You Need to Friend & Follow!

The other thing we notice is that when the technology is the hottest trend everyone wants to be a part. This leads to some of the craziest use-cases you will see. Let me give you an example: I noticed recently that the chain gas station down the road from my house has a giant sign asking me to like their Facebook page and to follow them on twitter. I think this perfectly typifies this technology-colored glasses. Why would I need to friend a gas station franchise on Facebook or follow their tweets? Now perhaps they have a very good reason for creating this social media presence and there is a real target audience they have created a marketing strategy around capturing. But my first thought is they have simply latched on to something they see as “trendy” tech and wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Ironically so I think since Facebook is over a decade old now and Twitter also is no longer the latest and greatest. But the pervasive nature of attempting to be fashionable in tech is clearly evident.

The Need For Marketing Automation

What does any of this have to do with marketing automation? While the previous two paragraphs may feel a bit like two separate issues or topics what you will soon come to realize is how each plays a critical role in the current state of marketing automation and what I consider to be the technology trap.

Marketing automation at one point around 10 years ago was the hot new software technology. It had features and abilities that went far beyond anything else available at the time. Everything from email campaigns (sending emails over a specific time period), to lead nurturing and lead profiling were features found in this new and exciting area of technology. And customers jumped at the opportunity to try and implement this software in their business. Many were admittedly enamored by new and shiny technology and willing to suffer through the occasional bug or struggle with a hard-to-use lackluster UI. Fast-forward 10 years and you now see the overwhelming interest in marketing automation by all companies and organizations. Everyone sees marketing automation as technology they need. This is how marketing automation touches on both of the introductory two paragraphs. But what does this mean? Where does the problem lie and how does this lead to a marketing automation trap?

The Marketing Automation Trap

In the first paragraph we discussed the trendiness of the software and how forgiving we were of new techology. But there’s a key word in that sentence. New. When software is new and when the company providing the software is active, listening and fixing issues then we are content to continue to use the software. The minute that progress fails to continue or the bugs in the software become persistent rather than fixable we begin to lose interest and become disgruntled users. Marketing automation has begun to reach that point. The existing software is now old, overwhelmed with bolt-on features and generally slow. Bugs exist for months without being fixed and users are becoming less and less tolerant of issues. This is the first marketing automation tech trap.

The Marketing Automation Magic Tool?

The second side of the trap relates to market saturation and a belief which tends to surround technology in marketing automation. Marketing automation technology can appear to be a glamorous and quick solution to increasing leads and sales. The idea that this software can be a magic bullet for increased revenue is overwhelmingly compelling. Every company at every size wants this technology to instantly turnaround their sales. But here is the trap. Many believe marketing automation is a fantastic technology that solves all their problems. The truth is much different. Marketing automation is a powerful tool to be used by skilled marketing experts. Please let me repeat that sentiment: Marketing automation is technology and a tool to be used by a business to accomplish a goal.

The Mechanics of A Hammer

Here’s a simple analogy: think of marketing automation as a hammer. You wouldn’t buy a hammer and then expect a house to magically be built. You would expect to pick up the hammer and use the tool to accomplish your goal of building a house. But you would have to understand the mechanics of the hammer (duh, that’s easy!) as well as how to use the hammer most effectively to build a house.

Marketing automation is a tool to be used. If the technology struggles or falters than an alternate solution will be created and the market will shift to the new and the shiny new thing, in this case, that new thing is Mautic, a revolutionary marketing automation platform built on open source technology, powered by a global community, and available for everyone to use at no cost. Bugs are fixed quickly, improvements are constantly being made and the open source community means a democratized approach to new features and quick, successful, iterations.

Secondly this Mautic community is actively working to build an ecosystem of learning and education around the best practices for using marketing automation. You can use this community to quickly become knowledgable about how to use the marketing automation “hammer” and build your business. Never forget, software and great technology is only a tool to be used to accomplish your goals. Don’t fall into the marketing automation tech trap.

