Ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels, going in circles, and not getting to where you need to be as a marketer? Sounds like you need to hit the brakes with your marketing communication plan. When it comes to marketing automation, you don’t need the fastest car to win the race – you just need to know how to use it effectively and efficiently.
Luckily, we here at Act-On have an ace driver in Jeff Day, Act-On’s SVP of Marketing, who has 25 years of experience working in go-to-market teams. In this webinar collaboration with Marketing Profs, he sharedl best practices and tactics that work in optimizing marketing automation. It’s the extra boost you need to get you off the slow track and into the fast lane.
When it comes to marketing automation, Act-On’s no rookie. We earned our racing stripes with over 4,000 satisfied customers. Learn how Act-On’s Marketing Automation is the best in the business.
Where the Rubber Meets the Road
Why use marketing automation tools in the first place? According to Gartner, businesses are using less than 50% of their marketing automation capabilities. That’s like owning a sports car but only driving on suburban roads.
When used correctly, marketing automation users see improved lead generation and more conversions. But although companies increasingly take advantage of the benefits of marketing automation, many don’t feel they’re getting all they could from the technology. According to a recent study, 54% of marketers admit they aren’t using marketing automation tools to their fullest potential.
In the webinar, Jeff and Mike Felix, an Act-On solutions consultant, delivered tips for tuning up your marketing automation machinery to achieve benefits such as:
– Driving more qualified leads
– Converting more leads to sales
– Optimizing your marketing spend
Work On a Well-Oiled Machine
The tools are right at your fingertips: leverage all that data! Start with 1P (first-party) Data – information on your customers you already have, because you’ve been collecting it through their activity on your website, engagement with your emails, and with your social media. Augment that with 3P (third-party) data where it’s helpful, such as demographic and firmographic information from other sources, as well as intent signals. Analyzing this data allows you to fine-tune your messaging into automated programs for that audience.
Next, empower sales: help them optimize their sales ability by feeding them higher quality leads through the front-end of the sales pipeline. Integrate your marketing automation platform to your CRM so your salespeople are equipped with the data that can help move a prospect closer to a sale.
In the process, you can make your other systems better. It’s a virtuous cycle when you empower sales automation, account-based marketing, and social with what your marketing automation platform knows about your customers. The more you lean into your data, the richer your output will be.
Accelerate Conversions and Create More Personal Programs
These days, it’s not a good idea to “set it and forget it” with your marketing automation.On the other hand, moving away from “dedicated send” emails to automated processes is crucial. How? By aligning your automated programs with the marketing outcomes you want to achieve. The content you send for outreach, nurture, and re-engagement programs should vary in tone and content.
Rev up your marketing with a focus on personalization and segmentation. To effectively send more personalized communication, you need to be able to segment your audience based on their characteristics. Put pedal to the metal by aligning nurture streams around the buying lifecycle. Know if your customer is ToFu, MoFu, or BoFu (top, middle, or bottom of funnel), and treat prospects in each part of the lifecycle differently. For instance, those closer to the top of the funnel haven’t demonstrated enough genuine interest for product-focused messages. Hit them with more generalized content. Once they progress further, they’ll be more receptive to pushing harder towards a sale.
Then keep fine-tuning. Analyze, test, iterate – don’t expect to get it right the first time. Nobody goes from zero to 100 miles an hour in one step. Track how your programs are performing, and test new content, subject lines and CTAs.Learn about Best Practices for Email Marketing Automation here.
Get In the Driver’s Seat with Personalized Engagement
Use demographic data to drive content. A prospect’s behavior score and activities should drive the next step in your automated platform: if they’re not engaging with your content, keep them in ToFu and handle accordingly.
Remember, there’s no need to stay in one lane – reach your prospects through multiple channels: email, social and SMS, and remember to personalize your content with dynamic content.
It Takes a (Pit) Crew
You want to hand over the best leads to your sales team. But how do you optimize scoring leads?
Learn how to assess demographic and firmographic scores and see how they match up with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Use behavioral scoring to measure engagement and readiness, to help sales prioritize and follow up with relevant conversations. Shifting gears, how does AI help you to improve efficiency and scale? Read about Act-On’s vision for AI and marketing automation here.
Keep an Eye on the Dashboard
Take steps to tweak and improve. Use your reporting to analyze what is and isn’t working, then take an intentional approach to making changes. Continue to iterate and test, but always measure!
It may seem like you’re on the right track, but are you actually driving sales conversions? Is the marketing fuel you’re spending leading to ROI?
Kick Into High Gear
Watch the full webinar and learn more tips from experts on how to use marketing automation to optimize your marketing and outpace the competition. You can also explore the full transcript below.
Webinar Transcript:
Joe Roberts:
Hello everyone and welcome to today’s webinar. I’m Joe Roberts from Team Marketing Profs, and I’ll be your moderator for today’s event that is Fast and Furious, how to optimize your marketing automation to outpace the competition. Thank you for being here. But before we get started, I have a few housekeeping items to go over. If you lose audio or visual, simply exit out of Zoom, come back in. That should solve most problems. The chat feature is available at the bottom of your screen. It’s a great way to network and meet new people and to add your general comments to. But if you have any questions, please add them to the q and a, that way we don’t lose them in the chat. So we will hear from our speakers and then we’ll go into our Q&A session, and I’ll be asking as many of those questions as possible.
