Category Archives: Demand Generation

Free Trials Aren’t What They Used to Be

An important aspect of Demand Generation are the offers: what will your prospects register for? A popular offer for software vendors is the free trial. I read an interesting article on the decreasing effectiveness of free trials as a lead generation tool in the DemandGen Report. In the article Howard Sewell says that free trials “eliminate a huge subset of potential customers at the outset—people who (…) simply don’t want to expend the time or hassle downloading, installing and evaluating the actual product.” Very true.

Over 100,000 Downloads!

In my previous job I managed to get over 100,000 trial downloads. The frustrating thing was: very few prospects managed to use it successfully, so the conversion rate to paying customers was almost too low to measure, maybe 0.02% or so. And as a marketing manager I did not have control over the product experience. Very frustrating.

Developers or End-Users?

The product I promoted was used by developers. They tend to insist on trying out a product, so we had no option but to keep the free trial. Trials that are started by end-users are a different story though. Especially software-as-a-service (SaaS) products seem so simple! Even end-users get the impression that they can use the product in just 5 minutes. And that’s where free trials can really backfire.

Alternatives for Free Trials

The article mentions alternatives, like trials with limited functionality, single-user trials or shared online demo systems that are wiped every night. I think the issue with all these options is that prospects still have to learn the product, which takes time and effort. The other three solutions were interesting though: ROI tools, free consulting offers and paid pilots.

ROI Tools

ROI tools are probably more for decision makers than for product users. But if you don’t have an ROI tool yet, it may be a good idea to develop one. It doesn’t have to be a fancy web application: it could be as simple as a spreadsheet. It is useful to convince the decision makers, but I’m not sure if people who are interested in a trial will be totally satisfied with it.

Free Consulting offers

I see this as a version of the “free initial consultation” offer at most law firms. If a lawyer expects to get 10 billable hours after a 30-minute free consultation, a consulting or software firm may expect 20 billable days after 1 day of free consulting (as an example). The challenge is to qualify prospects well, to avoid providing free services to unqualified prospects.

Paid Trial

This is the alternative I like best, thinking from the vendor’s perspective. The customer pays money for the service, but can opt-out at any time in the 2-3 months of the trial. Even if they abort the trial they get useful deliverables, so it’s not waisted money. However, it serves a different function from a free trial: at the free trial stage, prospects are typically still comparing multiple vendors. With a paid trial the customer has already chosen a solution. So from the customer’s perspective a paid trial is not a good alternative to a free trial.

Other Ideas: Demos & Training

Other possible trial replacements that are not mentioned in the DemandGen article are recorded product demos and live product demonstrations. It may not be as “real-life” as working with the system yourself, but it still gives a good idea of the features of the product.

One strategy that has worked well for me is offering affordable online product training. Prospects pay a fairly low fee to learn the product. I believe we charged $400 for 10 hours of training. The fee covers the cost of the trainer. We simply used the revenue to pay our consulting department to deliver the training. And for highly qualified prospects we sometimes waived the training fee.

And If You Still Do a Free Trial…

In addition to making the product as user-friendly as possible, you could consider to provide sample projects, so prospect don’t have to set up the system. They can start playing right away.

Another suggestion is to do a manual qualification before granting someone access to a free trial. Prospects with the right skills and knowledge are more likely to be successful with a demo.

I also like Norm Bellisario’s suggestion to measure how far prospects get with the trial. If there are signs they got stuck (e.g. they didn’t login for a couple of days) you could kick off a lead nurturing program or send a notification to the sales and support teams.

Conclusion

Reduced attractiveness of free trial offers is a big issue for SaaS companies. There are many alternatives, but not all proposed solutions are a full replacement for trials, both from the vendor’s and the prospect’s perspective. But I hope that some of the suggestions in this article are useful for you. Let me know what you think!

Demand Generation Blogs Continued

In the spirit of Twitter’s Follow Friday I’d like to finally publish the remaining Demand Generation blogs that I enjoy reading. Earlier I published the Top 10 Demand Generation vendor blogs and the Top 10 Marketing Automation Blogs.

Of course, there were many great blogs that I forgot to include, so here are the remaining ones!

  • B2B Marketing Zone
    This is more of a meta-blog, aggregating a large number of B2B blogs, including this blog. I’ve discovered several new and interesting blogs on the B2B Marketing Zone, so highly recommended.
  • DemandGen Report
    This is an leading online magazine for Marketing Automaton, which features vendor information, news articles a job board and more.
  • Rebekah Donaldson’s “Red on Marketing”
    Rebekah and her team write about demand generation, with lots of good articles on content marketing and social media.
  • Brenda Gelston’ Marketing Momentum blog
    This blog provides a strategic perspective on the demand generation process.
  • Gary Katz, Marketing Operations at Work
    Gary is one of the forces behind promoting marketing operations as a important specialty, and on his blog he writes about this.
  • Ken Molay, Webinar Blog
    Demand generation is not complete without covering Webinars, one of the key lead generation programs. Ken’s blog full of useful webinar ideas.
  • Net-Results blog
    This is one of the newer vendors in the Demand Generation market, focused on the SMB market.
  • Jeff Ogden’s Fearless Competitor blog
    Jeff specializes in helping companies find new customers, he wrote a great e-book about that, and blogs about Demand Generation, primarily from a Sales perspective
  • Upshot Institute
    This is a resource website with information on marketing automation vendors, podcasts, webinars and blogs.

