Author: Dayna Rothman

At Marketo, we’re all about the science of marketing.

Everyone thinks of marketing automation as a new field. But few people know about our rich heritage as marketing automation pioneers – a story that stretches back to the experiments of Dr. Gustav Marketo. More than any single individual, Dr. Marketo advanced the science of marketing through the use of mechanical, electrical and galvanic technologies.

His revenue-generation machines (some of which are still in working order today) were considered a marvel of Victorian engineering and a considerable aid to the early pioneers of marketing science. But few people know that Dr. Marketo also sent the world’s first tweet (“Watson come quick, I need #tea.”) and posted the first user-generated video (“Charles has inadvertently masticated my digit.”).

This brief catalogue is intended to correct these misconceptions and restore Dr. Marketo to his rightful place as the original source of the ideas behind today’s marketing automation technology. You can download the slide show here.

Dr. Marketo’s Cabinet of Curiosity was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Phil Fernandez

Today Marketo began trading as a public company on The NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “MKTO”. You can read about it and see some pictures here.

This milestone certainly marks an exciting moment in time for the company, but it also highlights exciting times for marketers everywhere. Large-scale trends, such as increasingly self-directed consumers and broad and instant availability of information online, are changing the role and responsibilities of the marketing department in most organizations around the world. In today’s data-centric, multi-channel business environment, marketing professionals are being pushed to fundamentally change how they engage and interact with prospects and customers.

These trends have led to the emergence of a modern approach to relationship marketing, requiring marketers to fundamentally change how they engage with prospects and customers. Marketo is dedicated to providing a marketing software platform that enables organizations to engage in this kind of modern relationship marketing.  Today’s offering is just one step along the journey towards this goal, and I’m more excited than ever about the opportunities in marketing today.

Thank You Marketing Nation

The extended Marketo community includes over 2,300 customers, 27,000 online community members, over 370 employees and over 100 partners who share their experiences, best practices and ready-to-use marketing campaign templates with other Marketo users. We call this the Marketing Nation, and I want to take this milestone moment to sincerely thank each and every member of the Marketing Nation who has been on this journey with us.

I want to thank our customers for your business, and even more importantly, for your trust and passion.  I want to thank you for the thought leadership that you have demonstrated in your businesses; we have learned from you at every step on this journey.  Your success is at the core of the Marketing Nation. I also want to thank our partners; thank you for all that you do in support of our common customers and your central role in helping them be successful.  We value your support and believe that when you succeed, we succeed.  I want to thank our venture investors who helped us to get to this milestone and helped us invest in our customers’ success. And, I want to welcome our new shareholders – we are excited about the journey ahead. Thank you all for being part of the Marketing Nation.

Finally, I want to extend a sincere thank you to all of Marketo’s employees for your dedication, hard work, and passion. It is your passion that drives success for our customers and our business. It is a privilege and an honor to work with such a high caliber team, so thank you – THANK YOU – for everything you do. I look forward to continuing this journey with you.

One Small Step for Marketo, One Giant Leap for the Marketing Nation was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Julio Viskovich

Real-time marketing is a process that enables marketers to capitalize on real-time events and deliver a relevant message to the right person at the right time. Ideas must be developed in minutes rather than days or weeks.  And messaging centers around real-time feedback from customers or around current events that happen. The benefit of this type of marketing, is that you can capitalize on trending topics that your followers can relate to.

Real-Time Marketing in the Dark

Take Oreo’s “you can still dunk in the dark” real-time campaign for example. Within mere minutes of the power going out, Oreo had posted a photo of an illuminated Oreo cookie (seen below) that took the social media world by storm. The tweet was during the Superbowl power outage and was retweeted just under 15,000 times and increased their Twitter following by 8,000. They also posted to Facebook, leading to over 19,000 likes and boosting their Instagram followers from 2000 to 36,000 along with over 16,000 pictures submitted.

