Marketing Automation And Advocate Marketing: A Sweet Combination

Marketing automation + advocate marketing = delicious!

This post was originally posted here.

2013 has been a year of transition for me. My wife and I will be adding a new addition to our family, which will require me to paint a room pink and have tea parties (it’s a big transition after having two boys), and I moved from a behemoth of a technology company to a fast moving startup.
I have also moved from one area of B2B marketing to another. While the audience we focus on at Influitive is still primarily B2B marketers, the space that we play in is a bit different.

Marketing automation software is essentially a marketing database that runs marketing campaigns and provides insights on how those campaigns have performed. It’s the driving engine behind marketing’s efforts and can justify where marketing should be spending its budget. There are, of course, many other functions, such as sales enablement features, but let’s focus primarily on the core aspects of marketing automation.

Influitive focuses on advocate marketing, which is all about taking your customers, partners, employees and fans, and mobilizing them to support marketing campaigns, refer new business and help close deals. We call these super duper supporters your advocates and Influitive helps you tap into these amazing brand ambassadors.

Looking at these two areas of B2B marketing, they are not as different as they once appeared to me when I switched marketing disciplines.

Why advocate marketing and marketing automation are like waffles and maple syrup

Is it a coincidence that marketing automation and advocate marketing share the same initials, but in reverse? I think not!

Both areas actually work well together, like like waffles and maple syrup, for example.

Waffles, which represent marketing automation, are awesome by themselves, but they taste so much better with maple syrup, which is the advocate marketing component.

Adding advocates to campaigns which are being executed from your marketing automation system can amplify your existing campaigns and maximize your marketing automation investment.

5 ways marketing automation can tap into advocates to increase campaign effectiveness

Here are the top five recommendations on how you can leverage your advocates and advocate activities to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing automation campaigns:

1. Mix in online reviews to your lead nurturing efforts

The most recent Nielsen Trust In Advertising report found that 84% of buyers cited recommendations from people like them as their most trusted source when purchasing a product.

When mobilized, advocates can provide online ratings and reviews on sites such as G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, Quora, the Salesforce AppExchange and many others.

Instead of directing prospects to marketing materials that you have created, which are seen as less genuine in the eyes of your buyers, why not direct them to third-party sites where your advocates have left you glowing reviews?

You can also ask your prospects if they would like to connect with these advocates and set up a reference call.

Did you know? Like maple syrup, marketing automation and advocate marketing have strong roots here in Canada.

2. Score leads based on acts of advocacy that have been performed

There are certain social indicators of advocacy which explicitly indicate that a prospect is more interested in your company as well as when their interest is peaking.
These can include:

• Following your company on social channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, SlideShare, Spiceworks and Facebook
• Sharing information about your company on social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn
• Mentioning your company on public forums such as Quora or Spiceworks
• Responding to surveys and requests for more information

Many of your prospects are fans of your company even if they aren’t customers.

They may not have the budget or exact need at the moment for your services, they may have used your product or service at a former company or they may love what your company represents in their industry.

You can tap into this positive sentiment and track these activities.

As these activities increase, they should be scored appropriately, and an inside sales rep should reach out at the right time to see if they are ready to purchase or just to thank them for their support.

3. Add testimonials from advocates to landing pages to increase lead conversion

MarketingExperiments has published a number of case studies which show that including indicators of trustworthiness on your landing pages reduces friction.

There is no better way to do this than to use testimonials that you have collected from your advocates. You can gather testimonials that indicate the strength of your customer onboarding services, various benefits of your products and even justify spending the five minutes needed to read through an eBook.

Sprinkle in some testimonials and measure the increase in conversions.

4. Ask advocates to share your marketing content

These days, relying solely on email and even your owned social and web properties to reach your target audience is a mistake. The Nielsen Trust In Advertising report backs this up: content shared by people who are similar to your intended buyers is much more powerful and your prospects will be much more receptive to this information.

Have your advocates share your infographics, upcoming webinars and other marketing content with their social networks in order to maximize the effectiveness of the campaigns that you are running.

Be sure to accurately measure the leads coming from advocate activities by using unique URLs and/or designated landing pages.

5. Get feedback on your planned marketing campaigns

…before pulling the trigger on a larger audience. Advocates love to provide feedback. Why? Because they want to have their voices heard.

They feel connected to you and asking them for feedback enhances this relationship. Of course, you need to ensure you are recognizing their contributions for this to work. When performed properly, you can use advocates to provide advance feedback on campaigns that you want to run for a larger audience.

