Branding and Marketing : Top 3 Ways to Measure Content Marketing Success

Branding and Marketing : Top 3 Ways to Measure Content Marketing Success

Companies of all sizes have committed resources to content marketing, but not all of them understand how they should be measuring their efforts. Jesse Noyes, VP of Product Marketing, Content and Communications, at Kapost, says that there are three things content marketers should be measuring to ensure success and relevancy to their business.

Production

We all produce lots of content, but do you know what it really takes to get it done? Are you keeping track of how long it takes to produce each content piece, from a single blog post to a full campaign surrounding an ebook? If content is the thing that fuels your pipeline, then you need to measure that pipeline. You need to establish benchmarks around production and make sure your team is meeting deadlines. If every project becomes a slog and takes time away from other activities, that should weigh into the cost-benefit analysis of your content. Oh wait, that's what marketers call ROI.

Reach

This is the easiest part for many marketers because all the sharing tools give you these numbers. Yes, it may be all manual and siloed, but it is relatively easy to determine which social channels drive traffic to your content. This helps you understand where your prospects and customers are and which ones are helping to amplify your content across their networks. The engagement around your content is what you are looking for. These are retweets, shares, clicks, comments, hearts, stars or whatever other symbol your audience's favorite platform uses to indicate audience engagement. By understanding the reach of your content, you understand how to drive more people to the top of your funnel.

Conversion

Conversion is the most important metric to consider when measuring content success and most marketers do not go deep enough into this whole category. You can start by understanding how many people clicked on the offer and completed the form for a download, but you should not stop there. Do these leads become qualified, either by a marketing lead scoring model or by a salesperson? And the next step of the process is to understand how your content contributes to closed deals, cross sales and upsells. Finally, are you supporting customer retention efforts with your content and how does that convert? Every piece of content has multiple conversions along each stage of the buyer journey, or funnel, pick your marketing metaphor, and the more informed you are about this, the more relevant your content will be in the future.

Branding and Marketing : Marketing Personas: Beginners Guide

Marketing Personas: Beginners Guide

The basic marketing persona template

I love this description of a marketing persona from the team at Krux:

With personas, businesses can be more strategic in catering to each audience, internalize the customer that they are trying to attract, and relate to them as human beings.

So how many of these “human beings” do you need to create? It is recommended that you make three to five personas to represent your audience; this number is big enough to cover the majority of your customers yet small enough to still carry the value of specificity. Hubspot has tons of examples of companies who have created marketing personas, and there are templates galore for making personas of your own. 
Many of these templates include the same basic information. You want to know who the person is, what they value, and how best to speak to them. Here is a quick overview on what you should include in your marketing persona template:

Name of the persona
Job title

• Key information about their company (size, type, etc.)
• Details about their role

Demographics

• Age
• Gender
• Salary / household income
• Location: urban / suburban / rural
• Education
• Family

Goals and challenges

• Primary goal
• Secondary goal
• How you help achieve these goals
• Primary challenge
• Secondary challenge
• How you help solve these problems

Values / fears

• Primary values
• Common objections during sales process

Marketing message
Elevator pitch
Don’t worry if some of these aren’t quite clear yet; we’ll go over an example in just a second.

Additional persona information specific to your customers

Beyond the basics, you will find that your specific business might need specific information. Personas can vary from business to business and industry to industry. An Internet news company would require different customer information than a medical supply company, and a persona built for a buying funnel might look different than one built for a blog.
With that in mind, here are some miscellaneous bits of information that you might consider adding to your personas.

• Hobbies
• Real quotes from interviews with customers
• Computer literacy
• Where they get their news
• Blogs they read

How to create a marketing persona

So where do you get all the information you need to make a persona take shape? There are many sources of information on your audience, from the tiny details logged away in your site statistics to actual conversations with real-life customers. Cast a wide net when coming up with information related to your personas.
Here are three places to look:
Check your site analytics.
Inside your analytics, you can see where your visitors came from, what keywords they used to find you, and how long they spent once they arrived. This data is key for personas as it can reveal the desires that led your audience to your site as well as the tools they used to get there.
Involve your team in creating profiles. 
Get the team together—not just marketing, but customer service, growth, development, and more. Anyone with interactions with customers and customer data should be involved in sharing their perspective on what makes your customers tick.
Social media research
You can also do some research with social media. Use social media listening to find your potential customers asking questions or airing problems your product can solve on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, or even try Pinterest for retail-oriented insights.
Ask your audience questions.
Who knows your customers better than they know themselves? Surveys and interviews are often a critical component to building a useful marketing persona. In particular, interviews can reveal deep insight into your customers since you can really dig into their answers and follow up with the goals, values, and pain points that will resonate the most with them. For personas to become useful tools, it’s best if they’re based on interviews gathered from salespeople, customer service interactions, and the buyers (customers) themselves.

Step-by-step guide to filling out a marketing persona template

Now that you know where you’re headed with a marketing persona, the next step is to actually build out the profile. Here’s how we might fill out the template above at Buffer to help find and connect with our core customers.