The Theory

In the New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott boasts that Real-Time Marketing & PR will also enable you to:

• Develop a business culture that encourages speed over sloth
• Read buying signals as people interact with your online information
• Engage reporters to shape stories as they are being written
• Command premium prices by delivering products at speed
• Deploy technology to listen in on millions of online discussions and instantly engage with customers and buyers
• Crowdsource product development, naming, and even marketing materials such as online videos

Real-Time Humor FTW

Smart Car struck it big when they took advantage of a tweet that read “Saw a bird had crapped on a Smart Car. Totaled it.” The folks who run social at Smart Car put together a quick but hilarious infographic response that read “Couldn’t have been one bird,@adtothebone. Sounds more like 4.5 million. (Seriously, we did the math.)” This resulted in over 500 new followers on Twitter and became favorited over 500 times! They also drove their engagement rate through the roof with avid tweeters and listeners across Twitter and the social media world. These opportunistic real-time strikes by brands show they are listening and on-the-ball, while allowing them to be edgy and fresh.

Meeting The Challenge

The challenge marketers are facing is how to spread real-time marketing to more traditional forms of media like television. Jay Baer points to 17 examples of Brands and their Tweets that completely missed the mark at this year’s Oscar’s, which attempted to replicate Oreo’s success by capitalizing on a highly publicized event.  Clearly, the success of real-time marketing is still up for debate. However, no one can discount that it is a breath of fresh air to consumers who have been longing for relevant messages that make sense to them when they receive it. Consumers now more than ever, have developed expectations for responsiveness, participation and relevance of messaging on social media channels. 42% of consumers believe brands should respond to their questions or concerns within an hour on any given day, including weekends.

As an example, AARP has a team dedicated to real-time marketing.  The team regularly appoints a rotating member as the “engagement lead”, and their role is spotting and engaging in real-time marketing opportunities. Someone is also tasked each night with live tweeting to communities of a major event. They have live-tweeted and captured audience attention at everything from Dancing with the Stars to the NBA All-Star Game, the Super Bowl, and the Oscars.

What to Expect

Regardless of some early failures, expect brands to see the potential and ramp up their marketing spend in responsiveness and real-time marketing. It could be like riding a bike; you might fall a few times but then you get it right. Keep your eye on brands like Heineken, who have committed and announced their intention to leverage their global tie-ups with Google and Facebook to develop real-time marketing initiatives around mobile devices as the brewer looks to capitalize on fans who are watching sponsored events such as Champions League soccer matches and push messaging through mobile apps.

What are you doing to capitalize on real-time marketing?

The Benefits of Embracing Real-Time Marketing on Social Channels and Beyond was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Rajiv Kapoor

Change of focus

Once clients of mine get their marketing automation platform in place their entire focus changes. Up to this point, their lives were dominated by focusing on what the new technology is and how can they get it up and running.

Now, let’s say you are the client. You are capable (obviously) and have setup key processes including lifecycle, scoring, marketing activities, and analytics. It is all working, the leads are coming in and moving through the lifecycle and you have visibility.

At the same time you are getting pressure from above to produce more results.

So you turn to me (your friendly Marketo Consultant) and ask what additional functionality does marketing automation offer to help me create more revenue/profit?

This is the exact moment where your approach needs to change!

You need to move past “what the platform can offer you” and start asking yourself “what are the critical variables that drive revenue?”

So what are the variables?

What I like to do at this point is encourage my clients to think of their revenue mathematically.  I usually think of the revenue cycle like a factory line. Raw materials come in (“names”). They are processed (“revenue cycle stages”). And then the product comes out (“revenue”). If you think of it that way there are clear variables that will impact the product being produced.

The key revenue variables are the following:

• Number of names in Engaged status = A
• Number of names added to Engaged status = B
• Quantity of Engagement = C
• Quality of Engagement = D
• Product quality = E

If you want more revenue you will need to significantly increase some combination of these variables.

