Archive for year: 2017

Small budget + small team = limited marketing options, right?  Notsomuch.

You can (and will) make the most of your small budget with a little advice that’s actionable and doable.

Are big marketing budgets all that different anyway?
When I worked for Monster, the global marketing budget was around $250 million per year. So, in an environment like that, you find yourself spending your budget in increments of $50 or $100K. But I have also worked with several organization with budgets around $1 million. And in those instances, we were allocating budgets in $5 or $10K increments.

But I found that while the size of the increments is different, the decision-making process is kind of the same.

How do you make the most out of what you have?

In a smaller environment, you need to watch your marketing investments closely.
Here are some proven tips to help you do more with less…

1. Amplification through a multi-channel strategy – Promote the same message or asset across all of your channels. Make sure it’s consistent on your site, in your retargeting efforts, used across social, and anywhere else a customer or prospect may find it.
   • Throw one apple at a time – Think of it this way: if I threw an entire bushel of apples at you at one time, you would probably have a hard time catching any of them. But, if I toss you one apple at a time, you could probably catch every one. It’s the same idea when you send one message out to the market at a time.
   • Repetition is the mother of all learning – The more a prospect sees your message on different platforms, the more likely he or she will be to click on it or absorb it.
   • Find a theme that tells a story – If your assets are similar, you’re building on the same theme and telling a story across channels and content offers. You make it easier for prospects to follow since they’re not adapting to new creative every time.
   • Do something different – Marketers with small budgets need to try to break through the noise in their markets. If your competitors are all using white papers, go a different route. Think of how to cut through the clutter with something that’s different and worthy of their time.
2. Hit the replay button on your content – Reusing and repurposing content is a must for small teams and small budgets.
   1. Do a quick content audit – Run a quick audit to see what you have and then create a content inventory. You’ll formulate your reuse plan once you see a complete listing in one place. You probably have more than you think.
   2. Consider a facelift – Some of your content may be evergreen and would benefit from a simple redesign. A new look and feel could be just what your eBook needs to appeal to another audience.
   3. Breathe new life into it – Have a customer testimonial video? Lucky you, you can rework that into a powerful case study. Look for ways to reuse the great content you have in house.
   4. Look outside too – Find a study online that relates to your industry and polish it up. Highlight the most interesting parts of the study, add images, crank out some charts, and make your own thoughts and predictions based on the data.
3. Empower your team – Understand your team’s workload and help them focus on your company’s top priorities.
   • Make sure you know what your team is working on and determine if there’s a way to help them streamline their activities. Are they working on high-value activities that generate revenue? As a marketing leader, I made sure I had meetings with my direct reports and quarterly meetings with any level-down staff members. Several times, I uncovered efforts that were taking up a lot of time but not leading to impact for the business. These meetings helped my team focus on the activities that really mattered.
   • Remember that unifying your messaging around a core campaign can help alleviate stress from your team as well. They won’t feel that they’re being pulled a million different ways with tons of tactical activities. A big, integrated campaign motivates your team to work towards a goal they feel will have impact.

Don’t let a small budget (or an even smaller team) hold you back! You have what it takes to rock your budget with your small team by your side.

Anything else you would add? What other ways do you make the most out of your small budget? I would love to hear from you.

Everywhere you look in marketing, people are talking about testing. Testing is the best way to get better results! Testing and Learn, they say. But testing takes time and effort. Before diving in, you need to ask yourself: should I be testing in the first place?

For example, if you’re testing content offers (perhaps an infographic vs. a whitepaper), then you’re going to have to double the amount of effort behind content creation. For most organizations, content creation is a 4-8 week undertaking. It’s a worthy commitment, and some companies I work with are great at content creation so testing content offers is easy for them. But if you’re like one of my many clients where getting enough content done to support your efforts is difficult, testing these kind of offers may be out of the question.

Teams that are bandwidth constrained might be better served on focusing on executing one email offer really well, with great partnership and follow-up from the sales team instead of splitting their focus into multiple offers.