I hope you found some interesting new blogs in this list. And again, if you have any blog recommendations, please let me know: I’m looking forward to discover new thought leaders.

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

Marketing Automation Introduction

Many posts on this blog are fairly in-depth, so it was fun to write an introduction to Marketing Automation on the Genius.com blog. For easy digestion, I split up the marketing automation process in four steps:

  1. Getting more visitors to your website
  2. Get more visitors to register
  3. Lead nurturing and scoring
  4. Marketing & Sales Collaboration

In addition to the overview article that I linked to above, I’ve written one post for each step. Those will be published this week and next week. The first article about getting more website visitors is already live.

I’ve heard other definitions of the steps that are more catchy, like “pre-click, post-click and post-conversion”. These are the same steps as my steps 1 to 3. I’ve chosen to write out a description of the steps, because I think that’s easier to understand for people who are new to Marketing Automation. And I’ve added step 4 because collaboration with sales is one of the key success factors of marketing automation.

Anyhow, I hope you find the articles on the Genius.com blog interesting, even though you may already be a Marketing Automation expert :- )

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.

Inbound Marketing & Marketing Automation

The Marketing Automation industry is evolving continuously. Many digital marketers are using marketing automation tools to automate lead nurturing. But if you want to expand your business, you also need to continuously add new leads to your database. Traditional lead sources are tradeshows or lead programs with magazines. Those are definitely useful, but the number of leads is low and the cost per lead is high. It may be attractive to shift more budget to generating leads via your company’s website. And that’s where Inbound Marketing comes in.

“Isn’t that Search Marketing?”

Yes, I feel that Inbound Marketing is sort-of a rebranding of Search Marketing. But Inbound Marketing focuses primarily on organic search, not pay-per-click (like AdWords). I’ve personally often used Google AdWords to drive traffic to websites: it’s instantanious and you can fine-tune campaigns to target a specific audience. But it can quickly get expensive.  Search Engine Optimization may be a more cost-effective alternative.

Search Engine Optimization focuses on getting your site in the natural search results. That takes a lot of work upfront, but will result in ‘free’ traffic in the future. SEO has not exactly been a science: you have to optimize your site’s structure and content, and you ask other sites to link to you. Both activities have traditionally either been done manually in-house, or outsourced to an agency.

Inbound Marketing is more than just SEO. It also includes Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), blogging, creation of high-quality content, and website conversion optimization. In short: everything to make sure that prospects find you, rather than you trying to find your prospects with ‘outbound’ marketing.

Inbound Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation vendors have done very little to automate Inbound Marketing activities. Their main focus has been on nurturing and scoring your existing leads. Lately, most vendors have added features to monitor anonymous traffic your site (the most recent announcements: Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua). But that doesn’t help with getting more visitors to your site.

There are software vendors that focus only on Inbound Marketing or SEO automation. Hubspot – an early Inbound Marketing evangelist – is one of them, and so are Enquisite, Raven and SEOMoz (probably I’m forgetting at least a dozen vendors, so feel free to leave a comment). Those tools are promising, but not mainstream yet.

What Does it Do for You?

The Inbound Marketing Automation tools have a lot of useful features, such as:

  • Keyword research: find out which keywords to optimize for
  • Rank tracking (or SERP tracking): monitor your site’s rank for those keywords
  • Competitor rank tracking: monitor competitor’s rank for those keywords
  • Link building: get high-quality links back to your site
  • Website quality checking: structure your website properly (title, description, URL & headings)
  • Social Media monitoring: see who writes about your company or your areas of expertise
  • Project management: work together with a team of people
  • ROI reporting: see which activities result in new leads

There are many tools that do one particular thing, such as rank tracking. But there are also integrated tool suites, like Hubspot and Raven. Those include extensive project management and reporting features. Actually, I’ve found they are a real time-saver when you do Inbound Marketing: before using these tools, I found myself copying data in and out of spreadsheets. That took at least 25% of my time. Now I’ve virtually eliminated the use of spreadsheets.

