B2BHebeisen

By Bob Hebeisen

True story: the other day I stepped on a dead bird while walking home from daycare drop-off.

I didn’t see it because I was reading my email on my smartphone.

Multitasking can be messy!

We are all living in a multitasking world.  There is really no escaping it.  Paying half attention to where you are going might be good enough for avoiding big mistakes (like walking into oncoming traffic).  But it hardly lends itself to flawless execution.

Here are 7 ways Marketing Automation helps marketers multitask more effectively:

#1. Setting Up Marketing Campaigns For Appropriate Tracking

I used to work for a billion-dollar tech company with an army of marketers.  This company had the worst marketing systems: a homegrown Content Management System (CMS) and a poorly configured Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.  It made it incredibly difficult to set up campaigns for proper tracking and easy execution.

For example, here is how a marketer needed to zig-zag through the systems in order to execute an email marketing campaign:

If you messed up any part of this process — or if you cut corners because you just had too much other stuff to do and were up against a deadline — then the tracking for the campaign would not work and you would have incomplete metrics for the campaign you had slaved over.  Ugh!

Marketing Automation solutions unify all these marketing activities into a single seamless process, so setup is a logical workflow and tracking is handled automatically.  This saves you a ton of time and ensures proper results tracking.

By Bob Hebeisen

Part 3 of 7…Here are 7 ways Marketing Automation helps marketers multitask more effectively: #1. Setting up marketing campaigns for appropriate tracking #2. A/B testing #3. Integration with CRM #4. Lead nurturing for better lead quality #5. Doing the little things right, automatically #6. Reviewing results and applying your learning #7. Taking a moment to celebrate your successes

Have you ever generated a ton of leads, and then proudly walked down to the sales bullpen and have your sales reps tell you the leads were junk?  Well Marketing Automation can help with that too.

Marketing Automation solutions typically easily integrate with SalesForce.com and other major CRM systems.  So your leads can be flowed automatically into the CRM, and the leads stay synchronized as you continue to execute marketing and sales activities against the contacts.

Have you ever had to manually upload leads into your CRM?  Or manually export leads from the CRM to use for a marketing campaign?  Or manually updated a bunch of contacts in the CRM to reflect the fact that a marketing activity was just executed against them?

If you have, then you know that it is possible, but it is often not easy, and it can easily sink half your day each time you do it (or it can be so unpleasant that it gets put on the back burner and delayed for a long time).  So having your marketing activities automatically synched with your CRM is an immeasurable benefit.

Another advantage of having your Marketing Automation and CRM systems integrated is that metrics continue to be tracked as the sales team works leads and updates the status.  So you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns at a deeper level — not just cost per lead, but cost per opportunity, or cost per sale, or cost per customer lifetime value.

Next time your sales reps tell you that your leads are lousy, you can actually run a report to see if the data supports that assertion!

By Bob Hebeisen

Part 5 of 7…Here are 7 ways Marketing Automation helps marketers multitask more effectively: #1. Setting up marketing campaigns for appropriate tracking #2. A/B testing #3. Integration with CRM #4. Lead nurturing for better lead quality #5. Doing the little things right, automatically #6. Reviewing results and applying your learning #7. Taking a moment to celebrate your successes

I was reading a Harvard Business Review article the other day and the author turned the phrase “complexity traps and kills good ideas.”  He was talking about complexities in your business model, but it is equally true for marketing execution.

If a marketer’s plate is overflowing, instead of doing all the little things right, he is likely to go into triage mode and cut some corners on things that add complexity to his task list.

Here are a bunch of things Marketing Automation does right, automatically, so there is no danger of skipping them in the interest of expediency:

Social Media share buttons automatically placed on emails, landing pages, and blog posts

Marketers know that it is a best practice to include social media sharing buttons on the content they publish, so viewers of the content can easily share your content with friends and colleagues.  But sometimes in the haste to get things done we can let little details like this slip.  Marketing Automation solutions don’t forget, they do it automatically.

View email as an HTML page link on all emails

Creating a HTML page for every marketing email you create can be tedious.  But there are benefits to doing so, in case your email is not rendered properly by the recipient’s email client.  And also because if it is done properly the HTML pages themselves can lend SEO “juice” to your website.  Marketing Automation tools can be set up to do this automatically so it takes no additional effort on the part of the marketer.

Incorporating target keywords in your blog titles, headlines, and body copy

It is a rather obvious tactic that marketers should include target keywords in their blog posts to improve SEO.  Marketing Automation solutions like HubSpot can actually prompt marketers to do so, identifying the fact that keywords are absent from your blog posts while you are composing them.

Social Media tracking & measurement

Here’s a famous myth: it is not possible to track the effectiveness of social media marketing.

The fact is, it is just as easy to measure the inbound traffic and leads generated by social media as it is for any other form of online marketing (email, PPC, etc.).  You just need to generate coded links for each social media post so the source can be tracked.  The problem is it is a tedious exercise to create those coded links manually because the volume of social media posts is typically much greater, and social media marketing managers have simply lacked the discipline to do it.

