10 Strategies for Automation and Inbound from Marketo and Moz

Still struggling with the how-tos of marketing automation and inbound marketing? You’re not alone and Jon Miller, VP of Marketing and Co-found of Marketo, and Rand Fishkin, CEO of Moz broke down 10 simple strategies to keep on your radar moving forward.

1. The way buyers buy has changed forever due to Digital Abundance

The way you market and sell must change as well. Digital buyers today have more access to information today than they have ever had before. They can get instant access to details, comparisons, and pricing. Social is a way to share and compare.

2. The right content > more content

For many sites, just a few very high value pieces a year is enough to achieve remarkable results. One of Moz.com’s single resources, The Algo Change, has earned more traffic than the 50+ surround posts combined.

3. Data yields smarter social sharing

Analyze when your followers are online and engaging with you most (Suggested Moz tool: followerwonk) Sharing your resources more than once may feel inauthentic, but you need to hit your readers when they are actually reading.

4. If you’re going to do video, do it right

Just like any written content, your videos should be targeted to the keywords and topics your customers are searching for most. Learn their pain points and deliver the solutions with high quality video that has an interesting cover photo. Transcripts of your videos are also a gold mine for SEO and accessibility.

5. Google+ is like cheating at SEO

Did you know that Google features posts from your Google+ circles on the first page of your search results? Growing your Google+ network may be even easier than traditional SEO methods for getting on the first page of results.

6. Use different tactics for different stages

Your customer doesn’t always want a free white paper. Or a webinar. Or a free trial. They want those things when they are in different stages of buying readiness along your funnel. Early stage buyers will be more interested in social media posts and YouTube videos where those closer to buying will be more interested in tools and free trials.

7. Be like a stock picker – don’t put all your marketing into one program

It’s not all about buying the hottest Pay-Per-Click ads any more. Sponsored emails, webinars, trade shows (even virtual trade shows!), content syndication, sponsorship, display ads, and blog articles all pull in their own targets. Analyze what works best for you, but keep your resources spread out.

8. Sales people don’t want names, they want “win ready” leads

If your sales team just wanted millions of leads every month, they could just look them up in the white pages. Lead nurturing and scoring your leads to qualify them into different stages of readiness will make you the hero of your sales team.

9. The key to relevance is behavioral targeting

If someone downloads your white paper on social media, don’t send them a load of emails on google analytics. Send your emails in smaller, more targeted content chunks to increase engagement.

10. Use analytics to turn marketing from a cost center into a revenue driver

Use your metrics to set and justify budgets for each level of the funnel. If you know your conversion percentages, you should know how much each lead cost to acquire, and therefore, how much you should spend to create X number of leads to start with.

If Content is King, Segmentation is Queen

 

It’s 1996. You’re Bill Gates. What’s on your mind? Interactive multimedia content, the kind made possible by the Internet. Revolutionary content that would transform the Internet into “a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products—a marketplace of content.”

A place where “content is king.”

Fast forward to 2013 and new content is being created, curated, and shared worldwide at record speed. But many organizations using content creation as marketing strategy still ignore one of Gates’ other nuggets of wisdom:

“If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will.”

This is a content strategy: rewarding customers with deep, up-to-date content that’s relevant to their interests. How to get there? If content is king, then old-fashioned market segmentation is queen.

Customer, know thyself

Rewarding customers—their needs, their desires, their concerns—with what’s on the screen starts with segmentation.

Consumers already self-segment online. They’re increasingly using social networks to “see” what other people like them are doing, what decisions they’re making, and what the results are, posting on Facebook to ask for recommendations.

Why? Do we really believe our hundreds of Facebook “friends” are experts on everything from glass baby bottles to buying a new car?

The truth is that we don’t care. It’s tough making decisions, and even tougher when decisions get bigger or more expensive. In a world of information overload, the more we can block out unnecessary or irrelevant input, the easier decisions become. One way to do this is to use familiarity, or social closeness, as a gauge. We implicitly trust someone we know—even though we met her once at a party 10 years ago—and attach greater weight to her opinions.

This doesn’t seem like a great tool for making important decisions. But it makes sense in a way marketers can understand: We assume the people we know are similar to us in some way. That means we have a higher level of confidence that the information coming from our social networks is relevant to us and our decisions.

Marketer, know thy customer

By segmenting your customers, you are increasing the odds that the information you’re generating for target customers will make the cut. A useful market segment is one that hits the sweet spot, where customers receive maximum value from your product and the company makes maximum profit from sales to that segment.

Ideally, segments should be made up of customers that respond in a very similar way to your marketing efforts, and who respond differently than other customers (in other segments). These differences form the basis for your content marketing strategy.