But what about testing simple things, like subject lines? Most marketing automation platforms make subject line tests easy to implement so it seems like a no-brainer. But before attempting even these simple kinds of tests, you need to make sure you’re going to get actionable results.

Here are a few things to think about to make sure that your investment in testing delivers the impact intended.

1. Ensuring statistically significant results

If you’re considering a test, there are three important things to consider to ensure your results are statistically significant:

1. Volume – how many people are in each of your segments? Is your database large enough to give you statistically viable results once you split it into groups and test?
2. Conversion rate – how many successes are you going to get (and be able to measure)?
3. Difference between the segments – It’s hard to predict outcomes if the test results are similar across segments. If they’re too close to call, and you can’t determine a clear winner, then the test is a bust.

In order to mitigate risk, you can always increase the volume of the segments being tested to ensure your results are accurate. There are some great A/B Test Calculators that free you up from doing the math yourself. Email us at info@revenateconsulting.com for an easy to use A/B Test Calculator.

2. Do I have the operational capacity to support testing?

Ask yourself: will the extra effort to create tests (and the content to support them!) result in a MEASURABLE improvement in results that justifies the extra effort? Besides considering volume, conversion rate and differences, you need to think:

• Do I have the capacity to create the necessary assets to support testing?
• Do I have the capacity to manage the campaign logistics to support testing?
• Make sure your test will result in some kind of incremental benefit you care about before moving forward. Higher engagement does not always result in higher business results. The deeper into the funnel you go to test, the more accurate your results will be.

One of my cautions to teams that are just starting out with demand generation is to focus on doing a few things well. Testing is great and should definitely be part of your plan. However, if your team is still struggling to get a single, error-free email out on time, perhaps it’s best to focus on the basics first.

3. And, finally is the ROI there to justify testing?

Additionally, the improved results from testing may not be significant enough to offset the increased effort required to implement the tests. Remember the earlier example on the content test? Well, if you double the costs of running the program (2 content offers instead of one) and your test doesn’t result in enough increased revenue to offset these costs, then you have not really improved the results of your marketing efforts, which was the reason to do testing in the first place. Right?

And I add one more thing before you start to test: Do you have your baselines measured? Do you know your conversion rates through the funnel? Do you have the ability to measure your test results through closed-won business or at least a pipeline that’s been created? If these sorts of measurement processes are not set up to have accurate baseline metrics for your relevant channels, then you definitely are not ready to start testing!

Go for it!

The only way to keep improving your marketing is to test new approaches. Your decision-making abilities become clearer when you use data and run tests to see which tactics yield the best results.

What are you going to test? Please share what you’re testing and how it goes!

And if you want more information on testing, please read my other blog post on testing.

Doesn’t it seem like you receive emails filled with tips and tricks promising to grow your list all the time? Sure, there’s lots you can do – from adding forms to your website, pop-up windows and refer-a-friend campaigns – but, while these are great tactics, each one of those efforts are only going to drive small numbers of new names for your database.

What do you do when you need to significantly grow your database?

What do you do when you are starting from almost nothing? What if, to meet your goals, you need to double or even triple the size of your database?

Here I outline three different methods for significantly increasing your relevant contact database. However, each one has advantages and disadvantages. Your strategy is going to depend on your budget and needs.

Purchasing contacts – In this approach, use a reliable and reputable vendor and tell them exactly what you want. You choose the job titles, segments, geographic breakdowns, industries, size of company, etc. You’ll even get to preview the data to make sure it’s what you want before buying. (Note: It can take time to manually review 1000s of preview contacts but I really recommend doing this to increase your quality). The great thing about this methodology is that it’s usually pretty inexpensive (starting around $0.30 – $0.50/per lead. AND the ability to pick just the contacts you want is also great advantage.Sounds great, huh? Well, unfortunately it’s not perfect. There are two potential problems with this approach.