We’ll get to as many as we can within the time allotted. Now I’d like to take a minute to thank Act-On for sponsoring today’s broadcast. Act-On Software provides solutions that empower marketers to engage targets at every step of the customer lifestyle, allowing marketers to build smart and effective programs to grow their businesses and generate higher customer lifetime value. Now onto the official speaker introductions, I’m excited to introduce Jeff Day and Mike Felix. Jeff Day is senior VP of marketing at Act-On and has 25 years of experience working on go to marketing, go to market teams and manage managing all functions of marketing. He’s passionate about building highly productive teams and driving growth in tech companies. Mike Felix is a solutions consultant and sales engineer at Act-On Software, a former engineer at Lockheed Martin and NASA. He brings a decade of experience helping marketers learn that marketing and sales success shouldn’t be rocket science. All right, you’re here for Fast and Furious, How to Optimize your Marketing Automation to Outpace the Competition. Jeff and Mike, the floor’s all yours, take it away.
Jeff Day:
Thank you, Joe, and thank you for everyone joining us today for this optimizing. So this is an optimizing class. We were told to bring the pro tips. That’s why I have Mike here. He’s the pro. I’m just in the lofty towers, but this is a sort of 300 level, 400 level targeted topic in terms of optimizing. So this is not 1 0 1 how to get started. We’re trying to bring you practices that we’ve seen our customers do and we follow ourselves that have really helped to optimize. Oh, I’m on the wrong screen and it’s not advancing. There we go. So you already met us, so we do have fast and furious theme.
Mike Felix:
Little bit. You got to share your screen.
Jeff Day:
Oh, thank you, Mike. Thank you, Mike. Rookie move. All right, let’s see if this works better.
Mike Felix:
All right, there we go.
Jeff Day:
Awesome. I saw the screen. I didn’t know why everyone else can’t see it. Thank you for that. We do have this fast and furious theme, so you’ll see some references to that throughout. We’ll try to keep it a little fun and light straight roads are made for fast cars, turns are made for fast drivers. So you guys are the advanced drivers today, quote by the famous rally car driver calling McRay. I won’t really spend time, I’m not a big fan of reading the agenda, but like I said, this is sort of circuit tips on how to optimize and we’ll follow the agenda that was published to you. I wanted to start out with a poll kind of to set the stage of where everybody is or is feeling like they are in maximizing the potential of their marketing automation platform. Joe, can you help us? There we go. So do you feel like you’re using your marketing automation platform to its full potential? Please pick one.
We got the numbers coming in here. I don’t know if everyone can see the numbers. Let me see. C nnn, my magic ai, C n N driven reports. Tell me. With 72% of participants responding, we’ve got pretty clear winners around, not really closely followed up by somewhat, so not too many people falling into the definitely camp, which is probably why you’re here today. Kind of makes sense. It goes, all right, how do I close that out? And it keeps popping back up. There we go. So let’s keep moving. There we go. What we’re hearing, Mike, you want to lead us through these industry stats?
Mike Felix:
Yeah, yeah. So first and foremost, great to be here. Excited to have this discussion with you guys. To be honest with you. We put that pull out, but we kind of knew what’s most of the answers would be. We’ve seen a lot of data come in through various sources. One of them being Gartner. They identified that businesses are utilizing less than 50% of their marketing automation capabilities. And there’s also another stat to show that less than 50% of organizations that have certain marketing automation tools are not even leveraging them. So a lot of data around the utilization of certain platforms. But what we’re noticing, the title of this presentation is optimizing your marketing automation to outpatient your Competition. There are the other 50% that are, so we want to you with ensuring that you get the most out of this information and you’re outpacing your competition. 80% of marketing automation users see improved lead generation and 77% see more conversions. Marketer, automation users experience a full hundred and 51% increase in qualified leads. 63% of customers are outperforming competitors with help from marketing automation. To be honest, we have about 50 other data points that we could present, but the point here is that there’s evidence to show that what’s happening within this marketing automation space is having a positive impact on your business from a revenue standpoint, but it’s up to you to lean into it.
Jeff Day:
Absolutely. Right? Yeah, thank you for that, Mike. Yeah, and so it is good that, you know, have the marketing automation platform, but definitely getting used out of it using its features is key that getting outpacing your competition and getting full benefit from it. So let’s dive into that. So of course this isn’t, we don’t do this just to score leads or tot our own horn on how well our emails are performing. It’s really with the business outcomes of driving more qualified leads to get those to sales so that sales is focusing on the highest potential pipeline opportunities, convert more leads to revenue, giving them the giving sales, the signals and the activities and all the information to improve their performance throughout the pipeline. And then from a marketing perspective, to optimize really your R o I so optimize your spend and your effectiveness, focusing, getting the most out of all the inbound leads, outbound prospecting and nurturing those leads into successful pipeline opportunities.
