Customer Happiness | 4 Tips to Measure What Truly Matters

Do you want happy customers? 

Of course, you do. No business wants unhappy customers. But how do you know they’re happy? Repeat business isn’t necessarily a sign of happiness, as proved by the concept of customers as hostages (when customers don’t want to buy from you, but feel like they don’t have a choice.) 

Is it, in fact, even possible to measure happiness? 

Every year the United Nations publishes its World Happiness Report, ranking the planet’s countries in order of the happiness of its citizens. (The happiest nation is Finland, for the fourth year running.) 

Sounds like a tough gig, but the metrics used by the UN are actually easy to understand and clearly relate to how happy people are: life expectancy, corruption, levels of anti-depressant use, and so on. 

So what if we could do something similar with our customers, and create a marketing equivalent of the World Happiness Report to find out how happy they are with our services?

1. Stop measuring the wrong things

This would be distinct from, and hopefully more useful than, the traditional indicators of success. Metrics such as how many users visit your site, the conversion rate, and the basket size are important but they’re missing something.

They can’t tell you how the customer is feeling. Because they’re all about your business, not the customer. 

Instead, we need to think about engagement and satisfaction. Both are much talked about and sought after but rarely measured properly or even understood that well. Even when a brand has an active social media presence, making it easier to judge how engaged your audience is, marketers sometimes miss the point. 

2. Engagement is about more than numbers

It’s often assumed that a high number of followers automatically means you’re doing something right and, while that’s not untrue, it doesn’t mean you’re engaging people. Or that they’re satisfied. 

You might have 500,000 followers but if most of them aren’t liking, sharing or commenting then they’re not engaged. Conversely, if you have 50,000 followers and half of them are engaging, they’re worth more. If they are engaged, chances are there is at least some interest in what you do, which is half the battle won.

There is the question of assessing the sentiments behind engagement. Assessing if people are happy has a problem because people are more likely to express a negative sentiment than a positive one, so negativity tends to be over-represented. 

Complaining about a bad experience seems easier than being complimentary about a good one. Complaining is an expression of frustration and a means of retaliating. But being nice? There’s not much in it for the customer. 

3. Just ask what they’re thinking

The best way of encouraging positive feedback is to just ask for it – or rather, ask for feedback. People need prompting to make the effort but it doesn’t need to be complicated – long surveys are arduous and boring for the customer – so keep it to something simple, like a post-purchase SMS. 

And while the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is used everywhere, in an age when how people interact with and recommend brand has changed significantly since its inception in 2013, perhaps its days are numbered. Better to use questions that are specifically tailored to your business and customers, and less open to interpretation than NPS’s scale of 1-10. 

Using a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is common practice, but its success is not just about finding out what a customer thinks. It’s about taking action if things aren’t right.  

4. When things go wrong, fix them

If there’s something wrong, follow it up. “How did we do today” messages are ubiquitous but they’re worthless if the responses are not followed up. Learning what a brand is doing wrong is as important as understanding what it’s doing right. 

What makes someone happy is often perceived as being subjective, and therefore difficult to measure. But when it comes to customer experience, it’s not hard to work out what makes people happy. 

Good service, complaint resolution, solving problems – they’re all a lot simpler to quantify than levels of corruption in society and anti-depressant use. If it’s possible to figure which is the happiest country on Earth, it’s possible to work out if your customers are happy.

The post Customer Happiness | 4 Tips to Measure What Truly Matters appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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via IFTTT

Customer Happiness | 4 Tips to Measure What Truly Matters

Do you want happy customers? 

Of course, you do. No business wants unhappy customers. But how do you know they’re happy? Repeat business isn’t necessarily a sign of happiness, as proved by the concept of customers as hostages (when customers don’t want to buy from you, but feel like they don’t have a choice.) 

Is it, in fact, even possible to measure happiness? 

Every year the United Nations publishes its World Happiness Report, ranking the planet’s countries in order of the happiness of its citizens. (The happiest nation is Finland, for the fourth year running.) 

Sounds like a tough gig, but the metrics used by the UN are actually easy to understand and clearly relate to how happy people are: life expectancy, corruption, levels of anti-depressant use, and so on. 

So what if we could do something similar with our customers, and create a marketing equivalent of the World Happiness Report to find out how happy they are with our services?

1. Stop measuring the wrong things

This would be distinct from, and hopefully more useful than, the traditional indicators of success. Metrics such as how many users visit your site, the conversion rate, and the basket size are important but they’re missing something.

They can’t tell you how the customer is feeling. Because they’re all about your business, not the customer. 

Instead, we need to think about engagement and satisfaction. Both are much talked about and sought after but rarely measured properly or even understood that well. Even when a brand has an active social media presence, making it easier to judge how engaged your audience is, marketers sometimes miss the point. 

2. Engagement is about more than numbers

It’s often assumed that a high number of followers automatically means you’re doing something right and, while that’s not untrue, it doesn’t mean you’re engaging people. Or that they’re satisfied. 

You might have 500,000 followers but if most of them aren’t liking, sharing or commenting then they’re not engaged. Conversely, if you have 50,000 followers and half of them are engaging, they’re worth more. If they are engaged, chances are there is at least some interest in what you do, which is half the battle won.

There is the question of assessing the sentiments behind engagement. Assessing if people are happy has a problem because people are more likely to express a negative sentiment than a positive one, so negativity tends to be over-represented. 

Complaining about a bad experience seems easier than being complimentary about a good one. Complaining is an expression of frustration and a means of retaliating. But being nice? There’s not much in it for the customer. 

3. Just ask what they’re thinking

The best way of encouraging positive feedback is to just ask for it – or rather, ask for feedback. People need prompting to make the effort but it doesn’t need to be complicated – long surveys are arduous and boring for the customer – so keep it to something simple, like a post-purchase SMS. 

And while the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is used everywhere, in an age when how people interact with and recommend brand has changed significantly since its inception in 2013, perhaps its days are numbered. Better to use questions that are specifically tailored to your business and customers, and less open to interpretation than NPS’s scale of 1-10. 

