It's All About Revenue: The Revenue Marketing Blog

Is Eastern Europe the Next Email Marketing Frontier? [CHART]

Andrew Stivelman — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:54:31 +0000

by Andrew Stivelman | Tweet this

With Eloqua Experience Europe just around the corner, I started to wonder how many, if any, attendees from countries from the former Iron Curtain have participated in previous Eloqua events.

Although Russia is of particular interest to me (in a former career I was a Russian language interpreter and translator), I decided to take a look at how email marketing is progressing in five countries out if Internet and social media (in this case Facebook) usage are directly proportional to the country’s population.

As a result of this exercise, I learned, interestingly enough, that based on each of these five country’s population in 2012, the Czech Republic has the largest number of Internet users per capita. This fact surprised me: I expected to see the largest number of users in the Russian Federation based on the sheer size of the population. Perhaps people are afraid to venture into this part of the world, but the numbers of /Internet and email users are increasing dramatically, due to fast internet connections, access to the outside world and the latest technology.

This article, 10 things marketers need to know about Russia, is a fascinating glimpse into how to overcome those fears. It also seems that in the smaller of these nations, Facebook usage is becoming more and more popular as compared to the number of Internet users. By inference, and from my experiences working with Soviet, and then Russian groups over the years, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland have traditionally been more progressive than their (then Soviet) and Russian counterparts. Bear in mind that it’s only since the early 90s that the Curtain came down, so it will not be easy to penetrate these markets.

I also learned that television is not the way most younger Russians get their information: it’s via the Internet, YouTube, smartphones, and other media. There are many email marketing providers popping up in Russia, and the terminology has not yet evolved to include native Russian words to describe Marketing Automation functionality: the words have literally been “Russian-ized”, meaning a direct Cyrillic representation of the sound of the English terms. This is perhaps an indication of how this part of the world recognizes that this will be how to reach millions of customers and are rushing to understand and use this terminology to attract worldwide customers who wish to break into this market.

Да здравствует автоматизация маркетинга! (Or “Long live marketing automation!”)

Is Eastern Europe the Next Email Marketing Frontier? [CHART] is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing

Creative Marketing in a Data-Driven Culture

Eloqua — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 04:00:04 +0000

by Eloqua | Tweet this

Marketing is driven by many components, making it difficult to balance between creative and data-driven concepts. The latest advances in the behavioural sciences reveal the hidden effectiveness of marketing – and suggest that your finance director may not be right about everything.

Eloqua Experience Europe attendees will hear from Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman, Ogilvy Group UK in London 23-25 June. Since joining the agency in 1988, Sutherland has worked on key accounts including Amex, BT, Compaq, Microsoft, IBM, BUPA, easyJet, and Unilever. Sutherland was appointed Creative Director of OgilvyOne in 1997 and ECD in 1998. In 2005 he was appointed Vice Chairman on the Ogilvy Group in the UK.

Sutherland will deliver a keynote address at Eloqua Experience Europe at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel in London, where he will underscore behavioral trends and developments. To preview his session, Sutherland shared how different behaviour-driven concepts should be shaping your creative marketing strategy.

You’ve cited “measurebation” as a fetish for obtaining or analyzing measurements. Can you explain why this concept significant to B2B marketers and the principles of customer experience?

Rory Sutherland: The availability of behavioural data, “big” or not, is of vital importance to marketers. It can be used to better understand consumer behaviour, to enhance service levels, to better direct investment – and to perform really valuable tests and experiments quickly and at low cost. I’m a fan.

BUT, in the wrong hands (or minds), the availability of this data, not all of which is useful or valuable, may be badly used. First of all, it may be used to create the wrong kind of metrics – based on chasing what is measurable, not what is important. It may lead to an excessive targets culture – where targets are pursued and models followed – not because they are especially valuable, but because it allows the person following those targets to justify his existence. And it may lead to what Hayek called “Habits of mind inappropriate to the field in which they have been formed.” In other words, people will try to model human behaviour (which is a complex system) as though it were Newtonian physics. This is a profoundly mistaken view of the world – as any good scientist or physicist will tell you.

Human behaviour will never be perfectly predictable or deterministic – much as the finance function may want it to be so. Our models need to acknowledge this – and marketing needs to push back sometimes against the constant demands for more “accountability”.

