Marketing Strategy :: Zephyr 47 | Marketing Automation, Demand Generation, Content Marketing

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Campaign Workflow – Map the Process Before Hitting Send

Posted by: Brian Hansford | Comments (3)

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Steven Covey says to ‘begin with the end in mind.’ Another saying is ‘set the goal and the how-to’s will reveal themselves.’ When building a campaign strategy and implementing individual campaigns, mapping the workflow for each step is critical to ensure solid customer connections at the right time and with the right information.

Don’t Let Workflow Tedium Scare You

Marketing campaign development can be tactically tedious with multiple steps that have “if X happens then Y” and on and on. Regardless of how tedious, building the right campaign workflow is just as important as clear messaging and a solid offer. A campaign with the best creative and messaging will fail with a well planned and tested workflow. A marketing automation solution helps marketing teams develop and execute campaign workflows. Of course some campaigns may have more extensive workflow than others.

Here are some workflow considerations for building an email and web marketing campaign. (This list is not intended to be exhaustive.)

Who are you contacting?

Prospects
Existing customers

How are you contacting them?

Email
PPC Search
Social media
Seminar
Survey

What kind of response/conversion is required?

Complete forms on hypersites
Complete forms on homepage
Register for event

How much information is required?

First and last name
Company
Email
Phone
Title
Project information

What happens when a nurtured contact responds with new contact information or more contact information than previously provided?

Update contact record
Update previously blank fields
Etc.

How is the promo content delivered?

Landing page
Hypersite
Email confirmation

When is the lead “qualified” and “sales-ready” for direct follow up?

What happens to “disqualified” leads?

What happens to email addresses that “bounce”?

Soft bounce monitor
Hard bounce deletion

How are email unsubscribe requests processed?

These are just some of the steps to consider with your marketing campaign workflow. Again, this is not an complete listing but hopefully provides ideas and considerations for mapping your campaigns. Marketing automation systems are ideal for building and managing all levels of sophistication of campaign workflow. Marketing automation also provide incredibly valuable information for measuring campagns.

To ensure campaign success, make sure to map the process BEFORE hitting send.

Additional Resources

White Paper – 10 Keys to Maximize Your Marketing Automation Investment

Categories : Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, Marketing Campaigns, Marketing Operations, Strategic Marketing

Comments (3)

The Content Grid from Eloqua/JESS3 – A Brilliant Model

Posted by: Brian Hansford | Comments (6)

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

The swirl and excitement around social media, social networking, and social media marketing (they are each unique) creates many new opportunities to engage customers, partners, families, friends, and ‘communities. There are many great stories of how organizations are using different channels of social media to network and engage their constituents. Yet with nearly every SM event or discussion I participate in I always hear the question on who OWNS social media in an organization. Answers come up that the communications team, PR, or marketing should OWN all social media. All of these answers are WRONG.

Eloqua has developed a brilliant Content Grid with superior illustration from JESS3. The Content Grid very clearly illustrates an organizational content framework including the different types of content, the channels, the ownership, and the audience. In my opinion the Eloqua Grid is equal to Geoffrey Moore’s model from “Crossing the Chasm” in both brilliance and clarity. I want to write about it here to help proliferate the model and also help my SM and marketing colleagues envision how they can use this model to work with their organizations and clients. I have the grid posted below and it also available from Eloqua’s blog site written by their director of content marketing, Joe Chernov.

Here why I like this model and why it is valuable:

1. Social Media is a functional component of an overall marketing and business strategy.

2. Content is a macro-organizational responsibility. No single group owns ALL of the content or CHANNELS. Content delivery involves both centralized and decentralized channels with different objectives.

3. Content comes in different flavors with different audiences and different functions. The content that build awareness is unique from the content that helps a customer support their buying decision. Additionally, existing customers will have different content needs than prospects in the awareness stage.

4. Hyper-Focus on ROI is minimized or eliminated. We have all struggled with the ROI Question related to content strategies and social media engagements. The Eloqua Content Grid illustrates to business managers and executives where content fits into the overall business and marketing strategy. If executives still need to focus on ROI, ask how they measure the ROI of email. A better discussion is the opportunity cost of NOT developing and implementing a content strategy.