What’s your persona?

Different customers respond to your marketing efforts differently based on a broad range of variables: demographic, geographic, and psychographic. Somewhere within each segment, there’s an ideal customer for whom your product, service, or specialty is the ideal solution. To execute your content strategy, bring these ideal customers to life by creating buyer personas.

Buyer personas flesh out the key factors that differentiate segments from each other. Think of creating buyer personas like you’d describe the conversation you had last night with “the most interesting man in the world.”:

  • Who are they? — What’s their age, gender, personal quirks? Where do they live? Add as much real-life color as possible.
  • What do they do? — What are their daily activities and responsibilities? Think beyond work or school to hobbies, moonlighting gigs or volunteer work.
  • What are the biggest challenges or issues they face this year?
  • What are their long-term aspirations, professionally, personally, or both?

Long live the king

Now that you’ve created the most interesting buyer personas in the world, you can begin to know them better. If you hit the mark, your organization’s content can stand in for a friend’s opinion on Facebook, or an online review. Your videos and photos can speak directly to the right customers, offering the visual proof that’s most beneficial for the way each customer segment makes buying decisions.

The more you know about your target customers — through research, meaningful segmentation and vibrant buyer personas — the more you can reward them with content that fits their needs, solves their problems, and positions your organization as a trusted member of their social network.

Guest Post on the Kapost Content Marketeer

 

What Marketers Need to Succeed – Infographic

eCornell breaks data down from four reputable sources to show why marketing professional development is necessary for success and increased profitability. Click here to view the Marketing Infographic.

 

What We Follow Friday – July 19, 2013

On Fridays, we highlight some of the most interesting articles we’ve been reading from around the web. Articles feature news, strategies, and tools focused on marketing strategy, data mining and analytics, conjoint analysis, customer segmentation and targeting, and market response modeling, and a few others for fun. If you come across an article you think we should be reading, tweet it to us, post it to our facebook page, or leave us a comment at the bottom of the page.

This week, we’ve found some great pieces from quite a few of our favorite news sources: IBM, Forbes, and more. Enjoy!

Data Scientist: Consider the Curriculum

“Data science’s learning curve is formidable.Read More

Using Porter’s Five Forces to Defeat Unseen Threats

When we think about competition in business, we usually refer to other businesses who directly fight with us for customers. After all, it’s these companies who are the biggest barriers in the way between you and world domination. However, helping your company to reach its potential isn’t as simple as having a better product or message than your competitors. In fact, the biggest threats to many companies are the ones that they’re simply not thinking about.

The Marketing Myopia

Theodore Levitt’s marketing myopia highlighted a very basic, but powerful point. Companies don’t just compete with other companies – instead, they compete with other industries. Read More

Using the Three Cs to Create Value for Your Customers

Marketing often seems like an overwhelmingly confusing proposition, but really it’s quite simple. At its core, the marketplace can be distilled to its three core elements – your company, your competitors and the customers. You may recall Omhae’s Three Cs from your Marketing 101 class, but don’t dismiss this as just another clever acronym. Everything you do in marketing should incorporate these three Cs. After all, marketing basically is finding a way to position your company so that customers choose it over the competition. The bigger question, though, is how to do this.Read More

Simple A/B Testing for Results

If you’re using a website to sell products or services, or to draw supporters to your cause, you want it to be the best it can be. Split, or A/B, testing provides the data you need to make better decisions about how to achieve this.

A/B testing is a simple experiment: You create two different versions of your website, randomly split your site traffic to each, then sit back and watch what happens. What happens depends on your goals. For most businesses, these goals are related to maximizing sales, customer engagement, ad spending, or optimizing product features.Read More

How Effective is your Marketing Dashboard?

We recently had the chance to sit down with two professionals from the hospitality industry who frequently initiate new media marketing campaigns and evaluate their impact. Lauren Levin, Vice President of Interactive Marketing for Sbe Entertainment, and Greg Bodenlos, Marketing Manager for Revinate discuss how they determined the success of their efforts for the brands they were serving. Last week we featured their answers on how they measure their marketing performance. Read More

Conjoint Analysis and Big Data

Recently, the team at eCornell had the chance to sit down with Marco Vriens, Managing Director of Strategic Analytics and SVP Methodology at The Modellers and ask for his insights on marketing research using conjoint analysis. Marco has also appeared in eCornell’s Ask the Expert segments for our newest certificate Advanced Marketing Research

How do big data relate to conjoint analysis?

So nowadays there’s a lot of talk about big data, and obviously big data has an incredible potential Read More