In case you haven’t heard about these awards or InfoWorld, here’s the deal: Every year InfoWorld, a major information technology monthly magazine, releases a list of best open source software as compiled by hundreds of contributors. They divide software into six categories, starting with the best open source applications. This is the category where Mautic has been selected as a winner. Other winners include Docker, RethinkDB, and CoreOS. This clearly points to the incredible success Mautic has seen and the continuing explosive growth that our community is experiencing. Our vision is becoming a reality and this recent award from such a strong and reputable source as InfoWorld attests to this!

You can help our community even more if you will share this recent award on your social networks and with your friends!

Read the full announcement (original source no longer exists): http://www.infoworld.com/article/2982622/open-source-tools/bossie-awards-2015-the-best-open-source-applications.html#slide7

Mautic 1.2 (Statistically Speaking)

This release of Mautic spanned a short 46 days. (Of course we’d be wrong to not mention this means 45 nights as well!) But it’s more than just working long hours, development on Mautic has been packed full of new features and bug fixes as well. Mautic release 1.2 includes 4 major new features and 72 issues addressed. It’s incredible to think all this has been done in such a short time. As we have always said development extends far beyond issues related to the code. The Mautic community has grown incredibly in other ways as well. As of September 3 Mautic has 117 translators working on 40 languages!

Major New Features

As mentioned above there are 4 major new features in this release. Here is a brief review of each.

Monitored Email (Bounce Management)

Monitored email allows Mautic to monitor an IMAP account(s) for bounced emails or unsubscribe requests.

Webhooks (Developers Rejoice)

Mautic now has webhooks! Configure them through the new Webhooks link in the admin menu. Notify 3rd party services or scripts when a new lead is created, updated, etc.

Smarter Lead Lists (Smart Lists Got Smarter)

Lead lists can now be segmented by list membership, bounce status, and others. You can now also use relative dates like today, tomorrow, next month, etc.

Lead Tagging (Nothing to see here)

Lead can now be tagged through their profile page, edit form, API, or tracking pixels. Search by tags, tag through campaigns, etc. To tag via the API or tracking pixel, append &tags=tag1,tag2,-tag3 (prefix with a minus) to delete a tag).

Of course as always if you want to see a more detailed breakdown of what’s been fixed and featured in this release check out the release notes on GitHub or in the forums.

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]]> https://mautic.org/blog/overcoming-the-marketing-automation-learning-curve Wed, 12 Aug 2015 13:36:12 +0000 https://www.mautic.org/overcoming-the-marketing-automation-learning-curve/ So you’re thinking about implementing marketing automation into your business plan…that’s excellent! It means you are taking your marketing seriously, looking for new outlets and hoping to grow your business by sharing your product or service. With so many options it’s difficult to know where to begin, you may need some help when approaching the topic of marketing automation software.

Marketing automation is a powerful process and can produce tremendous gains for your business or organization; that is…when it’s used properly. Any strong marketing campaign requires the same basic principles: objective, strategy, optimization, and implementation. The rudiments of marketing most definitely still apply when utilizing a marketing automation platform, in fact they are even more important when we consider the number of “moving parts” involved in a well-built automation campaign. This leads us to the first step in addressing the learning curve.

1. Sharpen Your Marketing Knowledge.

Marketing is a catch-all term for the fields of study, processes of engagement, and creation of interest surrounding the message and image of your products, services, and information. It’s all about getting your message to the right ears and drawing interested customers to your brand over your competitors.

“You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” – Lee Iacocca

Without marketing know-how it is virtually impossible to get the word out, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start marketing with what you do know. You’ve created something you think people will want, but why do they want it? What problems does your product or service solve, and what makes it different or better than the others? If you can answer those questions then you are well on your way to creating killer a marketing plan.

