B2B Marketing Automation Agency

By ‘good’ I mean ‘nerdy’ and by ‘things’ I mean ‘experiments’. But let’s start at the beginning. One of our clients, a classic B2B multi national firm, uses data to track which product line would be of interest to a specific contact in their database. They do it so they can send better targeted information in their campaigns, direct inquiries to the appropriate product people internally, and because I told them to.

In this LinkedIn post , I explore three themes that inhibit the achievement of accurate Lead-to-Revenue visibility within B2B organizations.

Marketo has been communicating this architectural change to its customers worldwide since August of 2016, yet only lately it has become clearer that the change will affect more than a few fields. Specifically this is true for Marketo customers whose Salesforce CRM edition is the Professional edition.

Tip: if you're unsure which edition your Salesforce org is running on, log in to your account there and simply hover the cursor on the browser tab where Salesforce loaded. The tab tooltip will show you the edition.

If you're not a Salesforce Pro user, you can stop reading here; the change won't affect you beyond the 16 fields that you were asked by Marketo to recreate in Salesforce (see here , Marketo login required).

It's hard to overstate the degree to which Marketo's Email Editor 2.0 has improved on the previous generation. In fact, it has become, in one fell swoop, the most powerful email editor in the marketing automation space - and we know quite a few of them very well.

One of its most striking features is the use of variables to expose many aspects of email design and functionality to the editor's user interface, enabling users to quickly and easily manipulate their email's elements, without resorting to source code edits or fighting the whims of the rich text editor.

To fully benefit from this feature, though, it's important to understand the two types of variables available to you: global and local. Mastering them and configuring your templates accordingly can greatly improve your (or your users') email editing experience in Marketo.

One of the key functions of any marketing operations role, or system, is to ensure the proper handling of new leads. Depending on your business process implementation, this may involve any combination of the following sub-procedures:

1. Auto response triggering
   
2. Email address validation
   
3. Tagging the record with complementary information, e.g. inbound campaign data, automated record enrichment data, etc.
   
4. Basic de-duplication, i.e. identifying the pre existence of a database record with similar key values and preventing the creation of a duplicate record
   
5. Advanced de-duplication, i.e. identifying the pre-existence of a database record and initiating processes like record linking, record merging, deletion or human decision request.
   
6. Lead scoring, e.g. based on the demographic details included in the inquiry
   
7. Syncing to CRM, or the suppression of sync
   
8. Assignment to lead owner or queue, including sending out email alerts or CRM notifications to the record owner
   
9. Associating the lead to a campaign object, useful for future first-touch or multi-touch ROI analysis

OK, here's the story. Converto is a B2B marketing automation services agency .  Every word in this phrase means something, so let's break it down, shall we?

B2B Marketing = differentiated from consumer (B2C) marketing. B2B marketing encompasses a huge sphere of marketing practices, know-how and technologies, which all boil down to this: there are businesses that sell stuff to other businesses and it's the marketing department's role to facilitate those sales. (OK it's a bit reductionist but let's keep things simple for now.)

Marketing Automation = the brilliant marketing people at said B2B firms often use technologies to assist them in doing their job. One such technology, if not the most important of them, is marketing automation . Briefly, these are software systems, often cloud based, that serve as the operating system of the marketing department. Those systems manage marketing data, organize and execute programs and campaigns, connect to other customer data systems like CRM and the website, and basically are key to the successful execution of most marketing strategies that your typical B2B marketing department employs.

Services Agency = at Converto, our primary function is to serve B2B marketers who use marketing automation systems. In other words, we are first and foremost service providers , and our clients come to us because we are recognized as experts in providing specific services . We are not a full service agency. We are not a studio. We are not a social media marketing agency. We don't do SEO or PPC. In short, what we are is a highly specialized service provider.

Fact: LinkedIn is an excellent network for B2B marketers to target their audiences. Its present reach and targeting capabilities, and the promise of future advertiser goodies like off-network display and remarketing, make it the premier destination for B2B marketers looking for laser targeted media campaigns to generate & engage leads in different stages of their respective buying cycles. 

Take a look at a few key stats that illustrate LinkedIn's appeal as a demand generation destination platform for B2B marketers:

Information Security concerns are always valid, end of argument. If you're a business, and you run part or all of it online, infosec should be on your mind. When it comes to marketing automation, concerns may be raised due to the fact that such systems require integration to the CRM in order to run smoothly and to result in the desirable improvement in marketing-sales business processes.

So should you, the B2B marketer or Marketo implementer, run into such concerns, we've collected a few helpful resources and pointers:

B2B marketers are routinely asked by their management to report on the results of their efforts. While doing so is a standard practice, what often goes unmentioned is the amount of time and resources the marketing department wastes collecting data, vetting it and ensuring it correctly reflects the state of the funnel at their organization.

You'd expect this to be part & parcel of what decent Marketing Automation systems do, yet unless you're aware of a few particular nuances in how these systems collect funnel data from the CRM, you might miss big on your reporting accuracy.

To help, we've written a detailed Pulse post that describes the challenge and what can be done to address it. Enjoy!

There are several things in life that remain mysterious to us even though they're an integral part of our daily routines. We use micro-ovens all the time, but how the hell do they work?! Same goes for TV remotes. Or,  what operates Teenager Mental Machinery? And what's the mechanism that makes my wife right ALL THE TIME?? 