Think about it. You’ve spent or about to spend a significant amount of on a nurturing program, video, infographic or webinar series. Wouldn’t you want to get some honest feedback or test your messaging on a smaller, dedicated audience before you do a major campaign launch? This is easy to do with a co-ordinated advocate marketing program. Using advocates this way, you’ll guarantee a much better chance of campaign success.

I hope you will take advantage of these recommendations and add the sweetness of advocates to your marketing automation efforts.

Chad H.
@chadhorenfeldt

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B2B Marketing Trends From Eloqua Experience 09 Via Twitter

Earlier this month I left my newborn and poor wife at home for an unforgettable week at Eloqua Experience in San Francisco. This sold out event brought together some of smartest marketers from all over the world. While there were a few keynote speakers, the conference focused on having the Eloqua community share their experiences so we could all learn from each other.


The main difference this year from last year was that we not only shared our knowledge and insights with each other but with the power of Twitter, we could share these with the rest of the globe. This made the event even more exciting as tweeters could listen to speakers, engage other tweeters, tweet their experiences, and see what others were tweeting about all at the same time! To better understand, how Eloqua pulled this off, see: Social Media Buzz at a Live Event. The result was better than Eloqua could ever have expected. The content generated by the event attendees was almost as good as the content from the speakers themselves. Why? Because it’s real. It’s in the moment. What better way to get in the heads of those that attended than by reading their actual thoughts.

While I could write a number of blog posts on my own findings from this event, I decided to let Twitter write the post for me. Of course, I did sift through over 1,000 tweets for trends as well the most memorable tweets. The Eloqua product was much discussed at the event but I’ve excluded those tweets here as this post was focused on learnings for B2B marketers that goes beyond Eloqua. I hope you enjoy it and I encourage you to follow the Tweeters that I mention below. They are some of the best and brightest out there. And if you’re mad that I forgot a important moment or missed a cherished tweet of yours, add a comment at the bottom.

Social Media And B2B Marketing

Social media played such a major factor at this event. This post as an example, was written from the product of social media (Twitter). At Eloqua Experience, there was a focus on helping marketers better understand the different aspects of social media, how to better leverage social media, and why they need to leverage it. One of the memorable moments on Day #1 was at the social media training session when all of students needed to set up a Twitter account (if they didn’t have one) and tweet using the #EE09 hash tag. It actually caused Twitter to block the IP address at the hotel from accessing Twitter for a short period of time due to the amount of new Twitter accounts generated. Those at the event felt proud that they’re collective voice reverberated across the internet – powerful stuff!

David Meerman Scott was a fantastic speaker and adding all the golden nugget tweets from his presentation wouldn’t due it justice. I have added a few though.

Here is a small taste of what was discussed:

tracyekraft: Social Media Revolution http://bit.ly/1Q6I5R at Eloqua Experience learning how to be better w/social media. #ee09

EricHorton: Twitter just blocked the IP for the #ee09 Twitter training session. How will new users learn to reap the benefits from Twitter?

jocebrown: Social's big impact in B2B marketing will be in how you interact with customers and develop advocates and relationships - Laura Ramos #EE09

stevewoods: Thought leadership and credibility, NOT community size are main drivers of why ppl engage in online communities - @lauraramos at #EE09

chadhorenfeldt: Track social media engagement, not ROI @lauraramos #EE09

edthewebguy: #ee09 steve woods - if facebook was a country it would be the 4th most populous

rhonda: #EE09 It's not about controlling the message it's about getting information out there. @dmscott

Bpoz: @dmscott: lose your fear of social media and lose control of your marketing. #EE09

tillatorrens: New Rule by @dmscott - EARN attention by publishing your way in - via YouTube, blogs, etc #EE09

chadhorenfeldt: #EE09 @dmscott borrowed this from @yoda to describe new rules of marketing: u must unlearn what u have learned

The Marketing Organization

While many of my conversations are focused solely on technology, it’s the people and process that are the building blocks of a successful marketing organization. The tweets below focus mostly on the session held by Tony Jaros from SiriusDecisions and some additional tweets from the Omniture session who use much of what SiriusDecisions preaches. The marketing organizations that have the right people and are using the best practice strategies will have the most success. As an example, SiriusDecsions focused on the concept of what they called the Demand Center.

lauraramos: #EE09: Tony Jaros of Sirius Decisions talks about the gap in marketing skills, not the technology or relationship with sales.

lauraramos: #EE09: Now need 2 worry about how 2 facilitate demand through the entire waterfall. Don't sell yourself short by thinking it's anything less

lauraramos: #EE09: Best marketing organizaitons will see the biggest change at the bottom of the waterfall. Waterfall is center of all marketing.