That’s just the beginning of your marketing automation journey, the next step is to educate yourself. Find marketing materials, take classes, read books and start simple with your marketing. No one starts off as a guru – we are all learning and growing. What that means to you is that the first step in writing a marketing strategy is to immerse yourself in marketing education, get back to the basics and hone your skills before you implement marketing automation. No marketing campaign, automated or not, can succeed without a thoughtfully written educated strategy.

2. Learn The Basics -What Is Marketing Automation & How to “Do” Marketing Automation

Before you can understand how marketing automation fits into your overall marketing plans, you must first understand what marketing automation accomplishes. Familiarize yourself with the basic principles and features of automation and put that in context with what you already know about marketing.

Generally, marketing automation is a means of taking the tedious or repetitive tasks, like monitoring leads or sending emails, and automating them. While marketing automation includes many other functions such as: social media tracking, lead behavior tracking, scoring, and 1:1 real-time marketing, it is primarily a smarter, faster, and larger means of reaching specific individuals with an automated series of event triggered communication workflows. Of course, you will learn all about the details and how to make the process more effective, but for now check out marketing automation education materials to learn more.

If you choose to do marketing automation research by visiting service providers sites, don’t let persuasive sales reps push you to make a decision, lay out all of your options for your marketing solutions before you commit any of your budget. Find out what features your business requires and determine what means you will use to achieve their implementation. Whether it is you or an employee who will be focusing on marketing automation, training is the most vital element in your future success.

3. Invest in Training

Your real primary investment should be in training and the development of your general marketing skills, alongside marketing automation education. No matter how much money you spend on the capabilities of your marketing automation software, your campaign is only as good as your ability to effectively address every detail of your marketing strategy.

If you do not have the staff to invest in marketing automation training, you might have to find a different course of action. This could mean hiring specialized marketers, increasing your investment in training, or outsourcing your marketing automation to professionals. Regardless of what course you choose, learning the processes is a must.

Whatever your experience in digital marketing, development, or automation, you should make every effort to seek out education through training materials and hands-on development. Some marketing automation providers offer access to learning materials and user group meetings, but only if your pay their exorbitant service rates. Free training resources are available through a nonprofit organization. Mautic is an open source marketing automation community, whose goal is to create community support for marketers, educational resources, and training courses to support their free marketing automation software.

4. Build Your First Campaign

Once you’ve learned the basics and gone through some training, it’s time for you to put it all together and build your first campaign. This is an exciting time as you finally get to put your new skills to work. Start with the most basic of your campaign building skills; the key points of your strategy. From there you can further develop each of your campaign points in the framework of marketing automation. Just remember to start simple.

• Create your campaign strategy
• Define your elements
• Design simple emails, landing pages and forms
• Build your workflow
• Measure your results.

Remember, it’s your first campaign, so it may not be perfect, but it can become much better if you learn from the experience and use the data you get to make your next campaign even better. With this approach, continued learning, and a positive attitude, you are well on your way to becoming a marketing automation professional.

5. Analyze Your Campaign Results

The feedback you get from your campaigns is what drives marketing automation progress and leads to long term development and success. The most powerful brands utilize the data from every measure of a campaign’s activity and engagement. Metrics help marketers to design better sites, landing pages, keywords, email subjects, and any other measurable factor. These metrics allow brands to interpret engagement and consumer behavior in order to consistently improve every detail of their campaign’s design, content, and delivery. The goal is to achieve an optimal level of engagement, by separating your market from the crowd, meeting your leads wherever they are in the customer lifecycle.

As you continue to develop your marketing automation skills, and the ability to interpret your campaign reports, you will find more ways to collect valuable data. One such strategy is that of “split campaigns” or A/B testing. By creating two slightly different campaigns and comparing the resulting analytics in defined element fields, marketers can quickly adapt their content or design to their customer’s preference. These unconscious influencers make all the difference with marketing automation, where customer behavior triggers exactly the action you need to drive your message home and to start turning leads into conversions and revenue. Developing your marketing automation skills even further makes you that much more powerful as a marketer and yields stronger growth, so what’s next?