So let’s dive into the meat of how we’re going to help you leverage your marketing automation solution and maybe tune up some of the areas where you are leveraging it. Oh, it’s a build slide. Awesome. So first and foremost, there’s a lot of solutions in the MarTech landscape right now. And if you’re like us, you probably have a lot of marketing technology across the board. Marketing automation tends to be the foundation and the center of the MarTech universe, but you do want to leverage all of these different systems to really make your engine hum at high performance. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about some of the different ways that you can take advantage of these different systems and make your marketing automation platform work at a higher level. Really, the big message is leverage all that data as a marketing automation platform.
You have all the one P, that’s first party data. That’s the data that you’re collecting as a brand about your customers. And through marketing automation, you get their activity on the website, their engagement with your emails, if you’re leveraging s m s, social media, all of the programs and leads that hopefully you’re bringing into your marketing automation solution. All of that creates this wealth of information about what your customers are doing with you and how they’re engaging and really take advantage of that. And then of course, augment that with third party data where it’s helpful. So we bring in a lot of demographic and firmographic information from third party sources because we’re not asking that of our customers as they come in, as they fill out forms or as they engage. So let’s augment that so we know more about our customers as they come in.
And then more and more we’ve got all these wonderful sources of intent signals, third party intent signals that say, Hey, this company is researching these topics a lot. How can you use those intent signals to not only improve your lead scoring, but guide how you want to engage with those prospects as they come in? And that leads to the next point, which is really about increase your relevance to your audience via targeted content and aps. The more about the audience, what topics they’re searching on, the titles the companies are coming from, the industries they’re coming from, you can then tune your content to that audience. So it’s the way you want to speak and the content that you want to provide to a VP of marketing is very different than say an email specialist or a marketing ops person who might be very interested in the systems and the technology and the analytics less about strategy, that sort of thing. So you can use all that data that you have to create automated programs. Sorry, when we say ap, we mean automated programs, the sequenced email programs or sequenced content programs that you set up through marketing automation and you can personalize and fine tune those aps to your audience. Mike, do you want to talk a little bit about the next couple steps?
Mike Felix:
Yeah, no, absolutely. Before I jump into those extra steps, I want to pause for a second to say that even throughout all of this information that a key thing here as you listen to us and what you take away from this presentation is to make sure you explore, turn over every stone, make sure that you understand what the benefit can be from you even having this data. Years ago, we did not have the technology to have this data. So there’s a duality here to technology for one, tech created a lot of noise, two, tech C created a lot of opportunity. So the companies that lean into understanding how to leverage this data to deliver a message at the right time is very important. Okay, so Mark Mar, we’re going to explain later that marketing automation is far more than just what I would say some people consider to be like an email marketing platform, but there’s a lot of depth to this information that we want you to explore even after this short presentation here.
So when we reference journeys, there’s a conversation that there’s a conversation that’s held with anyone who has any type of intent on prospecting or what’s the word, showing interest in your offerings. And marketing automation enables you to have that conversation without expending certain types of resources, but moving that to when it actually matters. So when we start speaking about empowering sales, the best way to empower sales is to give them the opportunity to do what it is that they need to do, which is sell. They need to be able to optimize their sales ability and their output by ensuring that the front end of that pipeline was done well. So by integrating your marketing automation platform and any C R M that you’re using, you’re able to have your salespeople commence that conversation with enough insight so that they know what to say, how to say it, and they have an angle towards being able to move that prospect closer to a close. When we say making other systems better, empowering your sales automation, your account based marketing, your social, what we’re referencing is the fact that the more you lean into leveraging this data, the richer the output would be. All right, and we’re going to lead into some details here in a moment, but I’m hoping that you’re grasping the fact that we have access to more, while we have access to more. There’s also a lot of noise, but we have to make sure that we’re leveraging it in the right way.
Jeff Day:
Yeah, I love the way you put that, Mike, about making your interactions richer with the audience, really, because certainly as one who gets a ton of prospecting emails and calls and everything, somebody who can come to me with a targeted message that already understands what I’m interested in based on whatever I’ve been researching, that’s the stuff that I’m going to engage with, and that’s what we’re trying to accomplish. At the end of the day, we want to engage on a one-to-one conversation with our target audience. And so if you can make that conversation more rich along the topics that customer is interested in, that’s the name of the game. All right, our second poll, how many active automated programs or whatever you want to call them, do you have? So these are programmed automated sequences of either emails, emails and calls, social media messages, whatever you have, but
Mike Felix:
Funnels is a word that many have adopted as well. Funnels, some refer to them as campaigns.
Jeff Day:
Campaigns could be. Yeah. So we got some answers coming in. Let’s see, I’m waiting for the numbers. So we got 62% of participants. It’s a fairly good distribution, I think is Mike, can you see this? Can everybody
Mike Felix:
See? Yeah, I can see it. And it does, again, love the inputs. There is a certain level of predictability to these inputs. The majority of people are none. Each email is a single dedicated send. We’re hearing that a lot. So we’ll be touching on that.