Using a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is common practice, but its success is not just about finding out what a customer thinks. It’s about taking action if things aren’t right.  

4. When things go wrong, fix them

If there’s something wrong, follow it up. “How did we do today” messages are ubiquitous but they’re worthless if the responses are not followed up. Learning what a brand is doing wrong is as important as understanding what it’s doing right. 

What makes someone happy is often perceived as being subjective, and therefore difficult to measure. But when it comes to customer experience, it’s not hard to work out what makes people happy. 

Good service, complaint resolution, solving problems – they’re all a lot simpler to quantify than levels of corruption in society and anti-depressant use. If it’s possible to figure which is the happiest country on Earth, it’s possible to work out if your customers are happy.

The post Customer Happiness | 4 Tips to Measure What Truly Matters appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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Center of Excellence | Top 10 Questions to Ask Yourself

Implementing a foundation program library inside of your Marketo Engage application is one feat. Implementing a center of excellence outside of the platform is another. Without a focus on people, processes, and overall technology, you could be setting yourself up for poor adoption and support. With a focus on the three, you could be setting yourself up for optimized value realization and your next big promotion. As employees turn towards virtual work during the pandemic, these components are more important now than ever before.

Wait, what’s a Center of Excellence (COE), anyway? If you are familiar with Marketo Engage, you have probably heard of the Center of Excellence inside the platform…what we are talking about here is outside. A Marketo Engage COE is centralized governance, best practice, thought leadership, and organizational structure allowing a company or institution to control scalable marketing strategy, initiatives, and processes. It has been proven to drive improved efficiencies, consistency in communications, and brand standards across an entire organization. However, less than a third of companies have made the transition to experience-led businesses, according to a recent Forrester Research report. We call out this statistic because those who strive to excel with their digital capabilities to enhance the customer journey will definitely want to utilize this COE structure.

Here are the top ten questions to ask yourself when considering this transformation:

1. Why would I need a center of excellence? We already have one inside the platform…

We know, it might be confusing. Why did we call two different things the same thing? #growth. A center of excellence, or more appropriately, a foundation program library, is the place inside your Marketo Engage instance that houses the foundation program templates, typically those that drive the most value and are most commonly used, as well as approved for widespread use by your marketing operations team. Remember, you can get everything inside the platform right and still fail if the necessary structures and processes outside the platform are not in place.

A center of excellence outside of the platform is a broader concept that focuses on the people, process, and technology to better enable your marketing automation solution. It strengthens what you have built inside the application by nurturing design outside, including a dedicated focus on the following areas:

• roles and permissions,
• deployment and enablement,
• process management,
• change management,
• metrics and reporting,
• governance and governance model,
• the sales and marketing partnership,
• customer journey,
• and more!

Having carefully thought out and designed these structures will maximize your return on investment in your solutions and allow for organizational transformation both inside and outside of Marketo Engage. As we discuss in the COE, momentum needs a sponsor and your biggest successes will come with that sponsorship.

2. Have we carefully considered centralization vs. decentralization as well as hybrid models?

Centralization and decentralization can be applied to a plethora of disciplines. It is not insignificant to consider your strategic approach to aspects of your business with regard to centralization and decentralization. The mere act of thinking about where your organization stands or where you want different aspects of your organization to land on the centralization and decentralization scale is a step in the right direction.

There are different degrees of centralization, and it should always vary by degrees versus purely all or nothing. On opposite ends of the spectrum, there is total control and teach to fish—think of them, quite frankly, as they are named. These degrees of centralization applied to various business aspects are strongly correlated with company culture and resources, they are always on a sliding scale and there is no utopia.

Also, examine where you stand on the centralization spectrum with regard to the following areas:

• compliance
• training and enablement
• process documentation
• content creation
• creating and editing templates
• reporting
• nurture strategy

3. Do we have good momentum around marketing automation that catalyzes additional value across our business?

Take a step back and think about the momentum that exists today. Analyze why that momentum exists, learn from that momentum and how you can replicate or use it to inspire additional change throughout other facets of the business. If something does not have momentum and is not generating positive value in some way, shape or form, face it head-on, pivot, and adapt.

4. Are we personalizing and tailoring our enablement needs with accommodating tactics?

Engagement marketing maturity does not only need to exist externally with customers. Consider the enablement motions you have in place today. Think about the unique enablement needs of the team or teams. We recommend that you think about internal user groups, “brown bag” or informal lunches to info-share, and promote enablement, Marketo Engage community User Groups. (Check out the global list here for access to a strong community of Marketo Engage and digital marketing experts just waiting for you and your team to join.) There are many ways to get creative with personalized enablement and we encourage you to carefully examine what will work best in your organization.

5. Do we have a strong, defined enablement path moving forward?

In addition to the items mentioned above, we recommend that you focus on the basics as well. Build a plan around how you will onboard users of Marketo Engage with playbooks, user guides, training decks and recordings, launch checklists, QA forms, program requests, and promotion of strong internal and external resources—Marketo Engage has a ton of amazing resources, and other applications and advisory firms do as well. When there are new features, have a process on how you will roll them out. Additionally, you should consider annual standards training or reviews you might need to complete that are company-wide…and do not wait for these initiatives to happen. If you feel there is a topic that needs addressing, be that voice inside the company.

6. Are we tracking existing, critical KPIs well & are there net-new KPIs we should consider?

Take a data-driven approach and be able to tell a story and make a strong case with verifiable data. Understand the KPIs your constituents in sales, finance, customer success, etc. are tracking, learn how to speak a common language that will help you get buy-in, or simply have a productive conversation about metrics that do not leave your head spinning post-meeting with the CFO. Marketo Engage recommends you focus on metrics like program performance, lead quality, waterfall metrics, return on investment (ROI), and lead acquisition reporting as well as sales efficiency metrics. If your organization is very mature with regard to its attribution strategy, we recommend you agree upon multi-touch attribution measures across the organization and leverage the appropriate technology paired with maturity to facilitate that measurement. Also, consider a data-driven operating model to align and drive the business toward strategic objectives across the customer journey with minimal business disruption to ensure continued growth through alignment of KPIs to each stage of that journey.

