Measurement and Analytics is critical to closed loop marketing for both campaign attribution and campaign optimization.

Marketing Automation Selection Criteria

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Marketing Team Working on Vendor Selection

Choosing a marketing automation vendor can be challenging. Whether you are jumping into marketing automation for the first time, or are re-evaluating your current system, it can be a difficult and daunting task – especially with how many options are out there these days. Marketing Automation Selection Criteria can help.

The vendor you choose will have an enormous impact on not only your Marketing Department and marketing efforts, but could easily touch other areas as well such as Sales, Customer Service and IT. It is important to consider these other groups when evaluating various vendors, as they may have requirements, obstacles and questions that should be taken into consideration.

To help make the evaluation process a little easier and more effective, here is a recommended process to follow: Read more

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7 Attributes of a Lead Scoring Model

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Every company will have different ways of measuring a qualified lead, yet there is a set of factors that you can use to map into a lead-scoring model. Many marketing automation solutions, such as Eloqua, Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot, ShaprSpring, and others, have built-in lead scoring algorithms and pass this information into a CRM system like Salesforce and SugarCRM.

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These scores can be set up to deliver marketing-qualified leads based on certain criteria and scores, helping sales teams accept the leads (Sales Accepted Leads) and focus their energies on the top prospects.

Marketing Automation and CRM are both important. We use Sharpspring technology for our small business retainer services to deliver inbound marketing programs and integrated marketing. Sharpspring includes an integrated CRM as well as API hooks into leading CRMs so it is great for small businesses. The life of the lead is a great way to see the flow of the lead through time and the lead scoring approach helps sales focus immediately on the top inbound leads.

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Tracking ROI from Multiple Online Channels

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Screen Shot 2014-04-18 at 12.29.29 PMIn February, we posted an article about Marketing Performance Measurement and Attribution. In this, he discussed the tricky proposition of tracking offline marketing channels and how it’s important to be able to measure the customer lifetime value (LTV). Much of this is aided by having a good Customer Relationship Management Tool (CRM); but it is also important to make sure you are feeding good data and identifying all the online channels collecting lead generating data.

Establish a Tracking Strategy

We begin with asking the basic questions:

  • What am I tracking?
  • Why am I tracking?
  • What will I learn?

Any traffic source that arrives at our website should be tracked and many are automatically tagged via an analytics program, typically Google Analytics. This gives us the bedrock of data with which to set up goal funnels. These goals – or actions – can be anything from a form submission to a PDF download to viewing a video. It’s all trackable by virtue of actual page views, virtual page views, event tags and campaign tagging of URLs; so once we’ve established the various ways in which a potential customer can interact with our website we want to make sure these actions filter into the right buckets for further examination, with the goal of being able to generate  actionable insights such as:

  • Is a form too long?
  • Is the call to action weak?
  • Does the copy need to be re-written?
  • Do visitors leak on a particular step of a checkout?

Establish Tracking Systems

Provided our goals form data is synced up to a CRM, we will not only understand where our site visitors are converting from but be able to track this visitor’s lifetime value. Then if we segment our visitors into email campaign lists we should also be able to track these visitors back to the website and say compare these efforts against paid ads (cpc) for example:

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Of course social media is large contributor to our branding and lead nurturing. There are many social media reporting tools that help take the pulse of your social marketing efforts including how many followers, likes, reach and so on but we want to also make sure we are measuring their true impact on the bottom line.

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This is where analytics helps yet again by being able to see which social channels are converting and assisting in conversions. A visitor’s journey to get to our site and take an action may be long and winding. Perhaps beginning with an organic search, then viewing one of our social media accounts to then typing our URL directly into the browser address bar before making contact.

So which marketing channel gets the credit for that lead?

Conversion attribution tracking is the answer in order to understand which channels are assisting in generating leads; to use a basketball analogy – the Steve Nash or John Starks of conversions.

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Social media conversions can also be tracked against paid advertising. For instance Facebook offers its own native conversion tracking pixel that means you can set up ad campaigns with the sole purpose of being able to track sign ups to our website or Facebook app installs. This then allows to keep a close eye on the cost per acquisition of that lead and monitor reach and cost. Twitter has also now opened up it’s own native conversion tracking for advertisers.

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Establish Tracking Programs

Once we have established what we want and need to track to effectively manage our marketing spend and put into place the systems in order to do this effectively, we mist then initiate our program.

To learn more about Marketing Performance Measurement and Attribution, please feel free to contact us.

 

 

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Boost Performance with Sales Incentives

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When sales and marketing work together harmoniously, all is well. Marketing builds the brand and drums up leads; sales reels them in and brings them home as paying customers. Yet we know. particularly for sales, that sales incentives are the critical driver for performance focus. With today’s more unified revenue value chain and closed-loop across marketing and sales, you may need to realign your incentive programs to drive alignment and focus on the behaviors and results you seek. Programs need to fit in with your revenue operating model and reinforce team revenue performance.

Motivate Success

handshakeIncentive systems can motivate the right behaviors and align activities across marketing and sales. The incentive model should be transparent and readily understandable while clearly motivating your teams to perform in accordance with the prevailing company revenue strategy. Incentives can be a highly effective way to encourage and motivate, build morale and drive desired behavior. A study called Incentives, Motivation and Workplace Performance showed that a stunning 92% of respondents cited incentives as the top reason they achieved a workplace goal. Incentives can have particularly big impact when the sales and marketing teams devise a program together to effectively drive sales team behavior.

The best, most effective incentive programs are SMART.

  • Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
  • Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
  • Assignable – specify who will do it.
  • Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
  • Time-related – specify when the result(s) can be achieved.

 

Begin by identifying your specific and measurable performance goals. Ask focused questions:

  • What exact targets and changes do we want to accomplish?
  • What behaviors would we like to reinforce?
  • How will we measure and track success?
  • How will the incentive campaign be implemented and promoted?

Once you’ve defined core metrics of success and created an incentive program that’s right for your team, there are some additional things you should keep in mind:

Stretch targets. Incent based upon new, desired behavior, e.g. meeting a higher quota, selling a new product, etc. Rewarding existing quotas and behaviors won’t likely enhance productivity.

Find the sweet spot. Don’t set your incentive payout too high, or the sales team will neglect their core responsibilities to focus only on the prize. Conversely, the payout should not be so too low that it doesn’t drive interest. Find the measurable incentive payout “sweet spot” that truly motivates your employees.

Public recognition. Public recognition helps to affirm good behavior, boost morale and foster a sense of friendly competition among the staff by celebrating the successes.

Keep campaign awareness fresh. Send regular reminders to the staff that the incentive is in place.

Choose a long enough timeframe. Consider running your incentive program for a substantial amount of time, not just a month or a quarter. Studies show programs that run for at least a year generate a 44% increase in performance, while programs running for a week or less boost performance by just 20%.

Measure and Track ROI. Establish baseline measurements at the beginning of your campaign so that you can track results and successes back to actual sales.

Promote team spirit.  Team-oriented incentive programs generate a performance increase of around 45% compared with incentive programs geared toward individuals, which yield just a 27% increase. However, both approaches can have a motivating effect, and it doesn’t have to be an either-or decision; experiment with different programs and see what your staff responds to the most.

Good luck and good selling! Are you looking to enhance revenue performance?  Sign up for a revenue diagnostic using our 50-dimension model.

 

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