Applying 80-20 Principles To Marketing Automation ROI

Marketing Automation – The Basics

If you are like most Enterprise Marketers, your Company has implemented marketing automation within the past couple of years. You have your first set of lead nurturing programs in place. Your landing pages are built and are capturing inbound leads. You may be the 1 in 4 marketers who have implemented some type of lead scoring. You are starting to think about the ROI on your marketing automation technology investment. That’s bound to come up at budgeting time for next year. You also want to know, are you spending your limited time and resources on the right priorities? Are you asking all the right questions to maximize your ROI? Are you optimizing the right knobs, and pulling the right levers?

Your “First Order” Metrics

As you think of your marketing spend across technology and programs, here are some key measures that you may be tracking already:

• Top of Funnel: Number of net new leads generated for your revenue funnel this month.
• Mid and Lower Funnel: How leads are progressing through your revenue funnel, as they move from prospects, to sales-qualified-leads (SQLs) which then turn into opportunities (Opps) and deals-won

Some key metrics you may be tracking already include:

• raw leads that turn into prospects (paid) by channel e.g. $82
• raw leads that turn into prospects (organic) e.g. 40%
• cost per lead by channel, and average across all channels e.g. $120
• % leads that turn into opportunities e.g. 6%
• cost per opportunity e.g. $2000
• opportunity/customer e.g. 33.5%
• cost per customer (deals-won) e.g. $5,900 on say $30,000 in annual contract value

As we work with many enterprise B2B customers, we see a lot of energy that goes into driving for the lowest cost possible for raw leads. But if you really think about it, here is how it all breaks down for the typical B2B demand generation process:

• Let’s say your raw leads cost anywhere from $30 to $150 for a product or service that generates $30,000 in annual contract value.
• By the time these leads are nurtured, and turn into an opportunity, your costs are up at $2000 per opportunity.
• Assume that it takes 6 to 10 additional (say 8 on average) mostly “digital” touches before you can turn a lead into an opportunity.
• Each lead nurturing “digital touch” of the prospect will therefore cost you around $250. Now factor in the elapsed time between touches, and the number of different nurturing email campaigns and content offers needed to get to a qualified lead that turns into an opportunity. The costs, and impact of each successful “digital touch” with a prospect is in fact a lot more!
  

Question:  Are you better off, by focusing on new ways to engage, and accelerate “digital touches” by your existing prospects? Will that have greater impact on revenue (rather than optimizing your cost per raw lead)? [Our quick take: YES!]

80-20 Principles for Marketing Automation

More than 80% of your prospects will never visit your website! It’s just the way it is. They are out on the web, and you need to reach out, engage, profile and capture information about them, right where they are! They are influencers, even decision makers for your  B2B complex sale cycle. They may have a voice in the purchase decision, but may not know your brand at all.  They are the “other 7 people in the room”, and when one of them is in your marketing automation database, you have only reached 1 out of 8 of them, via your own website!

We have thought a lot about this. Instead of waiting for your prospects to come visit you, why not go out to them? Build and deploy branded, cross-channel campaign assets, everywhere. Apply a range of tactics with smart polls and mini surveys with targeted offers, smart banners with content offers, and branded, in-banner lead forms with offers. Catch your prospects where they are, engage, gather insights, have a conversation, and influence them.

Not just 80%, but 100% of your prospects today remain “unknown” to you outside your website, and that is a significant missed opportunity! Just imagine if you could engage with all prospects that are “known” to your marketing automation platform, all across the web. Serve them highly relevant messages, promotions and offers since you know who they are. Then record their interactions back inside your automation system.  You can now accelerate your high impact lead nurturing cycle not just inside your own outgoing email campaigns, but all across the web!

80% and more often, 90+% of your prospects will not click through your lead nurturing email to your landing page. They may completely miss your primary call to action. This is why you will want to drop in a “secondary” call to action such as an in-email poll, where you learn a bit more about the prospect, but then send them on to the same landing page to drive additional clicks and conversions.  You can get not just one, but two “digital touches” completed. One via the poll, and the second on your landing page when you get them to download an asset, or register for a webinar. Again take any insights you can collect back into marketing automation to accelerate lead nurturing.

Not just 80%, but over 99% of your prospects are unlikely to ever click on your banner ad or promotion. Typical banner ad click through rates are well under 0.1%. Since this is a critical channel to reach a new set of prospects, it becomes all the more important that to engage a prospect effectively. Present targeted promotions with A/B testing, or better yet, personalize the promotion using intelligence on the prospect’s target account, or other attributes of the individual prospect, straight from your marketing automation system. This is the only way to maximize your paid media ROI, and tap this channel effectively.

