5 Things You Shouldn’t Expect from Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is becoming a vital tool in today’s B2B space, as more marketers need to gain a better understanding of their customers’ buying cycles and increase their ROI from every campaign.

However, many marketers become enamored with the latest technology and jump into marketing automation without considering the human investment and business processes needed to make their efforts successful. If you focus on the technology over the planning, you won’t have the backbone necessary to support your marketing automation efforts and convert more leads into sales.

Whether you’re considering marketing automation or have already begun the process, you must understand exactly what you can – and can’t – achieve with the software. Here are five things you shouldn’t expect marketing automation software to do:

1. Model how your buyers buy. A key to marketing automation is reframing your thinking to focus on your customers’ buying process rather than your selling process. Before you implement a marketing automation program, you should map how your customers move through every stage of the buying cycle and become aware of their questions and concerns throughout each stage.
2. Define buyer personas. For your marketing and sales efforts to succeed, you need to understand your buyers’ challenges. One of the best ways to get inside a buyer’s head is to develop a profile of your ideal customer that includes his/her demographic, firmographic and psychographic details. You can even give your ideal customer a name and hang a photo of him/her near your computer.

   Buyer personas enable you to create targeted marketing materials that speak to your customers’ exact needs. If your marketing automation program sends your buyers information that is off-target, they will ignore your messages.

3. Get sales and marketing to agree on what a qualified lead looks like. How often does your sales department complain about the quality of the leads you send them? Unless your marketing department has sales intuition (the ability to read your prospects’ behaviour and anticipate their next actions), defining a good lead will be difficult to do on your own. Meet with your sales team and discuss what makes a lead “qualified.”
4. Create interesting and relevant content. Many marketers fail to consider the amount of educational content necessary to address their buyers’ concerns. For example, a customer in the early stages of the buying cycle might want to read articles and white papers, while someone who is closer to making a purchasing decision is more likely to request sales literature or product demos. While a marketing automation system will deliver the content, you’ll still need to develop a content strategy and create engaging communications.
5. Engage with others through social media. Marketing automation allows you to communicate with your leads without human interaction. However, human interaction is vital to your success with social media. Although some aspects of social media can be automated (such as inserting sharable links into emails and landing pages), you still need to personally interact with your online communities. One-on-one conversations with buyers can help you discover what messages are the most relevant to them.

After you lay the initial groundwork, marketing automation software can help you eliminate repetitive marketing tasks and increase your ROI. Here are three things marketing automation can do for you:

1. Understand individual buyers. Marketing automation software collects powerful data about your buyers to help you understand their interests and needs. The software follows the footprints buyers leave on your website and shows you what content they have accessed. This means you can gain a deeper understanding of your customers and have an advantage over competitors who are not using marketing automation.
2. Deliver the right message – at the right time – to each buyer. One of the biggest benefits of marketing automation software is its ability to deliver targeted content to your leads throughout every stage of the buying cycle. For example, if a lead responds to a campaign about your XYZ solution, your program can send her a case study about a customer who achieved strong business gains after implementing your solution. Imagine how this targeted information can educate your leads and convert more of them into customers.
3. Identify the right leads for sales. Once you and your sales team identify what makes a lead “qualified,” marketing automation can help you deliver those leads to sales. Your sales team can view specific data about your prospects, including the links they clicked, the registration forms they completed and their lead scores. This detailed information makes it easier for your sales team to reach their quotas.

A successful marketing automation program involves more than just implementing the latest technology. Have you considered the sales and marketing processes you’ll need to make it work for you?

(this post originally ran as a guest post on Astadia's marketing automation blog)

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How a 99¢ iTunes Download Can Change the B2B Software Industry

(this post originally appeared on the "It's All About Revenue" blog)

With the popularity of iPhone apps, common software price points have dropped from $39.99–$59.99 to $0.99–$1.49. This trend currently dominates the consumer market, but as a B2B software marketer, you should take notice.

GigaOM Pro recently forecasted that the market for apps is expected to grow from $183 million in 2010 to $8 billion by 2015. This means consumers will get used to paying low prices for the latest technology and this may change their expectations of how they acquire business software.

Why Does the 99¢ Software Trend Exist?

Over the past decade, the cost of producing and selling software has plummeted. Many of the up-front expenses have been minimized as new libraries and development tools make it easier for you to put software on the market.

In addition:

• You don’t need a major investment in a sales and accounting team to sell 99¢ software. Developers who use the old digital distribution model need to arrange for credit card processing, set up a bank agreement, handle billing and collect outstanding payments. Delivering your products through full service models like the App Store removes much of this backend work. In exchange for a 30% commission, Apple will take care of your credit card transactions and provide a platform where you can focus solely on your product.

• Selling through the App Store removes the need for credibility. You’d normally have to spend lots of time and resources to build trust with customers so they would feel comfortable giving you their credit card numbers. However, distributing though a respected entity, such as the App Store, eliminates trust-related hesitations. iTunes customers aren’t required to give out their credit card numbers with every purchase. They simply open an iTunes account and don’t have to worry about fraudulent bank charges from unknown developers.

You also must submit a software development kit to Apple for approval. Apple will run performance tests to ensure their customers receive software that does what it promises across a variety of platforms.

• Marketing costs are minimized. The low costs associated with promoting 99¢ software can make testing this distribution model attractive. Research has shown that the best way to sell apps is by word of mouth. Reviews on popular blogs and YouTube can drive sales and give you plenty of free publicity. The bigger the buzz, the more units you will sell.

• Huge distribution networks make it profitable to lower your price points. Selling your product through major distribution networks like the App Store lets you reach a new audience and gain brand recognition. Even though you may need to price your app at less than $1.99 to be competitive, the increased number of downloads can make it worthwhile.

faberNovel recently conducted a study to determine the best practices for iPhone app marketing. They tested several prices for the Paris public transport (RATP) app. When they lowered the price to 0,79€ (approximately 99¢), their sales tripled and 50% of their new customers went on to purchase the full version.

• The sales model allows for discovery through free trials. Offering users a free version of your software is critical to attracting new customers and driving sales of the full version. Free versions are far more likely to rise to the top of the “Most Downloaded” lists, giving you, and your paid version, significantly higher exposure.

This trend, of course, goes far beyond Apple, although theirs is the most widely recognized model. Google also acknowledged the importance of 99¢ software in today’s market by adding an apps search to Google Search for mobile. This function not only makes it easy for people to find apps but also gives software developers another reason to seriously consider this trend.

Should You Sell Your Software for 99¢?