In B2B marketing, 95% of us probably have, as part of our analytics tech stack, a Google Analytics account. Why not? It's powerful, it's Google, and it's free, a terrific combo. But its inner workings, or rather the way we can make it work for us , remain, for many a marketer, a mystery. An informal survey within our client base resulted in a handful of marketers stating they feel in control of GA and comfortable using it as part of their standard B2B marketing activities.

It's a terrible shame, because we at Converto think GA is da shit! So we've put together a few pointers to help Marketo admins and users get going on the path to true analytics bliss.

Created At

The date value in this field marks the first day a person has been tagged with a Marketo cookie by making a visit to the company's website. It can be filled that one time only. From that moment on, any subsequent visit made by the same person using the same browser & cookie, will be marked as an activity on that record's activity log, yet they may either remain anonymous in perpetuity, or until the day they become known.

Note: earlier this year, Marketo has deprecated the ability to use the 'Is Anonymous' filter and select unknown records from the database. 

Lead was Created

The date value in this field marks the first day that a lead has been created, or has become known, in the database. This could be the result of that person filling out a form on the web, having been added via a list import, or through an API call, or via a sync action from the connected CRM. As of that moment, it is considered to be a Lead in the system. This field, just like the “Created At” field, can be filled once only. 

SFDC Created Date

As its name implies, the value in this field marks the first date when a record has been created in Salesforce, regardless of  its source. 

Example :

Today is 07/04/2016. A person visits the webpage of Converto , reads some material, moving from one page to another, and downloading some reading material. In the meantime, since the person is not known in the system, all the information about the person is being saved anonymously, as it is being tracked by a cookie that was set in the person’s computer(similarly to the way their visits are tracked by Google Analytics). The person is now saved in Marketo, having ID and activity log, and the “Created At” field, filled with 07/04/2016.

A day later, the same person visits the same webpage and fills out a form. Once that happens, the credentials of that person are being linked to that ID that was given a day before. Now, the person has and ID, credentials, and “Lead was Created” field, filled with 07/05/2016.

Let's say that at Converto we don't sync the lead directly to our CRM, but instead, good B2B marketers as we are, we nurture new leads until they've provided the required signals telling us they're 'hot' enough to talk to a sales person. Let's also say this happened two weeks later. So at that point the field "SFDC Created Date" is populated with the date 07/19/2016.

The article covers each of the announcements Marketo recently met at the May Summit, including:

• Project Orion - rearchitecting Marketo for enterprise scale
• Account Based Marketing - dashboards, lists and account scoring
• Lead to account mapping
• Email Insights - new, much anticipated analytics module
• Email Editor and new templates - oh God, so welcome

And more. Read on for the full, well done coverage here.

It was in the air, but persistent rumors were pointing to SAP or Microsoft as the potential buyers. Earlier this month at their annual event, keynotes hinted at ambitiously bold directions, but who knew this was coming . Well, based on this graph, quite a few investors certainly felt Marketo was headed in a good direction:

If you have, then you should tread carefully: email security bots are prowling the digital landscape, and they're not here to play nice. My email post  over on B2BLeadNurture.com has everything you need to know:

• What are email security bots and what do they do?
• What are the implications for marketers
• How to tell you've been hit
• What you can do about it

When it comes to annual events, you can trust the top marketing tech brands to throw the best ones. After all, events like these represent the pinnacle of marketing's raison d'etre, right? Last week's Marketo Summit in Las Vegas was no exception. With keynotes by mountaineer Alison Levine, actor and producer Will Smith, and of course Marketo's CEO Phil Fernandez, as well as a rich agenda of informative sessions - there was a whole lot to digest for marketing automation enthusiasts.

Which, incidentally, is exactly what we are. So without further ado, here are the top five write-ups we enjoyed reading since last week about the summit.

What Happens in Vegas Makes it to my Annual Writeup / Maneeza Aminy
Full of emotion, with focus on the keynotes and takeways. We loved it because the excitement was catching.
Best quote: "[on using Account Based Everything to orchestrate experiences] I tell my folks that your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room. (Best definition I picked up somewhere). What do you want people to know or experience with you? In fact, what do we all want people to know and experience with us? I think we should write it down and then measure ourselves against it."

10 Thing we Didn't Learn at the Marketo Marketing Nation Summit / Socedo
A clever take by Socedo on their learnings from the summit.
Best quote: "Customer success, onboarding and sales can all benefit from marketing automation. Jamie Gutfreund, CMO of Wunderman, stressed in her keynote that each generation of buyers has an increasingly high expectation of brands. It’s no longer enough to use personalization; brands must achieve individualization. This can only happen when the entire customer journey is aligned."

Sometimes it's useful to manipulate data residing in our marketing database. We may want to do this when performing:

• Data Cleaning (e.g. remove invalid characters)
• Formatting (e.g.ormat phone number, change text to proper case, merge first and last name)  
• Adding Score Values Together

And in other cases as well. Recently we stumbled on a useful overview of the options available to us, via this excellent LinkedIn post by Fab Capodicasa, and we learned of a free webhook-based service that allows the application of Excel formulas on Marketo data. Pretty neat!