Tag Archives: marketo

MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit Boston

Monday and Tuesday I’m attending the Boston MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit. About two weeks ago I attended the San Francisco event, which had a similar program and exhibitors. In this post some thoughts about the program…
First of all, the best thing about this event is that the speakers are marketing practitioners, not vendors. This ensures that you get lots of real-life advice. However, there are also many different perspectives, and it’s not always easy to link them together. But, that can easily be addressed:
Classify the Topics
Having seen many of the presentations in San Francisco, I found it useful to classify them in three main categories:
Lead Generation
Lead Management
Content creation
The first is obviously focused on getting more leads into your database, while the second topic focuses on nurturing those leads. Many marketing organizations now realize that both these activities are more successful if they use attractive content, so that is also addressed in a couple of sessions. I tried to classify every session, and that made it easier for me to distill best practices.
The Review Sessions Are Recommended
I can also recommend the introduction and review sessions led by Flint McGlaughlin, Stefan Tornquist, Sean Donahue and Brian Carroll and of MarketingExperiments, MarketingSherpa and InTouch (all part of the MECLABS group). They do a great job synthesizing all ideas.
Favorite Session
My favorite sessions was presented by Maureen Thorman of National Instruments about customer segmentation based on web traffic: unfortunately this sessions will not be presented in Boston, that’s a bummer.
The Marketing Automation Vendors
My specialty is Marketing Automation Consulting, and many of the vendors were attending with a booth. In Boston the following Marketing Automation vendors are worth a visit (in order of booth number):
Pardot (booth 1)
Manticore Technology (booth 2)
Silverpop Engage B2B (booth 4)
Marketo (booth 6)
Genius.com (booth 7)
Marketbright (booth 14)
Hubspot (booth 16)
Neolane (booth 19)
Twitter & Questions
I will try to tweet as many sessions as possible at the LeadSloth Twitter page. Let me know if you have any questions via Twitter or email (jep leadsloth com).  And if you’re attending, let’s connect (see my picture on the right).

marketingsherpa b2b marketing summitMonday and Tuesday I’m attending the Boston MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit. About two weeks ago I attended the San Francisco event, which had a similar program and exhibitors. In this post some recommendations for the program…

First of all, the best thing about this event is that the speakers are marketing practitioners, not vendors. This ensures that you get lots of real-life advice. However, there are also many different perspectives, and it’s not always easy to link them together. But, that can easily be addressed:

Classify the Topics

Having seen many of the presentations in San Francisco, I found it useful to classify them in three main categories:

  • Lead Generation
  • Lead Management
  • Content creation

The first is obviously focused on getting more leads into your database, while the second topic focuses on nurturing those leads. Many marketing organizations now realize that both these activities are more successful if they use attractive content, so that is also addressed in a couple of sessions. I tried to classify every session, and that made it easier for me to distill best practices.

The Review Sessions Are Recommended

I can also recommend the introduction and review sessions led by Flint McGlaughlin, Stefan Tornquist, Sean Donahue and Brian Carroll and of MarketingExperiments, MarketingSherpa and InTouch (all part of the MECLABS group). They do a great job synthesizing all ideas.

My Favorite Session

My favorite session in San Francisco was presented by Maureen Thorman of National Instruments about customer segmentation based on web traffic: unfortunately this sessions will not be presented in Boston, that’s a bummer, because they used very advanced web analytics to improve the conversation with prospects and customers.

The Marketing Automation Vendors

My specialty is Marketing Automation Consulting, and many of the Marketing Automation vendors have a booth. In Boston you should definitely stop by at the booths of the following Marketing Automation vendors (in order of booth number):

Twitter & Questions

I will try to tweet as many sessions as possible at the LeadSloth Twitter page. Let me know if you have any questions via Twitter or email (jep leadsloth com).  And if you’re attending, let’s connect (see my picture on the right)!

What is the ROI of Lead Management?

Earlier this year I downloaded Silverpop’s lead management workbook, and I planned to write about it. Unfortunately, not enough time… Last week I received a copy of Marketo’s Lead Nurturing workbook. Similar books, but each with their unique approach and lots of smart advice.

