Arranging campaigns in Marketo

I was thinking of some possible ways we can organize our marketing campaigns in Marketo and this one came to my mind. I think we can organize our campaigns based on various stages of leads: Suspects –> Prospects -> Customer. We can create marketing programs and sub-programs and then campaigns within those sub-programs.
Here is a quick snapshot of how it would look ( I made it in excel):




The beauty of this approach is, apart from better organization, it would provide us a quick snapshot of campaigns across various key areas like Lead generation, Nurturing, Sales alignment etc.

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Competitive Response System: Kumar's 5 Step Model

Its very important to understand that its an ongoing process and no matter how strong is your model every now and then it will be tested by some unknown forces.

1. Industry Analysis:

* understand your market, what segment you operate into, growth potentials, customer profiles, pricing etc. Then based on your current and future aspirations of firm, try to define your KSAs (key success attributes).
* Various models like Porter's 5 forces, Value Net, SCP(Structure-Conduct-Performance)can be useful.

2. Gather Data about competition:

Since amount of information available out there could be huge, try to categorize your data in major categories like Financial, Product & Services, Partners & Vendors, Patents, Legal, Media Coverage
* Its not only important to have all the information possible but also
how we maintain and analyze those data. We can get data from some easy sources
like sales team, customers, web sites, analysis reports to market and pricing data, to some other ways like hiring pattern, product reverse-engineering or mystery shopping
- Couple of things we added recently is media scaning & Patent Filings. Media strategy reveals our competitor's targeting
- Understand partners and vendors:
* I also maintain sheet with all the vendors and partners with their detailed analysis of product/services along with their brand awareness, customer's preference

* Some major sources of data are:

Financial Data:
• United States Securities and Exchange Commission
• Dun & Bradstreet
• Standard & Poor's
• Hoover's
Legal Data:
• LexisNexis
Copyright/Patents:
• Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR)
Media Coverage:
• LexisNexis
• Newsalert.com
• Industry Watch
• NewsPage
• PR Newswire
Partners & Vendors
• Media Scanning
Product & Services
• Sales
• customers
• website, pricing data
• Hiring Pattern
• Product Reverse Engineering
• Mystry Shopping


3. Create your competitor profiles:

* Create a detailed competitor profile for all your major competitors. This helps us in 2 significant ways. 1st it can reveal some strategic weakness which we can exploit. It also helps in anticipating some strategic responses. You look at their financials, products, market share, brand, partners etc


4. Draw your Ecosystem:

* Its important to draw your ecosystem based on above information and where you stand. I normally prefer what is called Competitor Array. So I define key success factors in the industry and then assign weightage to each of these factors. Then I weigh my competitors.

5. Finally
Once we have good understanding of our ecosystem and various forces in it, all thats left to be done is what we learned in business schools. Game Theory.. Look forward reason backwards. You anticipate your competitor's move and then design your campaigns and marketing programs accordingly.

B2B vs B2C

Its really important for marketers to understand the difference between B2B and B2C. There is a fundamental difference between the way you approach these two sets of customers. In b2c, marketing goal is to not only market the product but also sell it. In b2b, you focus mainly on generating leads and helping sales team in nurturing those leads. For example, if you are creating an online landing page for your marketing campaign, in b2c your landing page will provide conumers the opprotunity to buy your products/services. However, landing page of b2b marketing campign is more informative in nature. It should focus more on educating your consumers so that they would consider you in their buying process.
B2c buyers normally put lot of emphasis on emotion, brand where as business are more rational in their buying decision. Apart from higher lead time, b2b consumers also have multiple approval layers. our marketing campaign should focus towards addressing people in that chain. Its really important for marketers to understand these small adjustments in their marketing strategies to succeed at highest level.

