Marketing Automation Strategy

Facebook and how people interact with it is changing.  

As far as marketing is concerned, I’ve been comparing it to the Wild West.  Anything goes, but truthfully I hope that changes sooner than later because there is so much potential.  Here are my recommendations for how to use Facebook for personal and business use based on my personal and professional experience.

FOR PERSONAL USE

I signed up for my Facebook account back in 2004 while I was a freshmen at UW-Whitewater.  Back then the name of the game was to have as many friends as possible and post as many pictures as possible.  We likely spent more time on that site than all other sites we were visiting combined.  

Now, many people grumble that Facebook is dying and it’s become irrelevant.  It’s just a bunch of people shit posting, looking up people they don’t know, following their exes, complaining about politics and seeing pictures of babies (and we’re not sure of who the parents are..or how we know them).  In the past few years, there have been times where I’ve been on Facebook and just felt not good afterwards at everything I was seeing.  

I don’t feel that way at the moment, though.  I’ve always described Facebook to friends, family and clients as the ultimate personal space.  To do so, you have to be selective about your friends and interests.  

Choose your friends wisely. If you’re friends with everyone, you’re friends with no one.  Unless you know the person on some kind of personal basis or at a minimum have met them in person, you shouldn’t be friends with them on Facebook (and I admit I didn’t always follow this advice).  This isn’t the easiest thing and I didn’t enjoy defriending people (we’ve all been on both sides) but if I haven’t seen you in 10 years or I pass you in public and you look right through me…well come on.  Neither one of us have any business seeing your most recent vacation photos…  

Same with your interests.  If you follow everything in the world, your mini feed is just a bunch of junk that likely won’t be honed in.  For me, I follow the Milwaukee Bucks, TMJ4, my favorite Mexican restaurant, Interpol and The Killers (my favorite bands) and some Miami Vice fan pages (because I really like that show).

You can also tighten your ad preferences.  If you don’t want ads, then go into your settings and say so.  I personally don’t mind Facebook following my web activity because they can present me relevant offers for products or services I’m interested in.  

^ As a result, when I login to Facebook, I see pictures of my nieces & nephews and good friends from college (because it gets harder and harder as the years go by), Giannis dunking on the competition, what the weather is going to be for the day and other local news, specials for Taco night, deals for The Killers at Summerfest and pictures of Don Johnson brooding in his Ferrari Daytona.  Why would I want to go anywhere else?  (Seriously)

Consider tightening up how you use Facebook and I bet you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how relevant the site has become for you again.

FOR BUSINESS USE

I also sell social media services to my clients.  In the beginning, it was largely based on having a policy in place for how employees were expected to use the platform and posting all about culture.  Then, it became about having posts everyday that pushed your offerings while running a like ad to get as many followers as possible.  You know what?  The same thing happened.  It all became just a bunch of noise.  The only people liking or sharing were employees…and it was because they were told to by their superiors or marketing department.  

Now, our goal for our clients is to make it much more relevant.  The strategies are four fold:

No policies in place.  If you have to control exactly how people use your business’s facebook page, it’s likely going to throw cold water on it… and the posts will be met as such…cold as ice.  Get a few administrators access to your account and encourage them to post photos of what the company is up to.  Give them guidelines, but don’t micromanage the message.  Worst case scenario you can always delete or edit a post.  

Showcase your product or service IN ACTION.  The caps are the key.  People connect with other people, so showing what you offer in the present tense along with it’s features and benefits are key.  You can count on some additional likes or reshares from the people that know the people you are focusing on.  This is a great way to grow organically and people will love the story aspect.  Pro tip: Videos under 30 seconds with sub titles are all the rage back home.

Limit your posts.  Ever notice that US Presidents seem to disappear from the spotlight after 4 or 8 years in office?  That’s because people get fatigued by seeing so much information about them everyday.  It’s also the reason why people start to miss them in the future.  Creating demand involves not being too available.   Consider limiting your posts to once or twice a week. The same pro tip applies: Videos!