Major kudos to the Eloqua team for publishing this grid. In this case a picture is worth a million words. Let me know your thoughts.

Cheers,

Brian Hansford

President

Zephyr 47

Categories : Content Marketing, Content Strategies, Social Media, Strategic Marketing

Comments (6)

Marketing Campaign Planning and Execution – A Battle Proven Approach

Posted by: Brian Hansford | Comments (3)

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Battle-tested and successful marketers minimize the noise of randomization by planning strategically and executing brilliantly. This is especially important with managing and executing marketing campaigns. Campaign planning provides the entire enterprise a vision of what to expect for demand generation and awareness throughout a defined time period. Desired outcomes and objectives are planned and agreed to. Behaviors and expectations are aligned across departments. The sales organization will understand the timing, target audience, and campaign messaging. The campaign content contributors also know what content to develop and when they need to deliver. This entire process helps avoid the dreaded peaks and valleys of lead flow.

Theories aside, here are real world ideas to help with strategic marketing campaign planning:

What types of campaigns? (i.e. Demand generation or Awareness?)
Identify the objectives and desired outcomes for each campaign and roll up to the strategic plan.
Identify the target audience. (i.e. Existing customers? Technical decision makers? Business decision makers? Vertical industries?)
Timeframes: monthly, quarterly?
Map campaigns and themes against known milestones or important events. (i.e. Major product launches; Holidays)
Provide a 12 month campaign calendar to the internal and partner audiences.
Identify the primary content contributors (i.e. Product managers, channel partners, customers, analysts) and proactively manage their contributions to allow for review, edit, and approval cycles.
Identify the delivery platforms and content elements. (i.e. Email, hypersites, communities, on-demand webinars, podcasts, white papers, etc.)
Map all content with a marketing automation system such as Manticore Technology and Eloqua and perform a pre-campaign test to ensure content quality.
Use the marketing automation system to monitor and measure results and make adjustments as needed.
Communicate in advance to internal and channel partner audiences of the impending campaign kickoff.
Monitor and measure sales effectiveness on lead follow up.
Duplicate what works. Improve what doesn’t.
Celebrate success.

What has worked for you? What hasn’t? Let me know your thoughts!

Categories : Content Marketing, Manticore Technology, Marketing Automation, Marketing Campaigns

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Smarter, Faster, Stronger with Marketing Automation

Posted by: Brian Hansford | Comments (2)

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Marketing professionals like me who began their careers well before the Dot-Not Bust have seen a steady evolution with growing demands on what marketing should deliver – along with growing disappointment.

Long gone are the days where a marketing VP or marketing communications director would focus exclusively on agency management to develop meaningless and expensive ego-driven advertising (i.e. Dot-Not “New Economy” ads) libraries of salesware and brochureware, and tons of tradeshows. Also gone are the days of relying on the voodoo of junk mail agencies to scatter thousands upon thousands of mail pieces per month (and random email spam) in order to generate a stellar 1.00017% response.

Vast empires of marketing coordinators, traffic coordinators, event managers, inhouse designers, marketing communications directors and others were considered successful if they generated XX-thousands leads per year, depending on what the definition of a lead was at that given moment in time. During annual business reviews marketing statistics were always tweaked to show a growth in “lead” generation over previous years. Strangely, revenue would remain flat or decrease. Finger pointing ensued. (Hopefully this is familiar to many of you in a past-tense and not currently!!!)

Smarter, Faster, Stronger with Marketing Automation

This is one of the most exciting times for organizations to build strong customer relationships thanks to the rapid innovations in web technologies and social media channels and with marketing automation which ties everything together.