Both books show how you can increase sales by nurturing all leads, from inquiry to opportunity. Heck, why not nurture customers too? (that is one of the great suggestions in Marketo’s book).

lead management roi

Both books cover lead nurturing and ROI calculations, and Silverpop also explains lead scoring. Silverpop’s book is a little more high-level and written in magazine style, while Marketo’s offers more practical advice on how to set up your nurturing campaigns. Read them both!

By the way: on August 19th Marketo has a webinar about lead nurturing and on August 20th Silverpop has a webinar about lead scoring (hopefully a recording will be available afterwards).

Why Lead Management

Both books do a good job of describing why you need Lead Management. A proper follow-up ensures that leads are nurtured until they are ready to talk to a sales person. And – because of the nurturing – they are much better educated, making the sales person’s job a lot easier. Because you can follow up with 100% of your leads, and because your sales people can be more effective, you will turn more inquiries into sales. See also my post on the MarketingGenius blog for an introduction to Lead Management, and The 4 steps of Lead Management.

Lead Scoring

Silverpop includes a great overview of Lead Scoring. They explain that sales & marketing need to jointly create a definition of a qualified lead. Then you can implement scoring rules to identify those leads, based on implicit and explicit criteria. Marketo has published separate Lead Scoring Guide with similar suggestions. See also my introduction to Lead Scoring.

Lead Management ROI

The word “ROI” is often abused, but not in these workbooks. Marketo provides several worksheets that make it easier for you to calculate your return on lead management. Silverpop presents a 5-step process for proving the ROI. Both vendors suggest to look at conversion metrics between buying stages: from inquiry, via qualified lead and opportunity to a closed deal. This is the best way to get quick indicator of improvements, because waiting for the closed deal can take a while if you have a long sales cycle.

Silverpop suggests starting your ROI calculations with a simple metric, such as the number of leads. Marketo has a great recommendation to identify how many opportunities come from fast-moving leads (say under 30 days old) versus older leads (> 30 days old). If you have few opportunities from older leads, your nurturing should be improved.

I’ve just published a introductory post on Marketing Automation ROI on the MarketingGenius blog.

Some Highlights & Smart Ideas

I don’t want to summarize the entire workbooks in this post, but I’d like to highlight a couple of smart ideas that are mentioned in these whitepapers.

Marketo mentions Accelerator campaigns, in which the prospect can choose to speed up the nurturing campaign. A simple and nice idea. Also, their workbook gives lots of examples of their own nurturing processes (used by Marketo themselves): this makes the recommendations come to life.

One of Silverpop’s lead scoring tips is to decrease the weight of scoring activities over time: older activities are just not as relevant. But how long should you wait? They recommend to take the length of your average sales cycle to start decreasing, and twice the sales cycle to completely omit the activity.

Both papers suggest setting the duration of your nurture campaign to the length of the average sales cycle. By that time the average lead should be sales ready. If not, you can put them on a long-term nurturing program. In principle, leads should not just ‘sit idle’: you either nurture or toss them.

Both papers also look at the buyer roles (e.g. economic buyer, end-user, IT, etc.) and the stages in the buying cycle (e.g. awareness and evaluation). For each stage and role you need to have optimized content. Yes, that means a lot of copywriting!

Oh, and both have hired illustrators to make these whitepaper pretty colorful. Does that make it a not-so-whitepaper? :- )

Conclusion

Big kudos to Marketo and Silverpop for creating these comprehensive workbooks on lead management. Their best practices are useful for any demand generation practitioner, and are not tied to one particular marketing automation system. And even as an experienced marketer I read several new and interesting ideas in both books.

Have you read these books? What do you think: are they good or do you see room for improvement?

B2B Pay Per Click Advertising

Interview with Terry Whalen from CPC Search

terry whalen cpc search To generate demand for your products, it’s not enough to nurture the existing leads in your database. You also need a steady stream of fresh leads coming in. There are many ways to find these new leads: inbound marketing, search advertising, tradeshows, lead programs, etc. They all have their pros and cons, and most companies use a combination of strategies.

I have written a lot about Inbound Marketing (social media and search engine optimization): it’s free, but takes a fair amount of time to set up. Search advertising (pay-per-click) is another popular option: it costs money, but it immediately starts driving people to your site. I recently got in touch with Terry Whalen of CPCSearch, a B2B PPC agency, and he offered to answer some questions: this turned out to be a great B2B Search Marketing primer. If you have additional questions for Terry, please leave a comment below.