jocebrown: Neither a white paper not a product is a campaign....you need to be solving a problem....cannot continue to be tactically focused #EE09

lauraramos: #EE09: Quality marketing talent must support a wide variety of disciplines. Silos must go. Marketing automation experience will be key.

jocebrown:Frightening number of B2B marketers self taugh with no budget for training according to Sirius....huge performance gap #EE09

lauraramos: #EE09: The Demand Center is a center of excellence for program creation but with advisory, technical, and execution around buyer's journey.

jocebrown: It's the people and process not the technology that is stalling sophisticated nurturing and scoring - Laura Ramos #EE09

lauraramos: #EE09: Omniture organization looks like: Audience Program Mgmt, Offer Development, Channel Execution, and Marketing Operations supports all.

lauraramos: #EE09: 1: Sales engagement means taking in sales language: what do we contribute to the pipeline, how many sales accepted oppty do you need?

paynejoe: Avg CMO tenure 22 mnths. BUT if the CMO has a demand generation or sales enablement background he/she is 2 times liklier to make 5yrs #ee09

Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

This was definitely a hot topic and Eloqua was lucky to not only have speakers like Laura Ramos and Tony Jaros but also CMOs from its customer base. A theme across many of these discussions was the need for marketing to demonstrate its impact to the rest of the business. This doesn’t just mean the pipeline influenced from a lead nurturing program but also can mean the effectiveness of lead scoring to the sales team.

lauraramos: #EE09: all this [marketing] activity amounts to 18 to 30% of the pipe. Must look at influence in the waterfall, even if marketing doesn't source it.

lauraramos: #EE09: @siriusdecisions Marketers must measure the performance of demand creation, not of marketing.

SuaadSait: Benchmarking marketing statistics is NOT what matters, Baseline YOUR mktng data & set goals to grow as a commitment per @lauraramos #EE09

jocebrown: Nurturing value measured in pipeline velocity - Drew Clarke IBM #EE09

rhonda: #ee09 Drew Clark on measuring nurturing: what type & how many activities lead participates in, what their role is in opp & in account.

lauraramos: #EE09: Waterfall + database segementation shows Omni needed to acquire 150K more names to feel the model. Content choice: research survey.

lauraramos: #EE09: Omniture measures conversion across channel and pipeline. Lets them know where to invest marketing programs and why.

rhonda: @pteshima #EE09 ?'s CMOs ask: What initiatives drive ROI, how does sales & mktg funnel look, r my strategies working, how do I benchmark?

rhonda: #EE09 Scott Sheppard shares great ideas on rolling out lead scoring to your sales team: videos, distribute custom reports & driving adoption

Marketing Tactics

If you ask many marketers, one of the main reasons they came to Eloqua Experience was to pick up a few tips that they could take home with them and implement right away. This could mean learning how to clean your data so that it could be easy to segment off of or something simple as creating a control group that you send no marketing communication to and measuring how it fairs to the rest of the database. It’s very powerful when marketers themselves can share their results and let you know what is working and what isn’t.

jill_rowley: @lauraramos - content needs to be about me and my needs, not you and your products, your awards. #EE09 #Eloqua

JenPumpItUp: Session tip: How good is your lead scoring program? Only as good as your sales team buy-in. Make sure they're a part from the start. #EE09

rhonda: #EE09 marketers shld work w/ the sales team to help define a qualified lead for scoring... But DON'T ask them to help you prioritize assets!

rhonda: #EE09 Incorporate time frame into ur scoring model to ensure recency is reflected in the "value" of the lead.

rhonda: #EE09 Sales adoption of lead scoring is a paradigm shift-if rep reluctant, push adoption not just from top but via success of their peers.


lauraramos: #EE09: Omniture says realtime alerts increased contact ratios by to 100X and increased opportuntiies generated by 21X vs. no tools/process.

jfernandez: I love the idea of misspellings within automated e-mails from Sales Rep to add a touch of authenticity. Brilliant stuff, @Omniture. #EE09

Eloqua: Omniture: EVERY email must be personalized and relevant. #EE09


gclarkmt: Mikel Chertudi says Omniture only saw a 3% drop in conversions with their really long contact form versus a short form. #EE09

gregforrest: Omniture says do less programs and make them better - get more out of them. #ee09

tmcmullen: favorite idea of the day - create a control group when testing marketing campaigns/effectiveness #ee09

hallim: #EE09 data cleansing - tactics to support the overall strategy of demand generation and qualified leads into the sales pipline

chadhorenfeldt: http://twitpic.com/o5sq5 - Great Eloqua data quality dashboard in Eloqua by @gregforrest #EE09 #b2b #marketing

jill_rowley: Tony Jaros from SiriusDecisions says something like....Lead nurturing turns garbage into gold. #EE09 #Eloqua

