Marketing With The Back Story

December 5, 2011 by Don Dalrymple · Leave a Comment

Melvin The Magical Mixed Media Machine from HEYHEYHEY on Vimeo.

There is a video which has an immense following. It is not about a person. It is about a machine, a Rube Goldberg machine, which promotes itself via Twitter, Facebook, video and a website.

Some passionate artists and technicians did the work of creating a show which told a story. The video above is astounding and speaks for itself to the creativity, hard work and genius of the project. The story draws you in even further. It is marketing at work behind the product.

Ironically, the automation developed in the machinery is one part of the project. The marketing which works to self-promote the machine is another process in itself. The story behind what we see draws us in further to discover the background.

Show And Tell

Seeing your product or service in action is an immense part of communicating your value to the world. New customers want to get their minds around how you work, what they are getting and how you deliver. You don’t necessarily have to build a Rube Goldberg machine, but there needs to be a show which helps them see what happens when they do business with you. It is part of the show which makes the tell easier.

The tell is the part which helps to bring color, description and intrigue to your value proposition. It is the back story which answers the questions:

How do you do what you do?
Why do you do what you do?

Telling your story is what makes you unique in the mind of the buyer. It is your own and noone else’s. We relate to story. It fills in the missing pieces for motivation, desire, and inspiration.

Melvin The Machine is a remarkable piece of machinery designed with patience, care and attention to detail. See how you get pulled into the back story and think about what your product or service would benefit from with a better tell.

How can your show and tell improve?

Filed Under: Blog, Feature Articles, Inbound Marketing · Tagged: automation, Inbound Marketing, marketing, marketing approach, positioning, Story

Lead Scoring Your Best Prospects In Loopfuse

March 11, 2011 by Don Dalrymple · 1 Comment

You can learn about how lead scoring works in an article at our AscendWorks blog. This powerful Loopfuse feature introduces the element of quantifying buyer behaviors. You can use Loopfuse to measure:

Downloads
Visits
Clicks
Opens
Completed Forms

among the options that can be measured. In our Loopfuse consulting, this is a key part of the campaigns we develop with our customers. In and of itself, this feature set is inept. It takes marketing automation strategy to power effective lead scoring. The decision tree and triggers you desire from an inbound marketing buyer who engages your content needs to be mapped out.

Sales Engagement From Loopfuse

At some point, your marketing automation campaign becomes integral to sales engagement. Loopfuse reports includes the Top 100 Visitors Score as well as Scored Opportunities. In the early stages of your campaigns, you can use these to further calibrate your metrics as part of a sensitivity analysis. After your campaigns are dialed in, the reports prove valuable to help your sales team take action with the most relevant leads. These are the prospects which engage the processes built inside of your Loopfuse system.

Loopfuse Consulting Best Practices

In our consulting, the design of an effective marketing automation campaign facilitates tasks in the CRM for sales users. This is the tactical piece which helps a salsperson rely on Loopfuse to ready a new buyer.

A marketer benefits from seeing what is driving scores and how to continually tune the content or logic within the marketing automation system.

What was once invisible is now visible and relevant for the timing of your sales engagement and follow-up.

You can learn about the details of how we further implement lead scoring at our blog here.

What would you do with your top measured buyers?

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Filed Under: Blog, Marketing Automation · Tagged: Inbound Marketing, lead scoring, Loopfuse, marketing

Marketing Automation Is A Salesperson

December 29, 2010 by Don Dalrymple · 1 Comment

Many of your customers are not ready to buy when they first meet you. They are in the research and education phase of their buying process. If you are a sales organization, your process typically revolves heavily around selling to ready customers. The lens becomes narrowly focused on who is ready. These are the minority. The majority might be ready in 90 days and beyond.

Following Up Via Marketing Automation

It’s amazing that organizations will pay a person salary plus benefits often totaling $70K+ per year not including the management responsibilities. The majority of this person’s time is spent following up. And how does the typical salesperson follow up? They call and interrupt people. Buyers have become quite adept today at blocking out strangers, interruptions and things they are not ready for. Caller ID, spam filtering, do not mail, etc. are in place because of sales processes that miss the mark. They are selling rather than nurturing with value. It creates mistrust and brand damage.