Jep: Some of my friends claim that B2B paid search is less interesting than B2C because the average B2B search budgets pale in comparison with B2C. What is your take?

Terry: B2B paid search tends to be more challenging to get right versus B2C – so if you like challenges, B2B paid search can be quite fun. It’s true that measuring true ROI usually takes a longer time and more effort than measuring ROI for B2C campaigns – so, when the ROI data does start to come in, it’s all the more exciting.

Jep: What are some of the key differences in running a B2B paid search campaign vs. a B2C campaign?

Terry: As I mentioned, it typically takes much longer to determine things like lead quality and ROI.  To me, this means that we want to be very careful to be clear on the true value proposition delivered by the client’s products and services when we are crafting ad text. I’m a little less inclined to “think outside the box” when it comes to B2B ad testing. Compare that to a B2C account where you are measuring credit card transactions. Because we’ll get super quick transaction and revenue data on any testing we do, we may feel more inclined to test “crazy” ad ideas that – if they do not work – can be quickly killed.  Same goes for keywords. For B2B keyword and ad testing, we tread with a bit more caution.

Jep: How would you describe the unique benefits of Paid Search in the entire spectrum of options that B2B marketing managers have to promote their products (such as banner ads, list rentals, telemarketing, etc.)?

Terry: Well, the reason paid search has become so big is that ads are matched to user searches.  When paid search works well, solutions (ads) are matched to needs (searches). If you can figure out which keywords are aligned with the user intent you are targeting, then you can have ads appear that are relevant to the user, and relevant to what your company provides.  Above all, paid search is very measurable and controllable. So, advertisers have a lot of wind at their back in terms of testing and iterating to get their campaigns working well for them.

Jep: Is there a typical target group that is easier to reach with PPC? E.g. promoting software to developers vs. selling a value-based proposition to C-level executives?

Terry: I’d say it’s easier to target certain groups for the very simple reason of size. For example, there are many more software and web developers in the world than there are CIO’s of F1000 companies. So, if you are selling into CIO’s of F1000 companies, you will certainly have a tougher time – the population you are targeting is a small population, and the number of daily searches done by this group will be a much smaller number than searches done by software and web developers.

Jep: How do you track opportunities or revenue associated with specific AdWords Campaigns? Do your clients use Salesforce for Google AdWords, Marketing Automation systems or other tools?

Terry: For the most part, clients use Salesforce-for-AdWords, which is a very elegant way to link leads with valuable AdWords data like keyword, search term, campaign, etc. For clients that are using marketing automation platforms like Marketo or Eloqua, there is a bit more integration to do, but the links can still be made to work. At the end of the day, we feel that the most important piece of data is the search query – so, if you can just get a hidden field to capture this data and connect it with a lead, you are ahead of the game. In AdWords, you would just append a parameter to each active ad you are running, e.g. keyword={keyword}.

Jep: Could you see some kind of integration with Marketing Automation systems that would make running a profitable PPC campaign easier?

Terry: Yes, in a very general sense, anything that can increase the value of a lead after it has been acquired – which marketing automation can certainly do – should have the effect of increasing ROI from your paid search activities, thus making it easier to rationalize larger budgets and higher cost-per-lead targets, which can lead to additional keyword and ad testing, higher keyword bids, and more leads.

Jep: Do some of your clients use lead scoring together with PPC advertising? If yes, can you use the lead score to refine the campaigns?

Terry: Yes, some do – and yes, we certainly can and do use that to inform our target cost/lead for various clients. Lead scoring can be a great way to speed up the time required before we know if we’re on the right track with certain keyword groups and ad messaging, without having to wait for the lead to have been closed (won, lost, etc.).

Jep: What are you tips for creating effective landing pages and/or microsites?

Terry: I think it’s important to be clear and transparent about what it is that your company brings to the table, include the lead form on the page, have the cursor already be in the first field (if possible), and include at least a logo that will take users to the home page if there is no other navigation available on the page. If you are getting sparse conversion data, consider using less fields in your lead form. If the sales folks are complaining about poor-quality leads, remember that one way to increase lead quality is to raise the number of mandatory fields in your form. There is no set amount of fields that are best.  We have never found microsites to be a good investment of our time.