7. Is there friction in the sales and marketing partnership that affects the customer journey?

This is a timeless topic. No matter how much technology evolves and no matter how sophisticated we become with our marketing tactics, there is no amount of machine learning that will ever trump the age-old practice of collaboration. It is critical that you nurture this relationship, have a strategic and ongoing dialogue, and truly value this partnership.

8. What other alignments of people and processes with other initiatives critical to Marketo Engage exist?

Here’s where process and change management comes into play. Do you have centralized processes that exist today? Consider how you adopted them, what made adoption hold and think about where you might need new processes to support your marketing growth. There are various pillars of COE process management infrastructure, user setup and process documentation are just two to name. Change management is key as well. Do you reflect on the catalyzation of change within your organization and all its glorious components like communications, change agents and change measurements? Food for thought…

9. Do we have stable Governance structures?

The role of governance and governance structures is pivotal in the success of marketing’s role as a revenue driver versus a cost center. Creating oversight structures across different layers of the organization brings together people, processes and technology of the organization in a strategic way to prioritize, assign, and execute key initiatives. We are not talking about more agenda-less meetings to add to your calendar.

10. Do I still need a COE if we have mastered execution?

The short answer is yes. No amount of excellent execution can mask poor design. Take the time to carve out these elements to reposition Marketing from “saving the quarter” to being thought of as a strategic authority and agency of its business unit. Design is just as important as execution.

Having trouble answering these questions? Adobe’s Digital Performance Strategy team has solutions that can help you successfully answer these questions and move to strong design and strong execution or even stronger design and stronger execution.

Check out more information here about Marketo Engage’s Center of Excellence Workshop or contact us here.

The post Center of Excellence | Top 10 Questions to Ask Yourself appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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via IFTTT

Center of Excellence | Top 10 Questions to Ask Yourself

Implementing a foundation program library inside of your Marketo Engage application is one feat. Implementing a center of excellence outside of the platform is another. Without a focus on people, processes, and overall technology, you could be setting yourself up for poor adoption and support. With a focus on the three, you could be setting yourself up for optimized value realization and your next big promotion. As employees turn towards virtual work during the pandemic, these components are more important now than ever before.

Wait, what’s a Center of Excellence (COE), anyway? If you are familiar with Marketo Engage, you have probably heard of the Center of Excellence inside the platform…what we are talking about here is outside. A Marketo Engage COE is centralized governance, best practice, thought leadership, and organizational structure allowing a company or institution to control scalable marketing strategy, initiatives, and processes. It has been proven to drive improved efficiencies, consistency in communications, and brand standards across an entire organization. However, less than a third of companies have made the transition to experience-led businesses, according to a recent Forrester Research report. We call out this statistic because those who strive to excel with their digital capabilities to enhance the customer journey will definitely want to utilize this COE structure.

Here are the top ten questions to ask yourself when considering this transformation:

1. Why would I need a center of excellence? We already have one inside the platform…

We know, it might be confusing. Why did we call two different things the same thing? #growth. A center of excellence, or more appropriately, a foundation program library, is the place inside your Marketo Engage instance that houses the foundation program templates, typically those that drive the most value and are most commonly used, as well as approved for widespread use by your marketing operations team. Remember, you can get everything inside the platform right and still fail if the necessary structures and processes outside the platform are not in place.

A center of excellence outside of the platform is a broader concept that focuses on the people, process, and technology to better enable your marketing automation solution. It strengthens what you have built inside the application by nurturing design outside, including a dedicated focus on the following areas:

• roles and permissions,
• deployment and enablement,
• process management,
• change management,
• metrics and reporting,
• governance and governance model,
• the sales and marketing partnership,
• customer journey,
• and more!

Having carefully thought out and designed these structures will maximize your return on investment in your solutions and allow for organizational transformation both inside and outside of Marketo Engage. As we discuss in the COE, momentum needs a sponsor and your biggest successes will come with that sponsorship.

2. Have we carefully considered centralization vs. decentralization as well as hybrid models?

Centralization and decentralization can be applied to a plethora of disciplines. It is not insignificant to consider your strategic approach to aspects of your business with regard to centralization and decentralization. The mere act of thinking about where your organization stands or where you want different aspects of your organization to land on the centralization and decentralization scale is a step in the right direction.

There are different degrees of centralization, and it should always vary by degrees versus purely all or nothing. On opposite ends of the spectrum, there is total control and teach to fish—think of them, quite frankly, as they are named. These degrees of centralization applied to various business aspects are strongly correlated with company culture and resources, they are always on a sliding scale and there is no utopia.

Also, examine where you stand on the centralization spectrum with regard to the following areas:

• compliance
• training and enablement
• process documentation
• content creation
• creating and editing templates
• reporting
• nurture strategy

3. Do we have good momentum around marketing automation that catalyzes additional value across our business?

Take a step back and think about the momentum that exists today. Analyze why that momentum exists, learn from that momentum and how you can replicate or use it to inspire additional change throughout other facets of the business. If something does not have momentum and is not generating positive value in some way, shape or form, face it head-on, pivot, and adapt.

4. Are we personalizing and tailoring our enablement needs with accommodating tactics?

Engagement marketing maturity does not only need to exist externally with customers. Consider the enablement motions you have in place today. Think about the unique enablement needs of the team or teams. We recommend that you think about internal user groups, “brown bag” or informal lunches to info-share, and promote enablement, Marketo Engage community User Groups. (Check out the global list here for access to a strong community of Marketo Engage and digital marketing experts just waiting for you and your team to join.) There are many ways to get creative with personalized enablement and we encourage you to carefully examine what will work best in your organization.