Run super relevant ads.  Take your top products or services and put together some ads that are informative and tell a good story.  Put these ads in front of targeted audiences that need said product.  Coming full circle with the personal aspect, if people are looking online for similar things, Facebook will categorize it and give you access to their feeds (if you pay for it, of course).   My recommendation?  Start broad with the ad audiences and let the data tell the story to get them dialed in.  

There you have it…at least in my world, anyways 🙂

Have you been thinking about establishing E-mail Marketing at your company?

Assuming you have all the approvals needed, below are steps to realize that goal. No more excuses!

1 – Sign up for a Mail Chimp Account
There are many E-mail and/or Marketing Automation platforms out there. If budget is an issue, you can do everything you need to for $50.00 per month with MailChimp. Signing up takes about 1 minute and the interface is extremely intuitive and easy to use.

2 – Integrate Mail Chimp with your web provider
Assuming you are using WordPress or Sqaurespace, integrating to your website shouldn’t take you more than an hour. After logging in to Mailchimp, click on your name and Connected Sites. Mailchimp will walk you through how to integrate, but most of the time it’s just logging into your web portal from Mailchimp to do the authorization.

Mailchimp Login Screen

3 – Create Lists that populate from your web form submissions
After you’ve integrated your website, you can create lists in Mailchimp that correspond to them. To do so, stay in Mailchimp and create the lists you want to use. Afterwards, login to your website and select your forms. There should be an option to send the contacts directly over to your Mailchimp list. The catch? You’ll have to make sure the fields all line up accordingly…

Integrating with Sqaurespace

4 – Create Simple E-mail Templates for a Thank You E-mail and a follow-up E-mail
Now you’re ready to create the actual e-mails and keep it simple! To get started, create a Thank You e-mail that does just that and mentions someone will be in touch within 24 hours. Include links back to your site and social media pages. Create an additional one that asks how their experience with the company was with a link back to your website or google to post a review.

Template Creation

If you can get a graphic designer or find some budget to hire a professional, great!

Although to get started, an administrator should be able to whip up some nice out of the box templates. All of them are responsive and guide you on how to create.

5 – Create automated campaigns
Finally, go to the campaign function and create an automated one. Again, it’s pretty intuitive, but the entry point should be, “immediately after a subscriber enters list.” Then select the Thank You e-mail template. Create another step that sends the Follow-up e-mail 30 days later.

…and that’s it! Afterwards, launch and monitor activity. I always say we don’t have to be perfect to get started. Now that you’re up and running, you can fine-tune everything, enhance templates and add in more steps.

This is just the basics. Our team has been around the block more than a few times on this, so holler if you need some help!

Marketing Cloud or Pardot?

Salesforce has two amazing Marketing Automation platforms on their hands. Marketing Cloud (formerly Exact Target) and Pardot. It can be difficult for a company to pick which one is right for them. Salesforce Account Executives will certainly tell you, but below is an inside scoop from someone who has worked at multiple agencies and saw the Pro’s and Con’s of both.

Number of Contacts
Pardot generally starts by offering 10,000 contacts and goes up from there. It can handle those 10,000 with ease. Once you get into the 100,000’s, the system will slow down with the platform taking longer to load screens and perform certain functions. It generally won’t affect your users experience, but it can be frustrating for your internal marketing team or administrator to get things done.

Marketing Cloud really has no limit when it comes to contacts. I’ve always told clients one of the main differentiators between the two is that if you’re looking to send tons of e-mail blasts and have 100,000’s of contacts, Marketing Cloud does it with ease. The user interface won’t miss a beat even if you add in a few hundred thousand more…

The winner: Marketing Cloud

Segmentation Ability
Pardot has a feature known as dynamic segmentation, which allows you to automatically segment your main contact list by setting If/Then statements. It works incredibly well and only takes a few seconds to setup. When synced with CRM, it will pull across all objects (contact, lead, account, etc) with ease.

Pardot’s Dynamic Segmentation

Marketing Cloud has what is known as data extensions, which allow you to carve up your main contact list with ease. There is a catch, though. If you’re synced with CRM, it only segments off individual objects, so unless your data is flat, you will likely run into trouble. You can write SQL tables to do so, but it will require someone with coding knowledge on your staff or selected partner. There is a feature called Audience builder that mimics some of the Pardot automation, but it’s very expensive.