Not just 80%, but well over 95% of B2B marketers are yet to generate leads from social media. We are seeing that folks are interested in doing this, but very few have taken the steps necessary to make it happen. We have been fortunate, in working with a few B2B “trailblazers” who have had good success with this type of program. SAP, for instance, recently ran a campaign on Facebook that saw a 5X relative to their landing page conversion rates!

Marketo, CrowdFactory and Marketing Automation: What Do Customers Want?

Marketo just acquired CrowdFactory. First, as fellow travelers, we at Kwanzoo would like to congratulate the folks at CrowdFactory upon their successful acquisition! It’s great news for Marketo, CrowdFactory, and their employees and customers.  Marketo plans to build out their social marketing capabilities with CrowdFactory. We wish them the best in that endeavor.

Kwanzoo is a Technology Partner with Eloqua, Marketo and Salesforce.  Besides marketing automation/RPM system providers, Kwanzoo integrates with all the social platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), as well as display advertising platforms, ad networks and exchanges (Google Display Network, DoubleClick DART, others).

Our work across these partners as well as with both B2B and B2C customers, we think, gives us an interesting perspective on industry dynamics, and where things might be headed. Of course, we might be completely wrong! Predicting the future is a  hazardous business! That said, here’s our take on what’s going on, what remain some BIG unsolved problems for enterprise marketers, and what we think customers really want from marketing automation:

Why did Marketo Buy CrowdFactory?

David Raab has an interesting take on it here. He suggests that given the minimal product and customer overlap, CrowdFactory’s primary value to  Marketo might be to penetrate new B2C accounts, that are looking for contests, sweepstakes, and referral marketing capabilities. Phil Wainewright talks about a potential strategy by Marketo to enable engaging in, and acting on social conversations by customers of a business, an area that also is more of a B2C activity. Marketo has traditionally serviced more B2B customers. So if you agree with what David and Phil suggest, the acquisition appears to be a decision based less on customer “pull” (i.e. current customers asking Marketo to address a critical need quickly) than a strategic decision by Marketo’s Board and Management to go after new customer accounts in a different category (B2C). Does this signal a strategic add-on focus on B2C by Marketo? Are they planning to go broad, and ramp up sales efforts into  B2C in one segment (e.g. SMB) or across segments (Enterprise, Mid-market, SMB)? Only time will tell.

What B2B Customers Want Today

With all the buzz around social marketing and now social marketing automation, we believe what has not changed is the B2B marketer’s strong desire to drive more top-of-funnel leads, and nurture leads even faster, to maximize the value of their marketing automation investment, whether it’s in Eloqua, Marketo or another system. In simple terms, this requires that they address 3 key challenges:

• Proliferation of channels – B2B marketers we talk to say they want to be able to quickly and easily execute highly effective demand generation campaigns across channels (email, web, social, partner, display, re-targeting, mobile).
• Better audience segmentation, and Personalization – Marketers want new ways to engage their prospects, and segment their audience across channels. Engagement necessarily means using all available data on a prospect (e.g. identify the prospect’s target account via reverse IP look-up, or match “known” prospects against the marketing automation database) to determine the message, content offer, or promotion. 
• Break Down Silos with Re-Usable Campaign Assets - Marketers want to quickly re-purpose and reuse a winning campaign concept or approach across marketing systems (whether marketing automation, CRM, CMS, Facebook Pages, community platforms, blogs, 3rd party publisher placements, partner email blasts).

All of these cross-channel challenges remain largely unsolved! In fact, within B2B, we see strong interest from marketers at larger enterprises in optimizing their multi-channel demand generation programs, with advanced capabilities such as progressive profiling, multi-channel lead nurturing, and relationship-based targeting,  all areas where we have been making some focused efforts in partnership with Eloqua. 

What Kwanzoo Brings to Marketo Customers (Post CrowdFactory)

While Kwanzoo also offers a tell-a-friend / referral marketing capability similar to CrowdFactory as one of over 20 ready-to-deploy multi-channel campaign strategies, we do expect Marketo customers may choose to leverage the new native referral marketing capability now available via CrowdFactory. B2B referral marketing, in our experience, has primarily been around driving webinar registrations and conference sales and a lot less around contests and sweepstakes.

We believe Marketo customers will continue to see strong value in adding Kwanzoo into their marketing mix in the following ways:

1. Drive more top-of-funnel leads across channels with smart lead forms, polls/surveys + lead forms, and smart banners with A/B testing
2. Nurture leads faster in the mid-and-lower funnel across channels (including nurturing emails) with rich media polls & surveys.
3. Automated lead capture from paid media campaigns into Marketo for instant lead nurturing emails.
4. Named account IP targeting of interactive ads and smart banners across all channels.