A New Sales Process With Less Cost

So what if you re-engineered your sales process recognizing the dramatic change in how people buy today? Here’s how it could look:

Fewer Sales People That Focus On Closing

Have fewer sales people that focus only on the last leg of the sale – conversion. This is what a good salesperson is about. They know how to close. Allow them to be set up for success by economizing their time rather than filling it with a pipeline of largely improbability. Thus, they would be talking to those that are ready to move forward with your value proposition. They would be brought in to do their job in the most relevant conversation of their job.

More Nurturing

Allow your marketing automation system to nurture and make ready those who are unready today. Within the Loopfuse system, you can set up various campaigns, Lead Flows, metrics and action triggers to help a buyer become more ready. This system has far less cost than a salesperson and is much more effective because it brings value, is consistent and creates transparency to a buyer’s readiness.

You can design your automation processes to work with specific buyer profiles you have identified and nurture them in a custom and intimate way.

If you fail to nurture, are inconsistent or create interruption, you will lose the larger potential from a continuous closing pipeline.

The world has changed. Change with it by recognizing that nurturing is critical when you are not allowed to interrupt today. Your value, messaging and timing better be focused in order to win a customer who has many options.

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Filed Under: Blog, Marketing Automation · Tagged: Inbound Marketing, Loopfuse, marketing, marketing-automation

How To Automate The High Fidelity Sale

December 22, 2010 by Don Dalrymple · Leave a Comment

In Kevin Maney’s book, Trade-Off, Why Some Things Catch On And Others Don’t, we learn about two categories of products and businesses – Fidelity and Convenience. High fidelity businesses are inconvenient. They typically have cachet and price points which make it more desirable for upper end buyers.

High convenience businesses are easy to get in terms of cost and access. Maney’s message is that to succeed, you must position and commit to one or the other. Otherwise, you are destined to fail. Ted Leonsis, former president of AOL, sums it up, “A successful business is either loved or needed.” The problem is when you try to be both.

Buying Process For High Fidelity

Choosing the high fidelity approach requires a focus on one of the 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing, “It is better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.” With automated marketing in Loopfuse, you have the opportunity to be first in the mind. Segmenting leads and delivering the right message and action at the right time with high value creates the conditions for a lead conversion. The art of nurturing within Loopfuse should be designed with a continual focus on the positioning of your value proposition.

The high fidelity sale demands that you show you are the best. Within Loopfuse OneView’s campaigns, ensure the communications contain a highly attractive and consistent graphical framework which elicits emotion from the potential buyer. If you have nurturing emails timed to go out based on a campaign opt-in within Loopfuse OneView, the content should highlight beyond mere features and benefits. Help the buyer to imagine. Powerful stories of customers using your product or service and the results they have in their life would increase the value perception to a high fidelity offering.

Furthermore, use cases which promote creativity and personal embrace help the potential buyer move from estrangement to intimacy. They can see themselves using your service or product and over time, with effective nurturing, emotionally move from indifference to near obsession.

Marketing automation enables you to present your brand incrementally and build trust by familiarity and increased relevance.

Loopfuse Consulting Best Practice

The best practice Loopfuse strategy for the high fidelity offering is to use nurturing email campaigns with a high attention to design. The content must connect and affect the emotions post by post. Imagine building to a gradual crescendo. The nurturing effect should be continually refined to produce a buyer from an uninformed lead. Help them get to know your value and your delighted customers through story as they build a picture of who you are. The picture comes into focus with each touchpoint delivered by Loopfuse. Such campaigns enhance your high fidelity offering by building a case for being first in your customers’ minds.

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Filed Under: Blog, Marketing Automation · Tagged: Lead Flows, lead generation, marketing, marketing-automation

3 Marketing Automation Strategies Using Loopfuse

December 15, 2010 by Don Dalrymple · 1 Comment

The promise of marketing automation is to create a repeatable, predictable process for nurturing unready leads. In so doing, you gain the advantage of creating an automated funnel. Your leads become ready for your sales process and in turn, previously neglected leads become valuable for a continuous pipeline.