1. The first is that the data isn’t perfect. Sometimes the titles are wrong, or information such as revenue and employee size is missing. When you’re dealing in that kind of volume, you’re not going to get perfection. This is another reason why you need to use a reputable firm. It’s worth it to pay more for better quality. Good vendors in this space not only make the best efforts to sell high-quality data but also provide you with the ability to replace any bounces and overall replenishment as your data ages.
2. The second issue is that the people whose contact info you’re buying aren’t hand raisers. In other words, they haven’t indicated any interest in the problem you solve or in buying your product. If your product category isn’t well known, or if your company itself is not well known, you’re fighting an uphill battle with these kinds of contacts.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to go with a high-quality data provider. There is a huge difference between vendors. Our clients have had success with companies like DiscoverOrg and Netprospex/D&B. They cost a little more than some others but the data validation processes as well as added functionality (such as automated Marketo connectors) are well worth the slightly higher price.

Custom List Builds – One of the newer ways to build your list is specifying the types of contacts that you want and then either searching out these contacts on the internet or hiring a third party to do so. Mechanical Turk (by Amazon) is one vendor that allows you to create a project and have independent contractors bid to take your project. The costs can be very low, such as $0.50 per contact.

The next level of custom list builds is using a vendor like SMARTe. These guys will take your criteria (company names and job titles, etc) and for as little as $5 each, give you phone verified contacts. Now take just a minute to think about that. When we were buying contacts we might pay $0.50 each. With these “phone verified” contacts we are paying 10x more. However, the old adage is true here: you get what you pay for.

Purchasing bulk contacts is going to have a lot more garbage data and phone verified contacts are going to be a lot higher quality. It still doesn’t make them a hand-raiser. There is still no guarantee they have a need for your product or are even ready to move into a buying cycle. But at least you know the data you have is solid and you can reach them with it.

Paid media – There are tons of different paid media channels to explore: retargeting, pay-per-click, social media, content syndication are just a few.

And there are a lot of different vendors for each type as well. However, this strategy helps you build a database filled with “hand raisers.” In most cases, if your ad and offer are designed correctly, people who respond to paid-media campaigns are clicking on your promotion because they have interest in your type of product/service AND they are providing their contact information at the same time. The cost for B2B leads using this approach can vary from $30-$700 per lead depending on how qualified or targeted the lead is. But while the cost is the highest of the three options, these contacts are going to be of the highest quality.

Also because these contacts are filling out a form with their own information, it’s more likely to be accurate. (I am not saying that people don’t fill out forms with false information. They definitely do. But most will provide you accurate titles, company names and email addresses.)

For many of these, you will also need to create content offers to leverage in these programs. This can be an additional cost for your company, on top of the cost-per-lead. Often you’ll need to put your content-marketing hat on and create content that’s relevant to your business as part of these programs.

This helps you position your company as a thought leader and/or helps readers/prospects do their jobs better. This approach helps you capture the hand raisers, so to speak. You can do this through retargeting, pay-per-click, social media, content syndication, and many channels to find leads that will respond to your offers.

Build your strategy.

Even though there’s a tradeoff between the costs and quality between these options, I recommend that you look at a combination of all three: purchasing contacts and list builds and paid media.

For example, you can start with a small budget focused on paid media. But no one has enough of a budget to do it all through paid media. So, simultaneously work with a vendor to create a list of verified contacts from an “ABM” or target account list. Once those are in-house, you may want to supplement with a large volume buy of contacts.

Below I have developed a framework to help you understand all of options and their relative strengths and weaknesses.

For each strategy (Contact purchase, Custom List Build, Paid Media) I have give a score from 1 to 3. A “1” means that the strategy is strong on this dimension.

• Interest – Likelihood to be in a purchase cycle (i.e. be a “hand-raiser”)
• Cost – This refers to the cost per contact
• Accuracy – This refers to the likelihood that the data you receive is correct. While vendors providing contacts in bulk make every effort to ensure their data is accurate, my experience is that there are more errors in their data than the other strategies.
• Targeting – This refers to your ability to purchase only the contacts you desire. With most paid media channels you can do a pretty good job of targeting and some are now offering to deliver only contacts for your target accounts (ABM). In these cases, I would give paid media a “1” instead of a “2.”