Let’s take a look at each field and talk about how we filled it out.
Give the persona a name.
The name can be whatever you choose. Make it a real name so the persona feels like a real person.

A persona should have enough psychological detail to allow you to conveniently step over to the persona’s view and see your products and services from her perspective. A persona can function almost like another person in the room when making a decision—It is “Sally.” She looks at what you’re doing from her particular and very specific vantage point, and points out flaws and benefits for her.

Identify the persona’s job, role, and company.
Your greatest resource for coming up with jobs for your personas is likely to be customer surveys. When you are building the surveys, you can include a field for job title, company size, and type of business. For instance, a recent survey of Buffer users showed that a large percentage are small-business owners—founders, owner/operators, or one-man teams. These can all fit nicely into a single persona.
Discover demographic information.
For demographic information, you can glean some insight from Google Analytics, plus your best educated guesses and survey info. Drilling down into the Google Analytics stats can show you where your visitors live as well as age, gender, affinity, and technology. Navigate to the Audience section of your Google Analytics to see all this and more:

Here is a sample of what you might see from Google Analytics for the interests of your site’s visitors. (If you cannot see certain demographic information, you may need to enable the feature or contact your Analytics administrator.)

For the elements you cannot find in your analytics, you can supplement with survey results. Many tools like Survey Monkey offer suggestions for how to word certain demographic questions to ensure you get the most accurate responses and avoid any confusion.

By this point, you may be wondering, “Is all this information really essential?” It might seem like fluff, but details like this do serve an important purpose. This is how James Heaton, writing for Tronvig Group, puts it:

These details have two functions:
First, they help force the creators to get into character. Specificity is a good way to push the process deep enough to facilitate genuine understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of your customers. We are not all naturally good at this, and it’s important for a persona’s effectiveness.
Second, it can help you find previously undetected tactical opportunities for your product, service, or institution. These can make what you do more useful and relevant in your customer’s lives. Where does your product or service constructively intersect with what Sally does or what Sally cares about? Once uncovered, these are very valuable insights.

Expressed visually, diving deep into personas can be the catalyst that turns a crude sketch into a true portrait.

Goals and challenges, values and fears
Actual customer interviews will be helpful in determining the objectives here. During your interviews, ask questions similar to the following—a great list from Marketing Interactions—to get a good feeling for your customers’ goals and challenges.

• What’s important to them and what’s driving the change?
• What’s impeding or speeding their need to change?
• How do they go about change?
• What do they need to know to embrace change?
• Who do they turn to for advice or information?
• What’s the value they visualize once they make a decision?
• Who do they have to sell change to in order to get it?
• What could cause the need for this change to lose priority?

While coming up with these goals and challenges, you can also identify the ways in which you can help customers meet these goals and overcome the challenges.
Your intuition here will be helpful. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and approach the solution with empathy. Consider what common objections arise for them during the sales process. What might keep this customer from closing the deal? Then brainstorm ways you can help.
Marketing message and elevator pitch
This part is all up to you! Put your knowledge and information to use and determine the best ways to meet the needs of each type of customer. At this step, “message” refers to how you might describe your product for this particular type of person.  Are you a complete social media service? An enterprise customer management tool? Then your elevator pitch can go into detail and set a consistent message on how to sell to this customer.

Examples of marketing personas

As mentioned above, marketing personas will vary from company to company, and each place will be unique. There will, of course, be similar themes that run throughout all personas. It’s when you get into detail that you start to see where the differences crop up. There are lots of neat examples online where companies have shared one of their own marketing personas. Here are a few shared by Hubspot and Buyer Persona.

Takeaways

 Marketing personas will help you identify with your audience and better solve their problems. And when you solve their problems, everyone wins. 

Be sure to include the whole team in coming up with these personas as everyone brings a different perspective and different information to the table. Then once you have your personas in place, act on them by using specific messaging with your content and by empathizing with customers as they go through your funnels.

The results will be a better experience for the customer and a more engaged user for your business.

What experience do you have with marketing personas? Are there elements of your persona template that have been particularly helpful? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you in the past or what you’re excited to try for your next persona experiment.

The SiriusDecisions Product Marketing and Management (PMM) Model

The SiriusDecisions Product Marketing and Management (PMM) Model

Branding and Marketing: Essential B-to-B Marketing Acronyms

Essential B-to-B Marketing Acronyms

Marketing Automation and SEO

Marketing Automation and SEO: Subdomains vs. Subdirectories

In recent months I’ve noticed a lack of content dedicated to marketing automation platforms and SEO. Most platforms, like Infusionsoft and HubSpot, have great content on general SEO best practices but there seems to be a gap in content that explains how to best use a marketing platform to support a site’s broader SEO efforts.



Specifically, there remains a lingering question on how to best use best subdomains and subdirectories in order to benefit your site’s overall SEO efforts.
In this post, I’m going to offer some insight into how to best use marketing automation platforms for SEO and how to avoid some of the most common pitfalls. But first, let’s take a step back and remember why marketing automation platforms came into existence and put their value into the right context.

