The Online Marketing Cycle and Marketing Automation Software

It's planning season for 2009, and as part of that I'm reviewing the successes and failures of 2008. The most frustrating thing? Those areas where we've spent money and I can't judge the value because metrics are lacking. The best part? The one area where we've enjoyed considerable success.

Our success has been the fulfillment of our plans for lead generation and hand-off, focusing on search engine marketing. Back in the first half of the year, we were averaging between 8,000 and 10,000 unique visitors to our website each month, and fewer than 50 of those would find our contact page and either call us or fill out a web form to request more information. All of those would immediately get handed off to sales, with little or no feedback on how qualified they were, which ones turned into real opportunities, etc.

At the end of August, we made several decisions that have resulted in drastic improvements. First, we put new personnel in charge of our search engine advertising, which had previously fallen short of expectations (and wasn't even hitting the planned budget numbers each month). The results were immediately apparent: in the first week our traffic spiked 50%. So we increased our budget, and we doubled our traffic in September, and tripled it in October. Confident that we could maintain or improve this level of traffic, we moved on to the next step: capturing information from a greater number of visitors. This took some strategic thinking, investigation of best practices, and quite a bit of work on the implementation side.

First, we dividied our keyword advertising into discrete groups of keywords, all focused on individual topics (e.g., terms about lean manufacturing, terms about inventory management, etc.). We ended up with 15 groups, replicating these groups on all three major search engines advertising networks. This grouping enabled us to do several things:

1) Create and test variations on advertisements with phrases and messages specific to each topic.
2) Create and test variations on landing pages with information specific to the topic. (Not surprisingly, shorter pages tested better than longer pages.)
3) Offer downloadable white papers or case studies appropriate to the topic, in exchange for contact information from the visitor.
3) Offer deep links to detailed information, taking people from the landing pages to the sub-pages on our site that provided extensive information on our capabilities in each area.

This was a HUGE amount of work, with several people working full-time for several weeks to get the content organized, the landing pages created and tested, etc.

During this process, we realized that the tools that we were using for tracking all of this information was not designed for our type of marketing and sales process, and was not streamlined to handle the amount of data we were generating. Upon a tip from a member of our board, we investigated several different marketing automation tools, including Eloqua, Vtrendz, and Marketo. All of these are online tools (which we love, since that's our business model), all are integrated with Salesforce.com (which we don't currently use, but which our sales team would like to use), and all are designed to optimize and automate online marketing campaigns, including search engine marketing, newsletters, and automated follow-up. I won't go into our decision-making process in detail, but in the end we chose Marketo.

The Marketo system enabled us to easily create and post the landing pages, with web forms that go directly into the Marketo database. Once someone fills out the webform, we track their entire history of web browsing on our site, as well as all outbound marketing to them (e.g., follow-up emails, newsletters, etc.) - and it's all done inside the Marketo database, including sending emails blasts and newsletters, scheduling automated follow-ups, etc.

Neither the Marketo system nor our internal process is perfect. Marketo doesn't offer captchas on their web forms, for example, and we still need to work on requiring the right information on web forms, and on focusing our efforts on the countries where we do business, etc.

Even so, the results have been simply amazing. For November, we maintained our high level of daily web traffic (though with the US holidays there were very few business days in November), and we received requests for information from over 800 unique individuals via our website ("conversions" in the Google/Yahoo vernacular). That's a tenfold increase over previous levels - yes, a TENFOLD increase in three months.

So, of course, the question is, what the heck do you do wtih all these requests? I'll write another post about what we're doing, and what we've learned, shortly.