Jep: What kind of conversion offers (whitepapers, webinars, trials, etc.) do you find most effective?

Terry: Trials, then webinars, then white papers.

Jep: Terry, thank you very much for this introduction to B2B pay-per-click advertising.

NOTE: if you have questions or remarks, please leave a comment below.

Measure Your ROI on Social Media Leads

On Tuesday Genius.com announced the Genius URL Shortener (GURL), which makes it easier to measure the results of social media campaigns. At first I thought: “what’s new about that?”, and Marketo wrote a post on an alternative way to create tracking links. But when I read Ardath Albee’s post about the Genius URL Shortener I really got it: GURLs are cool!

Lead Source Measurement Needs Improvement

Tracking where a visitor comes from is not a new technique. I first used it inside AdWords, in which they offered cross-media conversion tracking. You could create a tracking URL, which you would include in non-AdWords advertisements, email blasts, and so on. This allowed you to see how many people registered (= converted) for each source.

After that, Google Analytics provided similar tracking features by appending variables to the existing URL (see the Google URL Builder tool). There are two big limitations for using this in B2B marketing:

  • You can only see conversions, not opportunities or revenue (because that information is in the CRM system)
  • You can’t see data on individual users

Marketing Automation to Measure End-to-End ROI

The Google tracking is from before Twitter, so the URLs were long and ugly. Twitter made the URL shorteners popular, like tinyURL and bit.ly. So in my opinion Genius now provides similar conversion tracking, with four improvements:

  • It has short and clean URLs
  • The URLs are easy to create, and anyone in the company can create them
  • It provides end-to-end tracking to see associated opportunities and revenue (pulled from Salesforce.com)
  • It ties into existing identified visitor tracking functionality (so clicks on GURLs and the entire web session are added to the lead record as metadata)

Of course, Social Media is all the rage, but I would also use the Genius URL Shortener for online advertisements, list rentals, and so on. The only place where you wouldn’t need it is in your own email blasts, because those are already tracked automatically.

The one feature I would like to add is the ability to associate links to specific campaigns, so you can see which lead sources were most effective for a particular campaign (Marketo’s approach covers this, but is not so easy to use).

So in my opinion this is a very interesting new  tool that is makes it easier to track campaign ROI for Social Media and beyond.

How would you use this lead source tracking tool? Let me know your suggestions.

Disclosure: I am a guest blogger on the MarketingGenius blog

Inbound Marketing Automation

Should Marketing Automation systems add Inbound Marketing tools as standard features? Or is it better to keep those tools separate? I brought up this question in my previous blog post, and Maria Pergolino had some very good comments on which tools to use and how to integrate them for ROI reporting. That gave me enough ideas for a new post, so here it is.

What is Inbound Marketing? Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot defines inbound marketing to include search, social media and blogs. In short: any marketing activity that draws people to your website.

What is Marketing Automation? Maria Pergolino defines this as “Post-click, and Post-Conversion”. In short: any marketing activity that happens after people come to your website.

In my opinion any B2B company needs both Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation: the first to get in touch with new prospects, the second to move those leads through the funnel from suspects to sales-ready leads. I wrote more about this and about Lead Management on the Genius.com blog. Because both are different steps of the same process, it seemed logical to recommend a single tool for both Marketing Automation and Inbound Marketing. But let’s take a closer look.

Why Automate Marketing?

The ultimate goal of automation is to make marketing teams more productive, by automating repetitive tasks and creating better reports. Let’s give two examples. In case of SEO, checking the search rank of your website for specific keywords is time-consuming, especially if you also want to check the rank of competitors. In case of marketing automation, manual execution of email drip campaigns is a drag. Automation systems can do this work for you, and – in additional to saving time – also improve quality.

What does a Marketing Automation system do?

In an earlier post about Lead Management I listed the following Marketing Automation features:

  • building landing pages and registration forms
  • nurturing via email and other channels
  • calculating a lead score until the prospect is sales-ready
  • collecting as much information as possible (web & data analytics)
  • tracking the source of leads and providing ROI reports

Often these features work together to automate a specific campaign, such as organizing a webinar or promoting a whitepaper. The alternative to a Marketing Automation system is a hodgepodge of specialized systems, such as email marketing and form building tools (see also Maria Pergolino’s post on the Marketo blog). There are certain features – like activity-based lead scoring – that only exist as part of comprehensive Marketing Automation systems.