The Real Benefits of a Marketing Automation Platform

Marketing automation platforms combine many of the features of singular marketing tools in one package, take these examples to name just a few:

Recommended for YouWebcast: The Art of Building Partnerships

• Unbounce (landing page creation, A/B testing)
• Moz (keyword tracking, SEO on-page optimization checks)
• MailChimp (email marketing)
• WordPress (CMS)
• Hootsuite (social media management)
• Google Analytics (content performance)
• Google AdWords (PPC performance)

Whew! That’s a lot of different tools running at the same time, all trying to solve the same objective: drive traffic, deliver great content, generate leads, and turn those leads into customers.
Prior to the explosion of marketing automation platforms, we marketers were stuck managing campaigns across multiple tools that often didn’t speak to each other and had varying degrees of automation. Much of our time was spent on implementation instead of actually measuring results.

The goal of marketing automation tools is to drive traffic, deliver great content, generate leads, and turn those leads into customers.

Plus, analyzing the results of our campaigns – the most important part of marketing – was a nightmare. Remember trying to aggregate data from these tools into standard reports? A place where we could draw visitor and lead insights? Yeah, me neither. Features like lead intelligence and dynamic smart forms just weren’t possible for the average marketing team.
Marketing automation platforms are extremely beneficial. They allow you to combine multiple marketing tools into one home, set up complex automated processes, and seamlessly gather anything from basic analytics to comprehensive visitor and lead intelligence. That’s a huge win for digital marketers and absolutely worth the investment for most businesses.

So What’s the Catch? It’s All About the Landing Pages

The details are critical when using a marketing automation platform and we find we get the most questions on how to use landing pages correctly with these types of platforms. Most users aren’t sure if they should set up a subdomain to house all of their newly created gated content or use a subdirectory on their website.


(Source: Formstack)
To understand which is right for you and your site, it’s important to know how marketing landing pages should be used.

SEO Best Practice: How to Use Marketing Landing Pages

Marketing landing pages should be created on a subdomain and used for individual marketing offers used for lead generation capture and testing — that’s it. Here’s why it’s best practice to create marketing landing pages on subdomains versus a main top level domain

1. Marketers don’t have multiple versions of the same offer in a site’s subfolders (avoid duplicate content)
2. Subdomains can be masked with custom URLs not part of a main site structure (info.yourwebsite.com or demo.yourwebsite.com)
3. Subdomains are treated as separated sites so the content produced is only narrowly attributed to the corresponding top-level domain. This creates a “playground” for marketers to test offers.
4. Efforts made to optimize a top-level domain do not significantly impact subdomain authority and vice-versa.

Marketing landing pages live on a subdomain for a distinct purpose that benefit both the marketers and your SEO team by creating a test friendly environment to create lead generation offers. Marketers should not use a subdomain to replace any content that lives in a top-level domain.

Marketing landing pages should be created on a subdomain and used for individual marketing offers used for lead generation capture and testing — that’s it.

Here’s what happened to Timo Reitnauer when he started using a subdomain to house his company’s content. Big drop, right? Recent reports show his content still hasn’t quite recovered 6 months after moving it back to their top level domain.



Landing pages created through marketing automation platforms should not be the home of the SEO-rich content you create. Instead, they are the right place for you to promote that content for lead generation.

SEO Best Practice: Where Your Authoritative Content Should Live

Here’s where it gets a bit confusing. Most marketing automation platforms give you the ability to “optimize” your marketing landing pages for search engines. However, it’s important to note that while these platforms can give us marketers SEO “grades” and do really help track SEO performance, the use of a subdomain to publish landing pages is not intended to house the valuable, authoritative content that should live on a business’ main website (top level domain).
For most marketers, it should not be your goal for the subdomain to rank organically. You want to build up the domain authority on your main website using that amazing content you’re spending so much time and money creating.

“[Subdomains] act as a barrier for the full link equity, brand, and user/usage signals to pass to your main site. They don’t amplify; they diminish your ranking/visibility potential”– Rand Fishkin, Founder of Moz

We recommend creating SEO optimized, organized resource pages that house your authoritative pieces on your top-level domain, like free guides, webinars, interviews, and blog content. Be sure to pay special attention to the URL structure, the keywords on the page, and the length of your content.
Use your marketing landing pages on a subdomain to test out different messaging and calls-to-action. When you split out your content this way, your marketing efforts won’t conflict with your long-term SEO goals.

Driving Traffic to Marketing Landing Pages

It’s important to note: with marketing landing pages, you do have to drive traffic with social, PPC, or other referral traffic.
“Optimizing” these pages for SEO is a best practice in theory — as you would any published web page – but in reality, totally unnecessary. It’s a bit misleading that some of these platforms use phrases like, “enter keywords into your landing page” as if you are truly optimizing the page. Most of the time, your marketing landing pages will need a paid source of traffic or volume from a popular referral network, like email or a third-party site linking to your offer.

Subdomains vs Subdirectories: FAQ

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/FAQ.png.png

Before we close, here are the answers to the most common questions we receive about properly using subdomains with marketing landing pages.

