8 Biggest Mistakes Demand Generation Marketers Make and How to Avoid …

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And with that let’s get going!

Whether you have decades of experience in demand gen or are just starting out, we all have pre-existing biases that we may carry with us. For the seasoned marketer, it could come by way of a long history of successes and failures that have shaped your decision-making process. For the newbie, your biases could come from how you perceive marketing should be done based on how you have interacted with marketing in the past. In other words, you’re only considering marketing techniques that have worked on you and those in your immediate circle. When it comes to specific marketing tactics, biases can be very costly if you don’t keep them in check. The way to keep those biases in check is by relying on data.

Let’s take a look at an example…

Let’s assume we are trying to determine where to allocate additional marketing dollars and we are deciding between Paid Search and Social Media. Let’s also assume that we have a bias that Social Media is better. So If we look at one data point, in this case number of Clicks, we see that Social Media provides 58% more clicks than paid search. We may then assume that we should proportionately allocate more dollars to Social Media because we will in-turn get more clicks. This is where incomplete data can become dangerous. What we have done is essentially confirmed our bias, which is the tendency to interpret evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.

We’re just looking at clicks here. Is that really the more relevant metric? Clicks, views, and other vanity metrics can be misleading

- Ask certain questions when interpreting data

Avoid confirmation bias

Let’s assume that messaging, creative, timeframes, etc. are all similar, when you pull in bottom of the funnel metrics, the story changes dramatically.

When you think about your database you probably have thousands or hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people all which have different wants and needs. I think we can all agree that a single message will most likely not resonate with everyone.
Take some time out to think about you audience
Who are they?
What are their goals?
What do they care about?
What are their pain points?

How can you possibly fulfill all those variations at scale? It seems like a daunting task.

That’s where segmentation comes in.
Segmentation is essentially taking a broad list of people and grouping them by similar attributes.

When you think about segmentation, the purpose is to divide your broad audience into subsets that have similar traits or objectives. You will then be able to leverage that data to target and communicate with them in a more accurate way and at scale.

Now the most obvious application of this is through email. I assume that many of you are already doing this, but there are still a great deal of companies that struggle with segmentation for their email programs. For those companies, the question to ask is the exercise of segmenting your database worth the trouble?

The short answer is yes, because

Read stats,

Mention that this is just about email.

I mentioned before that many marketers are already segmenting their databases for email campaigns. But it’s also true that the majority of marketers say they have a need to improve email database segmentation. That's probably because it's not easy.

Segmentation is typically comprised of 3 components: Demographic: information related to a person, firmographic which is information related to that person’s company and behavioral which includes all trackable behavior that person has done. Many companies combine Firmographic information with demographic information which we’ve done here

The concept is to get to the bottom of “who they are” and “how do they behave.”

Let’s start with: Who they are: Demographic attributes, such as…

Next, “how do they behave”: Here you look at…

Once you have this information, you’ll be able to leverage it to build out specific segmentations with common attributes that will help you get the right message to the right person.

But how do you collect this information to use in your segmentations?

On the demographic side, there are various different ways you can collect the data you need….
capture forms, which is simply a form that allows you to capture basic contact information, typically in return for a piece of collateral or a specific offer
progressive profiling, When you recognize repeat Web visitors, ask for new information each time they fill out a form. With each completed form, you progressively add to their profiles
preference center, Once customers have subscribed to your email marketing, invite them to your email preference center, where they can customize their profiles and help you help them.
data augmentation services, There are many vendors specializing in either business data or consumer data, that can help you “clean” and augment your data.

It should come as no surprise that behavioral data can be highly predictive of future decision-making patterns and road-to-purchase activity. A person’s browsing and search activity relate directly to his intent; his social sharing activity can indicate future purchase possibilities; and emails opened, links clicked, and content consumed indicate interest.

How do you access this behavioral information?, you’ll have to leverage either a single platform like marketing automation which aggregates all behavior or you’ll have to look at each individual source such as your ESP, web analytics, CRM, etc to manually aggregate that behavioral data.

By looking across both demographic and behavioral data you can build out segmentations or personas that will help you more accurately target your audience in a meaningful way.