6. Specialize & Optimize Your Marketing Automation Skills

Once you have acquired a good understand of the things we have just discussed you will find that each campaign element can be more effectively tested and designed. You may have found what you are already good at, whether it’s landing page design, content writing, customer cycle “drip flow” campaigns, or email campaigns, but what about the elements that could be better?

The key to improving individual campaign elements is in optimization. Whether it’s SEO (the ability to influence the visibility of your website or web page to a search engines parameters or “organic reach”) or Content Optimization (understanding the way that keywords influence search result, as well as meta-descriptions, alt-tagging, and increased credibility), understanding optimization tactics is crucial to continued development of your campaigns.

One powerful tool that marketing automation provides is the ability to personalize your campaign content. Whether it’s a list, segment, or individual, personalization leads to conversions. Meet your customers with content that applies to them, addresses their unique needs, and caters to their particular buying process. With campaign personalization, you content reach and conversion will see their highest possible levels. So keep collecting that data, continually adapt your content to fit your target’s needs, and never stop looking for opportunities to optimize.

Whether you’re a small business owner, enterprise, nonprofit, marketer or student, learning the skills needed for marketing automation has tremendous power and value. The results you can produce with the right help and a strong strategy will make any and all effort worth your investment.

Find the resources you need to understand marketing as a whole and build a solid foundation with core principles. From that point you can approach marketing automation with context and direction.

Make sure your investment in training matches that of your expectation. Learning the principles and practices of marketing automation is a worthy and attainable goal.Don’t throw all of your money at a service provider if you can do it yourself. Use free open source software to develop your skills, it’s much easier with the right resources and a strong community to offer support.

• Start building campaigns and practicing your marketing automation skills.
• Send your “baby” on its way and make sure to analyze the valuable data you from your campaign
• Specialize your marketing automation skills through optimization techniques and campaign testing
• Keep learning!

Nothing worth having is easily attained, but don’t make it harder for yourself. Use your new skills to work smarter, automate your marketing, increase your reach and achieve measurable growth. Marketing automation isn’t a system you will perfect in a day, but it is well worth the effort. Tackle the learning curve head on by investing your time, not your budget, and see what do-it-yourself marketing automation can do for you.

Marketing automation saves lives

If you’re using a CRM then you’re well on your way to doing something incredible with marketing automation. You can read a quick tutorial on the topic of marketing automation here where we dive into more details and specifics but for now let’s look at how you can take your customer relations management knowledge and apply marketing automation to your setup to improve your life. Yes, it will improve your life.

Starting with the familiar CRM

For many, the CRM is a catch-all used to collect data and information about all types of individuals. You may have brand-new leads that have filled out a form on your website, existing contacts from an address book you’ve imported at some point in the past, maybe you’ve entered every business card you’ve ever received into your CRM, or finally you add all existing customers to your system. All of these are fairly common ways that businesses use a CRM. But there’s a problem here. When your sales team (or you) go into your CRM to find new business or stay in touch with existing customers…well it’s a mess. Everything is mixed in, and even if you’re one of the studious that create proper lists you’re still left with doing an enormous amount of work. You create your emails and you send them to your lead lists. You enter updated information when you learn something new about your leads or customers, and you spend hours upon hours trying to figure out which of your leads are the ones you need to contact that are actually interested in purchasing something.

All of these task have one very important thing in common; they all take time, lots and lots of time. And for most of us time is the one thing we simply don’t have enough of. This is where the true power of marketing automation comes in. Marketing automation is a process where you can save time by handling a number of repetitive tasks and actions automatically based on lead actions and scheduled events.

A key thing to keep in mind when performing marketing automation is the simple truth that automated marketing can still be personal. Simply because you’re scheduling points of contact (emails, social media messages etc…) does not mean you are no longer making a personal contact. Read more on personalization in marketing automation here.

So how does marketing automation work with a CRM?