As a B2B software marketer, this is a major trend that you need to be aware of. In all likelihood, you may conclude that it doesn’t make sense to sell your software for 99¢ directly, but in analyzing your market space, this trend changes the overall landscape directly. You should be aware that your competitors, and new market entrants, may take advantage of this new landscape. Whether or not you have considered a 99¢ distribution model, you should think about the following three factors:

• Disruption: It may not make sense for you to offer software at 99¢, but for a new entrant with significantly lower overhead costs because of this trend, it may make sense. Could a new competitor disrupt your space with a 99¢ offering? Have you thought about what could happen to your market space and how you’re prepared to compete? Can you produce a quality competitive offering with minimal investment?

• Business Model Creativity: When CD sales started to decline, iTunes revolutionized the music industry by selling songs at 99¢, but in doing so creatively changed the offering to include the music, the player, and the software to manage it. To compete in today’s app market, you might also need a more creative business model. Pull your team together to brainstorm new ways you can deliver a “unit of value” to your customers. Should you sell your software in the same way as you are today, or should you change what you sell, and to whom, to create a new business model?

• Go to Market: Your software might currently appeal to a small audience, such as a buying committee or senior executive, to maximize your ability to sell large deals. However, smaller apps that perform well and generate the most word of mouth tend to attract a much broader range of users. Can you approach your market differently by developing an offering that targets a broad population of end users, rather than a narrow population of executive buyers?

If you’re wondering how this model has affected sales of a fully featured software product, read the results of The Great 99 Cent Software Experiment of 2010. For 24 hours, Bill Pytlovany sold lifetime memberships to the WinPatrol PLUS system protection utility for 99¢. The regular price was $29.95. Sales during the promo were phenomenal, which made the experiment a success from a financial standpoint. In fact, most of the challenges he faced – high credit card processing fees, pirates and extra work handling orders – would have been resolved if he had used more current sales methods and sold the software through an online transaction system such as the App Store.

What about you? Have you analyzed your business and considered what would happen to your market space if a competitor used today’s tools to reinvent your category around a 99¢ price point? Are you prepared?

Building Benchmarks - 3 Main Approaches

In order to build a high performance revenue management process, not only must it be instrumented and measured to allow you to understand current state, but it must be continually improved. As the market, technologies, competitors, and your own capabilities change, you must continually adapt, learn, and optimize.

However, to do so, it’s important to understand where in the overall revenue process you are performing well, and where you are performing poorly. This requires benchmarking your performance and guiding continual improvements in areas that are most in need or most critical for overall revenue performance. Over the next few posts, we'll look at ways to think about building these benchmarks.

Before we do that, however, we need to look at how we are approaching the challenge. Revenue performance benchmarks can be built in three main ways; against alternatives to ensure that the most effective and efficient way of accomplishing a tactical objective is being used, against a plan to ensure that each element of the revenue performance process is contributing at the required level, and against best in class companies to ensure that the performance levels being seen are maximized to the level that the best performers in your industry are seeing.

Against Alternatives

The best way to start with benchmarking is to look at individual components of the revenue process and ensure that each element of the process is performing as well as alternative options. To accomplish this, a clear comparison metric needs to be established that can be seen as equivalent. If, for example, a webinar and a whitepaper marketing campaign are being compared as alternatives, they can only be reasonably compared with a clear definition of what the outputs are.

If, for example, the immediate goal of the two marketing campaigns is driving marketing qualified leads for sales, then that metric allows a fair comparison. Metrics such as website traffic and raw inquiries will be too high in the funnel to be meaningful, and metrics such as sales pipeline movement or closed business will be too disconnected from the initiative to be useful.
For this reason, when benchmarking alternatives, only initiatives that are truly alternatives for each other in that they drive the same intended outcome can reasonably be compared. A humorous video that drives awareness cannot be reasonably compared to a webinar campaign that creates marketing qualified leads, and neither can be compared to an inside sales campaign that drives business towards close.

Against a Plan

To benchmark efforts across the entire revenue performance spectrum, we first need to develop a comprehensive plan that models the full buying process from beginning to end, and provides conversion metrics at each stage in the process. With this plan in place, the volumes, velocity, and conversion rates that are achieved can be compared to the planned rates, and adjustments can be made accordingly.

In building this plan, key gaps in revenue performance often become visible, especially at points where a transition between siloed groups takes place. Understanding these gaps, and planning efforts and investments to remedy them and bring the conversion rates within the gaps to a reasonable benchmark level can have a very positive effect on overall revenue performance.

While the ultimate goal is, of course, a plan that looks into the future and maps revenue efforts to company objectives, the simplest plan to get started with is an incremental adjustment of past performance. For this reason, clear dashboarding of the existing state is vital in building a forward looking plan.

Against Best in Class

With the comprehensive view of revenue performance that this planning effort allows, benchmarking can now be done against best in class companies. Although each business experiences a different situation, benchmarking revenue funnel metrics against best in class companies allows quick identification of potential areas of improvement.

With an industry vertical, similar realities of buyer dynamics and sophistication may allow insightful comparisons of funnel sizes, overall buying velocity, and conversion rates. Similarly, comparisons against other organizations that share the same general go-to-market strategy (such as through a free trial program), or are comparable in terms of deal sizes, may provide valuable insights in terms of conversion rates and response profiles to specific marketing or sales efforts.

Now that marketing automation has made analysis of the entire revenue engine more readily available, we are beginning to see the ability to provide cross-company and cross-industry marketing benchmarks that provide insight into what best in class performance truly looks like.

Each style of benchmarking adds value in its own unique way, and the more visibility you gain into the performance of your revenue engine, the more you are able to make needed optimizations and improvements.

Current State of Benchmarking?

As we begin a series of posts to look at benchmarking, how are you approaching the challenge today? Do you feel you have dashboards in place? Do you compare tactical alternatives? Is there a quarterly or annual plan that you measure your performance against across the entire revenue engine? Do you compare yourself to best in class benchmarks?

The Results: Is B2B Content "Likeable"

A few months back, with Facebook’s announcement of a “Like” button for the web, I decided to run a quick, highly unscientific experiment to see if B2B content was “likeable”. Put more simply, is B2B content as likely to be shared in the social atmosphere of Facebook as it is to be shared in the more hybrid social/business atmosphere of Twitter.

While I will admit that I personally am more active on Twitter than on Facebook, I gave the “like” button a more prominent position at the top of the post to hopefully even the score a little bit. The results are dramatic – mentions of the content of this blog on Twitter generally fall around 20 or so mentions per post. Facebook, however, is lucky to get one or two likes or shares per post.

While many factors may explain this discrepancy, I suspect that the most reasonable explanation is the differences in social context between the two networks. Content must fit the context of the environment or it feels out of place and awkward, even if the participants are similar.



