Case Study: Using Social Media and Lead Nurturing for Demand Generation
In this detailed case study, Marketo will share the specific programs and tactics they use to drive revenue, including how to use content and social media to generate leads, best practices for lead nurturing and lead scoring, and advanced techniques to measure and forecast marketing's impact on revenue. No theory here, just practical, hands-on advice you can use immediately.
* Jon Miller, VP Marketing, Marketo
32. Key Takeaways Focus on the entire revenue cycle, not just the top of the funnel Don’t contact a lead before its time Make sure prospects keep moving and don’t sit idle Understand latent buying and active buying and follow-up accordingly Use forecasting to turn marketing from a cost center into a revenue driver
1. Model Your Revenue StagesTraditional sales methodologies, such as SPIN Selling and Miller-Heiman, provide standard benchmarks and best practices for the sales function, e.g. Stage 1 is 10% likely to close, Stage 5 is 70% likely, etc.However, marketing is typically less rigorous.These sales methodologies do not provide a sufficient view of what is coming from the earlier stages of the revenue process; put simply, they leave marketing out and are therefore limited for modern forecasting.That is why the first step in making a marketing forecast is defining the revenue stages a prospect can pass through. Explain Marketo stages.Explain transitions:A person may move from “Review New Names” to “Prospect” if they have revenue above $100 million a year and are in one of the target industriesA “Prospect” may move to “Lead” when the lead score goes above 100 pointsA “Prospect” may move to “Inactive” if they have not responded to any campaigns or visited the website in more than six monthsAn leads in “Inactive” may move back to “Prospect” if they respond to a new program
What I want to focus on here is two models that you can use to calculate the ROI yourself. In the first, the key is to estimate
Once you’ve defined your Buying Stages and Profiles, you can map all your existing content to each cell grid and start sending the right content to your prospects.This is often implemented as a drip campaign, which can be automated by marketing automation, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be a drip campaign. As long as you are consistent about sending out content, and you are diligent about segmenting your lists to sent the right content to each buyer profile and stage, then you are doing lead nurturing. Thinking about nurturing usually highlights where marketers need more content. In fact, not having enough content is probably the biggest concern I hear from marketers that want to get started with lead nurturing. To them I say, don’t worry about it! It’s better to get started right away with a small nurturing campaign, even if you can’t customize it by all your profiles or stages, and then continually adapt and improve it as you get more content. As long as you have a vision and roadmap for where you want to get to, it’s always better to start small, deliver value quickly, and then evolve than to get bogged down in a long implementation. Finally, even when you have built out all your content, you can continue to evolve and improve your nurturing processes with testing and optimizing. Which subject lines work best? What messages resonate the most? Which campaigns most effectively move people to the next stage? By tracking these metrics, you can tune your lead nurturing to deliver even better results over time.
5. Model Flow through the Revenue StagesThe final analytical step in the process is to project everything forward by taking your existing and new leads and modeling how they will convert through the various revenue stages over time. Explain slideNote: 65% of all deals; heavy spend on marketingIf your understanding of conversion rates and inputs are accurate, you will create a solid projection of what the revenue funnel will deliver in future periods.
Measuring how these conversion rates vary by type is a great way to measure marketing effectiveness. Actual Marketo slide to show conversion rates over the last yearTracking how the rates change over time is a great way to monitor marketing performance. If the percent of fast movers is declining, perhaps it is a sign of deteriorating lead quality. If the percentage of leads converting out of inventory increases, perhaps you are doing a better job keeping leads engaged with nurturing.Also:Do leads from certain sources convert better than other sources? If so, perhaps you should invest more in those. Notice orange bar - model
This type of presentation is useful to show actual results compared to forecast and plan, as well as how the forecast changes over time. The example shows actual results for the current month and a forecast for the next three months; it also shows the forecasts from the prior four months compared to actual results. This presentation can also illustrate the forecast for other revenue stages such as new prospects, marketing qualified leads, even closed bookings.
3. Measure Revenue Stage ConversionAt the core of your marketing forecast is an accurate understanding of how each lead type moves through the various revenue stages in terms of conversion percentage and velocity. Straightforward for Gate and SLA stages, since it is easy to know when to measure the conversion rate. A Gate stage conversion happens instantly, so the conversion rate for any period is simply the number of leads that passed the gate divided by the number that entered the gate. For an SLA stage, wait until after the SLA time is met to make the measurement; for an SLA of 14 days, you can measure an accurate conversion as long as you do it 14 days or more after the period is over. On the other hand, the calculation for an Inventory stage is significantly more complicated. Because leads can sit in the inventory pool for an indefinite period, you need to consider time when thinking about conversion. Any calculation that does not properly reflect this will suffer from inaccuracies and distortions. First, take all the leads that enter an inventory in a given month (or quarter) and measure the percent that convert down your “happy path” within the same month. This is a measurement of the quality of the incoming leads. Second, take all the leads that are sitting in the inventory at the beginning of the month and measure the percent of those that convert in a given month. This is a measurement of your nurturing effectiveness. Third, repeat the calculations for detour stages such as “Inactive” or “Lost”. Finally, combine all the results to estimate the number of leads that will be left in the inventory at the end of the period. Then you can repeat the second and third calculations projecting forward to estimate what conversion looks like over time.Explain slide
As we've all heard before, simple forms convert better, but the question is, how much better? Is the extra information worth the reduced conversion rate? Are certain types of information more costly in terms of conversion rate? I decided to use landing page testing to find out.The difference in the cost per conversion between the short and medium forms is $3.70, between the medium and long forms is $6.96, and between the short and long forms is $10.67. This means that each additional piece of information costs $1.85, and that asking for a phone number (the most invasive of all the fields) costs more than $5.00. At these prices, the conclusion was obvious: keep only the short form and turn off the other versions.As much as my sales team and I would like that information, it is not worth paying for these extra fields. Fortunately, this type of information is available from a variety of data cleansing and augmentation vendors, usually for as little as $1.00 for all the information you need.
Explain the chartLong charts get you good leads is the theory, but does it work in practiceJon to give example…