Marketing automation starts by tracking every lead, or visitor, to your website, or other online locations (in fact, you can even use marketing automation for in-store tracking but that’s a different post). This tracking happens similar to Google Analytics tracking just the basic information on each lead, what pages they visit and how long they stay for. Easy enough to understand. Marketing automation is the bridge you use to carry your potential leads safely to your CRM. Refining, setting speeds, organizing traffic, until finally each lead has been nurtured along the bridge safely into your CRM and ready to be your customer.

Landing Pages

Next, your marketing automation software should let you create beautiful landing pages where you can collect more information from your leads. Read here for more information about key things to consider when creating a landing page. These landing pages should live on your own domain and in your own website as this keeps the user flow consistent, bring a sense of familiarity and comfort that they have not been sent off to some third-party location. These landing pages typically contain a call-to-action, for example a form you want the visitor to fill out in order to download a specific PDF, or maybe an infographic or slideshow. This is a key piece of the puzzle. You have to provide value to your leads. They are giving up personal information (be that an email address or social media handle), and you must give them something of value in return.

Build Profiles

Once you have collected their information your marketing automation system will compile a comprehensive lead profile on each visitor. This is where things get exciting. Your lead profiles let you quickly see social media messages your visitor has posted, their public profiles, their history of interactions with your site and tons of other useful information.

Drip Marketing Campaign

These known leads can now be added to specific drip marketing campaigns. We won’t go into the details of drip marketing here but you can read this article to learn more about implementing and creating drip marketing campaigns and workflows. Through these campaigns you will send relevant information to your leads and based on their responses take different actions as a result. But of course you don’t have to do this manually for each lead. Your marketing automation has these paths, decisions, and actions all defined ready to be executed either as a result of the lead’s actions or alternatively on a scheduled timeframe you specify (e.g. send this email 3 days after a successful form submission).

Are you starting to see what’s happening? Marketing automation allows you to lead nurture your potential leads along the sales cycle without your direct involvement and time. Not only are you nurturing leads but you are generating new leads. And as these leads complete various actions (either through a campaign you’ve defined or simply through your website) you have the opportunity to assign points or a weight to each thing. Your leads are now being weighted for you based on the criteria you define.

Convert Leads to Sales

The last step in this marketing automation workflow is to convert these leads to customers. As they have accrued points and built their profiles you can define triggers that will fire at various stages. Ultimately this is where your CRM will come back into the picture. When a lead reaches a specific level that you have determined to be your qualified lead level you can have your marketing automation system automatically send this lead into your CRM. And now you see something brilliant. Your CRM has now turned into a hub full of high-quality, ready to contact leads. You know they’re qualified because they have been nurtured along the sales cycle automatically through your marketing automation.

Marketing automation can save hundreds of hours for both your sales and your marketing teams. Lead management, lead nurturing, lead generation and customer management has never been easier. You’ll find you have more time to do the things you love and the quality of your personal contacts with leads will improve drastically. Don’t waste your time contacting every unqualified visitor to your website, use marketing automation to save time and improve your business.

Returning to the CRM

Your CRM will still play an important role in your organization, but it will now play the correct role. Don’t use it as a random catch-all for every lead and every cold call. Manage leads in marketing automation, create landing pages to collect more information, use drip marketing to nurture them and give them valuable information, and then, when they are qualified, send them to your CRM. Marketing automation and CRM work hand in hand. Use them both and use them well.

1. You’re paying too much.

If you are using marketing automation services, how much are you paying?

What percentage of your departmental budget consists of marketing automation platforms or an external service managing you clients?

The answers to these two questions are likely much higher than you would think. Already a billion dollar industry, marketing automation platforms (like Hubspot, Eloqua, and Marketo) continue to find new ways to coax clients into utilizing additional services with separate pricing tiers and subsequent service caps. Most small businesses and startups cannot afford to pay thousands of dollars every month for a single service.