Where Are We Headed?

Here at Kwanzoo, we are talking to marketers everyday. We are all part of an exciting, vibrant space with many new platforms, products and tools that promise to make life easier for marketers. What’s clear, however, is that customers continue to find the process of implementing, and extracting optimal value from marketing automation quite daunting! It’s our humble view that all of us in the industry need to think about the following:

Open Up, Partner To Win:  We need to partner, open up our systems, APIs and data across systems, to gain a greater level of loyalty and trust from our mutual customers. Customers want their problems solved.  And they want it solved now, not months from now.

Do Less, But Do It Well:  Marketers want to know what really works, what can be implemented quickly to deliver results. The 80/20 rule still applies. For every customer, we need to make the 80% that is top-of-mind for them really easy to address.

Fix What’s Still Broken: Marketing automation platforms have a head start on addressing some key issues within traditional B2B marketing. That said, today’s systems continue to take a channel-centric view (website landing pages, and emails). The world has evolved a lot, and there are big, wide swaths that marketers worry about (e.g. display advertising) that remain completely disconnected from marketing automation.

There’s a whole new way marketers today are viewing marketing automation, that’s centered around the prospect, regardless of when, or where, or how they engage with the business or brand. This as opposed to the channel, or set of tactics (e.g. landing pages, email templates) supported by their tool or platform. When they approach things holistically in this way, it becomes possible to re-draw marketing processes in completely new ways that reset the bar on traditional metrics and targets for lead conversions, ROI and revenue.

Imagine capturing a lead inside a banner ad in a display campaign, or a paid placement somewhere. The lead is instantly captured inside your marketing automation system, to drive a triggered lead nurturing email, within 15 minutes of lead capture! This is just one example of how seamless marketers really want their world to be, as they engage with their prospects, customers and partners everyday.

Kwanzoo looks forward to being a part of the journey, as our industry continues to evolve in the coming months.

Kwanzoo News Updates – April 2012

In this issue:                                                                       04/18/2012

Features update: Lead nurturing beyond your website
Focus Roundtable: May 1st, 1 PM PT/4PM ET
Meet the Kwanzoo team at local marketing events

New Feature: Nurture Leads Everywhere, Not Just on Your Website

Kwanzoo units already enable lead capture everywhere. Eloqua customers can now use Kwanzoo polls & lead forms to nurture leads well beyond their own website. Kwanzoo units, regardless of where they are placed, can now identify visitors who are “known” in the customer’s Eloqua database.

Easily configure Kwanzoo to capture each known visitor’s poll responses, and content download actions, back inside Eloqua. Associate all the new visitor actions and data with a specific Eloqua contact record. Drive additional Eloqua program steps based on the data appended. Nurture and qualify leads faster, to dramatically impact revenue.

Focus Roundtable: Cutting Edge Content Marketing Strategies, May 1, 1 PM PT / 4 PM ET

Explore new approaches that can significantly boost your B2B content marketing initiatives. You’ll learn how to

• Manage buyer personas, offers and content assets across your marketing automation and CMS systems  
• Use new self-service platforms, tools, and interactive approaches that empower marketers to better match prospect interest  
• Measure campaign results and integrate data and insights across platforms 

Register Now

Meet us at your local marketing events

The Kwanzoo team will be present at the following events in the Bay Area and we would love to meet you in person. Contact us to set up a meeting:

Eloqua’s Road to Revenue, 4/26: A forum for all marketers to learn the latest ideas and practices that can help you and your organization excel.
Marketo User Summit, May 22-24: Listen to the experts on marketing automation, sales effectiveness, and the three words that changed marketing forever — Revenue Performance Management.

Regards,
The Kwanzoo Team

Kwanzoo News Update – March 2012

In this issue:

• Insights webinar with DemandGen: Mar 22
• Press Release: Kwanzoo Announces Smart Banners to Optimize Display Campaigns
• Kwanzoo Success Coaching: Weekly Webinars

Insights Webinar with DemandGen [New Ways to Fill the Funnel & Increase Website Conversion]: Mar 22, 2012, 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET

Join our CEO, Mani Iyer, and DemandGen CEO, David Lewis, as they discuss tactics for optimizing B2B demand generation across channels – from generating more top-of-funnel leads, to segmenting known prospects for additional insights, A/B testing marketing messages, driving higher paid media ROI and more effective webinar and content marketing. Learn all about new ways to capture leads and append prospect data directly inside Eloqua from multi-channel campaigns, using short lead forms, polls and mini-surveys, as well as newer social promotion strategies.