Marketing Sales Alignment - Success mantra for B2B

When your firm is targetting enterprise customers, B2B marketing becomes a lot challenging as it requires much more alignment with sales. Traditionally sales and marketing teams, I would say, are 'loosly coupled' and thats mainly due to lack of binding commitment to other's success. Around 80 % of leads passed to sales are dropped and 90 % marketing collaterals are uunused. 80% of enterprise technology deals are not influenced by marketing at all. It gets further tricky by the fact that marketing is not only about revenue generation but also has to manage brand and other marketing strategies. How many times you have heard CEOs calling marketing a 'Cost center". Well almost all the time. How can you make a cost centre integral part of revenue generation engine, which is sales. A part of this attitude towards marketing is to be blamed on marketer themselves. Marketer tend to sweat on web hits, leads etc and get lost in smoke of information instead of focusing on critical but simple things which can impact Revenue. So it becomes really important for marketer to track metrics like 'marketing influenced pipeline' and 'marketing influenced revenue' as a multiple of 'marketing budget'. This will demostrate their effectiveness and help correct the perception,often incorrect, towards marketing.
So how do we align sales & marketing. For marketers its really important to understand key objectives and challenges during each stages of sales cycle. During early sales cycle, market communicatin and content should be targeted enough to keep customers engaged. Towards end of buying cycle, customers tend to worry about failures and hence marketing should work with implementation team to create collaterals which displays risk factors across the timeline and ways to mitigate them.
Sales & marketing need to create sort of structure where boundaries and interaction points are clearly defined. We can do small things like creating a dashboard on Salesforce giving insight into leads/opportunities patterns, revenue/market insights. We also also start using some sales languages like marketing-qualified leads and sales-accepted leads. Apart from CRM tools, Marketing campaign management tools like Eloqua & Marketo and Search marketing firms like Enquiro can play a huge role in bridging the gap. Once a structure is established, Alignment is done by engaging both teams in taking active roles in each other's work and then alogning their compensation based on revenue, customer renewal and customer satisfaction.

Product Marketing in nutshell

I always wonder what makes someone really good product marketer. Is it your understanding of product & market or your ability to communicate effectively with market? Is it teamwork, leadership, networking skills or innovation ?? Actually list is endless but there are few thing which are very important and can hardly be ignored. I have tried to come up with some sort of framwork which I call PDLA (Plan-Develop-Launch-Analyse). You follow it and you got most of produc marketing covered.

Plan:
====
1. Define corporate-strategy - clearly undertand,define if required, corporate strategy. Understand your target customers, market size & Growth, competition
2. Product Road Map (2 years) - Try to develop a broad roadmap based on Sales input, target Customers, budget, Timeline.
Develop:
======
1. Product Requirement - Work with costomers, sales & Enginering teams. Come up with prototype and test the market if posible before going all out on the product.
2. Development Plan - Clear cmmunication with Engineerin gteam is crucial.
3. Identify Risk - Test your assumptions. If you cant then thats a risk.
Launch:
======
1. Product Launch
- Internal Communication - Exec presentation, Sales Briefing, Sales Training, Price Sheet
- External Communication ( Marketing Comm)
* Web Landing Page, Demo on voice Site, White Papers, Blogs/Social Netowrks, Marketing Campaigns (Adwords, use major media channel to reach targeted customers)
* Press Releases, Analyst Briefings, Client Webinars
2. Contingency communications
3. Scheduled Maintanance
Analyze:
======
1. Measure Key success factors
* primary : No. of leads/opportunities, Revenue Increase, Profitability
* Secondary: No. of media mentions, No of web hits

Is it all about product marketing. Not even close. There is a lot more to it but it doest provide me some sort of framework around which I would plan my work.

Wake up SId

Sid has always been a smart consumer who does his research before buying anything, from electronics to daily usage items. He gets the best value of his money more often than not. But what Sid doesnt take into account is the real price he pays. He doesnt take into account the carbon footprint of items he buys.

The best way to understand green consumers is by segmenting them based on Psychographics than demographics. Lot of research has indicated that LOHAS, Naturalites, drifters & unconcerned are the main segments of green consumers. Lohas and Naturalites are most likely buy green products and pay premium but marketing to these consumers is really tricky as they are well informed and connected. Deception doesnt work with these consumers.

Each gallon of gasoline in US typically emits 8.7 kg of CO2 which is 3.2 kg per litre of petrol. People like Sid should look at the carbon footprints of their purchases by looking at green information sharing platforms like carbonBulls.com and try to offset it not only by making better choices in terms of price & environmental impact but also by contributing to carbon offset projects through firms like terraPass. You can buy 1 year flying carbon offset for $50 or you can buy 4 person-year family carbon offset for $370 which include driving, flying and home energy.

Sid needs to step up and start looking for all these information at carbonbulls.com and not only make good value of his money but also make this world a better place.