Jeff Day:
Yeah. Well, this is good to understand our audience too. We’ve got a lot of people who are doing still sort of dedicated email approach, clearly with marketing automation that have one to five or six to 10 set up, and then definitely some people who have explored and made maybe more sophisticated and more targeted approaches. So great, we’ll dive in a lot more here. Thanks for sharing that information. Great. So here’s where we’re going to dive into automated programs. Lot of information on this page, so we’ll take some time on this. This is probably our richest topic in this webinar. Really important to think about how you’re leveraging your email, your automated programs, your campaigns to get the most out of them. And while it takes a little bit more to set up these multi-touch campaigns and think about who you’re targeting and building your lists and all that, it really pays over the long run, both in terms of your ability to engage in interesting conversations with your prospects and buyers, nurture them to a qualified lead and a more engaged buyer.
And then to scale what you can do as a marketing automation, because once you set it up, you can, we don’t want to say set up, forget it, because we do actually want you to go back, but you’re not doing a dedicated send every time you want to engage with a customer or send a piece of content. So one of the tips that I really like to do, and I found very effective is to not all campaigns, all outreaches, all communications with your customers are the same. And think about what you’re trying to do as an outcome and create automated programs appropriately that. So one way I think about them is, you know, have outreach emails. Those are kind of your prospecting, your first touch. Maybe you got a list from somewhere, maybe you got a bunch of opt-ins from an event, but they didn’t really engage with you.
So how do I reach out to them and try to drive interest as more of an awareness top of funnel type of activity. Then there’s the classic nurture of, which was a cornerstone of why marketing automation was created and nurturing is like, okay, I got to lead, but it’s not a marketing qualified lead yet. They haven’t yet kind of raised their hand and said, oh yeah, I want to talk to sales. So how do we nurture them and educate them and engage with them more and lead them down the buying cycle? So nurture those first touch inquiries to get them to become M qls. We’ll talk a lot more about that. It’s kind of going to be the core of what we talk about. And then what my team and I talk a lot about is as re-engagement emails. So this is the database marketing.
They’ve already gone through the nurture sequence or the outreach, they never made it to MQL or maybe they made it and got sent back, but this, you want to stay in front of them, keep them warm, stay top of mind with them so that when they do get back into a buying cycle, they recognize you. They’re like, oh yeah, I really like the content for our case that Act-On has been sending. I want to talk to them. I’m ready to engage now. So this is the keep warm, and each of those have a very different campaign structure and you’re going to be sending them different content. I am a strong advocate for building nurture programs for all inbound lead types of campaigns. So I think most people do ’em for paid for lead type of programs, content syndication type stuff, p p c, webinars, events.
But really sometimes, and I’ve seen this a lot, an event might get a follow up like, Hey, thank you for talking to us at so-and-so event, and that’s it. Or do a demo. And that’s a pretty big jump from picking up a t-shirt at an event to saying they want a demo. So can you create a more sophisticated email sequence that says, Hey, as a reminder, here’s kind of what we do and what we’re all about. If you want a quick hit video demo, go check this out. Or go check out our website and check out this. Give ’em a little bit more to chew on. Give them some next piece of content that’s a little more advanced. Maybe something about how to optimize their email programs and help them, educate them on what you do and what value you can deliver to them. And then maybe the last thing in the sequence would be, hey, if you’re interested, contact us for a quick demo. So in that way, every inbound lead is treated more than just a one-time hit. You know, either make it or you don’t, but you build an automated program to help educate them and bring them farther down the buying cycle.
I’ve been talking a lot, Mike, do you want to take over?
Mike Felix:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ll definitely lean into these next few points here. One thing I want to emphasize though is some of the words that we’re using in this presentation optimize accelerate, and we are using the word automated, so I want to speak on that for a second and then lead into these other points. You can do the right thing the wrong way. You can also do the wrong thing the right way. The aim here is to get as close as possible to doing the right thing the right way. So I saw a question in the chat that said, how do I calculate ri? You have to have some expectations on what you’re targeting, and then the focus here is to optimize and then accelerate. Okay? So as you’re developing these programs, as you’re thinking through how you want to engage with these prospects, you have to realize that you’re not going to get this a hundred percent initially starting out the gate.
The purpose of these marketing automation platforms and these programs is to be able to, over a period of time, optimize and get closer and closer to realize whether or not your expectations were feasible or whether or not you should do more to get closer to what you expected and get that return that you’re expecting. A lot of dynamics around that conversation, but we’ll cover some of that later. This point here, personalization through segmentation is huge because you have to ensure that you’re speaking the right language and you have the right message to certain individuals based off of where they are in their buying cycle, what they’re interested in, what problem they may be solving, what they’re looking to address, and how they’re framing their perception of your business and what you’re offering. So personalization is huge, and being able to put various contacts and leads and prospects into different segments based off of what they’re characterized by is very important to be able to automate those programs to them aligning your nurturing around a buying life cycle.