Number of leads in Engaged status = A

The number of names in Engaged status is a good representation of the size of a key marketing asset. This number will impact revenue. Many of your marketing activities will touch these people including email blasts, webinars, and lead nurturing for example. The more names in Engaged status the more interactions, marketing qualified leads, and deals won. The important point here is that we are ignoring names that are not interacting. If you purchase and upload a third-party list, that list will not count (purchasing lists is a no-no anyway)!

Number of names added to Engaged status = B

Bringing in more Engaged names will drive revenue. You will be able to interact with more people.

Quantity of Engagement = C

Your engagement will drive revenue. One way you can measure this is to use the gross score for a time period as a measure of the engagement you drove. See my post on interaction analysis for how you can do this.

Quality of Engagement = D

Quality of engagement can be impacted in many ways. Better segmentation will increase quality. Better timing will increase quality.  A well designed lead nurture program can help you improve the quality of engagement by better controlling segmentation and timing among other things.

“Product” quality = E

“Product” is in quotes because my definition of product is broad. My definition of product quality is how much people would miss your product or service if it went away. It includes the actual product/service quality, includes price, and includes other options in the market. If your execution is constant and product quality declines, you will have less revenue. At some level of the organization you will want to look at this but at a demand generation level you will likely want to assume this variable is constant.

What is the formula you might ask?

((A*weight 1) + (B*weight 2) + (C*weight 3) + (D*weight 4) + (E*weight)) = P*

Notes:

• P = your revenue cycle momentum
• If P increases you will generate more revenue
• Each variable has a weighting adjustment to equalize their impact on your final number – therefore any variable change will impact P at the right magnitude

How do you execute on this?

If you took these variables, your data, and a mathematician, you could create a formula that outlines the relationships of these variables. Getting complicated with this formula is not necessary though. All you need to know is that you have to measure and improve these variables to drive revenue.

So what this means is you need to figure out a way to measure these five variables. Benchmark these measurements and drive them to improve. If they improve significantly you will have more revenue!

The Mathematics of Revenue Cycle Strategy was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Stephen Frapart

Finals are over.  Graduation is right around the corner.  Families and friends celebrate your awesome achievements.  Woot woot!  Life is good!

Then reality sets in.  You’re a Journalism or English major.  You need a job.

A Mixed Job Market

Traditional broadcast and print journalism aren’t hiring with the same velocity as they once did.  For instance, some newspapers are shutting down, some are reducing headcount and some are going from daily releases to a couple of issues per week.

Take a look at this LinkedIn study, Winners and Losers During the Great Recession, Internet and online publishing are among the fastest growing industries, and newspapers are significantly contracting.

Why The Shift?

Our world has transitioned to a digital world. The buying process has dramatically changed–including the way we consume content and the way businesses connect with prospects and customers. Think about this: Barack Obama started his run for presidency before the first iPhone was released … the iPhone has only been out for 6 years!  The iPad has only been out for 3 years.  And widespread adoption of the internet has only occurred over the last 15 – 20 years.  Now we (and businesses) can’t imagine life without it.

Further, according to Forrester, 70% of a buyer’s evaluation is complete before they reach out to a salesperson.  Similarly marketers are spending up to 50% of their budgets on digital marketing activities.

The Trend Is Your Friend: Content Marketing as a Career Choice

Facts and trends are great, but think about this …

What’s the prerequisite for any interesting digital marketing activity?  Thoughtful content.

Now what’s the prerequisite for any thoughtful piece of content?  YOU!!!

Businesses (start-ups and Fortune 2000 companies alike) are embracing the digital trend and must create thoughtful content to keep up.  They’ll create blogs, e-books, videos, webinars, whitepapers and much more.  I speak with marketers every day and listen to what they need: content, content and more content.

That’s where you come in.  You can write beautifully.  You can work independently.  You can meet deadlines.  You’re trustworthy.  You can immediately contribute to teams.  And hopefully you’re fairly tech-savvy.

