1. Best Alignment of Marketing and Sales in Europe
   AND
2. Best European Lead Scoring Program

All our fingers are crossed for May 16 at Eloqua Experience in London, where the winners will be announced. But, as Concur’s Chris Porreca told us, “Win or not, just being among the finalists in two out of the three categories we entered—and having the opportunity to tell our story at Eloqua Experience—is simply awesome!”

Register now

Date:
Thursday, April 26, 2012

Time:
8:30 AM to 4:30 PM
followed by Happy Hour & Networking until 6 pm

Place:
The Fairmont San Francisco
950 Mason Street
San Francisco, CA 94108

The Day’s Agenda:

8:30 AM- 12:00 PM: “Eloqua on Eloqua” Topics & Tips ( for Eloqua customers)

• Get a preview of what’s new, from Eloqua’s Product Development Team
• Attend a breakout session to discuss and learn more about reporting and metrics, using social media  to drive demand, or AppCloud
• Learn more about Eloqua’s special “E10 update”

12:00 PM – 1:30 PM: Networking lunch – everyone is invited!

1:15 PM – 4:45 PM: Best Practices (open to all marketers)

• Hear a marketing strategy in action overview from Dell
• Attend a best practices session on ways to effectively link your social presence to your demand generation efforts
• See from DocuSign how easy it is to leverage social media tools
• Participate in breakout sessions that give you the chance to interact with a small group of like-minded people

4:45 PM – 6:00 PM:  Networking Happy Hour

Don’t miss it: register right now.

Quick new ways to use content:

• Slideshare
• Integrate tweets in campaigns
• Info graphics
• LinkedIn share in campaigns

Thoughts on lead nurturing:

• Getting content ready/classifying content by buying stage
• Implementing lead scoring
• Segments you can’t really nurture, such as higher level executives
• Using persona-based campaigning
• Integrating with the CRM

The Cloud and more:

• Tweets in Prospect Profiler
• Cloud apps and Eloqua 10
• “Share” on campaigns
• “Tweet this” in campaigns
• Using social media for feedback – CVENT
• Google Plus
• Campaigns incorporating all forms of media
• 10 ways to use Facebook
• Content builds community

Check out the other dates & locations on the tour.
If you’ll be in the Bay Area on Thursday, April 26, register for the San Francisco Road to Revenue stop, co-sponsored by DemandGen and Demandbase!

Today’s typical demand generation process:

• Drive prospects to website landing pages (powered by marketing automation).
• Get prospects to fill out a long form, in exchange for a content offer or asset.
• Send out nurturing emails to engage prospects and score leads until they are sales-ready.

The World Has Changed

As B2B marketers, however, you now need to deal with:

• A proliferation of marketing channels: Your prospects are everywhere, and you need to engage and convert them, wherever they are.
• Your prospects are not paying attention: You need new engagement tactics. You also need to personalize your content, offers and messages, all the way down to the individual.
• Too many silos/channel specific systems: From marketing automation to CMS, partner emails to Facebook, display ads to mobile, you need to run campaigns across more channels, while reusing campaign assets, to maximize resources & lower costs.

Introducing Kwanzoo

We provide an entirely new approach to demand generation, using smart, interactive marketing and ad units, with in-banner lead forms, polls, mini surveys and social promotions that run across channels.

Capture and nurture leads everywhere. No landing pages needed! Generate up to 5 times the lead conversions directly on website, paid media, social, partner and mobile placements! Bring rich media into email too, and increase email engagement and conversions by 30% or more.

 (Click graphic to enlarge)

Generate more qualified leads at the Top of the Funnel:

• Capture more leads with in-banner lead forms
• Personalize messages using IP and relationship data
• Deliver the right message using A/B testing
• Engage users everywhere, from email to mobile

Nurture leads faster in the Mid and Lower Funnel:

• Segment prospects with polls and surveys
• Augment profiles in marketing automation or CRM
• Nurture leads faster across channels (not just emails)

Kwanzoo integrates with Eloqua, Marketo, and Salesforce, and is pleased to be working with DemandGen to bring you the latest innovations in multi-channel demand generation.