Marketing To The Unready

The majority of your leads are not ready to buy today. They are early in the sales process. Their goal is to learn about you and build trust. The question is if you provide value and educate the buyer before they lose attention or find what they need from your competitors. Your marketing automation strategy needs to focus on buying. Buying is before selling. It is the mindset of your leads before they engage you. In our marketing automation consulting, the three key strategies to drive your Loopfuse system are decision points, value propositions and a consistent call to action.

Decision Points

In order for your Loopfuse system to be effective, your landing site should be well targeted for a specific buyer profile. Present the buyer with either one or a few decision points. There should be a click that is specific which you desire. Limit each page to as few clicks as possible and ensure the layout of the page lends itself to the desired action.

Value Propositions

Your buyer is initially looking to become educated. Help educate them through your marketing automation system so they can understand how your industry, market and product work. Allow them to be comfortable to ask the right questions when they are ready. Empowering your buyer is a powerful way to build trust and goodwill. You are delivering value in doing so.

Ensure your value proposition is packaged in a high quality and digestable fashion. Videos, white papers and articles are mediums which need to have both content and design elements to engage the buyer.

Call To Action

The call to action must be specific and readily available. It can be in subsequent landing pages or within autoresponse emails from your marketing automation campaigns. Regardless, ensure the call to action is clear and definite. Often this is a request for a consultation or ordering a product or service package.

Be careful of making the call to action a large step. It should be proportional to the amount of trust you have at the step in the marketing automation process your buyer is in.

Inbound Marketing Consulting Best Practice

The best practice is to put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and deliver proportional value and next steps according to the trust being built. Your buyer is getting to know you. Date them without pressuring them and you will find a natural progression in trust. By the time the call to action is taken, it is because your system nurtured with effectiveness.

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Filed Under: Blog, Marketing Automation · Tagged: Lead Flow, Loopfuse, marketing, marketing-automation

Brainless Marketing

November 23, 2010 by Don Dalrymple · Leave a Comment

Most marketers like to drop bombs and hope for a hit. There’s not much to be accountable for in such an approach. Hiding behind anonymity and effort is safer than doing the hard work of precision marketing.

Thomas Edison stated, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.” What if you got rid of the strategy of hope and replaced it with hard work and thinking through a true marketing strategy? What if you could engage, nurture and lead a buyer based on preferences to a sale in an intimate fashion? This takes leadership, thought and strategic thinking. It requires a step-by-step understanding of the movements of your prospective customer and the decision trees associated with various buyer profiles.

It’s difficult, not to mention largely inappropriate, for salespeople to call and bug the buyer to comply with your sales process. Without permission and trust, the buyer puts up defenses and uses tactics to avoid your value proposition, especially in today’s economy.

However, putting on the metaphorical overalls Edison alludes to can help drive a system which delivers qualified and ready buyers. That is, of course, if the hard work of one-to-one marketing process and systems are implemented. In your marketing approach, don’t throw money and time away as a disservice to your organization and your prospects. Pay the brain bill and focus it on a system, repeatable way to automate how a stranger turns into a friend. It’s easy to get attention. The real work begins to convert the attention to revenue. This means putting on the overalls. The opportunity to separate yourself from your competition can be within reach through a precision marketing approach. Why opt for brainless?

Filed Under: Blog, Feature Articles · Tagged: automation, buying, marketers, marketing, precision marketing approach, salespeople

Losing Your Audience

October 26, 2010 by AscendWorks Consulting · 1 Comment

The battle for clicks to your website typically comes from the hype of social media and traditional marketing these days. This gets a lot of press from the novelty and immediate gratification of having visitors. In the old economy, the numbers game worked somewhat because salespeople were afforded attention to educate the buyer and nurture them towards a decision to buy.

In the new economy, most well-meaning marketing falls short of producing a revenue result. Instead, the buyer falls off after the click to a site because of inattention. The mere volume of information we all have to engage with daily presents obstacles to a buyer’s focus on your value proposition. This dilemma was not so prevalent previously.