Bottomline: you’re hireable, and businesses are actively hiring people like you. Still not convinced? Take a look at another recent post The Content Marketing Mashup of Writing, Business, and Passion to see the evolution of a content marketing career.

Journalism and English Degrees Are Not Dead: The Rise of the Content Marketer was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Jon Miller (@jonmiller)

The Marketo Marketing Blog has long been one of Marketo’s most important and valuable marketing strategies. We started writing it in 2006 (here’s the first post) and have since published more than 950 articles.  Our efforts have generated more than 27,000 inbound links plus 400,000 unique visitors and almost $2 million in directly attributed revenue each year (plus influence on much more).

The years since 2006 have brought changes in style and web technology, and I’m thrilled to announce that we just released an all new blog design that incorporates many of the latest and greatest best practices.  If you are reading this post on our site, you’re seeing the new design; if you are reading it over RSS, please come on over to see the new design for yourself!

This post shares 10 best practices for blog design that we have incorporated into our new blog, and why.

The Old Design

But first, here’s what the old design looked like. It wasn’t terrible, but at the same time it left something to be desired in terms of visual appeal as well as usefulness for driving to our key goals.

10 Principles for Blog Design

Here are the principles we’ve incorporated into the new design.

1. Highly visual content design
2. Clear conversion goals that don’t get in the way of reader experience
3. Multiple paths to social
4. Give them Tweetables
5. Social validation
6. Fast page load
7. Great mobile experience
8. Merchandise our best content
9. Connect content to authors
10. Cherish guest posts

Highly visual content design

At Marketo, we’ve been using “content marketing” since before the strategy even had a name, and since the beginning our blog has been at the center.  As content becomes more and more popular, however, our readers are becoming overwhelmed with words.  That’s why visual content is becoming an important way to engage – especially with our audience of marketing professionals.

I believe this idea extends to the design of the content as well; in other words, a good visual design can make written-word content stand out. (Yes, even quant-heads like me are attracted to a shiny visual design.) Many sites are embracing the use of bold images and visuals to merchandise their content, including the new Facebook Timeline, LinkedIn Today, and Mashable.

We took inspiration from all these sources, and as a result, the new Marketo Blog design is highly visual, emphasizing images and headlines over lots of copy.  Here’s what the homepage looks like:

Clear conversion goals that don’t get in the way of reader experience

The #1 goal for the blog has been and will always be to serve as a source of thought leadership and expertise for our target audience. It’s imperative that our content speaks for itself, and that we never put conversion ahead of this primary purpose. At the same time, we do want the blog to help us achieve measurable goals, so we specified three main conversion goals at the beginning of our design effort:

1. Build our opt-in email list
2. Generate leads
3. Build our social networks

I’ll talk about the first two here, and the third in the next point (multiple paths to social).

Build the opt-in list

To drive this, we amped up the design and attractiveness of the offer to subscribe.  Here’s what it looks like before and after; it doesn’t take a conversion genius to assume that this new one will perform better (though our testing will prove or disprove).

We also decided to use a lightbox pop-up for the Subscribe box. Why? Test after test shows these things just plain work.

Now here’s the cool part.  Because we’re using the Marketo product to keep track of who has subscribed to our blog AND because we’ve integrated the blog design with Marketo, the subscribe box ONLY shows up for folks who have not yet subscribed.  This applies to the lightbox pop-up as well as the box on each page. That way, our subscribers can focus on the content, not our conversion goal. Neat, huh?

Generate leads

We wanted to avoid presenting traditional conversion offers to our readers, since in our experience we find that people have “banner blindness” – meaning they literally ignore the ads.

On the other hand, we saw with click tracking that when people get to the bottom of the post, they often ask “what should I read next”.  So, we created a section at the end of each post called “Related Resources”.  This presents three contextually relevant pieces of our premium content from the Marketing Resource Center on our main website.

Again leveraging the integration between Marketo and the website, if the reader is already a known lead, they are simply presented with a download button. But if they are unknown, then there will be a form to fill out to download this premium content.