And I know some of you may be familiar, a lot of us marketers we’re using these terms, tofu, mofu, bofu, this top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. Irrespective of what industry you’re in, you have a funnel, you have a funnel, there is going to be a certain level of volume that’s going to be coming into that life cycle, into that pipeline. I’m sorry, that pipeline that you’ve created for your business and some are going to fall out. And then there’s going to be more that’s in the middle of your funnel, middle of your pipeline, and then some are going to fall out. And then at the bottom of it, you’re going to have those prospects that are really close to becoming a customer. Those are individuals that you’re, you’re going to nurture them a little bit differently than the ones that just engaged with your brand. So you have to align your nurturing around what that life cycle looks like for your business. And this takes analyzing, testing, iteration and fine tuning. You’re not going to get it right the first time. I have yet to find anyone over a decade of marketing, running multi-million dollar advertising as advertising campaigns. I have yet to find anyone that got it the first time they optimized. I mean, apple doesn’t even get it right the first time. They optimize, they analyze, they test, they iterate, and then they fine tune.
Jeff Day:
Yeah, and that’s great. And as I’m hearing you talk about all this, and maybe this is a lot, particularly for people who are still in the dedicated email mindset, maybe this feels overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be one step at a time. You can start by creating a few nurture emails and maybe segmenting ’em by industry if that’s what you think is probably most effective. Or maybe you start by building what’s the next inbound campaign that’s coming in, build a nurture sequence off that and just kind of continue to build on it as you time. It doesn’t have to be going from zero to a hundred miles per hour in one step. This can be very iterative and as Mike says, go try something, measure it, analyze it, think about it. Could I do better? Could I do better here? Maybe there’s better content, maybe there’s better segmentation and personalization I can do, and then improve on that and build out the next one with that learning. So it can be a very iterative step.
Mike Felix:
And if I may, one point before we leave this slide, overall within a marketing automation framework or methodology, the point here is to be able to feed your tofu, to feed your tofu more without losing capacity. So marketing automation platform enables you to feed more volume into your tofu so that it can do what it needs to do so that more qualified leads make it down to your bofu. I see Roanna in the chat said, lol, I didn’t know what those acronyms were, so I’m glad you learned something. If you leave with anything, you know what those acronym, those acronyms mean?
Jeff Day:
Yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely right. And that gets to scale. It really does help you do more with less. You can handle more inbound, you can get more top of the funnel stuff going and actually create more bottom of the funnel M QLS with less effort. So little case study here, again talking about top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. At one point we reorganized our automated programs to align to tofu, mofu, bofu segmentation. And this is really with the mindset of saying, Hey, we know top of the funnel, they want more value add, educated, lighter touch information, best practices. Have you thought of this? What’s the impact of ai? It’s less demo and total cost of ownership and case studies and stuff. So how do we start to align our content thinking about our first engagement with a customer, leading them down a funnel, bringing them into a middle of funnel automated program based on the activity that they do with us.
So they only get there if they click and read some and download some content and do some things that we think suggest that they’re actually ready for the next level of content. We had incredible results from this. So we took 23 different individual programs and still with personalization and dynamic content and stuff so that we were speaking to our intended audience, but then aligning it to a tofu, mofu, bofu state, and I mean, look at our open rates we’re 53, 23, 60 9%, 62% are clickthrough rates top of funnel. Not surprising, they’re top of funnel, that’s by definition they’re not quite as engaged. So our clickthrough rate was not great. But then the ones that graduated into mid-funnel and bottom funnel, we had these amazing click-through rates. So overall we were able to improve our open rates from 25% to almost 60%. Our click-through rate from 1.32% on average to almost 32% on average. This really changed the performance of our email programs. And again, depending upon where you are, if you’re starting out with just a few programs, great, I would encourage you to think about how even if you don’t do sort of this level of programs aligned this way, but if you think about the content you’re delivering as top of funnel and then more engaged type of content as people work through their sequences, I think it’ll be very effective for you.
Mike Felix:
And one thing, oh sorry,
Jeff Day:
Should I go back?
Mike Felix:
Yeah, really quickly. I was just going to add, and again, this adds some depth to what you’re seeing here. You’re seeing data around email, but there are other elements that’s happening within a marketing automation platform that’s contributing to these increased open rates. It is visits to webpages, opt-ins, to various landing pages, opt-ins, to webinars. There’s other activities that’s contributing to when these messages are going out to these individuals that’s contributing to these highly effective open rates. So as you can see under the demo track, these individuals have gotten to a point within our life cycle that they are highly interested in seeing or experiencing that demo. So their open rates are going to be high, but all of that required excellent timing in when they were getting those messages. So just wanted to add that.
Jeff Day:
No, that’s perfect. That’s a very good point to make. What drives people from tofu to MOFU to more engaged states within our system is all of the activities off the website, off of email, off social media, off of downloads, form fills, everything that we do on track.
Mike Felix:
And just to address even with that, and we’ll jump to the next slide, the statement around the MQL slash funnel is dead. It’s not that anything is dead, it’s just that the qualifiers are changing. What’s moving people to actually buy those contributors, those elements are changing, so it’ll never die. It’s just that bar that you have to adjust to make sure that you’re more effectively selling. That bar is moving now that people are buying differently.