Marketing Automation (MA) can help an organization achieve a lot of great things. In fact, I have heard people say MA solutions can do everything except make toast.  One of the most significant ways in which MA helps an organization is driving more revenue. After all, at the end of the day, revenue is what matters.  Marketing automation has a lot of other benefits that are related to increased revenue when used properly (like any powerful tool — it must be used properly).  But the most strategic and significant reason is revenue.

Take a look at a recent Sirius Decision graphic on the ROI with and without MA. Pretty compelling.

I mentioned a few other reasons to implement MA.  Here are the top 3:

1. Predictable revenue — this is a biggie, perhaps the most significant reason to use a marketing automation solution.  All organizations needs to make money and being able to predict revenue and having confidence in those predictions enables organizations to execute operations efficiently.  This is hugely important to public companies that must provide projections to Wall Street, but just as important to smaller businesses so they can make informed decisions about adjusting spend or  other strategic maneuvers.

2. Higher average deal size — another great advantage of using a MA platform. Obviously, the higher the average deal size, the better.  Using a MA platform helps nurture a buyer, showing significant value of the “product” through various stages of the sales funnel.  The higher the perceived value of a “product” the less a purchasing decision is based on cost and as a result, average deal size is generally higher.

3.  Sales efficiency — is a result of the automated, lead scoring and nurturing capabilities of marketing automation platforms. The advantages of having a clearly defined lead scoring process (jointly developed and agreed upon by sales and marketing of course) enables definitive action for sales.  Once a lead reaches a certain stage — there is no gray area as to who owns what. Another way that sales becomes more efficient when lead nurturing is in place.  This allows sales to focus only on the opportunities that are ready for attention and have exhibited the pre-determined buying signals.  Sales people close deals — that is what they are paid for.  An effective nurturing program enables sales to focus on closing deals as opposed to pushing prospective buyers through the funnel.

Without a doubt, strategic planning and clearly defined business processes must be in place for any marketing automation solution to be effective. However, when implemented properly, get ready to reap the benefits of MA and drive more revenue.

Follow Erika Goldwater on Twitter: @erikawg

Most B2B marketers in the enterprise space are handed the responsibility for improving the quality of their leads, as well as hitting an MQL quota. After all the work of campaign development, in the end “success” usually boils down to getting a targeted campaign prospect to submit a form. Here are some tips to make those forms more effective.

Tip #1: Match your forms to the value of your content.

We all know that form conversion isn’t only about the number of questions you are asking. Knowing the value of the content and where the prospect is in the buying process helps inform your choices about:

• Whether you should be asking any questions at this stage
• What questions are most useful for profiling at this stage
• What questions are most likely to be answered at this stage
• What questions may be off-putting

Key tip: Use techniques such as buyer personas, data segmentation analysis, even focus groups or questionnaires to help define and refine the questions that you should be asking at each stage of the buying cycle.

Tip #2: Audit your existing website forms.

The largest marketing channel consistently delivering leads to Sales is usually the company website, but B2B marketers typically spend the least amount of time making sure the website forms are in alignment with their assigned verticals/products/solutions. Time and again marketers develop landing page after landing page to promote assets for their campaigns, duplicating efforts and complicating management.  Take some time to review your website landing page forms to make sure:

• They match the value of your content
• Each form is functioning correctly (for example, confirm that form submits are getting through to the assigned campaign in the company’s CRM with all the data showing up correctly)
• Localized versions are in alignment, if you are responsible for multi-language campaigns/regions

Key tip: Allot time to align corporate website landing pages and forms as viable avenues to receive campaign traffic. Use query string parameters to pass along your other campaign IDs to that form, in addition to the default campaign ID for the website traffic. This approach allows you to utilize the same landing page and form for your campaigns and still be able to distinguish the campaign source for each form submit.

Tip #3: Continually review and update your forms for greatest effectiveness.