(as part of this post, I should mention that HubSpot's Blog Grader does a wonderful job of tallying all the Tweets/Shares/Likes for a blog)

Does this match with your experience of B2B content on Facebook?

Marketing Dashboard: Active Discovery

One of the most valuable areas to gain an understanding of is the current state of how your prospects actively discover your company and your solutions. The richness of insights that can be gained with a deep understanding of how buyers are using search is nearly without parallel. Each insight allows you to guide investments in a way that maximizes their effectiveness in driving your revenue performance.

Basics of Discovery

The first area to look at is the set of 10 or 12 “main terms” that buyers most commonly associate with your solution category or industry. These are the main search terms that would ideally lead prospective buyers to your web properties. A dashboard comparison of both the number of searches being performed on each search phrase (the search engines' webmaster tools provide this information quite readily), and the number of visitors to your content based on those main terms gives a very good understanding of if you are successfully being discovered through this avenue. A few powerful insights can be gained here that allow a reallocation of investments:

- Need More Category Awareness? The raw number of searches being performed gives a good indication of the upper limit of your success with active awareness efforts such as search engine marketing or search engine optimization. Broader awareness efforts such as analyst and public relations may be needed to increase interest in your solution category if this is the case.

- Are you Being Discovered? The number of visitors, and more importantly the percentage of visitors, who reach your site for each search term gives you a good indicator of how well your paid and organic search efforts are performing against each term. If a term is performing poorly, either an investment in search engine marketing against that term, or a focus on content around that term may improve your chances of being actively discovered by buyers seeking information on that term



Deeper Searches

As looked at earlier, however, the way in which buyers seek information is changing. With the average search phrase being more than three words in length, it is equally important to understand what is happening with the broader universe of search phrases being used by buyers. With a robust content strategy, the raw list of search phrases that are used by buyers to find you can be quite instructive in itself. However, as a high level dashboard to provide an understanding of the current state of your revenue performance, the best way to view the longer tail search phrases being used is to have it provide insight into what buyer stage your audiences can be loosely categorized into.

To understand this, divide the searches that guide visitors to your website into four main categories:

- Navigational: searches that are simply a replacement for typing in your website URL, usually just your company name

- Main Terms: searches for the main search terms you have deliberately optimized against

- Long Tail (branded): deeper searches, often with multiple words in the search phrase, or for specific content, and with your company or brand name in the search phrase

- Long Tail (unbranded): deeper searches, as above, but without your company or brand name in the search phrase

This dashboard view provides some rich insights into how well your company and solutions are being actively discovered. First, the relative amounts of visitors who discover your offerings based on long tail phrases vs main terms provides an indication of whether your content marketing strategies are working effectively. Given that the majority of searchers use lengthy search phrases, if the long tail columns are not larger than the main term and navigational columns, there is very likely an opportunity to be discovered by many buyers who are actively seeking solutions such as yours that is being missed. An increased investment in content creation may be warranted.

Second, a comparison of your relative strength between long tail search phrases with and without your brand name (ie, “Sourcefire intrusion detection products” vs. “intrusion detection system comparison”) provides an understanding of whether the buyers discovering you tend to be more at an education stage (understanding the category) or have moved more into the discovery stage and are looking to better understand your specific products.




Of course, overall trends are also very much of interest. The effectiveness of natural search or content marketing strategy grows slowly over time, and its success is best observed by following the trend in these high level numbers over time.

Paid vs. Organic Search

In order to deepen the insight gained from these views of your prospects’ active discovery of your content, it is important to understand what is driven by paid search (SEM) and what is driven by organic search (SEO) efforts in order to better coordinate efforts between them. Most B2B marketing organizations invest in paid search campaigns to drive awareness, and with most if not all of these efforts there is an ability to differentiate between traffic driven to your site via paid efforts vs. natural search efforts.

By splitting these two sources of traffic apart, and understanding the trends in each, you can better understand the performance of two very different categories of marketing investment. Paid search is predominantly a financial investment, and the results are generally directly in proportion to the monies invested (with a reasonable variation based on the skill of the search engine marketing team, of course). For this reason, you should expect the trend line of visitors from paid search to map closely to your SEM investments.

Organic search efforts, however, are very different. Effort, mostly in the form of time to create and promote great content, is invested, and slowly builds credibility with the search engines and with influencers in the industry. Consistent, meaningful investments in this avenue with therefore result in a slowly but steadily growing number of visitors driven by organic search results.

For this reason, a combination of investments can be very useful. Paid search (SEM) investments can be made in areas that are new, where results are weak, or where a short term boost is needed. Investments in content and influence to drive organic search results can be done over time in core areas of focus.

Evaluating Marketing Automation - 10 Questions To Ask

The market for marketing automation software is doing very well these days. This has lead to an unprecedented variety of options for marketers to choose from, and the range of options can be dizzying. While many of the discussions can focus on software and feature/function comparisons, this is only one element of success. To be truly successful, you need focus on the people, process, and technology changes with equal energy. As a big believer in the economics of smart buyers, I wanted to share ten question areas that are key to dive into when evaluating a marketing automation investment.

The people and process elements of the investment are often the most interesting. Some organizations have the skills in house to make the needed business process changes, and some organizations are more comfortable bringing in outside expertise in order to facilitate discussions, avoid mistakes, and gain consensus on the changes.

If you have not gone through this process before, you will want to ask your team, your consulting partner, or your chosen software vendor some deep questions in order to ensure that you will be able to succeed with your software implementation.

There are no "right" answers to look for, but these are areas to discuss, debate, and understand. These questions will differ based on your business and your team, but the following list of ten questions will hopefully get you started.

Ten questions to ask your team, your services partner, or your software vendor, in order to highlight key questions, process issues, and areas of concern:

1) How will we define a qualified lead for sales?

Having sales buy in to your definition is crucial, but reaching agreement between marketing and sales on the definition of a qualified lead is not as easy as it seems. What mistakes can be avoided? How will you score explicit (who) and implicit (how interested) activity? Are there multiple product lines that need to be scored separately?


2) What is marketing's service level agreement with the sales team?

How are leads routed to sales? Are there overlays for strategic accounts, specific product lines, or geographies we need to take into account when routing leads? How will these be handled? How is routing in “large” geographies like New York city or California handled – zip code? Area code? How quickly do leads need to get to sales? What happens when leads are passed to sales – does sales have a specific time frame for follow-up? What if this is missed, are leads clawed back?


3) What do we do with leads that are not yet ready for sales?

Can we establish a lead nurture program? Do we have the right content? How will we monitor whether the audience is losing interest? How will we make sure we are not over/under-communicating to each person? Do we have the content in place to guide buying criteria over time as we nurture?