Jeff Day:
Yep, good point. So personalized engagement, I think this is just maybe hammering home some of the points that we’ve been making to support the previous slides. Demographic data is about the person, so title, what company they’re with, things like that. And that can be in enhanced with firmographic data. How big is your company? Revenue size, employee size, where it’s located, industry it’s in all of that. That usually drives the content that you’re going to deliver, whether it’s industry specific or title specific. The behavior score then is based on the activities that they do with you, as Mike was talking about through your website, through responses to email, click throughs, form fills, content downloads, social media responses, anything like that that drives triggers in both the automated programs. How do you get them to the next step or bring them lower into mofu, bofu and also drives their overall lead score with you. And as Mike said, this is multichannel. It’s not just about email, even though we seem to, that’s the core of what marketing automation have done, but we have expanded to include s m SMS and social media and web responses and forms and web pages, landing pages, all this stuff. So you can really personalize all this content, not just with first name, last name, but really dynamic content, dynamic images, dynamic content blocks within an automated program to personalize to the demographic, the title, the industry, all that.
Mike Felix:
Absolutely.
Jeff Day:
And the outcome is the Glen Garry leads. So yes, I’m aging myself by referencing Glen Garry, Glen Ross, but it is a great movie for any of you who haven’t seen it this out, the qualified leads, these are the really good mql. We want to pass the good golden leads to our sales team, so they’re very effective in using their time to go after the most promising leads and opportunities. So this is really the outcome of why we do all this.
Mike Felix:
And for those who do understand that reference, the whole ABCs in the movie, it’s always be closing because that was the generation that they were in. It was you call conversation, you figure out how to close. Now nowadays it’s more always be converting. There’s different layers to what you’re getting people to commit to or to convert on. So that also ties into how you would be adopting your philosophy around market automation.
Jeff Day:
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, you don’t have to close on Monday one, just get ’em to take the next step with you, just the next step and then the next step. And then the next step,
It takes a fit crew, advanced lead scoring for sales. So this is now shifting over another part of your marketing automation solution. Talking about lead scoring. Again, as we’ve said, the goal is to hand over the best leads. The Glen Gary leads to sales. Again, we leverage, and I think the sort of advanced thinking is thinking about a demographic slash firmographic score that is based on who the person is, the title they carry the industry, they’re from the size of the company. We have developed our own I C P, our, my gosh, it’s been so long, I don’t even know what it stands for anymore. Ideal customer profile. We talk about ICP all the time. And so your ICP for, if people who are unfamiliar with that term is taking a step back with the business and saying, Hey, who do we want to be selling to?
What’s the ideal customer look like based on company size industries that we’re really successful selling to, maybe activities that they do if you’re in a more transactional business, whatever it is that you can do to segment and profile that customer. And then having that drive how you want to set the demographic firmographic portion of your score. And then using the behavioral elements, all of the activity that they do with you that we’ve talked about. And you can score each one of those. I don’t actually know, I’m, I’m going to guess a little bit here, but it’s usually small points for engaging with you on your website. Maybe a P P L lead where they downloaded some content is five points, but filling in a form to get a demo is 50 points. That gives them an automatic score to MQL and away we go. So you vary your score based on the engagement points that the customer is doing with you in some sort of smart logic to say, Hey, the higher value, the engagement shows a greater level interest.
They’re farther down the buying lifecycle with the end goal being like demographic score plus behavior score will get them to the magic line of mql. And it’s, it’s all moving, it’s all independent, it’s all custom for who you are and how you want to set up the score. And it’s really a matter of balancing the score versus the bar. And here too, it’s just iterate, iterate, iterate until you feel like you’re pretty close. It’s never perfect because there’s always going to be outliers, but just keep iterating and playing with it until it’s close. And then using that to drive not only your automated programs, but then when do you actually turn it over to sales? Sorry Mike, I talked to that whole slide.
Mike Felix:
No, no, this is good stuff. I mean, this is really good stuff. Just carrying on this conversation around scoring, this also leads you to identify different ways to develop your marketing assets as well. So you being able to sort of quantify who is, who’s farther along within their journey is important to your sales conversation, but also looking at that data and scoring them based off of what’s contributing to their readiness. There are just within our business, we organized our website based off of what psychological pursuits someone may have when they’re thinking about adopting market, adopting marketing automation or what other contributors they have. So an example would be what other competitors or what other platforms have they seen? Well, we’ve created content around addressing how we differ from those other platforms. So when we look at not only one score, but what, when we also look at their behavioral pattern, we’re able to see, well, Susan got to the website, the first page she went to was pricing.
So when my salesperson has a discussion with them, most likely I think pricing may be something that’s going to be a high on her consideration when she’s choosing a vendor. But then the next thing that she went to was, well, how does Act-On compare to Marketo or HubSpot or some of these other platforms? Seeing which pages were visited enables our sales team to understand what competitors or what type of conversation we need to have to differentiate us from what they may be thinking already. So all of this, again, it takes iterations, it takes making changes here and the data you get from it contributing to changes over here on the website, on the content side, on the social publishing side, it all works together to, it’s all orchestrated to help you with building your revenue.