Both newly hired B2B marketers and those already pounding the pavement of their target audiences should take some time to review all the forms at least once a year, if not once a quarter, to:

• Align the forms and the content surrounding them with all of the current/planned marketing campaigns
• Update the questions and select lists as needed to ensure that they align with the company’s lead scoring system
• Address data quality issues by initiating/updating a data washing program or process
• Remove form questions that are not critical to improving conversion rates, and that you may be able to have answered by a third-party data appending service

Key tip: Sending the right communications at the right time to a target set of prospects requires an established cadence around form maintenance and data quality. Utilizing a third-party data appending service, such as the Demandbase Real Time ID for Forms, can alleviate some of this burden and free up valuable time while also enhancing your segmentation capabilities.

Tip #4: Don’t make your known prospects fill out forms again.

Marketers in the B2B space generally equate “form submit” with “MQL,” but this doesn’t mean that every individual has to actually fill out a form! Don’t you find it annoying when you have already filled out a form to get to a white paper, and then are forced to answer all the same questions again for the next offer from that company?

Once you have data on a prospect, don’t present the same questions again for your follow-up offer. (One exception is when you can prefill known fields during progressive profiling.)

Key tip: Use a blind form submit for follow-up offers. You’ll find it will improve your MQL numbers as well as enhance your segmentation process.

Ultimately, the most effective forms are the ones that are informative for you and painless for your prospect.

There’s still time to register for our joint webinar coming up on March 13 on how to convert more leads using improved web form strategy.

Landing Page Optimization Fundamentals. . .
and why the home page might be more important to generate leads

Landing page optimization (LPO) is a booming business, in both B2B and B2C. There are several outstanding firms, including  SiteTuners and Marketing Experiments, that specialize in helping their customers implement and exhaustively test changes to their pages, some minute and some major, that will ultimately help them to increase conversions.

Some common best practices you will hear with regard to LPO include:

Deliver What They Expect
If the landing page does not match the offer that the browser clicked on, you will lose them. For example, if you post an ad for a case study, but the link in the ad points to your home page, you are much less likely to convert the visitor … even if you think the link to the case study is very clear and obvious on your home page.

Clear Offer/Call to Action
If the offer is for a white paper, make sure the content on the landing page talks about the white paper … not who your company is and what you do. The white paper offer needs to be the focal point of the landing page. If you pull a “bait and switch” they will not convert.

Content Above the Fold
Images can add compelling context to a landing page. However, if those images dominate the page and push the actual text of the offer and/or form to below the “fold” of the page (requiring the browser to scroll down) then there could be an impact on conversions.

Focus On Payoff
Remind people what they get in exchange for their contact information, and why they will benefit from it.

Test, Test, Test
Testing has always seemed like eating your vegetables when you were a kid. It’s that thing that we all know we should be doing because it is “good for you” but is hard to execute. This is, of course, where the leading optimization firms excel. They will relentlessly test their suggestions to determine the combinations that drive conversions, and sometimes find that the winning pages do not adhere to any best practices whatsoever! That’s why you test. Every use case is different.

Shorten Your Forms
The single most common piece of advice you will get is to shorten your forms, and that has been the topic of other recent posts, so I will not talk too much more about them. I’ll just refer you to the posts HERE  and HERE.

Don’t Stop There
There is more to increasing conversions than shorter forms and optimizing landing pages. Consider the performance of a two-step conversion funnel. Step one is the home page, step two is the offer page. In this first chart, out of an initial 5000 home page visitors, 250 of them find and click on a white page offer that is interesting to them (5% of the total home page visitors).

Out of that 250 clicks, 10 visitors fill out a form and convert to leads, resulting in a very average 4% conversion rate on that offer page.

Now consider landing page optimization. By making some adjustments and doing some tests on the landing page according to some of the most common best practices (mentioned above) a 2% boost in conversion rates on the offer page would increase conversions by 50% (15 leads vs. 10 leads).

But what would the impact be if we increased the number of clicks from the home page to the offer page? What would happen if we could boost the conversion from home page to offer by 2% as well, resulting in an additional 100 visitors hitting the offer page?

