Templates, Shared Resources Emerging To Help With Initial Campaign Creation

“A lot of marketers get into marketing automation and think ‘Oh, we’re going to do nurturing,’ but there are other things to address first,” said Laura Ramos, VP & Principal Analyst, Forrester Research. “You’ve got to stop focusing entirely on generating demand and think of it as managing demand. Think about how to stop shoving stuff into the top of the funnel and really think about the buyer’s journey through the funnel and what happens to create acceleration through the funnel, to increase conversion at different stages, to align sales and marketing activity, and ultimately be able to demonstrate marketing’s impact on the sales activity.”

Addressing Adoption Pain Points
The common pain points during the early stages of marketing adoption are universal. Marketers often fall short by failing to define an effective lead scoring criterion, or ensuring that data is consistent and relevant.

“Whenever there is failure, it’s usually because a component of the ‘people, process and technology, concept’ has been ignored or underappreciated,” said Steve Woods, CTO, Eloqua. “We saw the same trend developing in demand generation. Marketers want a magical solution that would change the way they did business, but sure enough problems start to arise. So we thought how about how to tackle the overall problem.”

Eloqua’s SmartXchange is a library designed to provide clients with marketing best practices and pre-packaged templates and programs. Clients can access actual business processes and programs based on individual business rules configured for the user. A wizard walks users through basic campaign processes like lead scoring and nurturing, with accompanying documents for reference.

“Marketers learn by doing and innovating on top of what other people have done,” Woods said. “So it’s about starting, tweaking and changing and growing rather than starting with a completely blank slate.”

Other marketing automation vendors have acknowledged the need for initial startup solutions for their clients. “Purchasing a marketing automation platform without thinking through your business process causes major pain for new adopters,” said Christopher Doran, VP Marketing, Manticore Technology. “If you’re not thinking process, your marketing automation system risks becoming an expensive email platform – fast.”

Manticore Technology offers a rapid start kit to new customers, where a dedicated customer success managers works with customers to setup their account, integration and even a lead nurturing program.

Optimizing Planning & Processes

“We find that the biggest challenge new marketing automation users face is in the area of creating the initial plan or workflow,” said Adam Blitzer, COO & Co-Founder, Pardot. “Marketing automation is exciting because it opens up a lot of new possibilities that simply couldn’t have been a part of the marketing and sales strategy in the past. So it is really about understanding both the capabilities and the limitations of the technology and then taking that knowledge and running with it to create your dream marketing campaign.”

Pardot pairs new clients with a dedicated client services representative who guides them through setting up their initial campaigns. New clients are provided with an Implementation Guide, which is designed to define commonly used terms, as well as various Pardot functions.

“Access to easy, pre-built templates is what drove us to integrate a library of templates we’ve created into the Pardot email builder,” said Blitzer. “For those clients that may have less experience with HTML formatting or aren’t working with an outside creative agency, it is incredibly helpful for them to have access to clean, well-built HTML. This not only ensures that they are presenting their brand in the best possible light, but also that they experience maximum deliverability.

BtoB evangelist and Director of Field Marketing at Silverpop, Adam Needles, breaks down two major challenges encountered by new adopters of marketing automation. “The first is assessing the current state of lead management and content marketing strategies — understanding where the organization stands today with its demand generation activities and then mapping their current state to where they want to go with their marketing automation campaigns,” he said.  “This is a key leap when it comes to developing best practices, but it’s critical to develop best practices to be successful with marketing automation. The second is in getting organizational alignment between sales and marketing on a marketing automation initiative — ensuring that demand generation activities by marketing upstream will turn into a seamless and quality hand-off of strong opportunities between marketing and sales."

Silverpop strives to support customers by encouraging the sharing of best practices through both live and virtual community.  The company also works with various implementation partners, including The Annuitas Group and LeftBrain Marketing, which Needles said are well positioned to help customers analyze where they are today and where they want to go.  “This stuff is not easy, and so it’s critical to have a strong implementation partner,” he said.

Silverpop also offers a B2B Marketing University series, a Demand Generation blog and related white papers and e-books, designed to educate the next generation of BtoB marketers on best practices.

Forrester’s Ramos suggested marketers should ultimately focus on building a community of successful marketers who are interesting in increasing the professionalism of the profession, and creating a brand name for themselves as an expert marketer.