from your database. Right now. Go.

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In our quest for better email response rates we’ve looked at cleaning out inactive contacts as well as checking on your online reputation score. Today we’ll look at your follow-up times and how that can affect your response rates.

When you get a new lead into your database (through a website form, trade show booth visit, etc.) are you responding quickly? Or is it thirty days until the prospect hears from you? The longer you wait, the more likely they are to forget you – and ignore you. In this wonderful new world of social media I’ve noticed some marketers dropping some of their old-school tactics (such as autoresponders and immediate follow-ups). Don’t let those new leads go stale and become part of your non-responder baggage.

In our next post we’ll answer the question: Would your mother be proud of your marketing lists?

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I created a post on a Best Practice Tip for Lead Stages a while ago  and since then a coaching situation has come up again and again….some organizations combine Lead Stage and Lead/Contact Type in one field.

Most marketing organizations are trying to understand (1) where is the prospect in my buying cycle? and (2) who are they to my organization? And these two questions do not have the same answer key…

You should not combine Lead Stage and Lead/Contact Type in one field.

Lead Stage fields we recommend:

• Suspect
• Inquiry
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
• Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)
• Sales Rejected / Recycled Lead (SRL)
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
• Customer

Lead / Contact Type fields we recommend:

• Prospect
• Customer
• Partner
• Competitor
• Employee
• Press
• Analyst
• Student
• Vendor

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In a series of continuing posts looking at email response rates, today’s topic is about your reputation.

If you’ve noticed that your email response rates are declining, it may be time to check your online reputation and make sure that you haven’t fallen into a pit of undeliverability. I recommend visiting senderscore.org for a check-up. Think of it as the “credit score” of your domain name. While you’re there, you can sign up for an email series that will help you correct any issues you may uncover.

Next up… we’ll look at your follow-up times.

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Today’s Marketing Master is Rebecca Hagen, Director of Marketing at Lumeta.

How did you get where you are today?
Art, design and writing are my passions in life, so marketing is a natural extension of what I enjoy doing. As part of my creative work, I started doing graphic design in paste-up, and then picked up desktop publishing skills. After studying writing for my undergrad I did communications and marketing work for some media and arts companies and for an agency, then eventually found my way to high-tech. The complexity of high-tech adds another level to marketing that I find exciting.

What’s interesting in marketing for your space right now?
There’s a lot of buzz about Web 2.0 and what it means for the B2B world. Marketers are always looking for new vehicles to tell their story, but I think it’s important to consider the right strategy for your specific business and for reaching your specific consumer. Not every method is right for every business and even within Web 2.0 there are many different approaches and strategies to consider, and the differences really do matter.

How do you get good ideas and inspiration?
One place is from marketing award competitions. You get to see what some of the leading agencies are doing.

What campaign have you seen recently that really blew you away?
I really like the Sprint Now Network “Statistics” campaign (link 1 and link 2) think it’s really current and it advances a number of their brand attributes in a subtle, seamless way.

If you were a font, which font would you be?
Font selection out of context? Okay, I’ll humor you. Optima, occasionally Neue Helvetica.

Please share with us a nugget of your marketing wisdom for our readers.
Know what success looks like and how you’ll measure it for every facet of what you do. That allows you to have transparency on what your impact is for the business.

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