When should I use marketing landing pages on a subdomain?

Use a marketing landing page on a subdomain when you want to test different offers. Maybe you want to do an A/B test with copy or call-to-actions, or perhaps you want to create an offer just for your Facebook fans or Twitter followers. When you use a subdomain you don’t have to stress about affecting your top level domain with duplicate pages or content.
Use marketing landing pages on a subdomain when you want to isolate these pages from the rest of your primary website.
If you only have one offer on a page that will rarely change – say a request for a standard product demo on your top level domain – you could use a subfolder to house that page. Keep in mind though, that using a page on your subdirectory has ripple effects to your top level domain. Create these pages with as much effort and thought as you would any other main page on your website.

Should I link to my subdomain marketing landing pages from my top level domain?

You can if it’s appropriate for the lead generation offer you’re providing on your subdomain. While the outbound links from your top level domain to your subdomain won’t negatively affect your SEO efforts, I’d only recommend this tactic if it makes sense for you from a conversion perspective.
However, it’s important to emphasize that your authoritative content should not live on a subdomain. If you want to drive people to a gated free guide offer on your subdomain, make sure that free guide primarily lives somewhere on your main website on a dedicated page.

Do I need to use noindex and nofollow tags on my marketing landing pages?

I would use noindex if you want to direct Google not to index your landing pages. Nofollow tells Google not to apply link equity to the content so its use depends on if you want stand behind the content offered on your marketing landing pages.

This seems like a lot of work. Why would I even use marketing landing pages at all?

Using marketing landing pages correctly can feel overwhelming and a bit confusing. Some of our clients request to just use their top level domain to house all of their lead generation offers. And for many of them, it makes sense. The deciding factor here is flexibility and testing.
A subdomain allows you to test all different types of variables that go into generating conversions. Building marketing landing pages on a subdomain gives us the flexibility to test varying versions of pages. We also can create as many of these landing pages as we’d like without significantly affecting our top level domain SEO efforts. Now, this doesn’t give us a justifiable reason to create spam-filled pages, but it does give us a safe playground to test different approaches.
If you don’t plan on changing your marketing landing pages very often or you want to create just one page with a call-to-action form and focus on building up the page authority of that offer, you can just use a subdirectory. The use of subdomains are not required with marketing landing pages.
In the end, it all comes down to how you plan to use your marketing landing pages to decide on whether you should select a subdomain or a subdirectory for your offers.

SEO and Marketing Automation Platforms: The Good News

The good news: marketing automation platforms do let you track the SEO performance of your top level domain and grade individual top level domain pages for SEO – this is very similar to something like a Moz On-Page Grader. Some even come with helpful site and page-level keyword trackers.
I truly believe there are some powerful and helpful SEO tools within these platforms that should definitely be utilized. Marketing landing pages are just not one of them.

Design for Digital

Design for Digital

We have seen the development in the compute space – so the move from hardware based Operating systems to a software based approach – called virtualisation. The same is now also happening in the network and in the storage space. The ability to construct infrastructure related capabilities in a lego based fashion requires well defined interfaces and standards; open stack is the attempt to standardise these : OpenStack began in 2010 as a joint project of Rackspace Hosting and NASA. Currently, it is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community. more than 200 companies have joined the project.
The result has been impressive – add Cloud Foundry to the mix and you made a big step towards the virtual lego vision. Cloud Foundry is an open source cloud computing platform as a service (PaaS) originally developed by VMware and now owned by Pivotal Software - a joint venture by EMC, VMware and General Electric. Cloud Foundry was designed and developed by a small team from Google led by Derek Collison and was originally called project B29.It is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), comparable to Google Storage and Amazon S3 online storage services
But of course – this is great for green field or when you have only / mainly open source based environments – but what do you do with existing technology that is not OpenStack / Cloud Foundry compatible? It can be very tricky to establish a positive business case when dealing with such a scenario. However there is / are some signs of new products that might enable better integration. DevOps has captivated a large part of the IT industry and is fuelling the innovation cycle. For example IBM is starting to equip more traditional software products with DevOps based capabilities a la open source – see here a news updated issued last week. This will open new opportunities which then translate into new innovations to help clients making use of the lego based approach.
As I noted before the immediate future of infrastructure is hybrid, fully automated and invisible – we call it invisible infostructure. The idea is that we will deal with infrastructure that evolves into an invisible but extremely information-rich and powerful platform for business. To illustrate this we outlined 4+1 main building blocks :  

1. Virtual Lego
2. Let’s Get Physical
3. Build, Release, Run, Repeat
4. Orchestrate For Simple
5. What Would Amazon Do?

But infrastructure is one aspect for an enterprise – there are 6 other key areas to consider of course : read here



We call this framework TechnoVision and to stay uptodate we refresh TechnoVision every year. It is a framework that incudes viewpoints and insights to guide you through the technologies that will radically improve the performance and the reach of your enterprise.