So the key reasons to use a Marketing Automation system are:

  • Save time because it’s one integrated system (no copy-and-pasting between various systems, no integration effort needed)
  • Get specific features that are unique to Marketing Automation systems, like advanced lead scoring
  • Get better reports on the marketing ROI

So we should find out whether pre-built integration with Inbound Marketing systems decreases integration effort, adds unique features or provides better reports.

What does an Inbound Marketing system do?

For simplicity sake, I’ll limit myself to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features of the Inbound Marketing systems. For a full list of Inbound Marketing features, see the previous article. These are the most important ones:

  • Keyword research: which keywords do you want to optimize your website for?
  • Link building: which sites have you asked to link back to your site?
  • Rank tracking: how does your site rank for the selected keywords?

To start with Link building tools: those are usually project management tools, so there’s little benefit in integration with a marketing automation system, other than having a single login.

Keyword Research tools provide keyword suggestions, and help you select keywords based on volume, relevance and difficulty. It is useful if you can automatically add the selected keywords to the rank tracker, rather than having to put them in a spreadsheet first.

Rank tracking is most relevant if it shows the website traffic and conversions generated by the keywords, in addition to the position in the search results. Ideally it should even show the revenue per keyword. This is only possible by integrating with Web Analytics (traffic and conversions) or Marketing Automation (traffic, conversions and revenue). So this is an important ingredient for measuring Marketing ROI.

Who is in Charge of Marketing ROI?

It would be ideal if marketing ROI can be measured in a single location. In my opinion this should be the Marketing Automation system. This is an ROI chart that Marketo’s Jon Miller presented in the ‘Secret Sauce for demand generation‘ webinar.

ROI report from marketo's secret sauce webinar

This is a high-level overview that is already very powerful. However, it would be great if you could drill-down to see which keywords are responsible for most opportunities, and which of those keywords are actively managed in an SEO campaign. Based on this information, you can fine-tune the SEO campaign. To accomplish this type of report, the Marketing Automation system needs to pull in the keywords and rank information.

Conclusion

I’m not sure if there is a strong case for integration of Inbound Marketing features into Marketing Automation systems. It would reduce some integration effort, it does not add any unique features, but it can definitely provide more insightful reports.

Especially if your company gets a lot of leads via organic search, it would be useful to have an ROI report for your keywords. So either this feature needs to be added to the Marketing Automation system, or the Marketing Automation system should import the required data from an existing SEO rank tracking system.

My take: over the past months many Marketing Automation vendors have developed Sales & Marketing collaboration tools. Those tools are often sold as an add-on. So maybe the next add-on module should be for Inbound Marketing: its features will paint a more complete picture of your Marketing ROI, which is worth spending some extra money on.

Freelance Marketing Automation Consultant

This week I’m finishing up my day job as Sr Marketing Manager at Backbase, and will be available full-time for Marketing Automation Consulting. If you have Marketing Automation challenges, I’d love to hear from you (leadsloth email address or toll-free 1-888-4A-SLOTH).

I have hands-on experience with Marketo, Market2Lead, Pardot, Hubspot, Salesforce.com, DemandTools, various Email Service Providers, multiple CMSs (WordPress, Drupal), and a range of other tools. Because I understand Marketing Automation in-depth, I can usually get up to speed quickly with any other tools that you may have.

In the next three weeks I’m getting married and I will move from San Francisco to Durham, North Carolina. June 8th I will officially start as a full-time consultant. Around that time I will also pick up blogging and Twittering again. See you then!

Top-10 Demand Generation Vendor Blogs

UPDATE 7/14/09: I’ve now put all marketing automation blogs on a single page.

In my previous post I listed the Top-10 Demand Generation blog by marketers and consultants. Today I’ve put together a list of vendor blogs. Most of these vendors blogs really get ‘online marketing’, so they talk about best practices rather then just touting their products, and they post regularly.