4) How will our marketing automation data and CRM data integrate seamlessly?

What if a person doesn’t exist in the CRM system? What if they exist multiple times? If a person is influenced by multiple campaigns, how does this appear? How is digital body language presented to our sales team? How do the data, activities, and process aspects of the integration work together with our business?

5) How good is our data? How good does it need to be?

Are our titles/geographies/industries/revenues all standardized and normalized? Is new data from lists, web forms, CRM systems, and tradeshows standardized? Are we building rules for personalization, segmentation, lead scoring, or lead routing on top of data that is not standardized? Are there best practices for building a contact washing machine that we want to leverage?

6) Do we need to add data from external sources?

Are we going to ask prospects for every piece of information we need? Can we leverage sources like Dunn & Bradstreet to append data and avoid asking excess questions? Where in the process will we do this? What do we do about internally sourced info like sales territories or geographic regions – how can we append this data if we need to? Do we have an understanding of how to balance the customer experience between asking for too much, and too little data?

7) Do we understand how to maximize email deliverability?

How will we ensure that our emails are delivered? Do we have the right people to understand what technologies need to be in place to maximize email deliverabililty? Do we have the right relationships with ISPs and policy boards? Will emails appear to come from us, or from a third party? Can we allow our audience to manage their own preferences? What are the best approaches to use? What metrics will we look at to understand and report on email deliverability to see if we’re starting to encounter problems?

8) What analysis and dashboards will we present to management?

What are our key metrics? What industry benchmarks will we compare to? How will we define the stages of the buying process? How will we measure each of those stages? If there are many touchpoints in an overall buying process, how do we measure the effectiveness of an individual campaign? What will our executive marketing dashboards look like?


9) Where are we going? What is our strategy and roadmap for success?

Is there a marketing maturity framework we are using in order to guide our progress year over year? Do we know where we are currently on that framework? Do we have a plan for how we are going to make progress each quarter/year? Is management bought in to the goals?

10) How well do we understand the needs of our international colleagues?

Do we understand the cultural difference in marketing to each geography that we need to be aware of? Do we understand the regulatory differences in terms of permission and data management? How are we going to deploy a single platform to our international team? Do we understand the best approaches?


A few of these questions may not be relevant to your business, but many of them will, and they will take the discussion beyond feature comparisons in software platforms and into the realm of what it will take to truly drive success in your business. By taking a deep dive into each of these areas, you will gain a better understanding of your own needs, and the capabilities of various providers in meeting those needs. By doing so, you will move yourself one step closer to success.

5 technology trends every software marketer needs to know about

You don’t build products, write code, design architectures, or fix bugs. So why on earth should you want to be aware major trends that are happening in the software development space?

Because these current trends are big, transformative, and are changing the nature of how software is built, delivered, and sold. As a B2B marketer in the software space, these trends will likely have a major impact on how you do your job, or whether your job exists in the coming year or two. These trends are crucial to understand in order to see potential new opportunities, anticipate competitive threats, and be in front of emerging trends.

Here are 5 new trends in the software development landscape that will likely have a significant effect on our role as marketers of software:

1) Development Speed:
Looking back at software development in ancient times – like the early 2000s – it was *much* slower than it is today. This is not a “back in my day” rant, it’s just the nature of the business. Software, in many ways, works like Lego. You work with building blocks to create something. However, much like Lego, the building blocks evolve over time, and new pieces are developed that snap in quickly to do a task that used to take many weeks of coding.

Note for Marketers: Expect new capabilities in your space to pop up, fully formed, much more rapidly than they did just a few years ago.


2) Selling without Transactions:
Once you convince someone that your product is worthy, the “transaction” part of the sale has always been real work; taking credit cards, establishing AR departments, dealing with credit scores. However, major platforms like the iTunes purchase network that sits behind iPods, iPhones, and iPads makes this disappear. Sure, Apple gets a hefty cut, but a software developer does not need to build any “transaction” capabilities.

Note for Marketers: Brainstorm on how your business model might be attacked by a new entrant, with very low costs, selling $0.99 transactions.


3) Devices Everywhere:
The proliferation of high-end mobile devices like the iPhone, Droid, and iPad means that developing location-aware, mass-market software is, for the first time, very viable. Expect these capabilities to challenge the way in which we think about the “standard set of capabilities” of the markets that we are in.

Note for Marketers: Analyze whether your technology could benefit from location-awareness in any way. Someone will be trying this angle.


4) Connections Everywhere:
While we have heard about technical stuff like Web Services, APIs, and REST for a long time, it has always been squarely in the realm of the technologists. The important trend to be aware of now, as marketers, is that finally this trend has reached critical mass. Nearly all major platforms now have robust ways of hooking into each other quickly, easily, and seamlessly. Think about how prevalent the Facebook “Like” button has become as it is “snapped in” to websites around the world, bring a small element of Facebook functionality to those websites.

Note for Marketers: Assess whether a competitor might leapfrog you by “snapping in” capabilities from an ecosystem of providers. Assess whether similar opportunities exist for your team to leapfrog others in your space.


5) Innovating in the Cloud:
There’s been a lot of buzzword confusion when it comes to “Cloud” these days, as it seems like every vendor is renaming themselves a “Cloud” vendor. However, there’s one very interesting new trend to watch – the ability for developers to quickly create and deploy new applications on platforms like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, with only monthly costs, means that we can expect a faster pace of interesting new innovations in the SaaS space. While some of these innovations will be stand-alone software applications, many of them will be quick add-ons and enhancements to existing software.

Note for Marketers: Look for ways that your ecosystem of clients and partners can help you innovate and explore new areas and verticals through add-ons and extensions, rather than exploring this all in-house.


Things are changing rapidly in the development space, and while much of this change is not worth being aware of, these 5 major trends may have influences that extend well beyond the bits and bytes of software development.

6 Ways For Marketing to Help with Social Media

I can almost hear the comments already - shouldn't Marketing be "doing" social media, not "helping" with social media?

Yes.

Sort of.

But there's more to it than that.

The problem is that in many marketing teams, there's "marketing" and then there's "social media". The "marketing" group believes strongly in social media, and agree that it's crucial, but what they "do" is run events, launch promotions, spend ad budgets, and optimize keywords. The "social media" person manages the Twitter handle, the Facebook page, and the blog.

I might be oversimplifying, but this problem is one I've seen often enough to generalize.

The reason is that most B2B marketing teams are not set up to truly invest in social media. Most are organized more around "lightning strike" rather than "flywheel" investment patterns, and often marketing teams do not contain the real subject matter experts needed as content creators for great social media efforts.

