The basics: Promotion and Placement (after the Product and Price are locked)

Getting inside the consumers’ mind is one of the most important as well as one of the hardest things to do. There are a few key things to consider here:

• Who is the target customer
• Where are they looking for information
• When is the right time to target them
  

I work in open source software and primarily market to Developers, Architects, and System Admins. In order to create compelling campaigns around our products, I need to first learn how these functions like to consume information. Through user groups, interviews, and other research I’ve learned that Developers spend a lot of time in different online publications when trying to evaluate products – now, I post ads and content in these different publications around product evaluation and entry level information. I post up-selling ads and content in more of the denser content – up-selling on external publications when someone is just doing research would miss the mark completely.

In order to revamp our community website, I recently led a "usability study" to learn how developers (the target audience for that site) found the site, where they went on the site, and the things that were compelling them to click. My objectives with the site are to drive downloads, enable faster on-boarding getting people up and running with our products, and drive people to register (so I can then "drip" them ... much nicer term for "spam). During the study I saw people doing a lot of searching on "our product vs. xyz." Once on the site I noticed they were going to the "free" docs first, then the projects, then the download. This study helped vastly with the site update. More on usability studies later.

In a business to consumer setting, this could be seen in something as simple as shopping. When I go to the grocery store, I expect to see ads and banners around good healthy food and easy meals to make for my family. I do not expect to see restaurant ads cross-selling their meal delivery nor would I expect to see ads for clothing – these would totally miss the mark in this setting – my mindset is not on meal delivery and it’s certainly not on clothes when I’m shopping at a grocery store.

After figuring out what customers want, when, and where, it’s important to stay in touch with customers – check in to see how the product is doing and how they want to receive information. This will help continue to be a vendor to that customer. As the customer base grows so does information about your audience – this is when it’s hugely important to get a good CRM in place (examples are Salesforce or Sugar). These tools help track what you’ve done with customers or prospects so you can “ping” (or reach out to) them again.

Marketers need to know what’s going on in the minds of the prospect and customers, but they also need to know what’s going on in the external environment – environment will effect peoples’ buying behaviors and need to effect marketing planning.

Marketing Automation: Science meets Art

Marketing automation is a science and an art. The art is the given – who are you pinging, when, why, and how. The science is a bit trickier – what are you integrating with, how do you manage gated resources, how do landing pages play into SEO strategy, how do you manage spam submissions and legal acceptance, and how do the forms tie to drip campaigns. Brain spinning yet? No? Good.

Here’s our use case and some learnings from our 3-month bake off between 12 (yes, 12) marketing automation vendors – I hope it helps you.

Let’s talk about the science – our environment was/is pretty standard:
• CRM: Salesforce.com
• CMS: Drupal

We have added complexity because we have a .org site for our open source projects that’s backed by Crowd + Xircles to enable single sign on (SSO). The site has 1 reg form which needed to integrate with whatever new marketing automation tool we went with.

Now that you have the “lay of the land” here’s a look at the key requirements:

Overarching requirements:
• 100% up server time
• 100k contacts with room to grow – tiered pricing models
• Migration support
• Ongoing support
• Drag/drop of nurture flows
• Fine-grained user rights management
• Partnership with Litmus
• Partnership with ReturnPath (I don’t want other companies’ spam lowing the ISP score of the automation tool sending emails for me)

Email requirements:
• Support 1 contact view (even if the contact has multiple email addresses)
• WYSIWYG editor
o Ability to anchor links
• In-line CSS support
o To globally update links
• Ability to host images for emails
• Ability to check against different browsers
• Create hosted email
• Ability to attach files to campaigns
• Image hosting
• “view as webpage” hosting
• Off-the-shelf, tested, email templates (1-column, 2-column, etc.)

Form requirement:
• Ability to clone forms
• Hosted (dynamic) forms
• Need captcha

List requirements:
• Create compound lists – ability to create (and send campaigns to) a list that is composed of different lists (e.g. pulled from different forms)
• List “types,” or ability to exclude lists from being added to Global list
• Bi-directional sync with Salesforce.com
• Ability to pull list based on time (e.g., all leads from this form from 9/1/09-9/30/09)
• Segment by region
• Segment by role
• Segment by lead score
• Bundle lists (i.e. send an email to all prospects who fall within a certain campaign in SFDC)

Reporting:
• Time-series web and lead analytics (e.g., weekly PageViews plotted over time)
• Content-based web analytics (view analytics for specific URL or domain)
• Lead watches for larger numbers of leads
• Reporting based on total number of page views

Upon first talking to the marketing automation vendors, overwhelmingly all of them said “yes, we can do that.” I hate that answer – to me that screams sales person who, once the ink dries on a contact, will push the direct marketer off to support to figure it all out. This is where the reference checks and free product trials was paramount.

When doing reference checks I called on references put forth by the marketing automation vendors as well as backline references. On the calls, I dug into what other marketers were actually doing with their respective tool – not just what they liked. What I found was that people were doing limited to no drip campaigns and limited segmentation. There were definitely some inspiring marketers who shared best practices and successful tips on marketing automation, though, don’t get me wrong. I also asked “what’s the biggest problem you’ve encountered” – problems happen, that’s software for you, but I was and am more interested in how the support team managed the issue(s). Don’t get me wrong, server down time makes me cringe when I have emails that need to go out. But problems happen – it’s how they’re dealt with.

After getting through the initial requirements check list with vendors and going through long rounds of reference checks, I was down to 3 vendors. I have to say, I’m lucky in that I work for a brilliant Sr. Director of Marketing and a seasoned insightful CEO. They helped with the final decision between the three vendors – the final call came down to what we could/couldn’t do through the trials, pricing (of course – but in a market as saturated as the marketing automation tool market pricing is quite flexible), and company viability. I’m all for getting my thoughts/needs on a company’s roadmap, but I don’t want to shape that roadmap nor do I want to get in deep with a vendor who gets bought out or goes out of business in a few years. Getting a marketing automation tool set up and flows in place is no cake walk – I did not, and do not, want to start down the path with one vendor only to have to find another solution in another year or so.

So what about the art? We send drip emails based on activity – this can include online (filling out forms, even visiting certain web pages) and offline (attending events is the biggie). Each email within a drip gives something (an asset, advice, links to documentation) and drives the recipient to do something (download product, contact support, give us more information). User activity also gets a score and certain things get tagged with “interesting moments” to help sales. Sure, I want to keep leads “warm” but the real way to help sales is to give them insight into what’s happening with their prospects. Activity also feeds into reporting that we have defined in SFDC (I can pull more detailed reports in the tool itself but really, management doesn’t have time to go from tool to tool so having 1 stop reporting (SFDC) is great). I don’t want to show all my cards here … go to our site, fill out a few forms, and find out the response for yourself!