In alphabetical order:

Sorry, can’t help it: every time I try to make a top-10, I end up with 11 and find it impossible to choose which one should go. So 11 it is :- )

Again, let me know your suggestions for other blogs. I’m pretty sure I still have to discover lots of cool blogs.

Lead Management Automation Systems Compared

Stagnant email service providers becoming irrelevant? (see conclusion)

In a previous post there was a lively discussion about the terms Demand Generation and Lead Management Automation (LMA) systems. The consensus was that Lead Management System is part of the demand generation process, and focuses on managing leads you already have in your database (and capturing/importing new leads). Some example features:

  • building landing pages and registration forms
  • tracking the source of leads
  • collecting as much information as possible (web & data analytics)
  • nurturing via email and other channels
  • calculating a lead score until the prospect is sales-ready

But how does that compare to email marketing, web analytics and landing page optimization tools? In talking to several marketing managers, they often asked: “How do LMA systems compare to {fill in any other marketing software}”. In the next paragraphs I compare LMA systems with other popular marketing systems, and I hope to go more in-depth in future posts.

Email Marketing

Lead Management Systems can send out batch emails to a list, similar to Email Services Providers (ESPs) like VerticalResponse, ExactTarget and Constant Contact. Interesting enough, I’ve heard of several companies that still use ESPs in addition to their Lead Management System, not sure why. Let me know if you have ideas.

Lead Management Systems also provide lots of advanced email features, such as drip-marketing, event-based emails, heavily segmented and personalized emails (e.g. sent from the account of the responsible sales person), and event reminder emails. However, ESPs are also moving forward, and for example ExactTarget now also offers drip-marketing support.

Data Management

Some demandgen vendors provide data management features for deduplication and normalization. My personal opinion is that these features are usually somewhat limited, and that they’re not mature enough to replace specialized data cleaning solutions (Ringlead, DemandTools). But that may change soon, as LMA vendors keep expanding their offerings.

Web Analytics

All Lead Management Systems offer some kind of web analytics, mostly focused on marketing metrics. Only LMA systems aimed at smaller companies tend to offer generic web analytics (page views, referrers, etc.). In all other cases, you would still need a general-purpose Web Analytics systems, such Google Analytics, Coremetrics, Omniture or WebTrends.

There are also some specialized Web Analytics vendors that identify the company name of anonymous leads (Leadlander) or website activity for known leads (Genius.com). However, more and more LMA systems include this functionality. It ranges from fairly basic (Market2lead) to more comprehensive (Marketo, Genius Enterprise, ActiveConversion, LeadGenesys, Pardot).

Web Content Management

Lead Management Systems also do not replace Web Content Management systems, although it may be more common to have WCM features in Demand Generation in the future (earlier post). The only web pages they currently manage are landing pages or microsites. Those are usually hosted on a subdomain such as http://marketing.company.com. There are some exceptions: both Marketbright and Marqui include a full WCM system.

Landing page optimization & Website Personalization

An area where many Lead Management Systems can still improve is landing page optimization. In my opinion they should offer more features to optimize landing page conversion, which critical for Search Marketing efforts. There are dedicated vendors with a superior feature set, such as ion interactive, magnify360 and Sitebrand.

I’ve heard some vendors thinking about personalizing offers based on behavior of anonymous visitors to make it more likely that they register for an offer. Currently I’m not aware of any LMA vendors that offer this functionality: let me know if you know more about this…

Search Marketing

Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click management are usually not included in Lead Management Systems. At most, LMA systems provide reporting on the lead source (which keywords, and organic search or PPC). It looks like SEO and PPC management will stay separate from Lead Management for the short to medium term. Personally I expect this will be integrated in the long term, as lead acquisition and lead management naturally complement each other, and cover the entire demand generation cycle.

Conclusion

Lead Management Automation vendors are rapidly expanding their functionality, but will not replace all specialized tools any time soon. I think we’ll see a consolidation of the industry of the next couple of years. Specialized vendors need to keep innovating, otherwise they will falter. Some categories are there to stay, such as Web Content Management and Web Analytics, but each will also expand their marketing automation features.

I’m not sure about Email Service Providers: In my opinion they either need to move towards lead management or become irrelevant. ExactTarget, Lyris and Silverpop are on the move, but VerticalResponse is at risk: even for small companies there are more effective lead management solutions (such as InfusionSoft).