	Interest	Cost	Accuracy	Target
Contact Purchase	3	1	3	1
List Build	3	2	1	1
Paid Media	1	3	2	2*

 

So, how are you building your database or keeping your lists fresh? I’d love to hear.

 

 

 

Marketing Cheat Sheet: The Pros & Cons of Attribution Models

 “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is
I don’t know which half.”

– John Wanamaker, US department store merchant (1838 – 1922)

In the data-driven windfall that is marketing today, it’s easy to see why marketers have fallen head over heels for metrics and data analytics.

Without the ability to attribute marketing’s efforts to revenue, marketing is out of step with how other departments are thinking about success. The right attribution model arms marketers like you with the campaign-performance insights you need to optimize your marketing mix… and shows how marketing delivers results!

The question is, which attribution model(s) should you use and what are the differences?

The pros & cons of the major types of lead attribution models

Here’s a look at four types of lead attribution models used to calculate your program results:

These examples all involve the same leads, same programs, and same revenue, but—as you can see—you’ll report very different results for the various programs based on which attribution model you use.

1. Influence Model

PROS: This is the most common model used today. It’s easy to pull this type of report from Salesforce, which is one reason it’s so popular. It can be used to compare the effectiveness of one campaign over another but with some limitations.

CONS: This model isn’t very sophisticated and, consequently, has weaknesses. For example, the only criterion for attribution may be that the lead was, in fact, part of the program (and maybe achieved some level of success in the program, but not always). But worse, since the full pipeline value is attributed to every campaign that the lead participated in, the effectiveness of each campaign is clouded and allows for pipeline revenue to be counted multiple times, depending on how many programs the lead engaged with. But the big problem happens when marketing adds all these programs together and announces how their programs drove pipeline in amounts that are completely different than what sales is tracking. This kind of reporting can really hurt the relationship with sales!

2. Lead Source/First Touch Model/Last Touch Model

PROS: This model shows which programs are most effective in bringing in net new leads. You can basically switch out first touch for last touch if that makes more sense for your business. This model gives 100% of the credit for the pipeline revenue to a single campaign. This makes a lot of sense for businesses that have short sales cycles since the lead is not likely to have been part of lots of a different campaign efforts.

It is also an important view into which lead sources are delivering the best performing net new contacts. If you are using last touch before conversion (either to MQL or opportunity) this can also give you insights into what types of programs are the best at converting contacts into the next stage.

CONS: This model doesn’t credit all of the channels or touches that influence the buying process. So it can be hard to get a clear picture of the results stemming from a particular campaign if it was not likely to be the first (or last touch) for a lead. Often nurturing programs and events are undervalued in these types of models.

3. Multi-touch Model

PROS: I’ve found that this is the best model for accurately understanding campaign effectiveness. It allocates campaign results and revenue evenly across all the campaigns the lead participated in. Therefore, it can more accurately calculate each individual campaign’s contribution to revenue.

CONS: Some users feel the even attribution to programs seems arbitrary. Do you give the same weight to the downloading of an asset from your website as you do to attending a webinar? The standard multi-touch model doesn’t try to discern which activity is more important (and in many ways, we never know). So, while even distribution tries to give visibility into all the programs that might have influenced the lead, it’s not perfect.

4. Weighted Influence Model

PROS: This model allows for allocation according to business needs. It takes the buying cycle into account when determining influence. You can weight certain channels or specific programs as a bigger influence.

CONS: This is more complex and requires more advanced software and business analysis. You are also sometimes required to make some arbitrary decisions about how to weight various marketing campaigns which may or may not reflect the reality of their influence on the buyer’s journey.

I am a big advocate of the third model. It does require a strong marketing technology infrastructure to pull off. However, in a world where prospects digitally interact with your brand an average of 8-12 times before a sale is closed, you can’t afford to not be able to attribute revenue across multiple campaigns and touches. You will have to determine how important this kind of attribution is for your business. It takes some work on the front end to set up the optimal model for your company, but once you start tracking and measuring, you’ll be glad you did!

Which attribution model works best for your business? Please keep me posted on what’s working for you.