Marketing Cloud’s Audience Builder

The winner: Pardot

General Automation Functionality
Pardot has a great looking interface that offers an outline view of all functionality. Under the Marketing tab, you can easily find all of its features, whether it be automation rules, dynamic segmentation, creating e-mail templates, adjusting the scoring model, etc. It’s very intuitive and your Marketing Administrator won’t be intimidated when logging in. Campaign creation is mainly done through what is known as engagement studio. It looks good and works very well.

Pardot’s Engagement Studio

Marketing Cloud also has a good looking interface, but you have to scroll across multiple studio’s, including E-mail, Advertising, CloudPages, Social, etc (assuming you’ve purchased them all). Each has it own admin panel that needs to be setup and while they are very powerful individually, they don’t always tie together so well. Many features that you would assume are drag and drop still require a fair amount of coding behind the scenes. Campaign creation is done through whats known as Journey Builder and while it looks a little different, it works mostly the same as Pardot’s engagement studio.

Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder

The winner: Pardot

Attribution
Attribution is a hot topic among Marketing departments as they try to tie Return on Investment back to their multiple campaigns across social, web, e-mail, PPC, etc. Pardot has some ability to do so as it relates to e-mails, landing pages and to some extent, social. It utilizes what is known as campaigns as the entry point. These work extremely well, but for true attribution, you need to log all touchpoints. It’s doable if you get creative with salesforce campaigns, but it’s not exactly plug and play.

Marketing Cloud does a nice job of plugging in all their studios to the major advertising mediums. In most cases, you can integrate directly with your Google Adwords Campaign, your Facebook campaign and other web efforts. If your segmentation is setup correctly, getting individual reports for how each campaign performed is very realistic. Although, you’ll still have to use salesforce campaigns and use salesforce CRM to get the master report…

The winner: Marketing Cloud

Social Media
Pardot has a basic social feature that allows you to integrate to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. You can then schedule posts directly from the platform and track which of your prospects have interacted with your posts. It’s actually a very cool feature, but is somewhat clunky. For example, it doesn’t fetch previews, so you have to just trust the url and images are all going to look how you want them when you post.

Marketing Cloud is much more advanced. You can integrate with over 10 social media platforms and do the same scheduling/posting as Pardot, but it’s much better (and fetches). You can also automate responses, alert certain internal stakeholders of activity and do what’s known as social listening. It’s very powerful. The catch? It doesn’t currently integrate with your E-mail and Advertising audiences.

The winner: Marketing Cloud

Lead Scoring:
Lead Scoring is a powerful way to qualify leads. Pardot has an out of the box scoring model that can be tailored to an organization.

Marketing Cloud has no scoring model. Salesforce often sells companies both platforms. Marketing Cloud handles the bulk of the promotions, e-mail blasts, etc and then a small portion of that is taken and put into Pardot for lead scoring. I’m not a fan of it, but some companies have made it work for them.

The winner: Pardot

Template Creation:
Both platforms offer the ability to create e-mails, landing pages and forms. They look a little different, but they both offer flexibility and drag/drop features.

Template creation in Pardot

Template creation in Marketing Cloud

The winner: Tie

Integrations:
Pardot has many out of the box integrations to all sorts of platforms. It can be customized to an extent, but you need permissions from the company. As it relates to CRM, I’ve always described it like flipping a light switch. It’s very easy.

Marketing Cloud is wide open. Through their SOAP and REST API’s, you can custom build pretty anything you want if you have the ideas, time and resources. Likely goes without saying, but you’ll need people who are well versed in Salesforce coding to be able to do so. As it relates to CRM, it’s doable, but slightly more complicated than Pardot.

The winner: Marketing Cloud

Platform Standup:
Salesforce encourages you to utilize a Marketing Agency to help with the platform standpoint. Most agencies have a checklist or Quick Start as they are known, that they can walk you through. Pardot can take them anywhere between one week and one month for the initial standup depending on time/resources limitations. Much of this is training and overviews of how the platform works, which because it’s so intuitive usually goes very well. It usually requires a short term partner.