5. Do we have a strong, defined enablement path moving forward?

In addition to the items mentioned above, we recommend that you focus on the basics as well. Build a plan around how you will onboard users of Marketo Engage with playbooks, user guides, training decks and recordings, launch checklists, QA forms, program requests, and promotion of strong internal and external resources—Marketo Engage has a ton of amazing resources, and other applications and advisory firms do as well. When there are new features, have a process on how you will roll them out. Additionally, you should consider annual standards training or reviews you might need to complete that are company-wide…and do not wait for these initiatives to happen. If you feel there is a topic that needs addressing, be that voice inside the company.

6. Are we tracking existing, critical KPIs well & are there net-new KPIs we should consider?

Take a data-driven approach and be able to tell a story and make a strong case with verifiable data. Understand the KPIs your constituents in sales, finance, customer success, etc. are tracking, learn how to speak a common language that will help you get buy-in, or simply have a productive conversation about metrics that do not leave your head spinning post-meeting with the CFO. Marketo Engage recommends you focus on metrics like program performance, lead quality, waterfall metrics, return on investment (ROI), and lead acquisition reporting as well as sales efficiency metrics. If your organization is very mature with regard to its attribution strategy, we recommend you agree upon multi-touch attribution measures across the organization and leverage the appropriate technology paired with maturity to facilitate that measurement. Also, consider a data-driven operating model to align and drive the business toward strategic objectives across the customer journey with minimal business disruption to ensure continued growth through alignment of KPIs to each stage of that journey.

7. Is there friction in the sales and marketing partnership that affects the customer journey?

This is a timeless topic. No matter how much technology evolves and no matter how sophisticated we become with our marketing tactics, there is no amount of machine learning that will ever trump the age-old practice of collaboration. It is critical that you nurture this relationship, have a strategic and ongoing dialogue, and truly value this partnership.

8. What other alignments of people and processes with other initiatives critical to Marketo Engage exist?

Here’s where process and change management comes into play. Do you have centralized processes that exist today? Consider how you adopted them, what made adoption hold and think about where you might need new processes to support your marketing growth. There are various pillars of COE process management infrastructure, user setup and process documentation are just two to name. Change management is key as well. Do you reflect on the catalyzation of change within your organization and all its glorious components like communications, change agents and change measurements? Food for thought…

9. Do we have stable Governance structures?

The role of governance and governance structures is pivotal in the success of marketing’s role as a revenue driver versus a cost center. Creating oversight structures across different layers of the organization brings together people, processes and technology of the organization in a strategic way to prioritize, assign, and execute key initiatives. We are not talking about more agenda-less meetings to add to your calendar.

10. Do I still need a COE if we have mastered execution?

The short answer is yes. No amount of excellent execution can mask poor design. Take the time to carve out these elements to reposition Marketing from “saving the quarter” to being thought of as a strategic authority and agency of its business unit. Design is just as important as execution.

Having trouble answering these questions? Adobe’s Digital Performance Strategy team has solutions that can help you successfully answer these questions and move to strong design and strong execution or even stronger design and stronger execution.

Check out more information here about Marketo Engage’s Center of Excellence Workshop or contact us here.

The post Center of Excellence | Top 10 Questions to Ask Yourself appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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Lead Nurturing Campaigns | 6 Tips From a Small, But Mighty Marketing Team

Everyone is going to have their own story to tell when we reflect on the start of 2020. As marketers, we will talk about the enormous role of digital and how it impacted our jobs and our businesses. Some of us had to find the quickest way to move to a digital offering, and others had the challenging task of improving their business strategy.

As Global Marketing Manager at LiteracyPlanet, my small but agile team faced this situation. LiteracyPlanet is an online gamified learning resource designed to help school-aged children of all ages and levels.

When families faced life in lockdown and children began distance learning earlier this year, parents needed support, resources, and tools to help manage. According to UNESCO, 80% of children globally (1.37 billion students!) were studying at home due to school closures last March to control the spread of Covid19. And several surveys of parents showed they felt stressed, burnt out, and found supporting their children at home difficult. We saw how our product filled a needed gap in the market. There was a window opening up, and we had to jump through it. Literacy Planet was primed to help families in lockdown support their children’s learnings.

Tip 1: Increase your advertising when it’s advantageous

With the slashing of marketing budgets heard around the world, social media and online advertising costs dropped suddenly when the lockdowns began. The cost of impressions on Facebook went down due to fewer advertisers, yet more people were spending time online. People clicked on billions more Facebook ads in March than they did in September, according to data analyzed by Kepios. This meant we could take advantage of decreased ad costs to boost awareness of our offering, empowered with our Marketo Engage solution.

Tip 2: Respond to customer needs

Customer behaviors were changing as a result of events occurring globally, and we could help –  something marketers must do to support business continuity.

To do this well, we also needed to develop and execute the right programs to capture leads, place them in relevant lead nurturing campaigns, and ultimately pass them to Sales (at the right point in time). That’s a lot of work for a marketing team of three, but we managed it with speed and confidence with Marketo Engage. We acted quickly and efficiently to develop a Facebook campaign that would attract a broad audience: parents, teachers, and school leaders who wanted to keep students engaged and performing.

Tip 3: Always maintain sales alignment

We developed our plan in one day, set it up in Marketo Engage on day two, and spent the third-day executing tests. At the same time, we worked with our Sales team to align the process and make sure they were prepared for the influx of leads.

When leads clicked on ads and came to the site, they were scored based on their referral source and what content they consumed. They were then added to different nurture streams, depending on where they were in the buyer journey. When a lead signed up for LiteracyPlanet’s free trial subscription, the information collected identified if they were a parent, school leader, or teacher. Also, it signaled their readiness to move to Sales for account creation. All sales qualified leads are followed up by a phone call and set up with free access.

Tip 4: Use Net Promoter Scores when working in high volume

To make sure that the Sales team could use their time most effectively, Net Promoter Scores identified when a lead was ready to convert. When a lead hits a certain score threshold, their rep would be automatically alerted, thanks to our Marketo Engage integration with their Salesforce CRM. Through this integration, we can monitor customer engagement and use dedicated lead nurturing campaigns to feed them the right content as they onboard with LiteracyPlanet.