Segmentation is a must have: It still surprises me how many marketers don’t use segmentation considering that the only way to get the right message to the right person is to properly segment your audience. Many companies bypass this by emailing a generic message to their entire database hoping that it will resonate with enough people to make it worthwhile. Other companies attempt a form of segmentation by uploading individual lists to their email service provider (ESP) for one-off sends. Outside of just email sends, the power of segmentation becomes clear when you consider that it extends to other channels—allowing an organization to show different content on their website to different people, serve different digital ads to different people, etc. which will get into more in a minute

By providing a more personalized experience, you’ll find people stay on your website longer, download more offers and purchase more products. Using demographic and behavioral data to customize web and mobile experiences, marketers can drive up to a 30% increase in conversion rates.
(Source: Janrain & Harris Interactive)

Personalization isn’t something new. You’ve probably experienced it through YouTube, with suggested videos based on your viewing history or through Amazon when you see suggested products based on your interests and buying history.

But are you leveraging it for your business?

In email, chances are yes. As we discussed in the last section about segmentation. Even though there are a lot of companies that still rely heavily on broad-based sends, the easiest way to personalize communication is through email. But what about outside of email?

When looking at website personalization we see an average conversion rate of 33% and a 30% increase in qualified lead generation.

The way to do this is through dynamic content.
What is dynamic content?
Dynamic content is where you can create an individual landing page and make changes within the single page for each segmentation. The great thing about this is you only have to create one landing page and just switch out the image or maybe the offer for each segment.

Dynamic content is based on the segmentations that you create

Here’s an example of a B2B use case

Hortonworks.com has a high volume of website visitors with hundreds of content assets under the resources section. They leverage web personalization to target specific industries such as Healthcare. And as you can see they are able to dramatically increase their engagement using personalization. They saw average visit duration rise 313% and average pages for visit increase by 163%. All this achieve through changing content and messaging based on segmentations.

You can also extend personalization through other digital programs.

Here is an example of a generic Marketo digital ad. It looks good and it performs reasonable well, but like a broad based email or a standard landing page it doesn’t take into account any of the wants or needs of the person seeing it.

Again, this is where personalization become so powerful. In this example, we took the segmentation for Healthcare and develop ads specifically for that vertical. By showing these more personalized ads, we were able to drive 2x more lead conversions and saw an increase of 117% in year over year qualified leads.

Many companies leverage nurture, but there are still many companies that don’t use nurture or don’t use nurture to the fullest capacity. Why do we need to use nurture?

Part of being engaging with your prospect or buyer is to communicate with them on their terms – which means being relevant to their needs.

You also want to make sure that each step of your nurture is adding value to them and not simply a sales pitch.

This is what it sounds like when done wrong. Your emails may not explicitly say “Are you ready to buy” but they may feel like that.

It beats an incessant drum for subscribers. And does not engage them in a way that makes you valuable to them. Think about it from their perspective, why should they care?

This is more like what you want your email programs to look like. I won’t go through the list, but you can see these type of emails are attempting to add value to the person viewing them and they are not overly salesy.

Here’s an example of how you can conceptually set up your nurture program to run…..

The reason you want to do this is to be as relevant as possible and the more granular you can get, the better your message will be and the more it will resonate.

If you want to get more sophisticated, you can look into expanding into multi-channel nurture.

We recently tested a Topic of Interest stream as part of a multi channel nurture test.
Anyone who had previously downloaded a social asset fell into this stream
They were sent 5 emails with different social assets and were served the same assets on Facebook and Twitter while the emails were being served
We created custom audiences in Facebook and Twitter to then serve ads to these audiences in addition to Emails.
The CTRs on this TOI stream was 20% higher than the CTRs of most of the other nurture streams and the CTRs on social was 30-35% higher than other campaigns.

An ideal situation, is to nurture based on your buyer’s behavior. Based on these inputs, you can send relevant information at the right time.

a process in place for leads that would abandon the demo form pages. So we built a campaign that listens for that behavior, then sends a marketing email and alerts the sales rep. For folks that abandon the demo forms, we send them the attached email.

As a demand generation marketer, you’ll most likely agree that attribution analysis is extremely important. Proper attribution can help you remove bias, as we discussed earlier, but it should also be the primary driver of determining a program’s success. A demand generation marketer should be able to associate revenue generated (or pipeline created) with the marketing program(s) that contributed to that revenue (or pipeline). Conceptually it sounds easy, but it’s often difficult to run accurate full attribution analysis of your programs without the proper tools.

In fact only 32%...

It’s easy to see why many marketers are not prepared. Looking at this slide you will see just a snap shot of some of the data you’ll need to track in order to effectively drive business intelligence from your programs.