This means that the "marketing" folks generally work with two major levers:

- A Budget for campaign spend (ads, search keywords, event promotions, show attendance)
- A Marketing Database of interested or potentially interested prospects

Because they don't fit into these two major levers, the "social media" person's efforts often feel a bit disconnected from the major promotions being run.

So what can be done?

6 Ways Marketing Can Invest in Social Media

Smart marketing teams are applying these two major levers to turbocharge their social media efforts in 6 ways:

1) Content as Advertisement: Instead of spending ad budgets to promote high level branding ad spots, smart marketers are spending ad budgets to share the rich content their team is creating with a much broader audience of potential viewers.

2) Social Content as Nurturing: Rather than creating separate content for each nurture campaign or newsletter, leveraging the best content that the team has created (measured by the number of tweets, for example) gives you a sure win in terms of audience engagement, and lets your content be discoverable by the broader audience in your marketing database.

3) Hiring for Content Creators: If the subject matter experts in your organization are not creating a steady stream of rich content, hire a journalist to facilitate the process (credit for this idea goes to David Meerman Scott). A daily stream of interesting and inspiring content should be no problem for a professional.

4) Sourcing Data for Insight: If the ideas for what to write about are running dry among your content creation team, fund a survey to provide data and insights on topic areas that they suggest. Most organizations surprise themselves with how much mileage they can get out of unique and interesting survey data.

5) Fanning the Flames of Engagement: When your subject matter experts do write content, the marketing team can fan the flames of engagement. Sharing and promoting each new piece of content in the networks it's relevant to (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Delicious, etc) helps build awareness, and motivates your subject matter experts to continue creating more great content.

6) Leveraging Search to Showcase Content: Rather than use your search marketing budget to drive traffic from the same set of terms to the same set of landing pages, leverage your search budget to help each blog post, video, or eBook "get found". The content on each post is very likely long-tail or niche oriented, so the traffic volumes for each one will not be large, but the relevance will be very high.


Done well, the marketing team facilitates the growth of a healthy and vibrant community that is aware of and engaged with the rich, relevant content your subject matter experts and social media team are creating.

While the flywheel vs lightning strike dynamic is a real challenge, these investment options allow marketing teams to work in a coordinated fashion towards true social media success.

What have you done to get the "marketing" and "social media" people on your marketing team to operate in a more coordinated way?

Friends, Avatars, Countrymen, lend me your ears

David Meerman Scott had a great post the other day on “I do not friend logos”. Very well put, and I agree with him.

As you know we’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with the best way to apply social media in the B2B marketing realm, and David’s post hit on one of the biggest challenges we’re all facing – what to do about Facebook as B2B marketers. The numbers are undeniable, the active population on Facebook is huge. However, the challenge we’ve all faced, as DM Scott puts so well, is that companies are not really “friendable”.

So, how about a personality… in our next B2B marketing experiment, we’re exploring the idea of a corporate “personality” in the social space. For anyone who is part of the Eloqua community, you may already have met Drake. He now has a Facebook page, a growing bunch of friends, and a personality.

Having a personality is a good start, but how can one translate that into real market traction? For one, a personality opens up more avenues for having fun than a corporate logo does. As the first example, Drake has launched his first contest – take a photo with him, and you might win an iPad. Not something that would fly with a corporate logo.

Is this taking the idea of “personas” a bit too far? Will this crack the code on B2B marketing on Facebook? We’re not sure, but you’ll be the first to know. Well, maybe not the “first”; that honor might go to David Meerman Scott – he is, after all, friends with Drake on Facebook.

Content as Advertisement

Content has long been a key driver of success for great B2B marketers in today's world. That's nothing new, and we've talked about related topics such as the content gap and the need to get more subject matter experts involved.

However, one challenge that remains is how to draw attention to your content. Earning attention is certainly the best way, by steadily creating great content, winning over the hearts and minds of a loyal following, and having that loyal following share your message with still more audience members.

That's a great way to build an audience, but it is NOT a fast way.

The Challenge of Earned Media

In a recent post, I talked about the flywheel effect that these investments had; slowly building a following over time that built up momentum and energy, but based on the continual push of great content, rather than the blast of major marketing spend.

An interesting hybrid option has been appearing recently, here's one I saw from American Express:


And here's a similar example from Accenture:



These are ad placements - these happened to be on LinkedIn, but where is less important than what. They are regular, paid ad placements that advertise not promotions or brand-related things, but pure content.

Buying Your Way to Earned Media

This is not a shortcut of the mantra of earned media; for this strategy to work, the content has to be interesting, relevant, useful, and valuable. It is, however, a turbo-charging of it. By using advertising to broaden the discovery of the information, Accenture and American Express are just fast-tracking the process.

The content must still stand on its own merits, but for those with a reasonable advertising budget, the laborious process of building a loyal audience can be facilitated with a bit of cash.

I'm sure that this is an affront to many content marketing purists, so I welcome what I'm sure will be an interesting discussion. Have you tried using content as an advertisement in this way? Did it work?

Behavioral Targeting and Large Populations

I'm a big proponent of marketing measurement and careful analysis, but it's worth a cautionary tale as sometimes measurements can lead one astray. The more finely tuned your messages are to the interests of the buyers, the more they can cause analysis confusion if not approached correctly.

The core of great B2B marketing communications is relevance. If your message is relevant to the audience you are communicating with, it will resonate, if not, no matter how well written it is, it will not resonate. However, the key to relevance is understanding the interests of each prospect so that a marketing message can be delivered accordingly.

Within your universe of prospects, there may be only a small percentage of them at any one time who are the precise buyer role and executive level, at the particular stage of the buying process that your marketing message ideally targets. However, many marketers fall into the temptation to broaden out their messaging to a larger universe in order to get an overall increased effect. Whereas this may seem like a good idea, as it increases the overall campaign results, it can have the unintended effect of alienating a large segment of your audience as we discussed recently in looking at the idea of neutral results in a marketing campaign.

Equally importantly, however, is the fact that a poorly targeted message can lead to highly inaccurate marketing measurements due to the overall effect of a larger population. For example, let’s look at two marketing messages, for comparison. Message one was highly relevant to VPs of Marketing at the Solution Discovery phase of their buying process (2% of your database), and achieved a stellar 30% response rate in that segment. Message two was relevant to Managers of IT at the Awareness and Education phase (10% of your database), but only achieved a 8% response rate in that segment.

For the sake of this example, let’s assume that the general population of your database, outside of the segment to which each message was relevant, responded equally poorly with a 1% response rate.

If this campaign was targeted to the entire database, you can see quickly how the results can show a counter-intuitive message. Message one, would show a 30% response rate in 2% of your database, and a 1% response rate in 98% of your database, for an overall response rate of just 1.58%.