We would boost total conversions by another 6 leads, a 40% increase in total leads produced over landing page optimization alone.
Home Page Optimization
The inference is obvious … we need to drive more of our traffic through our home pages and into the meat of the website, where visitors are more likely to convert to leads. Take a close look at your home page. How much space is consumed by “one-size-fits-all” descriptions of your company, and how much of it is dedicated to offers designed to entice your top prospects to identify themselves and become leads?

Today’s post is written by guest blogger Shari Johnston, Demandbase

 
You have the perfect lead bait, you have carefully crafted your compelling marketing copy, and laid out your webpage, now onto the form design…

The guide below is your at-a-glance infographic for pulling together your form design for optimal performance in no time!

Simple changes outlined in our best practices can make some significant difference to your conversion rate and data integrity. By using these simple design elements you can improve your users experience, data quality and…. get more leads.

JOB TITLE:  Best practices state to label this field job title to avoid getting “Mr. and Mrs.” values. Avoid this data issue from the start by labeling the field clearly.

BUSINESS EMAIL: Encourage your prospects to include their business address and avoid your email campaigns getting sent to unattended web mail accounts.

CAPTURE KEY PROFILE DATA: This being the most involved and time consuming portion of form design, which fields should I ask for? Well we all know we will get more leads by using as few fields as possible, but internally we need that critical data sales is screaming for. Keep everyone happy and offer a shorter form and capture the data behind the scenes. Best of both worlds!

5 RECOMMENDED FORM FIELDS: By capturing the critical data behind the scenes, we recommend you stick with these 5 form fields (First Name, Last Name, Job Title, Business Email, and Company) that are key personal data attributes that are needed.

COMPANY AUTOCOMPLETE: Using a company autocomplete widget allows for data accuracy by avoiding misspellings and normalizes company name treatments making account management in your MAS and CRM clean and easy. And it makes it easier on your prospect to boot!

CALL TO ACTION BUTTON: Match the action of your CTA button to the user experience. This helps engage your user and improve conversion. Try “Register” or “Download”  or “RSVP” depending on the context of your form.

Keep this infographic handy for the next time your field marketing team needs you to build that critical form yesterday; you will be prepared!

First, stop thinking about segments and start thinking about individuals: Maria. If we want to run a campaign to Maria, what fields in the database and what values in the database would make up Maria’s persona?

Take another look at our example of Maria’s buyer persona. In the sidebar, we’ve identified some of the database fields and their values that we’ll use to create our “Maria.” In your case, you’ve got to identify what fields and what values are appropriate for your personas, then create those personas within your database.

Fields and Field Values

To “operationalize” your personas, you need to have structured records with the appropriate fields in both your marketing automation (MA) and CRM systems. For example, you will no doubt want a segment in your database that is targeted to prospects or non-customers, so you probably need or already have a field called type. The possible values for the field type might be customer, prospect, partner, vendor, competitor, employee, and so on.  Depending on your industry and type of business, you might have more specific values for type.

This illustration shows the database fields that we have decided to associate with Maria.

Maria is an ideal buyer for our mortgage product, and because we took the time to develop the buyer persona for Maria, we have gotten to know her pretty well! So it is fairly easy to establish the values that our Maria will have in these six key fields. It’s all about her fitness for our product.

Role: Loan Processor

Maria is a loan processor, so that is her role in the business. We need to know this so that our messages to her are appropriate for her role.

Type: Not equal to customer, *prospect*

When we target Maria as a prospect, we use this field to exclude customers from the campaign.

Number of offices: >2

Our ideal customer is a mortgage business which has at least two offices. Anything smaller is not a good fit for our product. Therefore, Maria’s business has more than two offices. Perhaps for another purpose you would create “Maggie,” another persona representing a loan processor who is a “one-man shop.”  But Maria is the persona of a loan processor who works within the right size company. If your Number of Offices field has multiple ranges for offices, you’ll likely use filters in your marketing automation system to include all the appropriate ranges.

Loans per month: >5

If a mortgage business is doing fewer than five loans a month, it’s not a good prospect for our product. Therefore, Maria’s business does more than five loans per month. The same thinking applies here as applies to the Number of Offices field above.

