Marketing Automation and the Importance of Documenting Processes – Part Two

In my last blog post, I discussed the importance of defining the marketing automation process. In this post, I’ll provide a brief description of the key documentation that every marketing and sales organization should outline for marketing automation success.

Goals

Business goals, departmental goals, long-term, short-term and any other important goals should be documented and act as your compass for marketing automation program decisions.

Definitions

Your documentation should serve as a record of definitions for the different stages of your buying cycle, which sales, marketing and executive sponsors have all previously agreed upon. This is where you’ll answer the question of what exactly “qualified lead” means in your organization and how you identify them within your systems. If you don’t have a definitions document, eventually you’ll need it, so invest the time to create it before it becomes mission critical.

Demand Generation Strategies: How to Nurture Buyer 2.0

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post called “Who is Buyer 2.0?” I followed up last week with “How to Engage Buyer 2.0,” stressing the importance of buyer persona research and analysis. Now that we know how to properly identify prospects, influencers, their content consumption patterns, and their sources of information, lets take it to the next level and talk about moving away from old school batch-and-blast techniques to thoughtful, well-designed nurture processes.

Is your marketing one-to-one or one-to-many? One-off email blasts to your house list offer a very low probability of your critical information making it through to your potential buyer. Even the greatest piece of marketing content does nothing to support the buying process if it is delivered to a prospect too early or too late in their journey. Marketing automation can be an effective tool for delivering content but it is often misused. Utilizing it without an integrated buyer-driven strategy that maps relevant content to your buyer will only add to your list fatigue challenges.

Who is Buyer 2.0?

Greater access to information has provided B2B buyers with unprecedented power – resulting in “Buyer 2.0.” Marketing success in the Buyer 2.0 environment requires a new set of people, processes and content to better leverage new marketing technologies and to engage with buyers on their terms.

Buyer 2.0 rejects traditional, interruptive marketing tactics, preferring a buyer driven, Web-educated and peer communication approach. Why? Because it’s a process buyers can control and it helps them get the answers they need from the sources they trust, when and where they want.

This new buyer behavior requires marketers to focus on buyer-centric demand generation. Buyer-centricity in demand generation means tightly integrating inbound marketing efforts, such as search, Web and social, with elements of outbound marketing, such as email nurturing and offer landing pages.

Content Is Expensive, and Other Obvious Facts

Last week was my first at Left Brain DGA and in true jump-into-the-deep-end spirit, I spent it largely in client meetings. I’m pleased to report there were no major surprises, since I was already familiar with the company’s basic methodology (the Left Brain Model)  and had met most of the key players. I did learn a bit about my new co-workers drinking habits (Jack and Coke? REALLY?) but that was about as soul-revealing as things got.

One thing that did surprise me was how much content our programs require. This may rank with Newton discovering gravity in terms of stating the obvious (was he really the first to notice that things never fall up?) But as someone who has focused largely on marketing strategy and technology, I haven’t given much thought to content except as something to test. Here’s what I realized last week: a basic Left Brain program involves four lead stages and three levels per stage, so somebody has to draft at least a dozen emails plus whatever white papers, webinars, worksheets or other materials are offered as response bait. Add unique versions for three buyer personas across four vertical markets and you’re well past one hundred items.

Post-Dreamforce 2011: Has Marketing Automation Moved Us Any Closer to Enabling Buyer-centric B2B Demand Generation?

The central theme in my evangelism over the last few years has been stressing the importance of B2B marketers’ adopting a more ‘buyer-centric’ approach in their demand generation efforts – or as I often term it, ‘putting the buyer back at the center of B2B demand generation.’  It’s at the core of the approach we take with our clients at Left Brain DGA.  And it’s the central theme of my new book, Balancing the Demand Equation, which releases on Amazon on September 19 (this coming Monday).

The core of the issue is simple:  In a social, Web 2.0 world, sellers have little, direct control over the information consumed by a buyer during his/her buyer education process.  Instant online access to product information and reviews and to peer input via Web search and social media applications has more than ever shifted power from sellers to buyers.  Thus the ‘content consumption’ journey, as we term it at Left Brain DGA, that each B2B buyer goes through in making a purchase decision is very personal … very one-to-one.  This has led to the rise of a distinctly-new B2B buyer – one I term ‘Buyer 2.0’ in my upcoming book – for whom legacy, product-centric, one-size-fits-all, mass-marketing approaches to B2B demand generation don’t work like they used to.  Success with Buyer 2.0 requires that our demand generation be built bottoms-up – i.e., centered on the buyer, triggered by the buyer and one-to-one in the timing and scope of content delivered to that buyer – not top-down.

Revenue Performance Management and B2B Demand Generation: Connecting the Dots

One of the things I find exciting about modern B2B marketing is that not a day goes by without rapid change and new thinking. It’s a great time to be a B2B marketer, but it’s also a quite challenging time. For example, over the past year, marketing automation vendors have shifted much of their messaging from a focus on automating marketing and powering demand generation to that of managing ‘revenue performance.’ Seems like a good thing–revenue is good; however, for some B2B marketers this is probably a bit confusing, and so the obvious question is whether we’re still talking about the same technology and capabilities. The answer is yes and no.

Pardot’s ‘Elevate’ User Conference: ‘Enterprise Grade’ Demand Generation Insights

I had the opportunity to attend the Pardot ‘Elevate’ user conference about two weeks ago.  Overall, it was a great event, and I want to extend my thanks to CEO David Cummings (Twitter: @david_cummings), COO Adam Blitzer (Twitter: @adamblitzer) and VP Sales Derek Grant (Twitter: @derekgrant) for inviting me to attend.

Let me first admit that given Left Brain Marketing’s focus on enterprise/mid-enterprise clients, I did wonder if the demand generation content at Elevate was going to be relevant for me and the segment I work with.  (Also, as a disclaimer:  Left Brain Marketing is 100% vendor agnostic – a policy recently highlighted by our founder, Malcolm Friedberg.  And as of the publication date for this blog post, we do not have any clients currently using Pardot.  So to be clear:  There is no sub rosa agenda in this blog post.)