Tip 5: Adopt your lead nurturing campaigns to help customers before, during, and after the sale

A new stage of lead nurturing helps novel users make the most of LiteracyPlanet’s gamified activities, tools, and resources. Emails provide guidance and instructions for the platform, showcase how it can support English Literacy schools for children of different ages, language skills and learning levels. This reduces churn at the end of the free trial, giving teachers the confidence to use the program to its full functionality while providing parents with a sigh of relief and support for their children as lockdowns continued.

Tip 6: Keep monitoring and adapting

Our marketing maturity has given us an advantage over other online learning platforms: we operate as a small team, but we compete at a higher level through our ability to assess our customer needs and changing behaviors. As the pandemic continues, we understand these needs will change, so we monitor customer needs and changing market conditions: from what channels to target, what content will best help parents and schools, to how to adapt our lead nurturing campaigns.

The result of hard work and nimbleness

As a result of our efforts, we maximized costs reductions up to 96%  in advertising costs, to attract and convert a large number of leads and pivot our marketing efforts to the needs of customers focused on helping children around the world. In April this year, we more than tripled our leads against our target as a result. And in our home market of Australia, we achieved 150% of our revenue target. Much of this wouldn’t have been achievable if we didn’t have the right processes, trust between our teams, and the technology to help execute our strategy.

The post Lead Nurturing Campaigns | 6 Tips From a Small, But Mighty Marketing Team appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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via IFTTT

Lead Nurturing Campaigns | 6 Tips From a Small, But Mighty Marketing Team

Everyone is going to have their own story to tell when we reflect on the start of 2020. As marketers, we will talk about the enormous role of digital and how it impacted our jobs and our businesses. Some of us had to find the quickest way to move to a digital offering, and others had the challenging task of improving their business strategy.

As Global Marketing Manager at LiteracyPlanet, my small but agile team faced this situation. LiteracyPlanet is an online gamified learning resource designed to help school-aged children of all ages and levels.

When families faced life in lockdown and children began distance learning earlier this year, parents needed support, resources, and tools to help manage. According to UNESCO, 80% of children globally (1.37 billion students!) were studying at home due to school closures last March to control the spread of Covid19. And several surveys of parents showed they felt stressed, burnt out, and found supporting their children at home difficult. We saw how our product filled a needed gap in the market. There was a window opening up, and we had to jump through it. Literacy Planet was primed to help families in lockdown support their children’s learnings.

Tip 1: Increase your advertising when it’s advantageous

With the slashing of marketing budgets heard around the world, social media and online advertising costs dropped suddenly when the lockdowns began. The cost of impressions on Facebook went down due to fewer advertisers, yet more people were spending time online. People clicked on billions more Facebook ads in March than they did in September, according to data analyzed by Kepios. This meant we could take advantage of decreased ad costs to boost awareness of our offering, empowered with our Marketo Engage solution.

Tip 2: Respond to customer needs

Customer behaviors were changing as a result of events occurring globally, and we could help –  something marketers must do to support business continuity.

To do this well, we also needed to develop and execute the right programs to capture leads, place them in relevant lead nurturing campaigns, and ultimately pass them to Sales (at the right point in time). That’s a lot of work for a marketing team of three, but we managed it with speed and confidence with Marketo Engage. We acted quickly and efficiently to develop a Facebook campaign that would attract a broad audience: parents, teachers, and school leaders who wanted to keep students engaged and performing.

Tip 3: Always maintain sales alignment

We developed our plan in one day, set it up in Marketo Engage on day two, and spent the third-day executing tests. At the same time, we worked with our Sales team to align the process and make sure they were prepared for the influx of leads.

When leads clicked on ads and came to the site, they were scored based on their referral source and what content they consumed. They were then added to different nurture streams, depending on where they were in the buyer journey. When a lead signed up for LiteracyPlanet’s free trial subscription, the information collected identified if they were a parent, school leader, or teacher. Also, it signaled their readiness to move to Sales for account creation. All sales qualified leads are followed up by a phone call and set up with free access.

Tip 4: Use Net Promoter Scores when working in high volume

To make sure that the Sales team could use their time most effectively, Net Promoter Scores identified when a lead was ready to convert. When a lead hits a certain score threshold, their rep would be automatically alerted, thanks to our Marketo Engage integration with their Salesforce CRM. Through this integration, we can monitor customer engagement and use dedicated lead nurturing campaigns to feed them the right content as they onboard with LiteracyPlanet.

Tip 5: Adopt your lead nurturing campaigns to help customers before, during, and after the sale

A new stage of lead nurturing helps novel users make the most of LiteracyPlanet’s gamified activities, tools, and resources. Emails provide guidance and instructions for the platform, showcase how it can support English Literacy schools for children of different ages, language skills and learning levels. This reduces churn at the end of the free trial, giving teachers the confidence to use the program to its full functionality while providing parents with a sigh of relief and support for their children as lockdowns continued.

Tip 6: Keep monitoring and adapting

Our marketing maturity has given us an advantage over other online learning platforms: we operate as a small team, but we compete at a higher level through our ability to assess our customer needs and changing behaviors. As the pandemic continues, we understand these needs will change, so we monitor customer needs and changing market conditions: from what channels to target, what content will best help parents and schools, to how to adapt our lead nurturing campaigns.

The result of hard work and nimbleness

As a result of our efforts, we maximized costs reductions up to 96%  in advertising costs, to attract and convert a large number of leads and pivot our marketing efforts to the needs of customers focused on helping children around the world. In April this year, we more than tripled our leads against our target as a result. And in our home market of Australia, we achieved 150% of our revenue target. Much of this wouldn’t have been achievable if we didn’t have the right processes, trust between our teams, and the technology to help execute our strategy.