Coming back to the future of infrastructure – the invisible infostructure. I outlined above what the immediate future looks like. Question is what is the long term future? What will Infrastructure look like in 2030? In 2030 infrastructure will be much more “business aware”. Our today known Infrastructure capabilities (like compute, network, storage) will have the ability to construct and orchestrate services that are business focused. Autonomics and robotics are accelerating the drive to invisible & intelligent “businessstructure” and we as consumers will be able to create, combine & consume in much more flexible and agile way. These “businessstructure” components are able to “understand” complex situations and by using enriched and realtime data, are able to make valuable decisions. The result? A much more connected, autonomous and truly invisible infostructure.

8 Inbound Marketing Reports You Can't Live Without

                    8 Inbound Marketing Reports You Can't Live Without     

As a marketer, you’re already familiar with the inbound marketing model: attract online visitors, transform them to leads, and then convince them to become customers. However, it is vital to choose the right reports and make them easy for decision-makers to interpret.
These eight inbound marketing reports will help you get the most for your marketing dollar clarify where your leads come from, which promotions they prefer, and which inbound channels work best for your business.

1. Traffic Sources
Your first job is to identify how people find your website, your social channels, and your content assets. These channels provide the majority of inbound traffic:

• Organic search. People find your website or blog when they type a query into Google or Bing.
• Online ads. You purchase pay-per-click ads on search engines or other sides, and those ads lead customers to your landing pages.
• Social networks. You connect with prospects on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or other social network, and those prospects click your links and visit your site.
• Referrals. Inbound links from a guest blog post you’ve published on another website direct potential customers back to your website. A prominent blogger mentions your company and provides a link readers can use to find you.
• Email marketing. When you use email for lead generation, people might click on your newsletters or download your promotional coupons.

2. Lead Sources
Most businesses discover that certain traffic sources deliver more leads than others. For instance, you might receive a lot of traffic from social networks but get the most verifiable leads from organic search. Once you understand which traffic sources create the most leads, you identify where you should spend more of your marketing budget after all not all qualified leads are not created equal.
It’s precisely why marketers need lead management software to automate lead scoring.

3. Leads Per Offer
Some promotional offers attract more customers than others. For example, one white paper might generate more leads than others. It’s a good idea to test different promotions against one another and also to test identical promotions in different contexts. Try testing two versions of a Google AdWords campaign offering the same promotion to see which generates the most leads.

4. Revenue Per Source
Different promotions and marketing channels attract varying qualities of leads. Your Instagram campaign might attract a few big spenders while your email marketing might generate a lot of small transactions. You can choose to invest heavily in high-revenue sources, or you can market products at varying price points over targeted channels. Market in a way that generates maximum revenue, but don’t become too dependent on one big client.
Monitor Lead Nurturing Effectiveness
It’s not enough to run reports; you have to create reports that decision-makers can understand. For example, Windward Studios helps businesses create reports that are professional and easy to interpret.
These reports teach you which lead nurturing methods convert leads into long-term, high-value customer relationships.

5. Contacts Per Persona

Your buyer persona identifies who your customers are. The buyer persona doesn’t have to be the person making the purchase; it could also be someone who influences the final decision-maker. Focus your marketing dollars on the personas that lead to the most purchases. Also, challenge your assumptions about your personas, and don’t hesitate to reconfigure them as you learn more about your customers.
“We question what we think we know about customers all the time,” says Daumantas Dvilinskas CEO of TransferGo. “Far too many companies forget their customers and their attitudes, buying patterns, etc, can change.”

6. Investment Per Opportunity Generated
Ideally, you want to keep your cost per lead low to stay under your marketing budget. At the same time, some leads become big spending customers, so investing more money into nurturing them becomes worthwhile. Use this report to identify which leads cost a lot of money while failing to convert.

7. Revenue Per Opportunity Generated
Getting leads is nice; turning them into paying customers is better. If you notice a low ratio of revenue per lead generated, it’s time to diagnose what’s going wrong with your lead nurturing cycle. You might need to swap out underperforming content from your lead nurturing campaigns or trim your investment in traffic sources that generate low-quality leads.

8. Contacts Per Lifecycle

It’s vital to know the current state of your marketing pipeline. If you’re heavy on new leads, focus your marketing budget on nurturing and getting conversions. If you’re light on new prospects, spend some money on pay-per-click or social brand awareness campaigns. The balance shifts constantly, and your marketing budget needs to shift with it.

Why B-to-B Marketing Should Have a Quota

Key Takeaways

A quota can improve alignment between a company’s sales and marketing department.

The role of marketing in closing a deal doesn’t just stop with generating leads. 

Marketing needs a process in place to score leads. ​

- See more at: https://www.ama.org/publications/eNewsletters/B2BMarketing/Pages/Why-B-to-B-Marketing-Should-Have-a-Quota.aspx#sthash.Vn54uTIh.dpuf

Key Takeaways

A quota can improve alignment between a company’s sales and marketing department.

The role of marketing in closing a deal doesn’t just stop with generating leads. 

Marketing needs a process in place to score leads. ​

​Many B-to-B marketing professionals would say that it’s not possible or desirable to meet a quota, but a quota can improve alignment between a company’s sales and marketing department. It can drive marketing to stay involved throughout the sales cycle and can help measure marketing effectiveness. 