So let’s look at some of the top of the funnel programs to see where we are generating new names or targets from. This is a screenshot from our revenue cycle analytics report in Marketo. If you don’t have a platform like Marketo, it’s a bit more difficult to run reports like this. You’ll most likely end up exporting data from various sources and consolidating them into a central report.

From this report, you can see that you are receiving the most new names from your PPC campaign for branded terms, targeted at prospects in the United States. But which campaign is bringing in the leads most cost effectively? At $0 per lead, your blog is bringing in the most cost-effective leads, while your tradeshows are the most expensive. This may be because blogs consist of content that your internal team creates, while tradeshows involve extra costs for things like sponsorship, booth design, collateral printing, and shipping.

But this is not a complete picture …

You don’t want to optimize your programs based on the number of names they bring in. You need to look at later stage metrics such as the number of opportunities, pipeline and revenue won as well as a return on marketing investment. So if we look at the same programs, we’ll see that our tradeshows generated solid pipeline (FT pipe of $1M and almost half of that revenue has been won; )

You also need to consider time to opp as it takes longer for some channels to convert leads to opportunities comparatively speaking

First touch is the first interaction that you defined as a success. It is essentially the program that brings in the Target. A person may see an ad about your company, they may do they’re own research, but the program they engage with first, will get credit as being the first touch.

but even that doesn’t tell the whole story.

You’ll want to also track MT. Multi-touch attribution is equally dividing credit among all the programs where that prospect has a success.

As an example, let’s say…

By looking at first touch and multi-touch pipeline you can measure different types of effectiveness. A higher amount of pipeline generated for FT indicates which channels are more efficient at acquiring the right type of leads.

A higher amount of MT pipeline generated indicates which channels may be more efficient at pushing leads through the funnel.

Ultimately, proper first-touch and multi-touch attribution analysis will give you a more holistic view of how your programs are performing. When you tie back bottom-of-the-funnel metrics to top-of-the-funnel costs, you are able to more accurately optimize your programs based on impact to the business. First-touch will show you which programs or channels are best at bringing the right type of people into the funnel and multi-touch will show you which programs or channels are best at pushing those people through the funnel.

Read quotes.

Lead scoring might sound like a daunting process, but it is extremely important to get Sales the right leads at the right time, and not waste your time and marketing’s $$$.

First, what is Lead Scoring?

At Marketo, we score across 3 dimensions. Fit, interest and buying stage.

Fit tells me, am I interested in you. Interest tells me, are you interested in me.

So they need to be interested in me (or my company), and I need to be interested in them. Actually, this is starting to sound a lot like dating, and that’s because it is. And in dating, timing also plays a role. So, maybe they are locked into another solution. Maybe they don’t have the budget. And this all relates to where they are in the buying stage.

So when we think about passing a lead to sales, we need to look at fit, interest and timing (or buying stage).

In order to do that, you need to make sure that your scoring model takes into account those inputs.

Here is an example of an lead scoring model that we have used in the past.

Positive Demo Score
e.g., Marketing Manager title, SFDC/Dynamics customer
Negative Demo Score
e.g., Generic email address, Illegitimate phone number

Let’s start with what S&M alignment means … it’s …

The keywords “work together towards a common goal” are really important here.

The benefits of having Sales and Marketing alignment are pretty obvious. Companies that…

Other benefits of S&M alignment include … higher revenue, shorter sales cycle, better conversion rates and increased forecast accuracy

You don’t make these decisions in isolation. Several teams need to come together and define these terms –
Marketing, Sales, Sales Development (Inside Sales), Marketing and Sales Ops.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
Opportunity
ROI

When you define the revenue funnel, It’s hugely important in making sure that your Sales and Marketing teams are on the same page with regard to different stages of the cycle and what moves a prospect from one stage to the next and what follow-up needs to happen at each stage.

Set Common Goals: Sales and Marketing leaders need to work together to define these goals. How many new targets, MQLS, SQLs, Opps, etc. need to be generated for the year, quarter or month.

Plan together
Utilize lead scoring
Communicate often

To further illustrate the point,

In a joint mathmarketing /marketo study, we surveyed 500 companies and found out that companies that had a shared Sales & marketing process

an additional 31% uptick in MQL acceptance
and a visible 63% improvement in Marketing’s contribution to total revenue

Alright, that’s all I have for you. I’d like to remind you that there is a brief survey after this webinar. Please take 30 seconds to complete it to let me know how we can make these better for you in the future.

8 Biggest Mistakes Demand Generation Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them

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