Multiple paths to social

We also had a clear goal to encourage social with the blog.  We identified three distinct social paths for social, illustrated below.

1. Sharing the blog homepage and category pages (blue).  This helps new readers to find us, improves the SEO for each of those pages, and incidentally helps with our AdAge Power150 ranking.
2. Share individual posts (yellow). This helps our content to spread with social amplification.
3. Follow the company on various networks (pink). This builds our reach and helps us maintain a multi-channel connection over time. An engaged Facebook connection can be just as valuable as an opt-in subscriber.

Give them Tweetables

Conversion experts Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg suggested that we make it easy for our readers to “sound smart” by crafting ready-to-go tweets for each post. This is yet another great way to encourage readers to help spread the word about our content.]

Social validation

Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion writes, that “When we are uncertain about what to do we automatically look to other people to guide us. And we do this automatically and unconsciously.” This is called social validation, and we believe it can play an important role in helping buyers find and trust our content. See a post with 1,000 shares? It just seems more credible than one with 20 shares. So, we made it easy to see exactly how many shares each post gets.

Fast page load

Adding all these social sharing buttons including share counts can really slow down your page, since each button ends up being a call to the underlying social network.  So instead, we built a process that stores the share counts locally (updating every few minutes). This lets us load our page much faster than the other method. That’s why each post shows the total number of shares, but if you mouse-over you can see the specific details.

Great mobile experience

Our old site did not present a good experience for mobile visitors.  Mobile visits made up 6% of the traffic, but bounce rate was 4% higher and average visit duration for mobile visitors was a whopping 280% shorter.

So, we used responsive design to make the experience great for our mobile visitors.  Here’s what it looks like on iPhone (also looks great in iPad). Mobile visitors can even subscribe by clicking on the email icon at the top.

Merchandise our best content

Since 75% of our visitors are new to the blog, we are faced with the challenge of guiding new visitors to additional posts they may want to read (or that we want them to read). This is especially important since many of our first-time visitors come from marketing infographics or other popular posts that may be less “straight up the center” than our core editorial content.

We do this in a variety of ways:

• Placing three popular or hot posts in the top section of the blog home page (two for non-subscribers, since the subscribe box takes up a slot)
• Rich, visual menus highlighting the top content in each category (see below)
• Sidebars, one showing the most shared posts, the other showing editorially-controlled top posts

Connect content to authors

Blogs are written by people, not companies (tweet this). So one of the things I personally hate about blogs is when I can’t easily find who the author is, or their key social handles. That’s why this new design highlights the author’s picture, bio, and social networks in a much more prominent way than our old design. We also use Google+ Authorship tags to help tie our authors to their content in the search engines.  Thanks to the OpenView Venture Partners blog for inspiration here.

Cherish guest posts

Lastly, we encourage our employees and community to contribute posts to our blog, and we wanted these guest authors to have the same exposure as our regular authors. I hate it when one of my articles is posted to another site, but someone else is listed as the author.  So, we made it so guest authors also get rich bios and profiles.  As a side note, this required us to use an author image plug-in instead of Gravatar for our author bios.

Thank You

I’d like to say thank you to everyone who helped design and build our blog, including Davis Lee, Lynn-Kai Chao, Glen Lipka, and Carina Boo from Marketo for design and user experience, Nathan Brauer from Marketo and the team at Adair Creative for development; Dayna Rothman for managing the content; and Mike Tomita for project management.

Let us know what you think of the design, and how else we can make it better!

Anatomy of a Blog Redesign – 10 Best Practices from Marketo was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Peter O'Neill

The following is a guest post by Peter O’Neill. Peter is VP, Principal Analyst and leads Forrester’s B2B demand generation and channel marketing efforts. He has been a favored speaker at many seminars and trade shows and is a B2B marketing expert.