Message two would show an 8% response rate in 10% of your database and a 1% response rate in 90% of your database for an overall response rate of 1.7%. If you look simply at the raw numbers, without diving deeper into the analysis, you can see how the final results will be misleading and will show the reverse of what is true. Clearly, it is the definition of the list, rather than the message success itself, that is causing these results to appear as they do.

Only by first looking at the targeting of your list, including both the fit of the individual, and the stage they are in their buying process, can you successfully show analytics that correctly reflect how effective each message was within that target psychographic or demographic segment. The results might be surprising.

Is Foursquare Relevant for B2B Marketers?

Recently, I’ve been playing around with foursquare to get a better understanding of it, and think about how it might have a significant impact on B2B marketers. Whereas I’m far from a power user, I have unlocked a few badges (sadly, one of my first was the “Jetsetter” badge that is given for checking in at 5 airports), and I’m in strong contention for the Mayorship of Eloqua.

With South by Southwest happening recently, the number of foursquare announcements on Twitter, of people “checking in” made #SXSW a top Trending Topic. Considering that foursquare only launched a year ago at SXSW 2009, this is clearly a phenomenon worth looking at.

Lots of businesses, especially those selling to consumers, are experimenting with special offers via foursquare in order to motivate those in the area to drop in, make a purchase, or accept an offer. However, it’s not clear that there is any relevant parallel of this in the business to business environment. Business buyers for any given organization are much fewer in numbers, do not generally make purchases based on their current location, and are unlikely to be motivated by the style of offers (come in now, save $10) that are viable using location-based advertising.

Certainly, at tradeshows and events, many B2B organizations are experimenting with foursquare, setting up transient “locations” at their booth and offering prizes to people who check in. I suspect, however, that this way of using foursquare in a B2B marketing environment is temporary at best, and will quickly pass.

I was tempted to conclude that foursquare might, therefore, have limited relevance to B2B marketers, but as I looked into what businesses had been tagged in places as disparate as Toronto, Zurich, Brussels, Antwerp, and London, I began to realize that, very quickly, vast numbers of business venues are being tagged. Almost every venue I visited had already been entered into the foursquare database.

The motivation to do this is startlingly small. Users are able to unlock “badges” with colorful icons and creative names like “Far, Far, Away” and “Playa Please”. Whereas it may seem too small of a motivator to incite behavior, the badges are displayed to the world, and it clearly is driving 100s of Millions of venues around the world to be tagged. I will even admit, it’s a bit addictive, and I found myself looking into the meaning of the badges to see how I might “unlock” the next one.

And that’s where the true opportunity of foursquare gets revealed.

The badges are unlocked for all sorts of very specific behaviours, such as checking in at 25 pizza restaurants. In order to be seen as having done these specific behaviours, of course, the venues you visit must be tagged as such. Because of this, there is a motivation on the part of every user to correctly (and with great detail) tag each venue with its correct type. Foursquare uses up to three levels of increasing detail to tag each venue – a very detailed categorization.

As a B2B marketer, especially one selling to very small businesses that are owner-run and not adopters of technology, this (theoretically) makes available a highly targeted data set. Want to know how many ship’s chandlers are in the port of Zanzibar? (an example that came up in a recent conversation I had with ShipServ’s John Watton). Foursquare may soon have the best data set. Currently, they don’t collect contact information for those businesses, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to apply the same model to acquire that data.

This proves a challenging problem for the classic providers of data who employ research teams to keep their data up to date. The more remote and small the businesses are, the worse the economics are in keeping this data accurate and current. Obviously, Google has been working on this problem too, from a different angle, by allowing business owners to update their own information on Google Maps. However, the dynamic is very different. In foursquare’s model, high-tech enthusiasts with iPhones and Blackberries update the data on multiple locations based on the motivations of a game, while in Google’s model, individual small business owners update their own information on Google based on their own business motivations.

Looked at side-by-side, the data provider models are very different:

Classic: Data provider employs researchers to update data on businesses

Google: Data provider allows business owners to update their own data

Foursquare: Data provider motivates population of enthusiasts to update data on local businesses

It’s not clear which one of these models will be able to collect the most up to date, accurate, and deep data on smaller businesses. It’s equally unclear whether foursquare will be able to leverage this data set to enable B2B marketers who target these micro-segments. However, as I think about what effect foursquare will have on B2B marketing, it is this effect that seems most promising.

Models that leverage the network effects of millions of people can be immensely powerful, and it appears that foursquare has hit on one of these models for gathering deep, location-based information on businesses around the world, that may be extremely valuable to B2B marketers who need this data set.

I would love to hear comments from other data providers, or anyone familiar with the data space, on how they see this model evolving.

Calculating the True Cost of an Email Campaign

Since the advent of email marketing in the mid-1990s, companies have embraced the misconception that email is virtually “free” as a marketing medium. This false impression often leads to over-communication, which, in turn, triggers diminished response rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribes. Even marketers who are sensitive to email recklessness sometimes face internal pressures, such as of year revenue numbers, to send “one last blast to the entire database” with the justification that “it doesn’t cost us anything.”

So what is the true cost of an email campaign?

To understand true cost, you need to first understand your marketing database a little better. The names within it are not all equally engaged, and your actions affect this level of engagement.

Net New Names

At one end of the spectrum are the names entering your database. As a marketing team, you work hard to populate your database -- attending shows and events, putting on webinars, publishing research, and investing in paid and natural search. As these efforts succeed, new names will enter your marketing database. By understanding the investment it takes to create these marketing programs, and then dividing that total cost by the number of net new names in your database, you can calculate a Cost per Net New Name. For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that cost is $10.

Emotional Unsubscribes

At the other end of the spectrum are the people who are disengaging from your messaging. The reality is that many marketers only measure actual unsubscribes – those who clicked on the unsubscribe link – as their measure of disengagement. However, this limited measure fails to fully account for the way in which most email recipients disengage. Most recipients reflexively ignore or delete unwanted messages, rather than clicking on an unsubscribe link. At this point, they have “emotionally unsubscribed,” and are not paying attention to your messages.

To identify people who have “emotionally unsubscribed,” you need to measure whether they have engaged at all – email opens, clicks, or website visits – in the past three or four months. If not, it is likely that they have disconnected from your communications.

The Path to Disengagement

Between these two ends of the spectrum is what you, as a marketer, control. Irrelevant messaging, poorly targeted content, and thinly disguised sales pitches will quickly drive your audience away. To understand how it takes for your prospects to disengage, you must analyze your email marketing history. Look at the number of “ignored” emails between any two “non-ignored” emails. If you look at a “reasonable maximum” for this number – say the 80th percentile – you can see how long it takes a person to disengage. For example, if only 20% of your audience ever re-engages after they have ignored 20 emails in a row, your Disengagement Path is 20 emails. Let’s use this figure for our example.