Can you speak to the “game theory” as it relates to the notion of customer loyalty?

RS: One of the greatest social scientists of the age, Jon Elster, remarked that it is impossible to understand most human behaviour without understanding game theory. The same applies to network theory, path dependency, etc. Yet conventional economic models are completely blind to this. That is why the increasing incursions of standard economic thinking into all aspects of business decision-making needs to be resisted.

Marketers are obviously quantitatively focused, but you’ve acknowledged that “value” is subjective. Can you explain the distinction between perceived and actual value as it relates to marketing communications?

RS: The human brain has not evolved to perceive the world objectively – indeed, had it done so, we would have all died out years ago. We see things relatively, contextually, and using a multi-modular brain, which will apply different frames and tools according to the situation we find ourselves in. That is why we need marketing. Everything else is commentary.

You’ve cited the tactic of inventing or popularizing a word or phrase to create a perceived “norm”. Many marketers are employing content marketing tactics to do just this. What are some of the primary considerations you’d encourage B2B marketers to be conscious of when developing their messaging strategies?

RS: A very simple approach is to look at what your competitors do and to then try and do something better. You do not have to be right in business; you just need to be less stupid than your competitors. It is quite likely that your competitors are making a lot of naive assumptions about how people decide. For instance they will assume that people decide individually, independently and rationally to “maximise their expected utility”. In fact our mode of decision-making is heuristic, loss-averse and social: common patterns of behaviour include habit (“do what I did last time”) and social copying – (“do what everyone else does.”) Once you realise this, you do strategy differently.

To that end, you’ve also talked about the next revolution being psychological, rather than technological, which is a particularly interesting topic to technology-focused marketers. How do technological-minded marketers address this change?

RS: There is a danger that technology marketers, being injected into an engineering culture, get subjected to left-brain bullying by their colleagues. But what I think the new advances in the social sciences make possible is a really thorough defence of quite a few of the marketing practices which people of an over-rationalistic disposition (finance, engineering, procurement) have traditionally derided as irrational.

Click here to learn more about Eloqua Experience Europe, and to register!

Creative Marketing in a Data-Driven Culture is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing

Back to Basics: 6 Quick Social Media Marketing Tips

Lauren Harper — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 05:32:05 +0000

by Lauren Harper | Tweet this

Social media is still a new frontier for many marketers. With the emergence of what seems like an inordinate amount of social sites and tools, figuring out how to get started and ramp up your efforts with social media marketing can be confusing. So you’ve set up your Facebook page, Google+ page, and your Twitter profile…now what?

Here are 6 quick tips to set your organization up for social success:

1) Unless you are speaking directly to someone on Twitter, be sure to put a character before someone’s Twitter handle when tweeting at or about him/her. For example:

@LaurenEHarper You are awesome! (This is a conversational tweet that goes directly to me and only people that follow us both will be able to see this.)

. @LaurenEHarper is awesome! (This is a tweet about me that can be seen by all of your followers because there is a character in front of the @ sign.)

2) Hashtags are your friend and your enemy.
Using hashtags on Twitter is a great way explain the topic you are tweeting about (i.e. #sales), and to get your content found on Twitter. However, there IS such a thing as too many hashtags. Using too many hashtags can come off as annoying to your followers, and runs the risk of looking like spam. A good rule of thumb is to keep it to 3 hashtags per tweet. #b2b #modernmarketing #ee13

3) Share other people’s content (OPC)!
When you attend a conference or event, you’re there to hear thought leadership from multiple people speaking on a variety of different topics. Treat your social channels the same way. Provide multiple viewpoints, from multiple sources. Hint: People like it when their content gets shared! This is also a great way to network, as it can provide a great opportunity for engaging someone in conversation, and encourage others to share.

4) Create lists to segment and enhance your relevance.
Whether you’re on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, lists are a great way to filter content. Lists allow you to follow as many people as you want, and mine the value of each of these people.

Twitter: create lists of people based on industry, job description, customer, vendor, etc. I personally follow mostly sales and marketing people on Twitter, so I have lists of the marketing and sales folks whose tweets I know I don’t want to miss. You also can create lists based on specific keywords or hashtags. If you use third party tools such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, you can set those searches up as permanent columns in your dashboard. Or you can follow lists that other’s have created, which you can find on their Twitter profile.