Watch Playback

Kwanzoo announces Smart banners to optimize display campaigns

We’ve just announced our latest platform capability today: Smart Banners with real-time split A/B testing that help optimize display campaigns. Split A/B testing is a simple way to test changes to banners against their current baseline and determine which ones produce positive results. Campaign managers can disable the banners that under perform — immediately saving time, money to optimize demand generation budgets. See what LeadMD CEO, Justin Gray found compelling about Kwanzoo Smart Banners…

View Press Release

Kwanzoo success coaching: Weekly Webinars
Every Friday at 11 AM PST/2 PM EST

Kwanzoo is pleased to announce the launch of our customer success coaching webinars. Each weekly webinar is designed to educate our customers and partners on how they can make the most of their investment in our platform. The session is FREE to attend, and 30 minutes long, with 15 minutes of Q&A.

Learn new campaign strategies for multi-channel demand generation. Explore with us different features of our platform each week as we share best practices and answer your questions.

Regards,

The Kwanzoo Team

3 Easy Steps to Increasing Webinar & Event Registrations

Your organization has an important event coming up. The challenge: increasing attendee  registrations for the event and amplifying your message through word-of-mouth referrals.  The Online Marketing Summit recently ran a Tell-a-Friend & Save promotion using Kwanzoo’s social sharing promotion capabilities.  The result was a 10X return on investment from a three month campaign. The OMS team had their first campaign up and running in about an hour. Here’s a closer look at the whole campaign. Just like OMS, you could be driving up registrations for your next event in three easy steps.

How it works

Campaign Results

OMS found that 18% of all registrations for their event came through the Tell-A-Friend Campaign. Social sharing by users increased from less than 1% to over 33%. They found that building these units is was simple, and did notrequire extensive technical skills. Skills needed were no more than what it takes to edit a Microsoft Word document, and placing a couple of images created using Photoshop.

Breaking it down: Creating your own campaign

Once signed into a Kwanzoo Account, follow a simple 3-step process to create your next event promotion. You will need to create two screens for your promotion, a Social Sharing screen and an Offer screen like these:

Step 1: Create your promotion screen

Choose the Tell-A-Friend (Smart Share) option and you are taken to a template.

Promotion Strategy:Decide what you will offer as promotion value to each user for social sharing. We highly recommend making this offer a little better than any promo codes you may have handed out to affiliates and partners, or to your own users via other channels, such as an email. After all, you are asking users to promote your event for you, and since you are asking them to put in some effort, the incentive needs to be strong and differentiated.

Key Insight: We have seen promo values that change from 10% for early bird to 25% closer to the event.  You can increase the promo face value from $50 to $250 closer to the event, while making sure the net value for every newly registered event attendee goes up for you over time.

Now that you have a strategy in place, expand on Step 2B to find the tools needed to create the final product.

Quick Tips:

1)    Set your title/incentive message: These fields, in a few short words, define the purpose of your campaign. Eg: Tell your friend and save $50 on registration.

2)    Choose or upload background logo: Choose a background from our gallery or create your own and upload it.

3)    Choose your share icons & set message:Users tweet the preset message 99% of the time so give careful consideration to the message including twitter handles, hash tags, visuals, etc. where necessary.

4)    Position Elements: This feature allows you to create a fresh looking unit every time by allowing you to move around different aspects of the unit.

Step 2: Customize the Offer screen

Key Goal: Remember, now that the user has shared your message, you want to quickly get them to your registration system to complete the sign-up for your event, using your promo code or discount code.

This step is similar to Step 1.  Create the thank you/offer screen with the call to action button as seen below

Step 3:  Running your campaign

Once you have created the Tell-a-friend (Smart Share) unit, choose ‘Run Campaign’ and select the channels through which you wish to promote your event:

Your campaign can run on all the above channels, including mobile.  Follow the steps that appear upon your selection and you are ready to run your campaign.  Continue to track your campaigns’ success through the platform’s analytics screens and reports so you can improve campaign performance over time.

Kwanzoo’s Tell-a-Friend social promotions are great for driving B2B webinar signups too! While for paid conferences and events, it makes sense to offer a discount, you will want to try a different offer for free webinars. Simply offer a compelling white paper or exclusive research report, to potential webinar attendees when you reach them via an email blast, on your website, or on your blog. When you do have someone signup to attend, you could offer a different piece of content on your webinar sign-up Thank You page, as an incentive for them to spread the word (again) for you.

As you just saw, creating and running a Kwanzoo Tell-a-friend promotion is really simple. So go on, give it a try for your next conference, event or webinar! And keep that feedback coming.