The post Lead Nurturing Campaigns | 6 Tips From a Small, But Mighty Marketing Team appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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Disrupting Law with Digital | Using Marketo Engage for Customer Needs

The starting point for marketing strategy begins with the customer. That’s not an approach you often find in a commercial law firm. LegalVision didn’t start as a law firm, but as an online resource for people. We began as a website where people could come and download legal documents that they could edit and use themselves, without needing a lawyer. But over the years, in response to customers, we’ve pivoted several times to what we are today: a young and disruptive commercial law firm. From the beginning, understanding customer needs and using a digital approach to meet them better was the top priority.

Legal delivered differently

We’ve always taken a digital-first approach and played the role of disruptors. Instead of starting as a law practice that added a digital strategy to keep up with the times, we’ve used our digital-first approach to understand and help everyone who uses our services. With Marketo Engage’s support and tools, we’ve been able to evolve and hone our service delivery continuously. Our business model, digital marketing strategies, and use of technology are unique in this sector.

As a marketer with a legal background, it’s been refreshing and exciting to provide innovation in an industry I feel passionate about. Technology and data have been a significant driver of this innovation, as we can use collected information to effectively nurture leads. I get to work with developers, the marketing team, and lawyers to understand and adapt to the needs of our market.

An article for everything

Identifying these needs in real-time is the benefit of using a data-driven approach to marketing. And content is critical to delivering our nurturing efforts. Our content library now holds 5,000 articles, written to address customer pain points in a language they can understand. That means we have specific downloads and articles curated for our personas, talking individually to their business needs.

We now get 350,000 monthly visitors, but converting these visitors into clients takes robust marketing automation. We use content, teamed with an understanding of customer behavior, to send personalized, relevant content at the right time. From the moment someone visits our website, downloads a document or attends a webinar, we can better assess their pain points and address their needs, sending them niche content.

Instead of thinking like lawyers, we take the approach of a retailer: focused on customer experience. And that’s how B2B needs to operate as customers (if you’re a business or individual) now expect personalized interactions.

Identifying customer needs

Since introducing Marketo Engage in 2016, we’ve developed an increasingly nuanced methodology to marketing automation and customer experience. Our personas are mapped out to a microscopic level, where we can analyze every touchpoint a lead experiences: from the second they click on a Google ad, all the way through to contacting us, becoming a client, and then coming back for repeat business. These touchpoints carry throughout the entire enterprise, from click-through rates to telephone calls with sales support, to interactions with our lawyers, backed by strong custom integration with our CRM.

Understanding our customers facilitates an empathetic approach that goes to the very core of LegalVision. Traditional law firms aim to bill as many hours as possible and maximize profit. But that doesn’t necessarily give a client the best result, does it? That’s why we introduced a membership model late last year: instead of a user-pays approach, customers can sign up for a 12-month flat monthly rate. Through this model, clients can get help with the unexpected events of 2020.

We’re seeing a rapid take up with our existing client base jumping onto this membership model. And it’s really exciting because it allows business owners to have a lawyer on demand whenever they need a legal question answered and then they don’t have to worry about expensive hourly rates.

Proactively helping clients

When COVID-19 started affecting businesses and the economy, we found many clients came to us with unexpected issues, like how to renegotiate their rent, or to handle problems around employment or accessing government assistance. We quickly identified the common questions and started holding webinars and providing relevant resources.

Our data analysis offers the ability to take an educative, proactive approach with clients, where we predict their next likely legal needs. We can deliver more personalized resources, something that continues to be critical. And when you’re already stressed with the economic uncertainty (and the pressure of running your own business), avoiding any nasty surprises helps tremendously.

Recent events have cemented the role of digital and marketing in driving pipeline contribution and overall business strategy. With the right technology, processes and approach, we better address customer needs in a timely and relevant manner that proves repeatedly valuable.

The post Disrupting Law with Digital | Using Marketo Engage for Customer Needs appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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Disrupting Law with Digital | Using Marketo Engage for Customer Needs

The starting point for marketing strategy begins with the customer. That’s not an approach you often find in a commercial law firm. LegalVision didn’t start as a law firm, but as an online resource for people. We began as a website where people could come and download legal documents that they could edit and use themselves, without needing a lawyer. But over the years, in response to customers, we’ve pivoted several times to what we are today: a young and disruptive commercial law firm. From the beginning, understanding customer needs and using a digital approach to meet them better was the top priority.

Legal delivered differently

We’ve always taken a digital-first approach and played the role of disruptors. Instead of starting as a law practice that added a digital strategy to keep up with the times, we’ve used our digital-first approach to understand and help everyone who uses our services. With Marketo Engage’s support and tools, we’ve been able to evolve and hone our service delivery continuously. Our business model, digital marketing strategies, and use of technology are unique in this sector.

As a marketer with a legal background, it’s been refreshing and exciting to provide innovation in an industry I feel passionate about. Technology and data have been a significant driver of this innovation, as we can use collected information to effectively nurture leads. I get to work with developers, the marketing team, and lawyers to understand and adapt to the needs of our market.

An article for everything

Identifying these needs in real-time is the benefit of using a data-driven approach to marketing. And content is critical to delivering our nurturing efforts. Our content library now holds 5,000 articles, written to address customer pain points in a language they can understand. That means we have specific downloads and articles curated for our personas, talking individually to their business needs.

We now get 350,000 monthly visitors, but converting these visitors into clients takes robust marketing automation. We use content, teamed with an understanding of customer behavior, to send personalized, relevant content at the right time. From the moment someone visits our website, downloads a document or attends a webinar, we can better assess their pain points and address their needs, sending them niche content.

Instead of thinking like lawyers, we take the approach of a retailer: focused on customer experience. And that’s how B2B needs to operate as customers (if you’re a business or individual) now expect personalized interactions.

Identifying customer needs

Since introducing Marketo Engage in 2016, we’ve developed an increasingly nuanced methodology to marketing automation and customer experience. Our personas are mapped out to a microscopic level, where we can analyze every touchpoint a lead experiences: from the second they click on a Google ad, all the way through to contacting us, becoming a client, and then coming back for repeat business. These touchpoints carry throughout the entire enterprise, from click-through rates to telephone calls with sales support, to interactions with our lawyers, backed by strong custom integration with our CRM.