Thus, you are losing your audience with only a superficial marketing approach. A much more integrated approach is required to:

Educate
Nurture
Build Trust
Prioritize Sales Engagement
Measure Interest

Our guards go up when we feel sold. However, trust goes up when we are able to feel freedom as a buyer seeking information. Your audience wants to buy. They want to understand your value proposition on their timing in a personal and relevant way. Selling prematurely will build tension and affect sales. A process to help the buyer walk through their natural steps for comfort is essential to avoid losing your audience. The process must be automated and well thought through. Only then can you win consistently in a world of inattention.

Filed Under: Blog, Feature Articles · Tagged: awareness, buyer, marketing, marketing strategies, trust

Talent Is Required

October 16, 2010 by Don Dalrymple · 2 Comments

Marketing Automation requires talent. There is a combination of different disciplines involved in successfully connecting with and nurturing a potential or existing customer. This talent can be part of an existing marketing team or hired via a marketing automation agency. Too many organizations focus on the tools and their feature sets and overlook the most important aspect of a successful marketing program – talent.

Here are the areas of talent which need to exist:

Strategic Thinking: Marketing automation campaigns involve thinking creatively about how the buying process works. Understanding the buyer and their mindsets is critical for success. Gaining attention and relevance must be mapped strategically by the successful marketer.
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Information Technology: The systems involved in delivering messaging and triggering actions requires a knowledge of how workflows are executed. A systems thinker who can understand the cross-impacts of changes and the repercussions of links, landing pages and database management helps to ensure not only a speed of execution but clean management of leads. The setup of various campaigns requires talent in the area of system navigation and management. It is the skill of both an architect and an engineer.
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Graphic Design: If the artwork, layout and presentation are not appealing and remarkable, then the communications of a marketing automation campaign will suffer obscurity and ineffectiveness. Skill in graphic design is a must when there is so much noise hitting people’s in-boxes and there are too many websites.
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Thought Leadership: Writing is a key differentiator. Poor copy will result in wasted effort and is also a reflection of your brand. Writing to sell turns off the buyer. Writing to persuade and bring value positions your company and offering. The talent of articulation and bringing a relevant message are critical to connect with a buyer. This is especially challenging in an age where there is a plethora of good and bad content.
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Leadership: Marketing automation is not a fulfillment function. If it turns into menial output, then the marketing will die a rapid death. Buyers today are too sensitive to their inbox and exert triage on their information world. They are looking for leadership. The most important ingredient is to lead the customer and your team with conviction around your brand and offering. A person who is only seeking to accommodate has very little chance of bringing an effective connection with an audience that is starved for leadership, conviction and clarity.

In all, the realm of marketing automation is cross-disciplinary. There is a convergence of various talents. It is rare to find this in one person, much less two or three. Typically, a team approach which creates the results of effective marketing automation is what is required.

Larger organizations may have some of the talent pieces within their own time that comes from traditional means for engaging the marketplace. Often times, the gaps need to be filled with outside consultants that have the expertise to augment the existing team for true success.

If you are making decisions for implementing successful marketing strategies, pay much more attention to what is required in talent than in the tools. The former makes more of a difference. The tools are approaching parity and can enable what talented teams can drive via their ingenuity and passion.

Filed Under: Blog, Feature Articles · Tagged: marketing, marketing strategies, strategy, talent, technology, thinking

What Is Marketing Automation?

October 14, 2010 by AscendWorks Consulting · 36 Comments

Marketing automation is the automation of the process a buyer takes to buy your services or goods. It is both relevant and indispensable in today’s economy where buyers have very little attention and too many choices. Furthermore, the attention economy has been further exacerbated by the enormous amount of advertising and mediums for marketing. To connect with the buyer in a personal, relevant and timely way each step she takes requires automation. Automation which is predictable, consistent and outperforms sales people that struggle to keep up with the sophisticated buying process.

The Sales Funnel

The best way to envision the impact of marketing automation is to think through how prospects move through the buying process. In the old economy, the methods for capturing a lead and closing a lead were much more tactical. A salesperson could cold call or immediately follow up with a response to an ad.

In today’s economy, buyers resent being sold and have multiple methods for blocking the sales engagement. The buyer walks through a completely different process.

Meanwhile, marketers and salespeople are myopic in their thirst for closing a sale that they miss the opportunities to connect and close buyers on a large scale.