Sales and marketing departments often treat each other with a certain amount of suspicion. Neither thinks that the other understands what they do, or values it. In reality, both have a role in meeting the company’s revenue goals. But to be most effective in growing revenue, sales and marketing have to be aligned, and the first step is to define common terms, goals and measurements. 

Leads vs. Opportunities

As an easy example, a click-through or open isn’t a lead. A lead is a qualified response that sales can follow up on. But while that’s a fairly traditional definition, the accompanying idea that marketing just pitches leads over the fence and moves on is now rather outdated. Sales has to do the follow-up, but marketing also has a role in nurturing an opportunity. 

The role of marketing in closing a deal doesn’t just stop with generating leads. Personally, I dislike the concept of “handing off a lead” to sales. I like to think of it as “introducing an opportunity” to sales. Marketing doesn’t lose the relationship with that opportunity, but maintains a connection.

To develop that relationship, marketing needs a process in place to score leads. By working with the inside sales team, marketing can further qualify leads. Once a lead is qualified and converted into an opportunity, marketing can continue to help in the following ways:

• Pipeline acceleration programs to help sales with more individualized programs for opportunities that haven’t moved forward; 

• More marketing touch points to help sales get a prospect moving; and

• More information for prospects who are ready to close, but for some reason haven’t.

Tracking Revenue Goals With Marketing Automation

Some marketing departments don’t focus on revenue as a goal because they either don’t know how or think they can’t measure it. Both marketing and sales need to set up a lead-tracking system—all the way through the buying cycle—to know when a prospect purchases, renews or cancels. This enables the company to track marketing’s contribution to revenue. Companies that don’t have this type of marketing system in place find it difficult to measure marketing’s impact. 

In fact, most companies that use marketing automation use it as a basic e-mail distribution system. Marketing should progressively score leads, measure conversion rates and measure the speed of conversion as opportunities move through the sales funnel. Armed with data like this, they can build a model that tells them what they need to achieve during every step of the buyers’ journey on the way to a sale. 

Putting Marketing Programs Under a Quota

An investment in marketing that is higher in the sales funnel, like awareness campaigns or social media marketing, might seem difficult to tie to a revenue number, but it’s not. Not only can you set measureable targets for creating awareness, but you can also incorporate demand generation elements into awareness initiatives.

For example, while an ad might be for the purpose of generating awareness, it can also have a call to action that leads to a personalized landing page in the marketing automation system, or a link to a web page where readers can download something. PR and social media content can also drive buyers to a microsite for a free trial or a webcast, or a number of other measurable actions. 

A social media campaign can measure marketing analytics such as follower growth, retweets or other actions that help move buyers into the sales funnel. If you promote a webinar on social media, set up a separate registration URL for each channel and see where the sign-ups come in. Then follow those attendees and see how many enter the pipeline, and how many eventually become buyers. 

The result of these changes in thinking, in coordination, and in how you use tools is marketing that shows its value to the bottom line. Sales and marketing coordinate more and work better together to realize real business growth. Documenting the results of marketing work in filling the pipeline, moving prospects along the sales cycle, and closing deals increases credibility for marketing, and being able to prove it earns more respect for the real results that marketing brings in and, ultimately, enables marketing to have confidence in signing up for a quota.

- See more at: https://www.ama.org/publications/eNewsletters/B2BMarketing/Pages/Why-B-to-B-Marketing-Should-Have-a-Quota.aspx#sthash.Vn54uTIh.dpuf

Key Takeaways

A quota can improve alignment between a company’s sales and marketing department.

The role of marketing in closing a deal doesn’t just stop with generating leads. 

Marketing needs a process in place to score leads. ​

​Many B-to-B marketing professionals would say that it’s not possible or desirable to meet a quota, but a quota can improve alignment between a company’s sales and marketing department. It can drive marketing to stay involved throughout the sales cycle and can help measure marketing effectiveness. 

Sales and marketing departments often treat each other with a certain amount of suspicion. Neither thinks that the other understands what they do, or values it. In reality, both have a role in meeting the company’s revenue goals. But to be most effective in growing revenue, sales and marketing have to be aligned, and the first step is to define common terms, goals and measurements. 

Leads vs. Opportunities

As an easy example, a click-through or open isn’t a lead. A lead is a qualified response that sales can follow up on. But while that’s a fairly traditional definition, the accompanying idea that marketing just pitches leads over the fence and moves on is now rather outdated. Sales has to do the follow-up, but marketing also has a role in nurturing an opportunity. 

The role of marketing in closing a deal doesn’t just stop with generating leads. Personally, I dislike the concept of “handing off a lead” to sales. I like to think of it as “introducing an opportunity” to sales. Marketing doesn’t lose the relationship with that opportunity, but maintains a connection.

To develop that relationship, marketing needs a process in place to score leads. By working with the inside sales team, marketing can further qualify leads. Once a lead is qualified and converted into an opportunity, marketing can continue to help in the following ways:

• Pipeline acceleration programs to help sales with more individualized programs for opportunities that haven’t moved forward; 

• More marketing touch points to help sales get a prospect moving; and

• More information for prospects who are ready to close, but for some reason haven’t.