Understanding our customers facilitates an empathetic approach that goes to the very core of LegalVision. Traditional law firms aim to bill as many hours as possible and maximize profit. But that doesn’t necessarily give a client the best result, does it? That’s why we introduced a membership model late last year: instead of a user-pays approach, customers can sign up for a 12-month flat monthly rate. Through this model, clients can get help with the unexpected events of 2020.

We’re seeing a rapid take up with our existing client base jumping onto this membership model. And it’s really exciting because it allows business owners to have a lawyer on demand whenever they need a legal question answered and then they don’t have to worry about expensive hourly rates.

Proactively helping clients

When COVID-19 started affecting businesses and the economy, we found many clients came to us with unexpected issues, like how to renegotiate their rent, or to handle problems around employment or accessing government assistance. We quickly identified the common questions and started holding webinars and providing relevant resources.

Our data analysis offers the ability to take an educative, proactive approach with clients, where we predict their next likely legal needs. We can deliver more personalized resources, something that continues to be critical. And when you’re already stressed with the economic uncertainty (and the pressure of running your own business), avoiding any nasty surprises helps tremendously.

Recent events have cemented the role of digital and marketing in driving pipeline contribution and overall business strategy. With the right technology, processes and approach, we better address customer needs in a timely and relevant manner that proves repeatedly valuable.

The post Disrupting Law with Digital | Using Marketo Engage for Customer Needs appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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Marketing Attribution Advice From the Marketo Champion of the Year

Multi-touch marketing attribution is an essential practice for any good marketing professional. It provides a complete picture of the customer journey, in addition to clarifying where the marketing spend is going and proving ROI for different channels and programs. But I found myself wanting to know more about the personal experience of managing marketing attribution and hear about it straight from individuals in our marketing community.

I set out to find someone with deep experience in marketing automation and measurement who could walk me through the top challenges of marketing attribution. I wanted to choose someone who has worked with measurement and reporting in many different marketing automation instances.

About Ajay Sarpal

Ajay Sarpal has proven knowledge of marketing attribution. He runs the Bizible User Group and has extensive experience both in-house and as a marketing automation consultant. So I sat down (virtually) with Ajay Sarpal, 2020 Marketo Champion of the Year, to discuss the challenges of marketing attribution and how he’s tackled them throughout his 20 years of experience. Sarpal is a marketer with experience both in-house and as a consultant. He is also 2x Marketo Champion, 5x Marketo Certified Expert, completed 9 advanced specializations on Marketing Automation, and one of the Fearless 50 top marketers.

It’s exciting to dig in and find out what the challenges are that his clients are facing marketing attribution, and he had lots to say about the subject. In the interview, we covered several key issues that marketers face today: top challenges with marketing attribution, proving the ROI of marketing channels, visualizing the customer journey,  and improving marketing and sales alignment.

Q. What are the top challenges with marketing attribution?

A. “Lots of marketers don’t know which channels are generating the most revenue, so they’re qualifying people on soft metrics like opening an email 3 times or five times, and secondly, they’re not following a process or best practices in terms of attribution. With these issues, the leads sales receives can be of low quality, which frustrates them [sales]. It hurts the relationship between marketing and sales”. “Many marketers aren’t even aware that they can solve these challenges—especially with proving out ROI”.

Q. How can marketers start to show return on investment?

A. “Marketers need to evaluate the tools that they are using and how they work with their tech stack. Some tools work better than others. Marketing also needs to get sales stakeholders onboard to get proper access on Sales CRM and also understand the environment (processes).”

Q. How can marketers visualize the customer journey?

A. “Marketing attribution has various touchpoints – like the first touches, and the last touches, but with Bizible, you can capture all your touchpoints. It’s proprietary technology in Bizible that can capture that data and tie it back to Salesforce as well”.

Q. How can marketing and sales better communicate?

A. “If we want to tie marketing and sales together, marketers have to speak the language of sales. We need to add dollar values to what we’re quoting, we need to speak about revenue and velocity (time to convert a lead to close). We need to talk about timelines.”

Marketers face key challenges with proving the ROI of their activities, and every-touch marketing attribution through Bizible is here to help. If you want to accurately capture and measure your marketing activities, you need to implement a marketing attribution solution that can grow with your company. For more discussion on multi-touch attribution, check out the Bizible user group or speak directly to one of our experts at Bizible.

The post Marketing Attribution Advice From the Marketo Champion of the Year appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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Marketing Attribution Advice From the Marketo Champion of the Year

Multi-touch marketing attribution is an essential practice for any good marketing professional. It provides a complete picture of the customer journey, in addition to clarifying where the marketing spend is going and proving ROI for different channels and programs. But I found myself wanting to know more about the personal experience of managing marketing attribution and hear about it straight from individuals in our marketing community.

I set out to find someone with deep experience in marketing automation and measurement who could walk me through the top challenges of marketing attribution. I wanted to choose someone who has worked with measurement and reporting in many different marketing automation instances.

About Ajay Sarpal

Ajay Sarpal has proven knowledge of marketing attribution. He runs the Bizible User Group and has extensive experience both in-house and as a marketing automation consultant. So I sat down (virtually) with Ajay Sarpal, 2020 Marketo Champion of the Year, to discuss the challenges of marketing attribution and how he’s tackled them throughout his 20 years of experience. Sarpal is a marketer with experience both in-house and as a consultant. He is also 2x Marketo Champion, 5x Marketo Certified Expert, completed 9 advanced specializations on Marketing Automation, and one of the Fearless 50 top marketers.

It’s exciting to dig in and find out what the challenges are that his clients are facing marketing attribution, and he had lots to say about the subject. In the interview, we covered several key issues that marketers face today: top challenges with marketing attribution, proving the ROI of marketing channels, visualizing the customer journey,  and improving marketing and sales alignment.

