The Online Marketing Cycle and Marketing Automation Software, conclusion

In a couple of posts last week, I described our recent success in putting into place a lead generation program using a marketing automation system from Marketo. It's been very successful, and each week we are turning over a record number of qualified leads to our sales organization. The first two posts dealt with how this whole thing worked. However, there were some bumps along the road, and I'm going to talk about those bumps today.

The first problem we had is that we had no experience in a few key areas: best practices around landing pages, and "lead scoring," the system whereby points are assigned based on activities people take on your website, downloading papers from direct marketing, etc. But the more pressing issue was one of content: if we were doing to take our direct marketing program to a higher level, we needed content (white papers, case studies, etc.) with which to entice our email recipients.

As soon as we deployed Marketo, replacing all of our web forms and landing pages, we discovered an annoying problem: junk responses (AKA spam). For those of you not familiar with this issue, it turns out that hackers have created a series of bots that can search websites for forms, and then fill in those forms with spam. You think it's annoying to get Viagra ads in your inbox? Imagine how annoying it is to get it inside of a marketing automation system. (Just to be clear: these bots are not actually filling in this forms, but rather they capture information about the program that reads the forms, and they send spam data directly to that program in a format that gets through).

There is a simple, though inelegant, solution to form-spam: a captcha. Captchas are those images of distorted letters that you must read and fill in in order to confirm that you are a live person rather than a bot. Annoying, yes, but entirely useful. You would think that any software that is routinely used to build web forms would have this capability built-in, but it's absent from Marketo - an absence that the companys says it will address. In the meantime, we've been working on deploying our own captchas on the Marketo forms, which requires custom programming, which takes time. In the meantime, we're stuck with lots of junk being entered into our system every day.

The long-term issues focused on our lack of experience in deploying landing pages conforming to best practices, maximizing our return on investment for our ads. We could have hired a consultant to help us, but in fact it's difficult to find consultants with expertise in these areas - especially in the midwest. Additionally, I'm a firm believer in letting my people stretch themselves, and I was interested in learning more about this anyway. So our solution? Read a bunch of articles, try something, watch the results, and improve it. That's what we've been doing - we post two landing pages for each ad, with one variation between each pair (e.g., different offers, different graphics, one short page and one long page, etc.), rotate them equally, and we watch the results. When there's a clear performance advantage to one, we update all of our landing pages with that new change, and then we test something else. To that end, we've been doing fairly well with our conversion rates.

The other lack of experience was in lead scoring. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the real value of lead scoring builds up over time, and so I wasn't expecting much out of this in the first few months. Our target customers take their time in deciding to launch a new project, and they do lots of investigation before they're really ready to talk to us - in some cases, they can spend a year or two thinking about it before they're ready to talk to us seriously. (Really, no joke - our record is 4 years between the time someone first made contact, and when they were ready to launch a project to evaluate and deploy a new ERP system.)

As I wrote in my earlier post, we decide to make lead qualification a manual process for the time being, rather than relying on lead scoring. We'll continue to learn more about lead scoring as we go along, and hopefully the scores of our visitors will start building up over time in a meaningful way.

In the meantime, I am exploring additional tools that may be useful. My wish list is as follows:

1) Data append service, so when someone fills out the minimal information that we request on the website, the other fields that we want (e.g., industry, revenue, etc.) gets automatically added in.
2) Web site visitor tracking. While we use an analytics package, there are more advanced packages like the one from NetFactor called VisitorTrack that captures data about browsers on your website and appends info from several sources, so you see a record of the companies (but not the individuals) that browse your site.

Ideally, this would all be integrated into a single package with an automation tool like Marketo. That would be the killer web marketing solution, in my opinion.