Kwanzoo News Update – February 2012

In this issue:

• Blog post: Marketing on Mobile to Business
• Introducing Kwanzoo Power Hour Webinars: March 8
• Insights Webinar with DemandGen: Mar 22
• Double Down on Smart Banners in March!

 Keep Reading

Introducing Kwanzoo Power Hour Webinars: First Webinar March 8, 10 AM PT

Insights Webinar with DemandGen [New Ways to Fill the Funnel & Increase Website Conversion]: Mar 8, 2012, 10 AM PT/1 PM ET

  Register Here

Double Down on Smart Banners in March!

 Get started on a 14-day trial

B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 5: Marketing on Mobile to Business

[Note: This is Part 5 of a 5-part post. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here and Part 4 here. Want to be notified of new Kwanzoo blog posts? Just enter your email address and hit “Subscribe”, or follow @kwanzoo on Twitter.]

Kwanzoo News Update – January 2012

In this issue:

• Blog post: Connectors, Connectors, Connector 
• Webinar with DemandGen: Feb 23, 2012
• New feature: Smart Banners
• Online Marketing Summit Raffle Winner

B2B 2012 Trends Part 4: Connectors, Connectors, Connectors
Deeper connectivity and integration across existing and new platforms and tools will be critical to marketers, as they execute their marketing campaigns in 2012. Marketers, as well as their target users, touch many marketing, technology, social, enterprise application and enterprise communication platforms/tools every day. As you add new platforms, are you making sure they integrate well? Or are you creating more work for your marketers?

Keep Reading

Save the date: [Webinar] Personalize Your Marketing, with Segmentation & Relationship Targeting, Feb 23, 10 AM PT/1 PM ET

Join Kwanzoo’s CEO, Mani Iyer, and DemandGen CEO, David Lewis, as they discuss tactics for personalizing marketing to the individual user, across marketing channels. Learn all about prospect segmentation inside email, on the web, social, display and mobile channels, and how to deliver the right message with relationship targeting.
Registration details coming soon.

New Feature: Easy A/B tests with Smart Banners

Kwanzoo announces smart banners for easy A/B testing across multiple banner ads placed everywhere. Banners supported in the following sizes: 728×90 Leaderboard, 468×50 ipad/android tablet, 300×250 medium rectangle, 320×50 iphone/android.
Run all the banner tests you want, with real-time campaign updates and analytics, and drive up your campaign ROI across channels.

OMS Raffle: We have a winner!

Kwanzoo is excited to announce the winner of our Online Marketing Summit (OMS) Raffle promotion. Congrats to Bernia Wheaton from Wellesley, Ontario, Canada for winning an all access pass to OMS’12 in San Diego, Feb 6-9.

Kwanzoo will be at OMS & we’d love to meet you there. Our CEO, Mani Iyer, is speaking on a panel dedicated to video, mobile, content, and search marketing success stories on Day 2 (Feb 8th) at 2 PM. You can still buy tickets for the premier online marketing education event.

Register Here

Lastly, we would like to wish you all a very happy 2012!

Regards,

The Kwanzoo Team

B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 4: Connectors, Connectors, Connectors

[Note: This is Part 4 of a 5-part post. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here. Want to be notified when the next post is up? Just enter your email address and hit “Subscribe”, or follow @kwanzoo on Twitter.]

B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 3: Go Social, Go Cloud without IT

[Note: This is Part 3 of a 5-part post. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. We will have a new post up each week! Want to be notified when the next post is up? Just enter your email address and hit “Subscribe”, or follow @kwanzoo on Twitter.]

The Exploration So Far – A Quick Recap
As we work with marketers at mid-to-large enterprises, Kwanzoo sees five key themes for 2012. First, marketers are looking for ways to maximize the value of their Revenue Performance Management (RPM) investment. Second, marketing teams are seeking new approaches to boosting productivity of their staff and resources by re-thinking traditional campaign design, and re-using campaign components across channels. We noted new opportunities to enable rapid multichannel campaign execution and accelerate the sales funnel. We see significant interest in delivering interactive user experiences that are more targeted by tapping into intelligence inside RPM systems – applying Account-based Targeting (or Relationship Targeting) techniques.

Social Sharing Gets More Seamless

We have all seen the recent proliferation of “social share” icons everywhere,  from your email newsletters, to blog posts, e-books, webinar registration pages and more. But are they effective? As  marketers and users understand the benefits of   sharing, there is opportunity to make the social sharing process easier, more natural, more seamless. Marketers can enable sharing in much more flexible ways so that it is weaved into the interactive experiences they provide to their prospects and customers.