Jeff Day:
Yeah, that was absolutely right. Thank you for sharing that. All right. You want to talk about ai? AI
Mike Felix:
Is yes, yes, yes. And again, I know we’re throwing out acronyms. I doubt there’s anyone on this webinar that does not know what AI stands for. If you don’t know what AI stands for, it stands for artificial intelligence. But just know this, it stands for artificial intelligence, right? So as you’re hearing a huge movement about ai, this AI that ai, AI does not replace the fact that you need human intelligence. You need that humanity to what you’re putting out there. But AI can enable you to track and do things that you just don’t want to do or not able to do. So from a standpoint of lead scoring, there are so many different dynamics to scoring that. AI is, I mean, we titled this the future, but we have already adopted predictive elements to leveraging AI, to scoring various leads based off of their sales conversion data, their behavioral data, the demographic and firmographic data and the technographic data, and having AI crunch a ton of data points and be able to provide us with some insight on who may have a higher likelihood to close and what that sales conversation should look like. So this is the future, but it’s only calling it the future because many of us or many companies have not adopted it yet, but it is here right now, especially in Act-On.
Jeff Day:
And we’re very excited about it. It will enable you to do a lot more efficiently. So as we can do AI driven, predictive lead score, AI driven predicted segmentation, audience analysis, we have our brand of content create is called AI create. It can write emails for you. So we are taking the approach that we really want to leverage AI to make you more efficient and effective. And so it’s helping you accelerate. As Mike said, it’ll never, well, I shouldn’t say never. Best practice right now is that it doesn’t completely eliminate, like you should take any of this and then apply the human intelligence, as Mike said, to make sure that content is what you want and the scoring makes sense and is right. But we do think that it’s going to greatly improve your efficiency and scale. All right, we’re getting close to the end of our time and we are getting close to the end of our presentation. One final poll. How often do you measure performance after activating a program? And this is important end cause I suspect that a lot of you measure performance, but how often do you measure performance and make changes to optimize based on that analysis?
And thank you for those who are still with us. We do have just a few more minutes and the answers are coming back in as I suspected, there’s not very many, rarely than ever. That’s good. I like to see that we usually measure performance but rarely have time to make optimization changes. That is true with a lot of us. And then yeah, this is, what do they call this, a W graph or something like that? 2.0 boy, I just went back to engineering school with the two point graphs and analysis. We got a bunch of other people most of the time do this. So good to see it’s on a lot of your minds. It is important of course to measure everything.
But then also the key to optimization, since this is an optimization conversation, is to take the steps to just tweak. It doesn’t have to be massive. You don’t have to change everything, but if you can change a subject line, if you can say, Ooh, I, we’ve got this new piece of content that I think would fit in really well here, let me swap that out, take a little bit of time to improve and tweak and iterate and then bring those learnings in. And that’s really the key to optimization is this continual tweaking. So use your reporting analytics, most marketing automation platforms, certainly our platform has a lot of analytics to help you analyze email performance, other automated program performance to do AB testing automated through the platform. You can dive pretty deeply into each individual email into the automated program as a whole. You can look at all of your content to see what’s performing best, take time to dive in and measure. And then my tip advice is to be very intentional about your experimentation and optimization and say, great, I’m going to apply these changes here and then I want to measure in a couple weeks certain timeframe what the changes were. Did that improve my performance? Great. Now let me take the learning of that one experimentation and apply it across other relevant aps or emails or social media posts or whatever it is.
And then of course, most important, and this is near and dear to VP of marketing here is like, okay, email performance is great, but really that’s a leading indicator to are we driving more conversions? Are we creating more M QLS out of our leads? Are those M QLS converting to more sales opportunities? What are my most effective channels and what’s my cost opportunity? One of the big things we talked at the top of our is how do you get more out of your marketing dollar? And so analyzing it in this way, you can say, okay, well where’s my lowest cost per mql, lowest cost per opportunity and let’s invest more in those areas to get higher roi.
Mike Felix:
Absolutely.
Jeff Day:
Mike, anything you want to add there?
Mike Felix:
And before we leave this, leave this slide just on the topic of analytics and testing and measuring, it’s key to make sure that you’re looking at your data and you’re analyzing things to tell a story in the way that it should be told to get you to those marketing objectives. So an example throughout this presentation, we’ve done a couple polls, right? First poll was, do you feel you’re using your marketing automation platform to its fullest, fullest extent? 53% of you said not really. Next question was, how many active programs do you have? 30 over 33% said none. Every email is single. And then last question was how often do you measure performance? And the highest one here is most of the time. So now if you would’ve just look at one of those questions that most of the time answer, I could mean something totally different if I didn’t already know that over 50% were not using the full capabilities of a marketing automation platform.
So when you’re looking at your sales, your marketing alignment, make sure that you are, you’re really leaning into analyzing your data the way that it should be analyzed so that you’re driving your sales outcomes. Because otherwise, just like someone mentioned Kumar, what should the ideal time be to optimize your learning curve so that it’s not repeated otherwise, you’ll be doing that a lot more. You want to create a cadence so that you are iterating at the right time and you’re iterating in the right way. And I don’t want to say hopefully, but it has to be progressive. All right? So just make sure you’re doing the right thing the right way.