Marketing Cloud is usually more complex.

Many discussions need to be had around how data is structured and how the org needs to be setup. This can take weeks or months depending on how organized both parties are. After that, the demo’s and setup usually go fine, but because it’s not as intuitive it takes longer to complete the hand-off and likely requires a long term partner.

Tying it all together:
It largely depends on your company’s size and what you’re looking for. If you’re a small business, Pardot is a better match and price for you. If you’re mid-size and up, Marketing Cloud may offer the functionality you need, especially if you’re looking to sends tons of e-mails on a daily basis as well as bring an attribution model to your company. Just be prepared for a longer and more complex build…

If you’ve got a similar project or need further guidance, our team has been around the block more than a few times. Give us a shout!

Social media has become an integral part of our life, both personally and professionally.

This is especially true for business owners looking to connect with customers and potential customers.  Social Media and Marketing Automation are stronger together.  Having a strategy is important, so that’s the first step.  You should identify an objective for the project and ask yourself how it will benefit the organization.  Part of that should be determining how that fits into a greater marketing automation process.  Here are 5 ways to do that:

1 – Schedule posts
Platforms such as Pardot, Marketo, Hubspot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud all allow you to schedule social media posts in advance, which is a huge time saver.

When selecting a marketing automation platform consider that Pardot and Marketo have a more simple interface.  Hubspot and especially Salesforce Marketing Cloud have advanced features that go pretty in depth with their capabilities.

Don’t forget about the content, either.  You should be consistent with your schedule.  Perhaps every Monday is a new blog highlighting a service, new pictures uploaded for Throwback Thursday and Fridays reserved for highlighting the community or company culture.

2 – Score or rate your posts
The platforms give you a huge opportunity to take your social media efforts to the next level.  Pardot, Marketo and Hubspot come with a scoring model that allows you to rank your prospect’s activity, which includes social posts.  When you identify them through a form submit or an e-mail send, you can cookie them (which just means you’re tracking them).

You can place a higher emphasis on your business related posts and a lower emphasis on the more fun posts.  Include this in a greater scoring model that includes web forms, e-mail clicks, webpage visits, etc and you can start to tie back ROI to your social media efforts.

You’ll look like a rock star within your organization, too.

3 – Re-target on Facebook
Giving some much needed love to MailChimp.  Until recently, it was mostly known as an e-mail tool.  They’ve really upped their game by adding on some automation elements and the ability to re-target on Facebook.

When a person fills out a form on your website, they enter into a list in MailChimp, where you can track their activity and send e-mails.  Now, it will also put advertisements up on Facebook when that person logs on to the account, yet another way to touch them.

Hubspot and Marketo have similar features.  In both cases, you’ll still need to create the advertisements in Facebook.

4 – Include links on emails
Every platform has the ability to add social media icons to the bottom of your e-mail templates.  While this is very common on web pages, you’d be amazed at how many companies still don’t include them on e-mails.

It’s an easy way to get your existing contact database to also follow you on social media.  Also, you don’t have to pay anything for the likes and follows.

5 – Automate replies on social media
Salesforce Marketing Cloud reigns supreme in this last category.  Their social studio features allow you to monitor posts across all of your platforms.  In addition, you can do what’s known as social listening and search for key words or competitors that you want to track.

In both cases, you can create what is known as a macro that will automatically respond to posts.  Use it to handle critical PR issues immediately, thank people for their interest and attract people away from your competitors when they drop the ball.

Learn more about that here: https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/social-media-marketing/

Marketing Automation isn’t so much a tool as it is a set of different technologies and processes.

It started when companies were onboarding commercial processes through a CRM system. As a result, among the streamlined processes was filling sales people’s pipelines with leads. Before this, the number one request of Marketing Departments was “Give me leads! Any of them!” They were hungry. Now they are to a point where they are actually overwhelmed. They are now saying “Enough!” Only give me the best leads that are ready to buy”. The tension between Sales and Marketing lives on.