Tracking Revenue Goals With Marketing Automation

Some marketing departments don’t focus on revenue as a goal because they either don’t know how or think they can’t measure it. Both marketing and sales need to set up a lead-tracking system—all the way through the buying cycle—to know when a prospect purchases, renews or cancels. This enables the company to track marketing’s contribution to revenue. Companies that don’t have this type of marketing system in place find it difficult to measure marketing’s impact. 

In fact, most companies that use marketing automation use it as a basic e-mail distribution system. Marketing should progressively score leads, measure conversion rates and measure the speed of conversion as opportunities move through the sales funnel. Armed with data like this, they can build a model that tells them what they need to achieve during every step of the buyers’ journey on the way to a sale. 

Putting Marketing Programs Under a Quota

An investment in marketing that is higher in the sales funnel, like awareness campaigns or social media marketing, might seem difficult to tie to a revenue number, but it’s not. Not only can you set measureable targets for creating awareness, but you can also incorporate demand generation elements into awareness initiatives.

For example, while an ad might be for the purpose of generating awareness, it can also have a call to action that leads to a personalized landing page in the marketing automation system, or a link to a web page where readers can download something. PR and social media content can also drive buyers to a microsite for a free trial or a webcast, or a number of other measurable actions. 

A social media campaign can measure marketing analytics such as follower growth, retweets or other actions that help move buyers into the sales funnel. If you promote a webinar on social media, set up a separate registration URL for each channel and see where the sign-ups come in. Then follow those attendees and see how many enter the pipeline, and how many eventually become buyers. 

The result of these changes in thinking, in coordination, and in how you use tools is marketing that shows its value to the bottom line. Sales and marketing coordinate more and work better together to realize real business growth. Documenting the results of marketing work in filling the pipeline, moving prospects along the sales cycle, and closing deals increases credibility for marketing, and being able to prove it earns more respect for the real results that marketing brings in and, ultimately, enables marketing to have confidence in signing up for a quota.

- See more at: https://www.ama.org/publications/eNewsletters/B2BMarketing/Pages/Why-B-to-B-Marketing-Should-Have-a-Quota.aspx#sthash.Vn54uTIh.dpuf

Key Takeaways

A quota can improve alignment between a company’s sales and marketing department.

The role of marketing in closing a deal doesn’t just stop with generating leads. 

Marketing needs a process in place to score leads. ​

​Many B-to-B marketing professionals would say that it’s not possible or desirable to meet a quota, but a quota can improve alignment between a company’s sales and marketing department. It can drive marketing to stay involved throughout the sales cycle and can help measure marketing effectiveness. 

Sales and marketing departments often treat each other with a certain amount of suspicion. Neither thinks that the other understands what they do, or values it. In reality, both have a role in meeting the company’s revenue goals. But to be most effective in growing revenue, sales and marketing have to be aligned, and the first step is to define common terms, goals and measurements. 

Leads vs. Opportunities

As an easy example, a click-through or open isn’t a lead. A lead is a qualified response that sales can follow up on. But while that’s a fairly traditional definition, the accompanying idea that marketing just pitches leads over the fence and moves on is now rather outdated. Sales has to do the follow-up, but marketing also has a role in nurturing an opportunity. 

The role of marketing in closing a deal doesn’t just stop with generating leads. Personally, I dislike the concept of “handing off a lead” to sales. I like to think of it as “introducing an opportunity” to sales. Marketing doesn’t lose the relationship with that opportunity, but maintains a connection.

To develop that relationship, marketing needs a process in place to score leads. By working with the inside sales team, marketing can further qualify leads. Once a lead is qualified and converted into an opportunity, marketing can continue to help in the following ways:

• Pipeline acceleration programs to help sales with more individualized programs for opportunities that haven’t moved forward; 

• More marketing touch points to help sales get a prospect moving; and

• More information for prospects who are ready to close, but for some reason haven’t.

Tracking Revenue Goals With Marketing Automation

Some marketing departments don’t focus on revenue as a goal because they either don’t know how or think they can’t measure it. Both marketing and sales need to set up a lead-tracking system—all the way through the buying cycle—to know when a prospect purchases, renews or cancels. This enables the company to track marketing’s contribution to revenue. Companies that don’t have this type of marketing system in place find it difficult to measure marketing’s impact. 

In fact, most companies that use marketing automation use it as a basic e-mail distribution system. Marketing should progressively score leads, measure conversion rates and measure the speed of conversion as opportunities move through the sales funnel. Armed with data like this, they can build a model that tells them what they need to achieve during every step of the buyers’ journey on the way to a sale. 

Putting Marketing Programs Under a Quota

An investment in marketing that is higher in the sales funnel, like awareness campaigns or social media marketing, might seem difficult to tie to a revenue number, but it’s not. Not only can you set measureable targets for creating awareness, but you can also incorporate demand generation elements into awareness initiatives.