Number of loan officers: >5

If the business has fewer than five loan officers, it’s too small for our product. Therefore, Maria’s business has more than five loan officers.  For segmentation, the Number of Offices field is used and would include all ranges above 5.

Region: Segment X

In the mortgage industry, regulatory issues differ greatly across the country. Therefore we have established certain regions that are the best fit for our product, and Segment X is one of them. So Maria’s business is located in Segment X. If your marketing needs require it, you might also have “Martha,” who could be Maria’s peer persona in Region Y, “Magda” in Region Z, and so on.

It’s critical that your marketing automation system and your CRM are in parity with regard to fields and field values. Fields and field ranges in your CRM should directly line up with the fields in your MA system. That way if a salesperson is capturing or changing that information, the MA system and CRM remain in sync with one another.

Targeting with Personas

Take another look at our two persona examples.

You’ll see that the one for Gary the mortgage broker/owner includes the same field set: the only core difference is the role. Because we are distinguishing between the two personas at this detailed level, we can truly tailor messaging to the right persona. Both of these personas represent our ideal customer profile: they work at the same type of office/business, but their roles are different.

Let’s imagine we want to run a campaign for an inquiry nurture. Without personas defined, anyone who goes through this nurture campaign would get the same messaging. But now that we’ve designed our personas, we can run campaigns with messaging that speaks one-to-one with the prospect. The way to build these segments  is through contact filters.

Nurtures can be designed in one of two ways; really, it’s personal preference as to which way you choose. We can tailor emails using multiple nurture tracks, or use dynamic content through a decision rule: is this recipient in this contact filter? So we can tailor our message to the Marias in our database by establishing a contact filter specifically for her. Using Contact Field Comparison, we can set this filter to match the criteria we already established for Maria. An example of one:

Buyer personas can be helpful to marketing in a lot of ways—but persona segmentation is the ONLY way to get the depth of understanding needed for precisely targeted campaigns. The results are worth the effort, and you’ll find it a fun way to talk about your campaigns: “We have a campaign going out today to Maria!”

When you first sit down to work on persona development, it can be a little intimidating to stare at that blank sheet! To help, we’ve come up with a very useful tool for defining personas that we’ve used successfully with a number of clients. The Persona Development Tool is a template that guides you through the process of creating a buyer persona, setting up questions to help you describe your ideal buyer. It’s a basic format, allowing you to make it as simple or as complex as your needs require.

We’ve filled out a couple of examples to help you understand how to use the template. For our examples, we used the personas of a mortgage broker and a loan processor, which we used in our work with Ellie Mae—a leading developer of software for the mortgage industry.

Download an Example and a Template

We like to start by giving our imaginary person a name and supplying a (stock) photo. This really helps make this persona feel real, allowing us to more easily endow him or her with skills, experience, education, thoughts, and feelings.

The Profile Overview
In the overview, imagine that you are telling a friend about this person. Is it a man or woman? About what age? What’s his role? How does she spend her workday? Depending on your product or service, you may want to look at different kinds of attributes. The goal here is to build up a solid picture of this person that everyone can recognize.

Pain Points
What does your prospect worry about? What does she wish she could change? Be sure to create your list from the prospect’s point of view.

Key Drivers/Motivators
These are the issues that mean the most to this person: the things that are behind every decision he makes, with particular emphasis on issues relating to your product/service.

Role in the Buying Committee
Is this person the decisionmaker? An influencer? Who might influence this person?

Effective Influences
What kind of content and information is most effective in communicating persuasively with this person? Are there particular kinds of information he is most likely to want? Is any one kind of media more effective than another? Is she likely to take advantage of any particular kinds of offers?

Buying Stage Table
This simple grid makes it easy to see how your messaging needs to change based on your prospect’s stage in the buying cycle. First, you define your persona’s motivation at each stage and what questions are being asked at that point. Then, you look at the right messages and value propositions that should be communicated at that stage, and what medium is best.

Working Through the Exercise
Persona development is a fascinating exercise to do with your team. You’ll discover all kinds of new ideas and insights as you think about each facet of your buyer’s personality.

Next time, we’ll discuss using the personas you’ve created to help with database segmentation.