Did you know that B2B buyers say that 70% of the content they read and study before making a purchase decision is actually found by – well, themselves?  Just 15% (each) is collected from either the vendor’s marketing department or the sales contacts.  In a Forrester report last year on content marketing being the new differentiation, I described the new interaction model of need-match-engage, where the buyers now initiate the interaction and spend a major part of their buyer journey doing their own research before calling in potential suppliers.

Discover and Explore

Content marketing is so much more than product and solutions collateral, campaigns, mailings and fulfillment. Marketers must become great at being found by buyers in their early research phase (the phases we call discover and explore).  In a way, successful marketers will “fool” their buyers into consuming their thought leadership and educational content in stages 1 through 5 – while hardly realizing its source. And the most successful marketers will learn how to mix their brand scent into that content without appearing to be selling – such that buyers will count it as part of the 70% and not the 15%. (BTW – there is no better company at doing this than Marketo!)

How do they achieve this success? Well, by understanding the buyer journey; by researching the buyer roles and their preferences; and using an “outside-in” taxonomy and point of view; among other things. But marketers find this extremely hard: one third of the marketers we surveyed recently cited “Getting the right customers/prospects to view the content” as their #1 challenge.

In a blog on forrester.com, I offered my reason for this: B2B marketers prefer to stay in their comfort zone and have trouble getting “outside-in” at all. In inquiry-conversations, they also tell me that they just don’t have the resources to do the research; create the content suitable for the buyer’s discover and explore phases. And they have little idea how to deliver it.

The Digital Marketing Service Provider

So, enter the digital marketing service provider to fulfill this need.

Marketers already tend to outsource much of their work and I introduced the term “Digital Marketing Service Provider” about 14 months ago (see below). Now I am noticing that content marketing is a massive opportunity for these providers as they become expert in the above content marketing tasks; sometimes even add teams of content creators; plus being good at using lead management platforms such as Marketo.  I suspect that many enterprise marketing teams will be happy to see their content marketing and lead-to-revenue management become externally provided managed services.

Now because Forrester sees the business purpose of successful content marketing as assisting buyers down their journey we see the end result as “revenue acceleration”; which is why I have entitled this blog “Revenue Acceleration Through Content Marketing As an Opportunity for Marketing Service Providers”.

Need more details? Drop me a line.  As always, I’d love to hear from you on this and other topics. Also be sure to sign up for my webinar The New Rules of B2B Management Every Agency Must Know taking place on Tuesday, May 14th at 10am PST.

Always keeping you informed! Peter

Revenue Acceleration Through Content Marketing Is A New Opportunity For Marketing Service Providers was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Dayna Rothman

I’d like to welcome Jeff Ogden as today’s guest blogger. Jeff is President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. He’s also the Creator and Host of the syndicated TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @fearlesscomp.

Word of mouth is generally considered to be the most powerful form of marketing available.  But too often it is poorly understood, especially since most of us look at it from the lens of our experiences.

Why is it so important to learn the principles of Word of Mouth marketing? Simply said, it’s low cost, even free. But it is also a lot of hard work.  Perhaps the best way to explain the power and effort required with Word of Mouth marketing is to share a success story.

The Word of Mouth marketing firm Brains on Fire worked with the State of South Carolina in a project to reduce teen smoking. Other states were running TV ads, but when the ads stopped, smoking went back up.  The goal was to develop something more sustainable. The project was named Rage against the Haze; here is their story.

Backdrop

When the state of South Carolina received their Tobacco Settlement stipend, it became the responsibility of the state to create an awareness campaign for teens about the dangers of tobacco use. And do it in Big Tobacco’s back yard was not an easy task.

Other states were pumping their settlement funds into huge media campaigns with in-your-face TV ads. But once the ads quit running, the teen smoking rates went back up (SOURCE: American Cancer Society).

Purpose

• To spread awareness of the dangers of tobacco use
• To cause a 5% decrease in youth smoking rates in South Carolina
• To create something so powerful, it would survive budget cuts

Action

Instead of trying to engineer a media campaign, they created something much more sustainable. They gave the reins to the teens and helped them develop a youth-led movement. So, they hand-picked 92 teens who we knew could champion the cause. These teens played a key role in the development of everything – from the name and identity, to the proprietary curriculum that was penned. The agency trained and armed the teens with the tools to spread the word, and then sent them on their way to find other “ViralMentalists™.”