Does the service you receive match the extreme rates you are paying? It is not secret that marketing automation is expensive, but what are the consequences of the overpriced service? For one thing, it means that only highly developed, revenue generating companies have access to the powerful growth potential of the software, and is the service really worth the cost for those who can afford to pay?

2. No Access to your data

Marketing automation platforms use big data for “Big” results, but without the right effort and access on the user end, results are unlikely to be of any real value. Marketing automation platforms are not only gladly taking your money, but they also get to choose what data you can access. Unfortunately, this means that all potential leads, consumer profiles and traffic data is filtered through your platform, they choose what percentage to give you as a report. As a result, you are at left at the far end of the data stream to use what you are given as opposed to what is yours. Why not allow access to it all, if you so choose? This brings us to the next point, that in addition to only having a limited amount of data access, you do not truly have any engagement with the powerful software itself.

3. Service Only, Not Software.

Marketing automation services are incredibly valuable to the growth of company. According to a survey published by Carlos Hidalgo of the Annuitas Group,

Businesses who use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.

In addition to staggering growth potential, the survey showed an increase in revenue of 417%. These statics imply that it will not be a matter of if businesses adopt, but when? Let’s explore what you are getting by way of service.

A strange dynamic exists between clients and providers, since you the client rarely engage with the software. You only receive the reports, leads, and data that is given to you in exchange for thousands per month. With the proper investment of time and an easy to use platform, anyone could utilize the strength of concept and achieve new growth potential. Currently, however, marketing automation users do not have access to the necessary software, and the service leaves much to be desired.

4. If You Find A Problem, Too Bad.

When a user experiences any sort of bugs, complications, or limitations in the program, they will have to wait until the next release and update. This drawback of closed proprietary services is common, but somehow almost expected. When a user runs into a problem with the program, they will have to wait until the platform developers address, fix, test and schedule an update release. When did this become the standard response upon encountering errors? What about the possibility of adding features and customizing the software for your purposes? Forget about it!

If you are a developer and coding is your thing, it does not matter that you posses the skills to fix and customize because you will never see that closed software.

5. User/Lead Caps

It is not enough that marketing automation platforms charge you a fortune, decide what data you receive, withhold access to the software, and make it impossible to address errors or add features, but they even add service caps in a multi-tiered service plan. Depending on the size of your company and what product or services you offer, some may not need to generate thousands of leads. Accordingly, each service plan includes a maximum number of leads. As your business grows and you find out that you can now handle all of these leads, providers will re-categorize and reprice your account to squeeze even more of your marketing budget out of you. All the while, you still are only receiving the reduced, chosen leads for which you pay.

When did these problems become so commonplace? I guess it is true that the one with the money and the software makes the rules. It takes a great deal of nerve and arrogance to demand the sky-high service rates of marketing automation providers and still limit your uses, access, experience and growth. So why has no one done anything about this dissonant dynamic?

There is Hope

Hope has arrived to an industry dominated by elitist proprietary services. While executives from Eloqua, Pardot, Marketo and HubSpot are laughing all the way the bank, changes are happening and the ground is shifting beneath their feet. Open source activists have penetrated into many sectors of the tech industry, and now it has reached the explosive marketing automation sector. What this means, is that the absurdly wealth executives who have gotten away with it so far, are about to learn what universal access to powerful marketing automation software will do to their company. Unless the clients are too wealthy to care about what they spend and too lazy to care about the quality of service, this open alternative will be utilized and will be developed.

A Bright Future

It is clear that the market is flush with opportunity and that marketing automation will continue to play an ever more vital role in growing businesses and organizations. The power of the concept is immense, the results are remarkable, and the service has left much to be desired. Software giants will not and cannot continue to do as they please while getting rich on your revenue. So choose wisely and remember what faults to look out for in a marketing automation service provider. Look to open source solutions like Mautic, a nonprofit development community with the only open source marketing automation software on the market. Now that the faults of the current system are clear and the solution seems to lie in open source transparency, more software and services will continue to pour from this powerful alternative.