What do you think: is there a future for pure-play ESPs?

Marketo 3.0 Screen shots

Today Marketo is launching their 3.0 release. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to take a closer look at it. However, both David Raab and John Gaffney have already published about it, so I’ll limit myself to posting several screenshots. This will give a good idea of some of the new features.

the marketo home screen

The Marketo home screen, showing the 4 main elements or Marketo: activities, design of emails and landing pages, data (lead) management, and reporting.

Marketo drip email campaigns

Drip email-campaigns, also shows the extensive Salesforce integration (bottom-right)

marketo wysiwyg landing page builder

WYSIWYG Landing Page Builder; new feature: progressive profiling, which enables showing additional form fields for repeat visitors

Marketo Reporting

Reporting, including getting reports by email

Marketo Data and Contact Management

Data and contact management, including enhanced support for merging duplicate leads

Marketo website monitoring

Website monitoring (incl. anonymous visitors and real-time alerts) and lead scoring; when visitors fill out a form and make themselves known, you still see their earlier website behavior (then still anonymous)

UPDATE: this is the new Marketo 3.0 demo (3 minute Flash movie)

Overall, it doesn’t look like there are any revolutionary changes, just a lot of improvements that will make the day-to-day use of the system easier, with even better usability and more time-saving features.

To all Marketo users: what is the new feature that you like best? Please leave a comment…

Demand Generation – Week in Review

Unfortunately the flu got the better of me last week, so my blogging and Twittering came to a halt. But let’s make the best of it, and collect a list of news from the past week. Lots of interesting things happened, and insightful articles were published. I probably missed several things, but these are the highlights:

Top-5 B2B Marketing tips

Jon Miller at Marketo summarizes the key findings of several B2B marketing thought leadership interviews.
1.Start with a solid base
2.Use Push AND Pull Tactics
3.Integrate Your Efforts
4.Innovate
5.Test, Test and Retest

Market2Lead 4.0 released

Market2Lead has launched version 4.0 with a completely revamped user interface. I was planning to write a short review, but haven’t found time for this yet. To be continued…

B2B marketing is Obsolete

Laura Ramos has published the final piece in the “Obsolescence of B2B marketing” series.
1.Build a marketing-only database to capture buyer insight
2.Shift from simply generating demand to managing it
3.Combine digital and traditional tactics to build dialogue around needs and motivations
4.Embrace the groundswell and community marketing principles

Social Media and B2B Marketing

Steve Woods wrote this blog post that gives some great ideas on how to use social media for B2B marketing.
1.Set your information free
2.Focus on being credible
3.Understand their buying process
4.Match your marketing to their buying process
5.Keep interest high through nurturing
6.Only sell when they are ready to buy

10 Tips For Tweeting A Live Conference

Mike Damphousse wrote an interesting article for those who want to use Twitter for PR, in this case for the coverage of an industry conference (the Sales 2.0 conference next week in San Francisco). I will also attend this conference, so let me know if you want to meet up!

Vtrenz changes name to Silverpop Engage B2B

After being acquired by Silverpop, Vtrenz continued under its own name for a while, but now the name has changed to Silverpop Engage B2B. Which makes me wonder: do they rule out using Engage for high-value B2C sales processes? In any case, it’s good they make a clear choice and are developing a new brand for this established marketing automation product.

Marketo 3.0 First Look

David Raab got a sneak preview of  the new release of Marketo and writes about usability aspects of Demand Generation systems in general.

Genius.com announces Genius Enterprise

Apparently it’s the week for new releases: also Genius.com is preparing a new product: Genius Enterprise. Key new features are automated lead nurturing and lead scoring. David Raab again has the scoop.

DemandGen Report Sales & Marketing Alignment Awards

Last week I wrote about the Stevie Awards and complained that few vendors had submitted their customer case studies. This week the DemandGen Report announced the winners of their Sales & Marketing alignment awards. The winners are:

  • Enterprise Category: eTrique implementation at Cisco
  • SMB category: Eloqua implementation at Sourcefire
  • Fast Track category: Genius implementation at ADX

I hope this overview is useful. Please add a comment to give your feedback, or to report important events that I’ve missed. Thanks!