Q. What are the top challenges with marketing attribution?

A. “Lots of marketers don’t know which channels are generating the most revenue, so they’re qualifying people on soft metrics like opening an email 3 times or five times, and secondly, they’re not following a process or best practices in terms of attribution. With these issues, the leads sales receives can be of low quality, which frustrates them [sales]. It hurts the relationship between marketing and sales”. “Many marketers aren’t even aware that they can solve these challenges—especially with proving out ROI”.

Q. How can marketers start to show return on investment?

A. “Marketers need to evaluate the tools that they are using and how they work with their tech stack. Some tools work better than others. Marketing also needs to get sales stakeholders onboard to get proper access on Sales CRM and also understand the environment (processes).”

Q. How can marketers visualize the customer journey?

A. “Marketing attribution has various touchpoints – like the first touches, and the last touches, but with Bizible, you can capture all your touchpoints. It’s proprietary technology in Bizible that can capture that data and tie it back to Salesforce as well”.

Q. How can marketing and sales better communicate?

A. “If we want to tie marketing and sales together, marketers have to speak the language of sales. We need to add dollar values to what we’re quoting, we need to speak about revenue and velocity (time to convert a lead to close). We need to talk about timelines.”

Marketers face key challenges with proving the ROI of their activities, and every-touch marketing attribution through Bizible is here to help. If you want to accurately capture and measure your marketing activities, you need to implement a marketing attribution solution that can grow with your company. For more discussion on multi-touch attribution, check out the Bizible user group or speak directly to one of our experts at Bizible.

The post Marketing Attribution Advice From the Marketo Champion of the Year appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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Apply for the 2021 Marketo Engage Champion Program

I am thrilled to announce that applications are now open for the 2021 Marketo Engage Champion program. Next year is extra special as it marks the 10-year anniversary since the Marketo Engage Champion program was first launched. 

The Marketo Engage Champion program represents an elite group of our most advanced Marketo Engage users and brand ambassadors who are Marketo Engage Certified Experts (MCE) and actively share their knowledge and expertise in the Marketing Nation Community. Also, in an effort to be more inclusive and provide ongoing access opportunities for underrepresented communities, we are increasing the Champion class size from 40 individuals to 50.

If you are a customer or partner interested in taking your Marketo Engage expertise and thought leadership to the next level, I encourage you to apply for the 2021 program. 

APPLY HERE

If you have any questions, please email us at advocacy@adobe.com. My team and I look forward to reading your applications in the coming weeks! 

Marketo Engage Champion Program Overview 

Champion Program Benefits 

• Eligibility to apply for the Marketo Engage Champion Leadership Committee  
• Exclusive Champion opportunities at Adobe Summit  
• Champion Spotlight in the Marketing Nation Community  
• Exclusive contests & incentives to help drive strategic Marketo Engage programs  
• Exclusive Champion swag  
• Access to Marketo Engage product beta testing and early adopter programs  
• Opportunities to engage with Marketo Engage teams to provide feedback and support  
• Ongoing speaking opportunities year-round  
• Exclusive Champion badges (LinkedIn, Marketing Nation Community, Purple Select)  

Champion Program Criteria & Requirements

• Current Marketo Engage Certified Expert (MCE) certification  
• Attend quarterly Champion Program Calls  
• Attend Marketo Engage Product Update Calls  
• Attend or speak at a Marketo Engage User Group 2x per year  
• Active participation in Marketing Nation Community  
• Help grow Advocate Nation  
• Sign Champion Program Charter and NDA 
• Additional requirements can be found here  

Meet the current class of Marketo Engage Champions here and our Marketo Engage Champion Alumni here. Here is the link to submit your application to become a 2021 Marketo Engage Champion. 

The post Apply for the 2021 Marketo Engage Champion Program appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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via IFTTT

Apply for the 2021 Marketo Engage Champion Program

I am thrilled to announce that applications are now open for the 2021 Marketo Engage Champion program. Next year is extra special as it marks the 10-year anniversary since the Marketo Engage Champion program was first launched. 

The Marketo Engage Champion program represents an elite group of our most advanced Marketo Engage users and brand ambassadors who are Marketo Engage Certified Experts (MCE) and actively share their knowledge and expertise in the Marketing Nation Community. Also, in an effort to be more inclusive and provide ongoing access opportunities for underrepresented communities, we are increasing the Champion class size from 40 individuals to 50.

If you are a customer or partner interested in taking your Marketo Engage expertise and thought leadership to the next level, I encourage you to apply for the 2021 program. 

APPLY HERE

If you have any questions, please email us at advocacy@adobe.com. My team and I look forward to reading your applications in the coming weeks! 

Marketo Engage Champion Program Overview 

Champion Program Benefits 

• Eligibility to apply for the Marketo Engage Champion Leadership Committee  
• Exclusive Champion opportunities at Adobe Summit  
• Champion Spotlight in the Marketing Nation Community  
• Exclusive contests & incentives to help drive strategic Marketo Engage programs  
• Exclusive Champion swag  
• Access to Marketo Engage product beta testing and early adopter programs  
• Opportunities to engage with Marketo Engage teams to provide feedback and support  
• Ongoing speaking opportunities year-round  
• Exclusive Champion badges (LinkedIn, Marketing Nation Community, Purple Select)  

Champion Program Criteria & Requirements

• Current Marketo Engage Certified Expert (MCE) certification  
• Attend quarterly Champion Program Calls  
• Attend Marketo Engage Product Update Calls  
• Attend or speak at a Marketo Engage User Group 2x per year  
• Active participation in Marketing Nation Community  
• Help grow Advocate Nation  
• Sign Champion Program Charter and NDA 
• Additional requirements can be found here  

Meet the current class of Marketo Engage Champions here and our Marketo Engage Champion Alumni here. Here is the link to submit your application to become a 2021 Marketo Engage Champion. 

The post Apply for the 2021 Marketo Engage Champion Program appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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