Until Eloqua Experience 2010…

I hope you enjoyed some of these tweets as much as I did and if you were at Eloqua Experience, I hope these tweets bring back some good memories. To end this post, I want to highlight some of the true marketing rock stars that were at the event. These people were the finalists for the Markie awards. Here is Tweet from the Markie awards ceremony celebrating the achievements of the finalists:

stevewoods: Was a fantastic evening! Congrats all! RT @chadhorenfeldt: http://twitpic.com/o7l7g - The Eloqua Markies finalists #EE09

For more information on the winners, see: Winners of the 2009 Markie Awards where you can learn more about the categories, the winners and why they won.

Be sure to add comments on your favorite tweets or moments at EE09. Looking forward to Eloqua Experience 2010!

Chad H.

@chadhorenfeldt

PS: For videos from the event and some of the sessions I mentioned above, check out the Eloqua YouTube Channel. For more pictures, Check out the Eloqua Fanpage on Facebook

PPS: I would like to thank every tweeter at the event – you made this post possible. Believe me, it was hard choosing who to include! I would especially like to thank @lauraramos, @jocebrown and @rhonda who I used extensively.

PPPS: I did mention that this post was not on the Eloqua technology but I did want to give a shout out to the Pedowitz Group and its Sweet Platform that captured all of the tweets from the event in Eloqua and made it possible for me to analyze them. Very nice add-on and a big thank you.

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USA Today is Web 2.0. OK

If you're looking for an example of a website that employs some of the latest and greatest of web 2.0. and does it successfully, look no further then USA Today. USA Today has reported a 380% surge in web traffic since it re-built its website last month with over 40,000 more user generated comments.


Here are some of the web 2.0 elements that I spotted:

• More then a Website - a Web Community: USA Today didn't just build a new website, they built a new online community that has a completely new experience. The website is no longer a site that you go to when you want the latest information and then leave - it's become a community that many web users call home. You can now register (which includes uploading an image) to become part of the community which entitles you to create a profile, add friends and leave comments which leads me to the next web 2.0. theme.
  

• User Generated Mania: USA Today allows its community members to leave your own comments on actual articles. The success of this is clearly evident with close to 1000 comments left for article that covered the tragic shooting at Virginia Tech. From scanning through the comments, USA Today has provided a forum for its members to cope with this senseless act by allowing visitors to have their say. You can equate leaving a comment to lighting a candle or dropping a flower off a memorial - it isn't much but it's something and the least that we can do.
  
  To demonstrate the importance of these comments USA Today actually profiles some of them in a rotating header image on the home page. Readers can recommend comments that they like and also report those people that abuse this feature.
  
  In addition, the USA Today community allows for its online readers to rate articles to guide readers as to which articles were actually enjoyed by others in the community.

• My blog, your blog, OUR blogs: As a community member, you can write your own blog on USA Today or you can read one of the various "expert blog" on the USA Today website. They have The Weather Guys, American Idol chatter, and a sports blog. The effect is that you feel like your really one with the USA Today website as you can try and copy the experts and comment on their articles as well as write your own.
  

• Simple, Boring, EFFECTIVE RSS Feeds: If you're still one of those people that could care less about RSS it's time to get serious about it if you produce quality content on a regular basis. On USA Today, you can subscribe to blogs, articles, videos - whatever you want. They also have a section called "Other Voices on the Web" which is an RSS feed of articles from other sites. In this section, USA Today has republished articles from blogs and other sites from around the web.
  
  
• Interactive Features Keep 'em Coming Back: If you and your spouse want to have your own celebrity name like Bennifer or Brangelina, check out the Celebrity Couple Name Maker. (My wife Allie didn't mind "Chadlie"). These type of interactive elements that ask for user input keep people coming back to your website.

So if you're looking to learn more about what this whole web 2.0. thing is all about, skip the books, the reports, the analysts and hot air and check out www.usatoday.com.

Chad H.

PS - To the families and friends that have suffered from the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, I would like to know that we are thinking about you up here in Canada.

Tags: USA Today, web 2.0., American Idol, user-generated content, UGC, news blogging, fun with web 2.0., online communities

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Even Your Father is on YouTube

Are you thinking about different ways to build demand for your products or services or just to attract more people to your website or blog?