Message for Marketing Automation Vendors

The current Marketing Automation vendors are solving only part of the online marketing problem: lead management. Few offer Inbound Marketing features. In my opinion, they will have to offer at least some Inbound Marketing features before the end of the year. This will differentiate them, and will allow them to increase the revenue per customer. The company that is furthest along with this, is not a Marketing Automation company. It is Hubspot: they’re quietly adding Lead Management features to their Inbound Marketing suite. So Marketing Automation vendors: you’d better hurry!

Conclusion

If you want get cheaper leads by improving your Inbound Marketing, don’t expect a Marketing Automation system to take care of that. Either work with an SEO agency, or read a book on SEO and use one of the integrated Inbound Marketing tools. Marketing Automation systems have many benefits, but they are especially useful if you already have a decent amount of leads in your database.

Request: I could write many more posts about Inbound Marketing, so please let me know what you want me to write about! Leave a comment or email me.

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.

Top-10 Marketing Automation Blogs

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

A couple of people recently asked me which blogs I’m frequently reading. So here’s the list. Please send me your favorite blogs, because there must be lots of great Marketing Automation blogs that I haven’t found yet!

BTW 1: Some of these blogs are more about lead generation, demand generation or inbound marketing, so maybe the title of this blog post is not ideal. But regardless of the terminology, these are the blogs that I enjoy most :- )

BTW 2: I have not included vendor weblogs: I will put those in a separate post.

In alphabetical order, these are the blogs that I read most frequently, and that I can heartily recommend.

(oops, that’s 11 blogs)

Let me know your favorite blogs, so I can put them in a follow-up post. Thanks!

Abandon Your Marketing Automation System!?

I’m working on an interesting project right now: moving away from a marketing automation system. The plan is to go back to using only Salesforce.com with some cheap add-on tools for email, form submission and data quality. Smart or foolish? I’d love to have your input on the potential pitfalls (and benefits) of this approach.

Background

The company in question has used a comprehensive marketing automation system for about 2 years. In the early days it was used to sift through hundreds of new B2B leads per day to identify the valuable leads. This changed over time: now the focus has shifted to pro-active outreach to a handful of executives, instead of targeting thousands of software developers. In addition to cost savings, the thinking is that a full-blown marketing automation system just makes less sense with the new strategy.

How to Replace a Marketing Automation System?

My first reaction was: no way, you should not want to do without any type of marketing automation system (for simplicity sake, I use this term as synonymous to demand generation and lead management). However, when I started looking into Salesforce.com and the wide variety of add-ons, I was less convinced. The Salesforce.com database has some big issues (e.g. the split between Leads and Contacts), but many 3rd party tools are addressing these weaknesses.

What is easy to replace?

Email marketing that integrates with Salesforce.com is provided by many vendors, like VerticalResponse, Boomerang, ExactTarget, Genius, Lyris and more. There are also some relatively affordable registration form vendors, like FormAssembly and OnDialog. Basic lead scoring features are built into Salesforce.com, and data quality tools are available from vendors like Ringlead, CRM Fusion and Datatrim. Notifications of companies visiting your website are available from Leadlander, Netfactor, LEADSExplorer and DemandBase. You can create reports and dashboards in Salesforce.com to provide analytics. So there are lots of useful add-ons available at a nominal price.

What Is Going to Be Missed…

Some Email Service Providers can send email on behalf of the record owner or can handle drip-campaigns, but those are exceptions and you sometimes pay quite a bit more for these advanced features. Unsubscribe handling is typically done via a generic page, rather than via branded page.

If you use a basic form vendor, you have to manually map the fields, and put the form on a landing page yourself. You may want to pre-fill the form, or send a thank-you email or the start of an email drip campaign: this is not always possible. Also, some form vendors are not able to append to existing records (resulting in duplicates) or to link new registrations to a Salesforce.com campaign.

Lead scoring based on attributes (e.g. job title) is built into Salesforce.com, but that does not include activity-based scoring, such scoring based on website visitors, clicks on links in emails or form submissions.

Even though you can get reports on anonymous visitors via stand-alone tools, it’s much more work to set up notifications of website visits by known users, and even more challenging to sync that information with Salesforce.com.

Then there are specific usage scenarios that are automated in a marketing automation system, such sending a reminder to non-registrants for an event: with the new approach this needs to be done manually, which takes a lot more time.

Most marketing automation systems replicate the Salesforce.com database with their own database: in the new situation everything is stored in Salesforce.com (or at least: that’s the goal). That is great for manageability, but – if you have the habit of qualifying leads before sending them to the CRM system – you now have a database full with unqualified leads.

What Is Your Take?

This project is still in the planning phase, so I’m still compiling a list of all the pros and cons. One thing is sure: in the new situation the monthly cost will be about $200, down from well over a thousand dollars. That is a significant savings.

But how much more time will it cost to manage the new situation? Are there specific features that create revenue, but simply cannot be implemented with the new approach. What is your take on this?