For example, while an ad might be for the purpose of generating awareness, it can also have a call to action that leads to a personalized landing page in the marketing automation system, or a link to a web page where readers can download something. PR and social media content can also drive buyers to a microsite for a free trial or a webcast, or a number of other measurable actions. 

A social media campaign can measure marketing analytics such as follower growth, retweets or other actions that help move buyers into the sales funnel. If you promote a webinar on social media, set up a separate registration URL for each channel and see where the sign-ups come in. Then follow those attendees and see how many enter the pipeline, and how many eventually become buyers. 

The result of these changes in thinking, in coordination, and in how you use tools is marketing that shows its value to the bottom line. Sales and marketing coordinate more and work better together to realize real business growth. Documenting the results of marketing work in filling the pipeline, moving prospects along the sales cycle, and closing deals increases credibility for marketing, and being able to prove it earns more respect for the real results that marketing brings in and, ultimately, enables marketing to have confidence in signing up for a quota.

- See more at: https://www.ama.org/publications/eNewsletters/B2BMarketing/Pages/Why-B-to-B-Marketing-Should-Have-a-Quota.aspx#sthash.Vn54uTIh.dpuf

Key Takeaways

A quota can improve alignment between a company’s sales and marketing department.

The role of marketing in closing a deal doesn’t just stop with generating leads. 

Marketing needs a process in place to score leads. ​

​Many B-to-B marketing professionals would say that it’s not possible or desirable to meet a quota, but a quota can improve alignment between a company’s sales and marketing department. It can drive marketing to stay involved throughout the sales cycle and can help measure marketing effectiveness. 

Sales and marketing departments often treat each other with a certain amount of suspicion. Neither thinks that the other understands what they do, or values it. In reality, both have a role in meeting the company’s revenue goals. But to be most effective in growing revenue, sales and marketing have to be aligned, and the first step is to define common terms, goals and measurements. 

Leads vs. Opportunities

As an easy example, a click-through or open isn’t a lead. A lead is a qualified response that sales can follow up on. But while that’s a fairly traditional definition, the accompanying idea that marketing just pitches leads over the fence and moves on is now rather outdated. Sales has to do the follow-up, but marketing also has a role in nurturing an opportunity. 

The role of marketing in closing a deal doesn’t just stop with generating leads. Personally, I dislike the concept of “handing off a lead” to sales. I like to think of it as “introducing an opportunity” to sales. Marketing doesn’t lose the relationship with that opportunity, but maintains a connection.

To develop that relationship, marketing needs a process in place to score leads. By working with the inside sales team, marketing can further qualify leads. Once a lead is qualified and converted into an opportunity, marketing can continue to help in the following ways:

• Pipeline acceleration programs to help sales with more individualized programs for opportunities that haven’t moved forward; 

• More marketing touch points to help sales get a prospect moving; and

• More information for prospects who are ready to close, but for some reason haven’t.

Tracking Revenue Goals With Marketing Automation

Some marketing departments don’t focus on revenue as a goal because they either don’t know how or think they can’t measure it. Both marketing and sales need to set up a lead-tracking system—all the way through the buying cycle—to know when a prospect purchases, renews or cancels. This enables the company to track marketing’s contribution to revenue. Companies that don’t have this type of marketing system in place find it difficult to measure marketing’s impact. 

In fact, most companies that use marketing automation use it as a basic e-mail distribution system. Marketing should progressively score leads, measure conversion rates and measure the speed of conversion as opportunities move through the sales funnel. Armed with data like this, they can build a model that tells them what they need to achieve during every step of the buyers’ journey on the way to a sale. 

Putting Marketing Programs Under a Quota

An investment in marketing that is higher in the sales funnel, like awareness campaigns or social media marketing, might seem difficult to tie to a revenue number, but it’s not. Not only can you set measureable targets for creating awareness, but you can also incorporate demand generation elements into awareness initiatives.

For example, while an ad might be for the purpose of generating awareness, it can also have a call to action that leads to a personalized landing page in the marketing automation system, or a link to a web page where readers can download something. PR and social media content can also drive buyers to a microsite for a free trial or a webcast, or a number of other measurable actions. 

A social media campaign can measure marketing analytics such as follower growth, retweets or other actions that help move buyers into the sales funnel. If you promote a webinar on social media, set up a separate registration URL for each channel and see where the sign-ups come in. Then follow those attendees and see how many enter the pipeline, and how many eventually become buyers. 

The result of these changes in thinking, in coordination, and in how you use tools is marketing that shows its value to the bottom line. Sales and marketing coordinate more and work better together to realize real business growth. Documenting the results of marketing work in filling the pipeline, moving prospects along the sales cycle, and closing deals increases credibility for marketing, and being able to prove it earns more respect for the real results that marketing brings in and, ultimately, enables marketing to have confidence in signing up for a quota.

- See more at: https://www.ama.org/publications/eNewsletters/B2BMarketing/Pages/Why-B-to-B-Marketing-Should-Have-a-Quota.aspx#sthash.Vn54uTIh.dpuf