Jeff Day:
This is why he’s the NASA engineer and I’m not. He’s the master of this. That’s awesome. Mike.
Last slide. And just to land this all and a success story we on, we have our marketing automation platform. We have customers, we work with agencies like the marketing guys to help our customers improve and optimize their performance. In this particular case, it was an engagement to help build custom and real-time dashboards, to analyze the multi-touch attribution, to help them optimize their performance, to do things like R O I analysis, which I know is a question that we need to get to. And we did do a lot of what we’ve been talking about today, not surprisingly leveraging, setting them up with behavior data, firmographic data from third party information that we pulled into our platform, helping them get richer data about who they’re driving, who they’re engaging with, building out more finely tuned and relevant automated programs. And then using the analytics that we built with them to measure, tweak and improve. And it really helped this, as the quote says, gives us all the data intelligence we need to execute on our lead generation strategy. So it really does pay off. It works. It is an iterative process. I hope we didn’t overwhelm anyone. We really wanted to provide a whole bunch of different tips that you can draw on the ones that you want to act on next,
Mike Felix:
Full pun intended, full pun
Jeff Day:
Intended, but if you’re sort of earlier in this process too, marketing automation platforms help you do this and can help you automate these programs. And so you just have to take the first step in building out a sequence or a couple of sequences and then just continue to grow from there. I think that’s all we have. We ran a little bit longer than we intended, but that’s to be expected because we’re passionate about our subject here and what we do, and we really want to help you optimize your programs. Do we have some time for q and a, Joe?
Joe Roberts:
I was going to say, if you’re willing to stay on for another minute or two, I think that we can get to a couple of questions. Sweet. Awesome. So I know that you answered a whole lot of them during the process of the presentation, but here’s one that came in towards the end. What should be the ideal time to optimize so that your learning curve isn’t coming in these big lumpy cycles?
Jeff Day:
Great question. I think we’ll probably all have our take, and I wish we could get my email manager on Mike on this one as well, but I think it’s one of those classic both. So as we said, every email, every automated program kind, everything you do, go back and visit it after an appropriate amount of time, measure it, see what’s doing well, see where you’re getting good clickthrough rates or bad clickthrough rates or good engagement, bad tweak experiment. That’s very iterative and doesn’t take a lot of time. And then sometimes if you feel like we showed our case study, we’re like, oh man, I want to do a full revision of how we’re doing our automated programs. We’re going to move more to a tofu mofu, bofu. That was a big effort, took a lot of energy with really surprisingly incredible results that we did not expect those good of improvements, but it had really good. So I think the answer is both when it’s appropriate, but absolutely do the iterative stuff.
Mike Felix:
And if I can add a point there to your marketing automation or just overall marketing, there’s going to be a lagging. There’s going to be a lag between how you’re measuring your marketing performance and how that translates into revenue generated and your sales performance. Certain companies are going to have a longer lag and certain companies have seasons. So if you’re in certain industries, you’re going to get a bulk of your sales during certain seasons. And you also know that when your prospects are looking for solutions, that also is going to be concentrated within certain seasons. So it’s really key to know what your sales timeline and seasons look like, what your life cycle looks like for a particular or your pipeline looks like for a sale. And then aligning your marketing at the front end of it so that you’re not, oh yeah, I clicked go on my marketing automation. Why aren’t my sales going up? It’s a matter of you knowing that there is a lag between what’s happening on a marketing end, the front end of your pipeline, and how that should translate a certain one quarter down the line, two quarters down the line, and then that’s when you’re really going to be able to get the most out of how you analyze that data.
Joe Roberts:
Okay. So one more quick question. Our team is pretty small. We don’t have a lot of resources. What do you recommend is our best first step?
Jeff Day:
Yeah, it’s a great question. We deal with a lot of customers who are sort of new to marketing automation, and that’s fantastic. My personal take, I’m sure my has, is start with what you can do. Journey of a thousand steps starts with the first step. So I’d say figure out who your I C P is. Figure out who you really want to improve your engagement with in terms of a segment or a buying audience, and create a few automated programs that maybe speak to different titles within that and line up some content and use that as a starting point. So if you’re coming from single email dedicated, use that as a starting point, see how that works, measure tweak. Then maybe you can go after the next segment of target audience that you want to go after and build. The nice thing is that it really does become a mechanism of scale, because once you get very efficient at building these things out and you can set ’em, they can run for as long as you want them to, and that gives you the scale to do more and more and more without each individual effort.
Mike Felix:
Ditto.
Joe Roberts:
Okay. Well unfortunately, we are at a time. This was a great in depth, lots of really important information. So many of us need. Thank you both for an amazing presentation and for answering so many of those questions throughout. Again, thanks to Act-On for sponsoring today’s presentation As a quick WI F Y I for the audience, just remember you exit Zoom, there’ll be a window that pops up the very short survey. We’d love to hear what you thought about today’s session. So thank you for joining us and we will see you soon.
Jeff Day:
Yeah, thank you everyone for attending. Thank you. Really appreciate it.