Using Marketing Automation Tools for Smarter Results - Marketing Watchdog Journal

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		September 2008, Issue 55

Featured Article
Using Marketing Automation Tools for Smarter Results
By Chris Parisi, Vice President, Technology, Bulldog Solutions

Four Tips and Lots of Advice

If your company is anything like ours, you are constantly trying to find the right mix of marketing and lead-generation tactics. These tactics come in all shapes and forms these days, but all likely have some of the same end goals: To make the most of your promotional efforts to capture leads, to identify your leads with the highest potential to close, to move leads further down your sales cycle. One battle-tested tactic that can do all these things efficiently and effectively is Webinars.

Let's say you've decided to embark on producing a Webinar. Here are a handful of questions you should ask yourself when defining your execution plan.

Is there a need to test your message or design? How do you know your e-mails are being delivered and, beyond that, how do you know that the appropriate message is getting to the appropriate audience?
How, when, and where will you capture your registration data? And if you are running your own Webinar, how will you reconcile the data you’ve captured on the event with your registration data?
How will the good leads bubble up to Sales? You'd likely want to segment your registrants so that you can nurture those not ready to buy and take immediate sales action on those that raised their hand and want to talk.

You can likely answer these questions in simple terms; however, the implementation and management of all of these moving parts is not always as simple. How can you manage the many moving parts efficiently and ensure that you can measure your performance?

Planning in an Agile Environment

Marketing automation technology is key to the successful production and management of a Webinar. Implemented properly, marketing automation tools provide the framework and platform needed to support your initiatives. Remember, however, that automation is only as good as the process it supports. It's therefore critical to have a fairly well-defined process to automate. The good news here is that marketing automation provides you an agile environment which can support changes on the fly and, therefore, allows you to fine-tune your process as you go.

Choosing the Right Marketing Automation Tools

The race in the marketing automation space began more than five years ago, but still continues to gain momentum today. As more and more tools join the race, deciding on a tool that will best work for you is becoming more and more difficult. The good news is that you can apply the same methodology you would use to buy any software—and there are now a lot of good technologies to choose from. In addition, most of the top tools are offered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, allowing you to keep implementation costs and time to a minimum.

I also suggest finding a tool that allows you to grow into the feature set. Why pay for all the functionality in a platform, if you know it will go unused while you tackle the basics? At Bulldog Solutions, we’ve selected Eloqua as our marketing automation tool, and have run more than 500 high-quality, multi-touch events since early 2004.

Mapping Out a Scalable Process

Once you've found the right technology, it's time to map out and implement an efficient and scalable process. Here are a few basic tips to help you run successful events:

1. Standardization Is Key

There will always be exceptions, but the more you can standardize, the better. In terms of messaging and design, your brand is your brand and hopefully doesn't change too often. That said, standardizing your e-mail design with current best practices and plug-and-play templates will save your production team valuable time and will also ensure brand protection in the way of consistency.

In addition, you should standardize your registration data. Spend some time up-front determining the information you want to capture from your leads. Standardizing your question set will help scale the production of your data capture pages and allow you to compare apples to apples when lead scoring or prioritizing your leads.

Finally, standardizing your goals is critical. How will you measure your success or failure? Define that and stick to it. You can't compare campaigns against each other if the goals and measurements keep changing. Be careful, marketing automation tools capture and report on lots of data. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose sight of the important stuff.

2. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

Once you standardize, leverage your technology by reusing templates and content. Not only will templates save you time, they will also help enforce consistency within a campaign and across multiple campaigns. The use of templates and content blocks also helps to unlock production dependencies allowing for different production resources like writers and designers to work independently on the same campaign at the same time.

3. Use Variables to Make Changes on the Fly.

Wherever possible, use variables in your e-mail promotions. Good candidates are fields such as event title, event date, speaker names, login information, etc. Variables allow you to clone over a previous event and just plug-in the information that changes from one event to the next. Aside from the time savings, variables allow you to make changes on the fly. Take it from me, things can and will change.

4. Integrate Wherever Possible.

Fair warning: Integration is challenging; however, it is well worth the effort and will pay for itself quickly. Without customer relationship management (CRM) integration in place, you will find it much harder to measure the performance of your campaigns, not to mention leverage functionality such as lead assignment/routing, campaign history tracking, personalization based on the owner of leads/contacts/accounts in your CRM system, and real-time notifications to your sales teams.

I wouldn't suggest this until you've really baked and tested your process, but look at integrating your own technologies with your marketing automation technology to automate repeated manual tasks. Examples of functions we've integrated include integration with our internal workflow engine—our Command & Control Center (see chart below)—to help expedite the production of our campaigns within Eloqua.

We've also built a service that allows a seamless data exchange between our system, Eloqua and some of the top Webinar applications. This allows for important data collected during a Webinar (such as those attended, the duration each spent on the Webinar, and any Q&A that occurred during the Webinar) to automatically be sent back into Eloqua for conditional messaging, so that we can follow up with leads quickly after the Webinar.

Here is a look at the framework we've built to support our Webinar execution. Questions or comments? I'd love to hear what you think of our system, and also what you are doing within your own organization to automate your marketing processes.

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Chris Parisi is VP of Technology at Bulldog Solutions, the lead-generation optimization and management company. Visit www.bulldogsolutions.com to learn more.

Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, senior manager of Field Marketing.