I used to flinch when I was asked to show marketing ROI. “That’s not how marketing works!” I’d say to anyone who would listen. “You don’t show return on investment. You can’t measure awareness. Marketing is dynamic and creative; ROI is for the pencil-pushers.”
I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I lacked confidence in my marketing campaigns because I didn’t have a concrete way to measure ROI. If you don’t have a way to demonstrate positive results, with accurate metrics to back it up, you’re lost. And without certainty in that knowledge, the imposter syndrome you’ve been wrestling with becomes all too real.
There’s a reason they call it “spray-and-pray” — serving up a million impressions and hoping people notice. If you market to a generic “everyperson” by simply repeating your name over and over again, they might remember it, but the repetition is just as likely to make it lose meaning altogether. We’re constantly bombarded by logos and buzzwords on every device. It’s estimated between 6,000 to 10,000 impressions a day now, per person! If you want to be heard above the noise, or better yet, be certain the right people hear and take meaningful action, you need a different approach.
When someone asks for marketing ROI now, I have the opposite reaction. I can show value all day long. I can provide absolutely bulletproof results, reliable stats on conversion rates and metrics on the influence marketing had on any specific campaign or sale. Not only that, but I know how to create and teach the strategies that produce those results.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the basics of engagement marketing. I want to come at it from the angle of what’s in it for you as a marketer. Yes, there are specific benefits for your organization in terms of campaign effectiveness and speed to market, but they also translate to a boost in confidence for you. It feels good to know what works and how to execute it. And perhaps more importantly, how to improve upon it time and again.
The Essentials of Confident Engagement Marketing
Marketo is responsible for coining the term, rebranding “marketing automation” as “engagement marketing” to take the emphasis off the how and put it on the why. Engagement isn’t just a positive, active word, it’s a transformative concept that flips the process from sales-driven (or even marketing-driven) to buyer-driven.
Here’s what’s required for confident engagement marketing, as I see it.
1. Encourage interaction with key conversion assets.
Engagement marketing hinges on triggering a behavioral response. So, when you’re creating your marketing plans, whether for a product launch or an upsell opportunity, design anchor content presumed to have higher conversion and higher value at multiple stages in the funnel. I call these key conversion assets, and you need them throughout the customer journey. This whole process doesn’t start until you get that first response, and it definitely doesn’t end when you pass a lead to Sales.
To get high rates of interaction, you need to use an appropriate gate. Not every asset needs to convert to Sales. I prefer soft gates for content that initiates the engagement. Just give me an email. I can do anything as long as I’ve gotten consent to send email. It doesn’t even have to be a corporate address. Some companies restrict domains, but I don’t often recommend that. For first touches at the top of the funnel, I don’t care if it’s Gmail or your AOL address from a time forgotten. I prefer the corporate address, but I’m not handing it to Sales right now anyway. Later on, I’ll have another marquee asset, like a webinar, and ask for a business email. With a webinar, you can put a form with 10 questions in front of registrants, no problem. But for now, I just want that person in my system.
Pro Tip: Simply labeling the email field on a form “Business Email” works surprisingly well, even if there are no actual requirements in place.
2. Track engagements within your ecosystem and beyond.
Once you’ve triggered a response, you start to gather more knowledge about prospects. Collect and learn from their signals. Track them on your web properties to see what they’re reading. See whether they clicked on that email and then went to another page.
To be clear, I’m not even all that concerned with the individual. What I want is a trend. A nice cross-section of data from a well-targeted campaign to help me determine what assets are working, what email subject lines are getting opens and clicks, etc. As with most things these days, data is everything.
This is where you need a marketing automation (MA) platform. Even though I’ve worked with Marketo for over a decade, I’m fairly agnostic when it comes to platforms. Finding the right one for your needs can be a lot of work, but it’s worth it. Migrating marketing automation systems is challenging too, but necessary if your current system isn’t a great fit for what you need.
3. Deliver personalized next steps based on those responses.
“Personalized” here means much more than using their name in an email. Truth be told, I rather dislike using people’s names in email; it’s a little weird to me. I like to think of personalization as being something your prospects don’t actually realize is happening.
For example, present content that’s relevant to the buyer at that moment in time, based on their journey throughout the sales cycle. Change up the content, the delivery or the medium to get another interaction. Send follow-up questions after a webinar. If someone clicks on a link to read a white paper — but doesn’t fill out the form — consider just sending them the white paper in another email a couple of days later. If they did submit the form, follow up with them and ask them what they thought, or suggest additional considerations related to the topic.
More importantly, do all you can to define their interests early. If they visit the web pages about Product A, which is well-suited to addressing Pain Point X, send them content that’s specific to that product and pain point. Don’t send it within five minutes of the page visit, mind you, because that’s just creepy. Kind of like when you’re talking about hammocks with a friend, and all of a sudden, your Facebook feed is full of hammocks. Don’t be creepy.
The old-school funnel stages are relevant here in determining what to give people when:
- Top-of-funnel: Promote awareness and empathy. Get people involved by talking about pain points. Tell them they have a problem, even if they don’t realize it. Overload this section with content across multiple channels. Top-of-funnel is where spray-and-pray still matters a bit. You still need to be where they are and get that first contact, that initial conversion.
- Middle-of-funnel: Make them aware that their problem has a solution! This part is pretty fun for the content creators, usually. Don’t speak as a marketer or even as the business. In my opinion, you shouldn’t even be talking about your own product yet, or at least not initially — this is still about them and their Get them to engage with something more substantial, not just a web ad or a click. Put on a webinar with a thought leader from outside your company to talk about how things have changed and how that’s an old problem that is easily addressed.