To help, the agency conducted weekend retreats, statewide tours, Festi-Viral events led by the teens in different cities across the state. They created an interactive website where teens could check in with each other, and a RAGE store where they could get SWAG – but only if they were out spreading the word and could prove it.

The agency sparked and shaped the movement. But the teens are the ones that owned and grew it.

Success

• 16.9% drop in youth tobacco use rates, surpassing the 5% goal – one of the highest in the nation. That’s with no mass media. And no tax increase on cigarettes.
• There are 6,000+ active ViralMentalists Raging Against the Haze.
• The smoking rate drop is unprecedented since SC has the cheapest cigarette prices in the nation. The rest of the US funded television and school campaigns from a $206 billion settlement — none of which was ever implemented by the state of South Carolina. And the budget did get hit by a bus. But RAGE lives on and continues to grow.
• The RAGE movement has earned a WOMMIE Award, a National ADDY and a 2008 gold EFFIE Award.

Word of Mouth marketing is incredibly powerful, but you have to take risks, like putting teenagers in charge.  You have to pick your champions careful – passion far more important than popularity.  And you have to let your champions lead.

“We sparked and shaped the movement. But the teens are the ones that owned and grew it.”

Igniting Word of Mouth: How WOM Reduced Teen Smoking in South Carolina was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Dayna Rothman

Visual content is an important part of creating engagement across social channels. It stands out from all the text promotion companies typically do, helps tell a story, and gives event attendees all the information they need in a short amount of time. Visual content for events can be a valuable tactic before, during, and afterwards, becoming a cornerstone of your event marketing strategy.

Event Graphics

At Marketo, we make a custom graphic for every webinar and event that we promote on social channels. We find that it increases the EdgeRank of our posts on Facebook because our followers tend to engage with images over text only posts. We have seen a huge uptick in registration by using this tactic, particularly in a promoted post.  Take a look at a visual image we used on Facebook for our Keynote at Marketo Summit.

Visual Notetaking

Hiring a graphic facilitator to capture visual recordings from an event is a fun and innovative way to keep your audience engaged and interested in your content. Having a talented artist on hand sketching notes in real time creates a memorable record. Here are three benefits from using a graphic facilitator to illustrate online and offline events:

• Extends conversations and builds buzz
• Enables better understanding of key takeaways
• Get attendees to look up from their personal devices

We use this visual notetaking for a lot of our events, including keynote sessions at Dreamforce and Marketo Summit. People love to come up afterwards and take photos that they then post to Instagram and Twitter.

Infographics

Creating an infographic about your event or series of events is a fantastic way to get someone excited about attending. Not only is it a fun and unique visual take on events, but it also provides your audience with important logistical information in a way that is easy to understand. You can even create one infographic depicting all of the events you will participate in during a given year. And because infographics are super shareable, they will give you a social lift. Take a look at some of the infographics we created for Dreamforce:

Cover Photos and Backgrounds

Leveraging cover photos on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter is a great way to get your event message across visually when followers come to your page. Cover photos and background images give you free real estate to engage with your followers in a primary location. Take a look at our Google+ cover photo for an upcoming Marketing Happy Hour. It really pops when you visit our Google+ page.

What other visual tactics do you use to promote events? To learn more about all things events, download our Definitive Guide to Event Marketing.

Using Visual Content to Promote Your Event was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Dayna Rothman

We are excited to announce Anne Shaneen as today’s guest blogger. Anne wrangles words as a marketing content specialist for MarketStar. She posts on their blog and regularly rants @annetown.

I’m Anne, and I’m a marketingaholic.

Room chants back: Hi Anne.