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Top Of The Funnel: Clicks And Attention

The top of the funnel consists of all the ways which causes a prospect to take notice. This could include any and all of the following:

Advertising

Social Media

Direct mail

SEO

Adwords

Cold Calls

Yellow Pages

Because sellers are so thirsty to sell, they put a lot of energy into these mediums believing them an end in themselves. The illusion is that these create sales when in fact they only start the buying process. Think about it. When have you bought from any of these mediums last? Have you bought from a cold call? Have you clicked a link to a company website and fell in love with them to buy what they had to offer? We do not buy this way.

However, these are the starting points; they are the top of the funnel. Number of Twitter followers or Google Adwords clicks creates interest. They pool potential buyers. Their mindset is not such to become your customer necessarily. They are interested. They must be effectively nurtured.

Middle Of The Funnel: Nurturing

The middle of the funnel is the nurturing of prospective buyer. The first touch with your company will rarely, if ever, close a sale. The buyer’s readiness to buy emotionally must be nurtured by personal, relevant and timely communications and touchpoints. This occurs by follow up which continues to bring value over a period of time to create trust and awareness of your brand and value proposition. This is necessary today because of the inattention a buyer has from being inundated with too many choices and many demands.

Many companies lack an effective middle of the funnel. They focus on the top and the bottom and play a mere numbers game; it is a game of pure luck. They are hoping they can create the urgency via charisma or crisis to get a buyer to say, “Yes.”

The middle of the funnel must be pre-designed and thought through. It has to account for the hard work of connecting personally in an automated fashion. It takes thinking, which is a rare quality. As Henry Ford stated, “Thinking is one of the hardest things there is. That’s why so few people do it.”

The thinking of an effective marketing automation process has elements such as:

Landing pages
Autoresponse communications
Task triggers
CRM integration and workflow triggers
Sales notifications
Lead scoring
Decision tree logic
Custom designed email communications
Newsletter communications
Form capture
Link click metrics

A marketing team which can implement the buying process has to have an array of talent. Typically, this is a retraining of current in-house marketing teams or hiring experts who can drive this critical part of the sales process.

Bottom Of The Funnel: Closing The Customer

When a buyer is ready, they will take a step towards engaging the sales process. For B2B businesses, this is typically about getting a meeting or consultation. For B2C businesses, this can include ordering a product.

The attention the buyer is willing to give in exchange for increased value in the form of information is the courtship which leads to a new customer. The buyer is evaluating your brand, your company and you for taking the next step in the sales process. Trust must be built.

The bottom of the funnel involves the experience and the steps for closing a customer. It includes the following activities:

- A world-class initial meeting
- A sales proposal
- Negotiation
- Project management
- Communications
- Increased nurturing

This process also involves marketing automation to execute an effective follow-up to continue building trust and keep attention via follow-up. The client’s behaviors need to continue to be measured during this period of time and their engagement may subside or accelerate depending on their timeline and pain.

Strategy Trumps Activity

Many organizations work at the top and bottom of the funnel. They throw people into the mix. A sales prospector or an off-the-shelf social media marketer can cost between $35K-$75K per year. These roles tend to generate more noise than results because of the problem of inattention. Most buyers are not ready to buy. They are in control. They use the web to gain information and make decisions on their timeframes. Your company is one click among many at their fingertips. It is easy to buy. The seller does not have the leverage they used to – information.

A more effective strategy is mapping the buying process and automating it altogether. Instead of hiring people, create a system which works 24/7 with any prospect that comes through the top of the funnel. The entire strategy should revolve around nurturing buyers and engaging a sales process with only qualified and ready buyers. Doing so saves headcount and ultimately cost as well as drives revenue. The strategy takes upfront setup, however, like all automation, it has lasting and predictable impact. Marketing automation becomes a staying asset to the business for driving revenue in much the same way as an always-on salesperson.

Filed Under: Blog, Feature Articles · Tagged: marketing

What is marketing automation?

September 18, 2010 by AscendWorks Consulting · 1 Comment

The Sales Funnel

In today’s economy, buyers resent being sold and have multiple methods for blocking the sales engagement. The buyer walks through a completely different process.

Meanwhile, marketers and salespeople are myopic in their thirst for closing a sale that they miss the opportunities to connect and close buyers on a large scale.