Calculating a Real Cost

Now, with these two values, you have a way to calculate the true cost of an email campaign. People who disengage must be replaced with net new names, or your overall effective marketing database shrinks. So, for an email campaign that is sent to 100,000 people, of which 40,000 open it, we have 60,000 who did not engage in any way.

The cost of this campaign is found by dividing those 60,000 by the Disengagement Path of 20. This email campaign can be said to have pushed the disengagement of 3,000 people.

At $10 per name, this loss of 3,000 people has a true cost of $30,000. Not an insignificant cost for an email marketing campaign at all.



If thought about in this way, which is much more accurate than just the hard costs of the email send itself, we would all make significantly better email marketing decisions as we would be guided by a much more accurate view of the economics.


(This article was originally published as a guest post on MediaPost)

CEOs and Marketing Metrics

CEOs may not be involved in the day to day challenges of the marketing department, but they can strongly influence its evolution through the questions that they ask and the metrics that they track, both in the marketing and sales teams. Done well, this structure and encouragement can facilitate a transition to a buyer-centered, efficient marketing and sales organization. Done poorly, however, the structure and metrics that a CEO imposes on his or her team can prevent the needed transitions from taking place.

High Level Framework

At the executive team and board levels, CEOs should measure marketing on objective, standard metrics around marketing’s ability to create, nurture, and qualify sales-ready buyers. By looking at Marketing’s ability to manage the top end of the revenue funnel through balance sheet and income statement metrics, CEOs will instill the discipline of defining the stages of the buying process, measuring leads against these stages, and facilitating buyers’ movement through each stage by carefully targeted campaigning.

Similarly, CEOs must work to have Sales and Marketing present their views of revenue projections, and the needed investments, in a coordinated fashion. The hand-off of a lead from Marketing to Sales should be based upon a mutually agreed-upon definition, and thus should enable a common view of the entire funnel from the earliest stages of awareness to the final closure of a deal. With this in place, and with an understanding of the conversion times and percentages between each two stages, there is an ability to see potential revenue shortfalls well in advance and adjust investment across the entire Sales and Marketing spectrum accordingly.

Conflicting Metrics

Without this coordinated focus, it is easy for conflicting metrics to develop. For example, if a Marketing team is focusing on only handing highly qualified leads to Sales, they will naturally reduce the number of leads that are passed. If, however, the Sales team is managed and measured based on activity metrics such as the number of calls per day, they will resist the reduction in lead volume from Marketing, even though the lead quality is significantly higher.

In measuring Marketing, CEOs encourage the right behavior when they think in terms of the buyers’ buying process:

- How is awareness of your solution category first developed?

- How do buyers educate themselves, and is that education process something you should be a part of?

- When prospective buyers understand a business challenge or opportunity and seek to solve it, do they discover your company?

- How are solutions selected and validated in your category?
What criteria are used, and how have we educated buyer on why to select us?

These questions focus marketing on understanding and facilitating buyers throughout the entire buying process.

What this may mean, however, is that Marketing focuses more on processes that continuously nurture prospective buyers, continually allow your solutions to be found, and gradually establish buying criteria that allow your solution to be selected. This can often reduce the number of large, one-off campaigns that attract significant internal attention, but may do far less to engage with buyers, as they are timed and targeted based on the company’s needs and schedules rather than those of the buyers.

Results in Terms of Buyers

CEOs that ask Marketing for results that are defined in terms of the prospective buyers – such as the movement of prospects between one stage of their buying process and the next – allow Marketing to better focus on campaigns that facilitate buyers. While large one-off campaigns can at times be useful, they often attract a disproportionate amount of internal attention due to their higher internal visibility. CEOs that avoid the temptation to only ask for and look at large one-off campaigns are guiding Marketing teams in a direction that is more focused on the needs of buyers.

Driving a Marketing team to look at hard metrics for their campaigns, and to take responsibility for those metrics has some interesting repercussions. A marketing team can commit to revenue metrics, delivery of objectively qualified leads, and to managing an overall healthy and predictable revenue pipeline. With this responsibility and measurement, however, comes the associated ability to associate compensation with directly measurable performance. CEOs should not be afraid to challenge long-held beliefs on compensation levels between Sale and Marketing. Even institutions such as Presidents’ Club, long the purview of Sales, should be opened up to anyone in the Marketing organization performing sufficiently well against objectively defined metrics.

CEOs that set the right framework and structure for their Marketing and Sales teams can drive an evolution of performance. However, simple actions and metrics, or long-held beliefs that are not challenged, can easily derail the best intentions of Marketing and Sales executives seeking to improve their own performance.

Mapping the Buying Process - A Framework

One of the recurring themes in this discussion has been the concept of thinking in terms of a buying process not a selling process. Many times when I speak about this topic publicly, there is general agreement in the audience, but the question of how to map a buying process often comes up. In some industries, it is significantly easier than in others, but some common techniques can be used across all industries to best understand how buyers ultimately arrive at a buying decision.

Mapping this process is more art than science in most cases, but the following question framework can help analyze how your buyers buy and if there are opportunities for better facilitating their buying processes. In each main stage of the buying process, one set of questions (below) looks at understanding whether there is a problem at all in this stage of the buying process, a second set looks at understanding how current buyers make it through that stage, and a third set looks at how your overall marketing performance could be improved in that stage.


Awareness and Education

Is there a problem: Are prospective buyers generally aware of your solution category and what it can do for their business?
- Ask industry analysts their opinion on the general knowledge of the market among likely buyers
- Survey your sales team on their experiences with initial calls
- Perform some first-hand survey research with likely buyers

What currently happens: How do existing prospects become educated about your category?
- Survey existing customers and prospects on where they read about topics in the general area of business you are in
- Analyze the traffic sources to any of your educational or thought leadership content
- Become an avid reader of industry newsletters and sites to understand their content topics and whether messages about your solution area are included

What are the options: How would prospects become aware of your category if they were not already aware?
- Look at the search results that are returned for searches on some of the terms related to pains that you solve (not terms that describe your category)
- Survey your marketing team on what events, tradeshows, and publications are well attended/read by key buyers in your industry
- Discover which industry sites discuss you and/or your competitors frequently
- Analyze which sites are referring web traffic to your site



Vendor Discovery

Is there a problem: If prospective buyers are going to find vendors to look into more deeply, are you on their list?
- Review competitor wins to understand whether you had been in consideration
- Look at the percentage of search phrases driving traffic to your site that already contain your brand or product names
- Poll your sales team on the frequency with which they were added as a last minute option, based on a cold call or chance encounter
- Analyze the percentage of leads that are originally sourced by marketing or arrived as inbound leads vs being generated by a cold call