- Bottom-of-funnel: With a bit of luck and the planet’s alignment, this is the time to start talking about why YOUR solution is THE solution. What differentiates your approach or offering? Is it value-based? What are the key benefits beyond the problem itself? Only now can you trust that their engagement, and their potential hand-raise, is an educated one. One that has them asking “Okay, but how much does it cost?” Now you have an engaged, sales-ready lead who has already responded numerous times.
I’ll fully admit that this funnel progression is the best-case scenario. Most prospects are nowhere near this linear in their journey, and we really need to break away from that way of thinking when developing the content and campaigns that cater to the customer-first mentality. Keeping with the TOFU, MOFU, BOFU concept above, don’t be afraid to put a piece of MOFU content at every third or fourth place in the TOFU nurturing stream. If they engage, fantastic — move them on down. If they don’t? Fantastic. Because you’ve got a deep well of TOFU content to keep serving. This philosophy applies throughout the journey. As long as they don’t click the dreaded unsubscribe button, you’re still winning.
Don’t Leave Me. I have zero anxiety over unsubscribes. This attitude is another product of reliable, confident data backing my decisions. By all means, track unsubscribes and take note of content that may inadvertently cause any spikes. And be prepared to rapidly modify or delete that content or asset. Be brutal in your editing of your programs to deliver the desired outcome. The data is your superpower. Tip the scales in your favor whenever possible.
Take advantage of soft gates as well. Please stop putting forms with 15 fields on any content ever. You’re better than that. Take advantage of key indicators. Set up specific questions that are used to identify pain points or interests in front of content. If they are already in your system, you already know who they are: Stop asking. Instead, ask only one question, such as “Which of these four pain points annoys you the most?” THAT is some actionable data. And it’s personalized. It lets them define their own journey.
Or, as another example, if your form somehow gains a little deeper insight into fit, take better advantage of it. Even if you haven’t implemented account-based marketing fully, when a lead indicates that it’s from an account that you already know and have confidence in, you can act on that.
There are countless ways to shift the paradigm away from a single gigantic global form that captures the information necessary for Sales. By the time leads are ready to hand off, you should have already been able to garner a ridiculous amount of information on their fit, behavior and needs.
4. Monitor results and adjust to accommodate.
This step is absolutely critical to boost your confidence and the measurable success of your campaigns. If you try to set-it-and-forget-it, you’re leaving valuable feedback on the table. If you haven’t adjusted a nurture stream or added content to your key initiatives in the last six months, you’re doing it wrong. This is also why it’s always important to foster relationships with the people in your organization who handle content creation. For smaller orgs, this may just be, well, you. But for larger organizations, the tendency to silo out content creation and disassociate it from the marketing automation geeks is a severe detriment. If you’re in MA, you should be at the table when they are creating the initial plan. If you’re in content creation, you should want your MA folks to be there with you. No singalongs here or anything, but for real, build those relationships — it’s HUGE.
Key concepts:
- Be dynamic. Adjust and tweak your content as well as the order and method of delivery to make it more actionable, improve conversion rates, A/B test concepts and choose winners based on best fit or best response. Where are you losing people? Go back a step and see what you can do differently to keep them engaged.
- Top-load the funnel. You might find you need 30 pieces of light-touch content at the top of the funnel, operating as feelers. You’re trying to get traction and bring people in before presenting something with more value, like a webinar or white paper that moves them further.
- Nothing is linear. You don’t have to create a single rigid map that dictates what people get in what order at what time. Instead, you can react to each move they make to stay in front of them in a meaningful way. Gaining notable data points should automatically land them into different streams.
- Utilize key conversion assets. Identify assets in your journey that are high-value, key conversion points ASAP. Build your campaigns to drive towards those assets. If an asset isn’t performing well, don’t be afraid to present it again. If it continues to fail upon repeat impressions, find something else. Don’t be afraid to move on from an asset, even if your org spent a ridiculous amount of money creating it and expects more. Sometimes just shelving it for a few months and switching up the messaging makes all the difference.
Content Is Key. By now, you’ve perhaps realized that much of what I’m throwing out there is keenly tied to having a nearly endless supply of collateral to promote. I bring it up repeatedly because so often, content creation is the bottleneck. Once you have a robust integration with a marketing automation platform, you have to feed that beast. And the beast is HUNGRY.
Confident Marketing Comes From Measurable Results
With engagement marketing as the organizing principle of your daily efforts, you’ll have the metrics to show what you’ve done and the ability to learn from it. During your next review cycle, you can readily show how you took last year’s campaign and directly influenced the positive results. You can also show what didn’t work and where money and resources were wasted. This reporting is every bit as valuable to the people who hired you. Instead of panic, the mention of ROI will draw a sly grin from you. You’re ready for this discussion — this is where you shine.
Great marketing is less about the specific tools, but more about how you use them to create a clear map of useful engagements over time. So much of what BDO Digital does is to make connections. We are first and foremost communicators, translators even; we’re deciphering the complex web among all the tools, resources and concepts. We strive to present them in ways that feed curiosity and are meaningful to folks like you doing marketing every day.
I’m strangely passionate about engagement marketing, as it bridges the mismatched hemispheres of my mind: the creative and the data-driven duality that no longer needs to be suppressed. I hope that, in some small way, these ideas can inspire you to embrace your own potential to transform the next project you’re involved with. And hey, if you need an extra hand, BDO Digital is here to help.
Colby Dix, Senior Solutions Architect, is an innovative and insightful marketing automation professional with a track record of successfully leveraging emerging technologies and software platforms. When not transforming Fortune 500 marketing stacks, he leads a pedestrian life of banal pursuits. An accomplished entertainer, comedian, multi-instrumentalist, avid home chef, brilliant amateur photographer, self-professed geek, ardent reader (“HHGTTG” is a favorite), hockey fan, avid gamer and wine enthusiast, he also finds time to mow the lawn on most weekends.
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