-A brief introduction of who we are. Egencia is the corporate travel arm of Expedia and part of the largest online travel marketplace. We help businesses manage their corporate travel programs and the marketing we’ll be discussing today is focused on the professional at a company who manages the corporate travel person. Depending on the corporate structure and travel footprint, this person or team may sit in Finance, Procurement, Operations, HR or have a Executive Admin role.
No targeted content, batch and blast by marketing
Each activity created a duplicate lead, key engagement missed, no prioritization for sales teams
Teams can listen and respond with the right message at the right time
Marketing is strategic partner vs. tactical admin
So here’s an example of a huge campaign my colleague Cate, who focuses on customer marketing puts together every year. Before Marketo, we had no way to easily build web content for a campaign like this, and the resources we had were limited. It took days to even get a draft of web content, and even that was pushing it. She was able to start CAW in 2012 once we had Marketo, and as she put it, the campaign was a way to celebrate herindependence as a marketer. There is no way I ever could pull of a campaign of that size before Marketo.
Another great example of scale is with something like a webinar. These are complex events, with email assets, landing pages, logic, and integrations with third party tools. These are examples of campaigns we’ve built in Marketo: registration pages, invites that are triggered based off of data from our webinar provider. We even automate really personal interactions, like email forwards. These are just baked into our templates. And once the event is concluded, we’re tracking views of the recording. When we have a future webinar, all we need to do is clone the past year’s event, swap a few variables, and go. What once took days now takes under an hour.
The third win we achieved with marketo has to do with reporting and insight into key marketing analytics. There’s an adage I hear all the time that “it takes seven touches for someone to convert or engage”. But this is a generalization, and something that’s probably different for every business. The really brilliant thing about Marketo is that since we’re tracking all the campaign interactions of our leads, we can then match that data up against our sales opportunities, and see all the activities, when they occurred, and with which key contacts to identify where marketing had a role in the success of a sale. It allows us to go beyond lead source and really dig into the underlying marketing interactions.
We can also compare our programs on a wider level, and start to understand which channels are performing better, both in terms of qualified leads, but actual opportunity creation and ultimately, ROI. We are actually big users of direct mail for certain specific campaigns, largely because no one does it anymore, so it ends up getting noticed. It too hooks into our Marketo and Salesforce, and through this reporting we were able to understand that direct mail, a channel traditionally seen as a waste of money, was actually a major influencer for many high profile wins with our sales team. That insight has helped direct our marketing spend moving forward.
And finally, one of my favorite features of Marketo that has been tremendous in helping our sales and marketing teams align is the revenue cycle modeler. It’s basically a flowchart builder within Marketo that lets us define our revenue process, SLAs, and then actually turn those visualizations into business processes that move leads through the funnel. We can then report on the flow between these stages, and start to understand where bottlenecks might exist.
So what’s next for us? I spend a lot of time watching what fellow marketo users are doing. There’s the marketo champions, some of the top users of the product who are really doing some interesting things, the marketo community which I find myself logging on to almost daily to see how other users and companies are utilizing the functionality. Plus we also have local user groups, one of which operates here in Seattle and on the eastside, which is a great support group to network with other users, understand the product better. Plus, for me, these have been huge opportunities for me in growing my professional network and career. The user group is actually how I ended up here at Egencia.
We’ve identified a few areas we can grow in. One is in data enrichment. How can we learn more about leads coming into our system without needing to explicitly ask the questions on the forms. Well we’ve recently started working with InsideView which connects directly into Marketo to append geographic, industry data, and more to our leads. So we can have shorter forms and higher conversion rate, and also get more insight on our leads.
Ultimately this helps us do a lot more with vertical targeting and messaging specific to industries, plus really interesting opportunities for personalization and nurturing.