What currently happens: How have prospects typically found you?
- Analyze the non-branded search terms that drive traffic to your website
- Poll your inside sales team on how their inbound leads heard of you
- Report on the breakdown of inquiries by source to understand what is driving early-stage inquiries
- Understand the percentage of leads in your marketing database that have been nurtured prior to becoming a qualified lead

What are the options: How would prospective buyers likely build their list of potential vendors?
- Determine whether the key industry comparison charts and analysts list your company
- Search for terms related to your category to see if your content is featured in the results
- Listen to webcasts, videos, or talks from key industry influencers to see if you are mentioned
- Act as a potential buyer and do your own "research" into solutions for the problems you solve to see if you are findable


Solution Validation

Is there a problem: When a buyer evaluates your solution, do they select you?
- Look at win/loss ratios for deals over the past few months or quarters
- Compare growth rates of your business vs competitors
- Build a discipline of analyzing losses with the sales team to understand buyer reasons
- Determine if you are ranked poorly in industry comparison charts

What happens now: How are buyers currently making their selection of a vendor?
- Analyze competitors positioning of your organization and your solutions
- Conduct third party win/loss surveys to obtain deeper information on buyer decision criteria
- Scan search phrases that include your brand or product names to look for objections or decision criteria
- Look at the marketing resources (whitepapers, case studies, free trials) currently being actively used by buyers to understand their current experience

What are the options: How can buyers’ decision process and decision criteria be better influenced?
- Identify key analysts and influencers who guide the market on how to think about key decision factors
- Map buyer objections to changes in buying criteria or positioning that can be inserted into nurture marketing efforts
- Audit common objections against current marketing assets to determine if gaps exists that would be better filled with a different marketing asset such as a free trial


This is, of course, just a framework for thinking about the problem. Every organization, and every industry, deals with a slightly different set of buying challenges. However, this framework can be quite useful for identifying gaps, challenges, or opportunities in the way your audience currently buys.

Interview with David Meerman Scott

I had a chance to chat with David Meerman Scott recently on a wide variety of topics. As one of the leading thinkers on social media in a business environment, his ideas, examples, and perspectives are fantastic to hear.

In this interview, we talked about why B2B marketers are so hesitant to embrace “fun” as an element of their marketing, and why we need to think about selling to people, not amorphous businesses. As part of that transition, we need to focus on creating a steady flow of rich, interesting, shareable content. Once we do that, we will find our messages shared freely among thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of potential buyers.


See below for our conversation (if this does not load, please click here to see the full conversation with David Meerman Scott):


Interview with David Meerman Scott


Towards the end of the conversation, DM Scott also spoke about how to balance freely shared content with the need for a flow of qualified leads for our sales teams. When it’s okay to ask for information, and when it is less likely to work. I hope you enjoyed watching the conversation and got as much out of it as I did.


For more insights from David Meerman Scott, see his blog at http://www.webinknow.com/ or follow him on Twitter (@dmscott).

Simple Metrics and the Business Case for Marketing Automation

There has been a lot of great discussion lately about the business case for marketing automation. For obvious reasons, I'm excited to see the discussion, but it often takes an interesting turn. The way in which people often attempt to measure it is in either efficiency gains, or revenue gains - when compared with a manual process for marketing in the same way.

This is the comparison I see a challenge with, and viewed in that light, it will be hard to see the level of value that is being seen today by the best marketers.

If you look at what marketing automation does in terms of business transformation, it is insufficient to characterize it in terms of simply just an efficiency gain, or a revenue gain. It changes the way that we, as B2B marketing organizations, are able to interact with prospects, and opens up new avenues of prospect understanding and prospect communication that simply would not have been viable without marketing automation.

A comparison is the transition from film to digital cameras. If you look at what is possible with film cameras, in terms of photo sharing, digital editing, virtually unlimited photo storage, and the social media use of photos, it is clear that digital cameras present an entirely new way of interacting with images. If contemplated from a framework of film photography, you might look at something like sharing a photo to Facebook and think of digital cameras as offering an efficiency gain; it’s possible with film, you just snap the photo, develop it, scan it, save it to a file, and then upload it. Much less “efficient” but still possible.

However, this misses the point. These things are not simply spectrums of efficiency or revenue, as there is a certain point at which the task would simply not be done.

If you look at the business process that B2B marketers using marketing automation are working to enable, it has a similar challenge. A simple way of looking at it is that we are seeking to:

a) Understand prospective buyers through reading their digital body language

b) Communicate with them accordingly, either through lead nurturing when they are early in their buying process, or through sales engagement if they are later in their buying process

The challenge with making a direct comparison between marketing as enabled and automated with today’s marketing automation software platforms, and marketing without using automation is that the level of buyer understanding and engagement being sought is simply not attainable without automation in any practical way.

To put the marketing situation in context, using marketing automation, we are attempting to deliver the right message to the right buyer at the right time. This means that we might use digital body language to understand the buyer’s role in the buying process (technical evaluator vs economic buyer), we might seek to understand where they are in their buying cycle (awareness/education vs vendor discovery vs solution validation), and we might attempt to time a message a week after they last engaged with us in order to remain top of mind.

Building this with outbound, batch and blast marketing solutions leads to a fundamental problem. Even with this simple version of buyer understanding and message personalization, the level of personalization required quickly moves you from a single communication per month, of perhaps 9000 recipients, to 36 individual communications, each only going to 250 people. On top of this, the lack of built-in awareness of buyers’ digital body language would mean that you had 36 individual segments to select, based on an off-line analysis of the prospect’s behavior.

This leaves us in a similar comparison to the digital vs film photography example. Much as sharing photos on Facebook is theoretically possible using film photography, but in practical terms virtually impossible, marketing in a way that understands and responds to buyers’ digital body language is, in any practical terms, impossible without marketing automation software. You must compare one overall approach with another, and understand it in aggregate.

So, when compared in aggregate, it is tempting to come back to the argument that it only makes sense in terms of a revenue gain or a cost decrease. This is not altogether false, but must be understood in context of your overall market. As it is not possible to truly understand and respond to the unique buying process of each of your buyers without a marketing automation solution, the comparison must now be understood in the context of the competitive landscape. If your competition is understanding and engaging the prospective buyers in your industry based on their individual buying processes, while you are not, they will have access to revenue that you simply will not have access to.

Framing the argument in terms of marketing automation allowing an increase in the efficiency, or the output of an existing revenue generating process is ignoring the fact that marketing automation allows a fundamental, and much needed, change to the revenue generation process itself.