Overview
Based in The Netherlands and serving companies throughout Europe and North America, The Marketing Guys is a full-service marketing agency specializing in strategy, execution, and technology.
- Custom, real-time dashboards provide uniform lead and customer profiles to measure every aspect of the lifecycle
- Average lead growth for clients within 6 months of adopting Act-On.
- Annual revenue growth (even in 2020) resulting from an active inbound marketing approach.
Act-On is a best-of-breed platform that provides great marketing automation that is both effective and easy to use. With Act-On, nothing is mediocre, the platform is built for success and allows us to leverage data toward successful campaigns.
Elias Crum
Founder and CEO
Challenge
Many businesses are struggling to adapt to the digital age through sound automation strategies. The Marketing Guys is dedicated to helping their clients better understand and leverage the possibilities of marketing technology and how they can execute their plans, strategies, and campaigns through modern martech platforms and integrations. And they do so by using Act-On to collect and interpret data that helps them deliver personalized and relevant marketing campaigns on behalf of their clients.
They help their clients generate more leads and align Sales and Marketing by using marketing technology in a pragmatic and useful way. Every engagement is based on the clients’ KPIs and target audiences, using tactics like chatbots, digital advertising, real-time dashboards, and conversion optimization to produce phenomenal ROI.
Approach
The Marketing Guys takes a straightforward approach with every campaign for every client. Their four-step process is efficient, effective, and follows every digital marketing best practice to the letter.
Plan: For The Marketing Guys and their clients, it all starts with planning and strategy. The first thing they do is assess their customers’ marketing technology stack and guide them to optimize for efficiency, scalability, and success. By identifying gaps and diagnosing each client’s campaigns and performance, they make clear and simple recommendations for the best marketing technology and integrations that align well with their objectives and goals.
Build: Once they’ve established a strategy and determined the best martech stack for their customers, The Marketing Guys begins building targeted digital marketing campaigns based on digital behavior (which is tracked through the Act-On website beacon and delivered via Website Prospector daily reports) and firmographics (which is determined through the use of Act-On forms and progressive profiling on pages built using Act-On). They carefully segment their customers’ contact lists based on the corresponding data collected to create targeted communications strategies designed to delight and educate at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Execute: The Marketing Guys views their agency as an extension of their customers’ businesses — a trusted partner and external marketing department for their clients. They typically coordinate with sales and marketing leadership to execute and optimize the campaigns they’ve built on their behalf and ensure that all lead behavior and contact details are properly synced between Act-On and the customer’s preferred CRM system. Some of their more specialized execution includes tailor-made CRM integrations, data cleanup, list segmentation, personalized content, and progressive profiling.
Data: The Marketing Guys uses all of the information they collect through Act-On and these other data sources to build custom and real-time dashboards for all of their clients. Using this knowledge, they can perform multi-touch attribution throughout the customer journey and then personalize their campaigns to deliver real value at every point along the customer lifecycle. This provides a great understanding of the entire buying funnel and customer experience and helps The Marketing Guys determine which leads actually drive revenue.
Act-On gives us all the data intelligence we need to execute on our lead generation strategy without feeling the absence of a CRM platform.
Elias Crum
Founder and CEO
Wins with Act-On
- Marketing intelligence
- Lead tracking in the absence of an integrated CRM
- Compelling personalized email templates
- Improved deliverability
- Growth in web traffic
- Higher click through rates
The first thing we ever do in a live demo is show the segmentation functionality. It might not be the sexiest part of what marketers can do in the platform, but it’s what allows you to do the cool stuff. It’s the basis for all of your success.
Elias Crum
Founder and CEO
Solutions
The most fundamental and important part of all of this work is that it’s driven by accurate data. According to Elias Crum (Founder and CEO of The Marketing Guys), “Act-On has good reporting features, but in order to see the real value of the data, you need to connect the information from multiple sources like your CRM, Google Analytics, and Google Ads to create actionable uniform views.”
Webinars are great for brand awareness and lead generation, but The Marketing Guys takes things a step further by using webinars as a lead qualifying tool. With Act-On’s webinar integrations, The Marketing Guys can insert dynamic and interactive polls and questions to gather more information to better understand each lead’s needs and position within the funnel. All of this data is tracked in Act-On and then synced with their customers’ CRM.
The Marketing Guys uses this qualifying information to create follow-up campaigns that are designed to drive further engagement. For example, if they’ve determined that a lead isn’t using a marketing automation platform, they send them a whitepaper outlining the selection process and which features are important based on their company size, industry, and objectives. This content places them in a prominent thought leadership position and further strengthens the growing relationship.
Further, when a lead registers for a webinar, The Marketing Guys are sure to include a pertinent question on the registration form to discover the lead’s main learning purpose for attending. Based on their answer, The Marketing Guys sends a notebook and pen to key leads with a personalized note about how the webinar will address their learning purpose. This alone has increased live webinar attendance by 300%.
Lead Nurturing
Elias believes strongly in the power of good segmentation to drive successful marketing campaigns. According to Elias, this segmentation begins with a master list that The Marketing Guys uses to create specific segments for both prospects and customers. They segment by lead source, industry, customer interests and pain points, and the nature of their relationship (partners, customers, leads using a competitor, etc.). This information allows them to structure highly relevant campaigns and insert dynamic content for further nurturing throughout the funnel. So, depending on who they’re attempting to engage with, The Marketing Guys could send a blog comparing the top marketing automation platforms by industry or a step-by-step infographic for how to make the business case for marketing automation based on the size of your organization.
Whenever The Marketing Guys begins a new engagement with a client, they install the Act-On website tracking beacon on the customer’s website. This feature tracks every user’s online behavior and transfers the data to the Website Prospector tool, which provides clear insights into specific users’ digital footprints. When these users submit a form or take another identifying action, they become known contacts and all of their behaviors are retroactively tracked to their contact record. This is invaluable information that allows The Marketing Guys to create extremely targeted and dynamic automated programs with highly relevant content based on the pages they’ve visited and the actions they’ve taken.
They also encourage their clients to sunset non-responsive contacts in order to keep their email reputation strong and their email deliverability high. Before they do that, however, they like to create re-engagement campaigns to attempt to salvage these relationships. Again, they review the contact’s demographic, firmographic, and behavioral profile within their custom, real-time dashboards so they can provide the most relevant messaging and content along a delivery cadence that doesn’t overwhelm the recipient.
At the end of the day, CMOs and CROs care most about two things: win rate and ROI. On average, The Marketing Guys are producing positive ROI for their clients through Act-On within 6 months. They’re also achieving a phenomenal 34% win rate, which is due in large part to how they use Act-On on behalf of their clients and to conduct their own marketing programs. Lastly, since they began using Act-On for their internal marketing campaigns, The Marketing Guys has generated 25% in annual revenue growth as a result of their active inbound marketing approach.