So what is Marketing Automation exactly? Many people think it’s a platform that sends emails out and tracks their open/click rates. Not quite.

It’s a collection of technologies that allows companies to streamline, automate and measure marketing tasks and workflows. Doing so increases operational efficiency and helps firms grow revenue faster. There are three components:

1. A Central Marketing Database: A place for all of your marketing data (think of it as the brain). A place where you can score and rank the relevancies of each lead and put them into groups. A place where you can gather insights into the conversations that took place with them.
2. An Engagement Engine: A canvas where you can interact with the database (think of it as the legs). A place to send information and relevant content to your contacts.
3. An Advanced Internal Team: Not so much technology as it is automation of internal marketing processes and fuller understanding of what a platform can do (think of it as the heart). This increase’s marketer’s ability to deliver relevant content to relevant individuals and arrange their sales team’s leads based on priorities. It’s also the human element.

To get started, look at the following platforms such as, Eloqua, ExactTarget, Pardot, Marketo, Hubspot and others.

MAKE YOUR SALES TEAMS CHAMPIONS OF THE OPPORTUNITIES YOU GIVE THEM. (Cham-pi-on/CHampeen/verb 1. Support the cause of; fight for, defend)

As 2018 roars on, the idea of a Digital Transformation strategy isn’t one that needs convincing. Companies believe in the power of Marketing Automation.

A few years ago I would have wrote about the definitions of those and how to get started. Now? Not needed as much.

What companies are now hungry for is a strategy that ties those elements together. Components such as SEM, PPC, Email Marketing, Web Personalisation, Branding, etc.

I like military metaphors. In any type of operation, there will be various things available. Soldiers, Vehicles, Air Support and other equipment. It’s crucial for any operation, but you know what else is too? A strategy that enables those components at a tactical level. If they aren’t all combined for a common goal and interconnected, any military exercise will fail. When do the troops go in? Before or after air support? Are they travelling via the vehicles or foot? If the latter, why are there vehicles? What is their goal and how long will they be there? Do they have enough food for the duration? The list could go on…but there needs to be a strategy that gives direction for the why and how.

Digital Marketing is the same way. Here are Five reasons you need a Digital Marketing strategy:

1 – One to One Marketing is all the rage (and always will be).
The most powerful marketing is one to one marketing. If you can speak to someone direct, that will resonate more than anything else. You’ll receive some kind of partnership as a reward. To do that right, you need the various components described above.

2 – Companies have able bodies, but not Thought Leadership.
I find it interesting that at this point in time everyone is the next marketing genius (myself included..). Companies aren’t looking for bodies or to outsource for this kind of work. They are looking to train their resources. The people who know what they are doing in this space aren’t working at a private company. They are either on their own or at a marketing services agency, which is how the wheel spins for them. They give their experience and get more in the process, which keeps companies after them.

3 – If people don’t know the why, they won’t care about the how.
Goes back to my military example. Yes – your company likely has an email platform. It likely has some web personalization and someone that can generate content. Why are you doing it, though? Is there a roadmap that spells out a goal, as well as the items needed to have a chance at being successful? Do sales know what to do once a lead is ready? Disconnected elements do more harm then good and start competing with each other. Trust me…that’s a mess you don’t want to deal with.

4 – … because it doesn’t have to be only about demand gen.
I’ve spent a lot of time in B2B markets and the normal conversation is to use Digital Marketing to generate leads. I’m a big believer in it, but it doesn’t have to only be that. Companies should consider tracking their brand awareness, too.

Get creative with the why.

5 – Guts versus Glory.
The best professionals aren’t doing this for individual companies. They are a unique breed. The right strategy takes guts and bold risk taking. The roller coaster that comes with that (The glory aspect) isn’t something most people want to stomach. Who can blame them? You likely don’t have that person on staff, though (if you do, let them loose on idea generation!)

So there you have it. There is no better time to be in marketing than now! No longer are we viewed as tactical doer’s. We’re now the strategic dreamers that can move organization’s forward. How awesome is that?

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