Successful marketing executives will have integral input, relationships and credibility with their peer executives and will help set the strategic direction of an organization. One of the key resources that rebuilds credibility is a marketing automation system. Marketing automation systems have numerous benefits that will strengthen the overall strategic focus of both marketing and the firm as a whole. Some of the most important advantages and measurable benefits are:

Doing WAY more with less. Empire building is over with massive and random headcount. Organizations with marketing automation can deliver and maintain more high quality customer connections with fewer people and less budget. (I can sense the twitches and gasps from my marketing friends…it’s time to evolve folks!) I am personally familiar with a firm that in the 1990′s and early 2000′s had a marketing department of 30 with a heavy focus on classic marketing communications and a massive annual spend with agencies and headcount. That same firm now has a marketing department of less than 10 and uses a marketing automation called Eloqua to manage and measure ther annual marketing programs. The quality of their customer connections are higher. They capture better information to help make strategic product decisions. The relationship between sales and marketing is strong. This would not be possible without a strong marketing automation system. With this company, marketing now has a seat at the table with the executive leadership.

Focus. Scatter gun direct mail with the “standard “1.4% response” is dead. Marketing execs need tools that help them connect with the right prospects and customers with the right content at the right time. No more pure guesswork. A marketing automation system provides the focus to deliver a campaign strategy for a company year after year.

Content is King. Help Customers Find You. Customers are in control for when and how they want to be contacted. They want information to help them with their buying decision. Develop and provide a range of high value engaging and entertaining content. Measure which content is best received and find ways to duplicate your success.

Measure. Measure the right data to help the organization make strategic decisions to identify market opportunites and respond to threats. The executives must agree on the metrics at the beginning of a reporting quarter, or year. Measure what works. Identify what doesn’t. Hold the entire organization accountable for the information reported. Don’t just focus on generating more “leads” year over year.

As the economy heals from the economic bruising from the last three years more organizations will re-invest in marketing. However, expectations are high, as they should be. The old way of marketing is dead. Marketing automation systems help organizations be smarter, deliver better results, spend wisely, and establish strong customer connections.

Categories : Demand Generation, Eloqua, Manticore Technology, Marketing Operations

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How to Tackle any Marketing Opportunity – SOSTAC

Posted by: Brian Hansford | Comments (1)

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Ed. Note: Zephyr 47 has launched the 2nd Edition the eBook “Guide to Product Launch Programs” available for free download here. Product Launches are perfect for the SOSTAC planning model discussed in this blog.

About 15 years ago I learned an effective approach to any kind of marketing program, campaign or comprehensive marketing strategy. And since I like to keep things simple this method fits nicely into an easily memorized acronym called SOSTAC. SOSTAC is especially relevant when pursuing a marketing automation strategy using tools like Eloqua or integrated social media and Web marketing programs. (Giving credit where it’s due: I learned this method from Paul Smith’s book “Marketing Communications – An Integrated Approach”)

SOSTAC stands for:

Situational Assessment (Where are we?)
Objectives (What do you want to accomplish?)
Strategy (How do we get there?)
Tactics (How will the strategy be implemented and when?)
Action (Execution, pure and simple. Make it happen!)
Control and Metrics (Monitoring and measuring. You can’t learn and manage if you can’t or don’t measure)

I use these guidelines when working with customers and partners to develop marketing automation strategies and integrated social media plans and marketing campaigns. The beauty of SOSTAC is flexibility and adaptability. Use SOSTAC to plan an event. SOSTAC is perfect for planning a 3 year marketing automation and strategic social media strategy. SOSTAC works beautifully for business planning for the upcoming year. Yes, this may seem like Marketing 101. But it is amazing how even the largest companies get into planning chaos because they don’t have a simple method to follow. With all of the “guru’s” and “experts” floating around promoting the latest tool or fad, especially in social media, take a fully planned approach. SOSTAC keeps you on the right track.

Give this a try. What methods do you use? Drop me a comment and share what works for you.

Categories : SOSTAC

Comments (1)

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Archive for Marketing Strategy

Campaign Workflow – Map the Process Before Hitting Send

Marketing Campaign Planning and Execution – A Battle Proven Approach

Smarter, Faster, Stronger with Marketing Automation

How to Tackle any Marketing Opportunity – SOSTAC

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