I've been reading a few articles lately about how some user-generated content ad campaigns such as the one that Dove ran called Dove Cream Oil Body Wash Ad Contest "failed" as it wasn't well received by the YouTube community. YouTube vlogger oneparkave (AKA Shmuel Tennenhaus) mentioned that the ad only received a 1 star rating out of 3 million views and received some extremely negative comments on YouTube. Shmuel argued that Dove angered the entire YouTube community as YouTubers perceived the video as self-serving for Dove and not adding to the YouTube community.

I was pondering this over a late afternoon coffee when I received a link to a video recorded in 1991 that featured my dad. It turns out that someone had recorded a speaking engagement in which my father had introduced the main speaker. Besides the fact that I saw a video of my dad when he still had some colour in his hair, the interesting thing is that the link was from YouTube! I could not believe that my father had a video on YouTube before I did and I'm the one that watched YouTube all of the time. What does this all mean? It means that YouTube is much more then just a community in itself as Shmuel perceived it. As a blogger and a marketer, you need to look at YouTube in a broader context.

YouTube is another way of Building Demand

Where Shmuel is incorrect about Dove's "failure" is that many people may not be aware that YouTube is the platform that is hosting the video. My father sure wasn't. A friend of his who did a Google search came back with this video in the search results. My dad has since emailed the link to anyone he has ever known with an email address. If I ask my dad what YouTube is, I'm 99% sure he won't know what it is. In this case, it didn't matter that the platform was YouTube.

In Dove's case, YouTube acted as a platform for people to post commercials that they created (like this interesting one). YouTube also assisted Dove spread the word about this campaign as those who made commercials could send them to friends and family. Studies including this recent one have demonstrated time and again it's those closest to you that influence your buying habits.

Yes, there will always be those who react negatively when marketing is encroaching on something like YouTube as parts of the YouTube community perceive YouTube as a platform for user-generated content only that is not sponsored by a corporation. Guess what Shmuel and the rest of you 'Tubers - get over yourselves. Marketers must think beyond the YouTube community and see YouTube for what it really is - another channel to help spread the word about your product or service to your target market. You may receive some negative feedback if you open up comments (which you generally should) but if you're up front about what your campaign is all about you're not doing anything wrong. It's the YouTube community that must accept that YouTube is now being used as a marketing tool. Bloggers have accepted this and even embraced companies that have started blogging. It's only when businesses deceive the public that things go terribly wrong.

There will always be those that leave negative feedback on either on YouTube, blogs, forums or websites just because they want to "stick it to the man". These are typically comments that don't really have much substance but they react negatively to businesses in general. As marketers, you need to way the odds of losing some control over your brand as you will typically succeed if you execute your YouTube (or any user-generated content) campaign successfully. Typically, these detractors are not your target market anyways so don't worry too much about them. I would recommend responding to these comments though in a generic sort of way - don't just turn off comments on a blog.

How Can I get Started Using YouTube?

One of the main advantages as we saw with my father's example above is that YouTube can assist your company as a means to increase your prevalence in search results for your company. You can use YouTube as another channel like a blog or email to get your name out there and increase your staying power. Do you have a demo or you did your company recently speak at a conference? Post it on YouTube! Here's another great idea - if your company does speaking engagements or puts on events, record the testimonials from the event and post them on YouTube. Here is an example from a recent Marketing Effectiveness Summit. It's really that simple. If you're a blogger, why not do a 1 minute intro video about yourself and your blog and post it on YouTube? It's that simple.

Remember - always think of your target market and don't get too distracted by those who don't really care about your product or service (or blog) as your not trying to market to them in the first place. In addition, if you do get some negative exposure, it may help build even greater demand as you get some additional viral effects that money couldn't pay for. Look at Cisco who is suing Apple over the use of the name IPhone. Even if Apple loses the suite they win as the publicity that is archived and the sympathy that Apple will attain from the law suite is even more valuable.

Here's a video on how to use YouTube (notice the subtle way that this person uses markets himself with this helpful video)




Chad H.

PS - Look beyond YouTube to other video hosting platforms such as Google Video
PPS - It was really great to know that I have a video of my dad that I can now watch. Video really has an amazing impact
PPS - here are some other posts on YouTube:

• Honda Gets its Elements in Order With Fun Game
• Mastercard priceless moment at Anything Goes Marketing
• Integrated marketing campaigns using YouTube!
• Anything goes marketing using You Tube
• Coke and Mentos - Anything Goes Marketing (AGM) Winner!

Tags: Dove, YouTube marketing, web 2.0. marketing, Dove, building demand, video marketing

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