Now that I got that confession out of the way, let’s admit it: Lead nurturing is not easy. Anyone who says it is isn’t telling the truth. Nurturing practices vary by company, industry, and buyer persona. You’ve seen the topic in countless blog posts, webinars, white papers – you name it. So, how do companies nurture leads successfully?

That’s where agencies come in. I know, I know, you’re probably striking up images of a questionable salesman trying to sell an elusive product or service. But not all agencies are created equal. Not to mention, most companies are afraid to even admit they might need an agency for lead nurturing. But numbers don’t lie. In a recent blog post from Marketo they back up the notion of using an agency, pointing out how agencies significantly shorten the time for success and improve overall results.

In light of industry shy-ness towards agencies, we at Marketstar are starting an agency coping group called “Agencies Anonymous.” Our goal is to provide you with steps to help you recover (and uncover) a strategy for lead nurturing that actually works and get over the reluctance of using an agency for lead nurturing. We’ve gleaned insight from the famous 12-Step program and have adopted the following 6-Step Program to coping with your lead nurturing failures.

Step 1: The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

Lead nurturing and management isn’t only a marketing automation tool that you have implemented. Marketing Leadership Council says a tool is only 20% of a successful lead nurturing plan. To be truly successful, companies must have a seamless integration between people, processes, and the tool itself. Do you have the right people? What about your processes and proven methods?

Step 2: Experiences beyond our own can restore you to sanity.

Agencies do exactly this. We put your lead nurturing into our experts hands and get results faster and cheaper than the expensive time it takes for you to learn lead nurturing and hire an internal team to manage it. Agencies are quickly becoming experts at lead nurturing, so let us help you optimize. Sanity restored.

Step 3: An agency’s care of your lead nurturing might not be such a bad idea.

Like I said earlier, lead nurturing is not easy, and it’s OK to admit that. Many agencies have invested the time to learn marketing automation and make it sing for plenty of clients. The agency you choose should instill a sense of sanity to your marketing efforts. There are plenty of maddening mistakes that come with learning a new process. We have already conquered spots where most beginners stumble and have experience navigating the tricky process of passing off leads between marketing and sales.

Step 4: Take a brutally honest inventory of your current nurturing plan.

Get out a pen and a piece of paper, shut your office door, and ask yourself these questions: How many sales-ready leads are you producing? What’s your sales team doing with them? Can you trace bottom line right back to your nurturing? What do you have to show your boss?

Step 5: Admit potential for growth to yourself, your team, and your superiors.

It’s okay to learn from the past. This is part of the buy-in process for your superiors. If you can prove an outsourced lead nurturing solution will yield more results than throwing leads into a database black hole, you’ll be eventually applauded for your marketing team tangibly contributing to the bottom line. Agencies are there to fill in the gaps of your team, without replacing it. A graphics and printing agency is better at making a billboard, that’s why the task generally gets outsourced to them.

Step 6: We’re finally ready to fix our mistakes and move forward.

Here’s where you pick your agency. With buy-in, and confidence that the agency you pick will provide results, you’re ready to graduate. Congratulations. We hope you find success and prosperity in your agency’s outsourced lead nurturing team.

Selecting an agency.

Now that you have the 6 steps to overcoming your fear of lead nurturing and are ready to partner with an agency, it’s time to pick the right one. Here are 5 qualities or features your agency must have:

• Reputable, extensive client list
• Marketing automation certification – even better if they’re a partner to the marketing automation platform you use
• Proven results on projects
• Transparent reporting capabilities
• Stellar team of marketing strategist, tool administrators, writers, programmers, and designers

Good luck in your search and may you have lead nurturing success in the future!

Apply now to the Marketo Agency Program.

To learn more about Marketo’s agency offerings, register for our upcoming webinar with Peter O’Neill of Forrester to learn more about your agency can create new opportunities.  Download the white paper Technology and the Evolution of the Marketing Agency.

Agencies Anonymous: 6-Step Program to Overcoming Lead Nurturing Failures was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com