But Marketing Automation tools can automate this process.  See the screen shot of HubSpot’s Social Media Publishing tool.  Each post can be scheduled and the results can be tracked.  In fact you can see that Social Media Marketing can produce results just as well if not better than other measurable forms of online marketing.

HubSpot’s Social Media Publishing tool let’s you schedule posts and status updates so they are posted at the time when they will make the most impact. Also, note that clicks are tracked for each post.  See more detail on how to automate Social Media Marketing with HubSpot.

HubSpot reporting shows us Social Media Marketing results. You can see that in this example Social Media Marketing is driving significant lead conversion (only email marketing is performing better).

By Bob Hebeisen

Part 6 of 7…Here are 7 ways Marketing Automation helps marketers multitask more effectively: #1. Setting up marketing campaigns for appropriate tracking #2. A/B testing #3. Integration with CRM #4. Lead nurturing for better lead quality #5. Doing the little things right, automatically #6. Reviewing results and applying your learning #7. Taking a moment to celebrate your successes

When multitasking marketers are juggling too many balls at the same time, usually the first thing that falls to the floor is analyzing results.  Marketing Automation helps in two ways.

• First, you gain efficiency thanks to their improved workflow and automatic data handling and all the other things I’ve discussed above.  So you are less frantic taking care of the tactics and have more time to focus on the strategy.
• Second, Marketing Automation does a great job with analytics dashboards.  It’s usually the first thing they display when you log in each day, and they email you a daily report of yesterday’s activity and progress against KPIs.

In the example I used earlier when discussing setting up a campaign with a poorly integrated CMS and CRM, it was impossible to get good reporting:

• Go to the CMS to see how many form submissions were attributed to your landing page.
• Pull the number of email deliveries, bounces, opens, clicks, and leads from the CRM.
• Go to the web analytics application to get the pageview statistics for your landing page.
• Put all the numbers in a spreadsheet and perform calculations for conversion rate, cost per lead, etc.
• Note that the numbers almost never matched up: Web analytics pageviews would not match the number of clicks, number of form submissions from the CMS would not match the number of leads in the CRM, etc.  So what numbers do you trust?

What a nightmare! There was a Marketing Operations department that defined dashboards each year to measure marketing performance against goals. It was so difficult to pull together the data that it often took the entire first quarter of the year for them to get dashboards created — one full quarter without marketing reporting!

Rolled-up analytics in your Marketing Automation system is a huge advantage!

The HubSpot dashboard report gives you a quick look at site traffic, leads, and landing page statistics.

The landing page report shows you which landing pages are performing the best, so you can learn from your successful pages and adjust the ones that are under-performing.

HubSpot email reporting gives you deliverability/open/click reporting.

The HubSpot traffic report tells you what sources are driving the most traffic to your site and which ones are producing the most leads.

By Bob Hebeisen

Part 7 of 7…Here are 7 ways Marketing Automation helps marketers multitask more effectively: #1. Setting up marketing campaigns for appropriate tracking #2. A/B testing #3. Integration with CRM #4. Lead nurturing for better lead quality #5. Doing the little things right, automatically #6. Reviewing results and applying your learning #7. Taking a moment to celebrate your successes

Marketing is a tough job because there are few opportunities to be the hero and lots of opportunities to be the goat.

• Ever run a campaign where you do 99 things right but the 1 thing you do wrong is the only thing anyone notices?
• When a new customer closes it is rare that the sales organization acknowledges marketing’s contribution — building a positive brand image, driving and nurturing the lead, arming the sales rep with awesome call scripts, demos, collateral, and presentations.
• When a company has a bad quarter and needs to cut costs, it is almost always marketing budget and staff that gets slashed first.

That’s why I love what HubSpot does to celebrate marketing accomplishments:

• Daily email: HubSpot sends you (and, optionally, your manager and your sales constituents) a daily email entitled “Daily Prospects Digest…” that shows all the companies that visited your website the previous day — very valuable for a sales rep that is working a particular account and is looking for a sign they might be making progress.
• 

  Weekly email results update congratulates you when things are going well, and suggests helpful corrective measures when things are going badly.

  Weekly email & Dashboards: When things are going well, HubSpot’s weekly email update and dashboard congratulates you and says “you deserve a raise!”, or “I think you are ready for the Glengarry leads!” [NSFW video]. Or if your leads or website visits are lower than last month it will offer some constructive help on how you can reverse the trend.

• Monthly email & PowerPoint: HubSpot sends you (and, optionally, your manager and your sales constituents) a monthly email with a recap of key results.  The great thing is you can also download those results in PowerPoint format, so you can present it to your boss and use the charts to support your strategy and wish list for coming months.

A little acknowledgement and encouragement can go a long way for a multitasking marketer!