Facebook: On your personal Facebook page you can create lists under “friends.” This way if you want to follow your customers, colleagues, etc., you can have them all in a specific list and you won’t miss any of their updates.

Google+: The customizable”circles” feature is a great tool to group people and content into specific categories (i.e. Social Media Experts, Marketing Influencers, Modern Marketers, etc.)

5) Repost your posts
It’s okay to tweet out an old blog post that you’ve tweeted before. Odds are not every single one of your followers will see every one of your tweets. When you come out with a new blog post, tweet about it that day, two weeks later, and then 3 months later (assuming it’s still relevant). You can even say in the tweet that it’s an older blog post, for example: “3 Ways to Engage Prospects [URL]

6) Take LOTS of pictures
Let’s be honest: who doesn’t love seeing pictures of themselves or people they know? Pictures are an amazing way to stay engaged with your fans, followers, and customers. The best part? They work for virtually every social channel. We at Eloqua get the most engagement on our Facebook page whenever we post a picture or a photo album. Pinterest is all about pictures, and so is Instagram. With one photo, you can post it on Instagram, tweet that out, AND have it upload to your Facebook page in one swoop. Google+ also just did a huge upgrade on their photo sharing and enhancing capabilities.

Bonus Tip: Schedule posts- but don’t lose engagement. There are a plethora of social media platforms out there that allow you to schedule posts on Twitter, Facebook, etc. (Check out Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, or Buffer- they all are free tools.) If you decide to schedule out your tweets or Facebook posts, make sure to carve out time throughout the day to respond, thank, or otherwise engage with anyone who has responded or retweeted your posts.

Looking for more social media best practices? Check out Eloqua’s Grande Guide for the Social CMO.

Back to Basics: 6 Quick Social Media Marketing Tips is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing

6 Ways To Maximize Your Webinars With Automation Technology

Amanda Batista — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:00:03 +0000

by Amanda Batista | Tweet this

Marketers tap a variety of communication and engagement tactics across all channels to build relationships and interact with prospects and customers. Webinars, in particular, are a great tool to connect with your audiences in a meaningful way — on their terms. A majority (61%) of marketers surveyed cite webinars as an effective content marketing tactic, according to the CMI and MarketingProfs report B2B Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends–North America.

B2B organizations are feeling the wrath of a buyer-driven marketplace, and are increasingly challenged to “get permission” to interact with their target audiences. But webinars provide marketers with a unique opt-in opportunity, as an online event registration is in many cases a declaration of interest in engaging with a solution provider — if only for their content.

Live webinars are appealing for marketers because an online event provides an effective way to support brand awareness, demonstrate thought leadership and credibility, and support an engagement entry point through the sales cycle (all the way to product demonstrations). Webinars create value for prospects and customers because they can engage with brands and access content without having to travel. Today’s on-demand culture is supported with always accessible, relevant webinar content.

Marketing automation adds a power punch to your webinars. Our benchmark data shows that automated pre- and post-webinar reminders can increase attendance by 32%.

With an integrated approach to data and profile management, you can maximize the value of your technology investments, and support effective contact engagement. Here are 6 tips to leverage marketing automation for your next webinar:

Trigger event excitement- Send an interactive asset to registrants, such as a video or podcast, highlighting the theme of the event, to get people excited about the content and encourage social sharing.
Collect Q&A information- Record the questions asked by attendees during a webinar and integrate that data into your CRM to provide sales with deeper intelligence and context for follow-up calls, and to further qualify the opportunity.
Segment your audience into groups based on key attributes, such as industry vertical, geography, or specific preference. This helps you refine your message and understand which prospects are most likely to convert and why. Segmenting can help reduce list decay and shorten the buy cycle.
Build drip email campaigns to help move webinar leads from one stage to the next, and progress to conversion. Integrating automation with your webinars offers greater visibility into buyer stage, so you can improve your tactical approach.
Match your content to your channel or target your invitations to people who you know have expressed interest in your topic. Rather than focusing on the need to cover a ton of ground, focus on exploring one topic in detail to support sound prospect education.
Score the names generated from webinars- This will support your sales teams so they don’t have to waste time placing calls to the wrong leads. While many names sourced through webinars are early stage, lead nurturing will ensure those names are cultivated over time and scoring will ensure that they automatically get routed to the right person for follow up when the time is appropriate.

With an integrated data process in place, marketers can improve key performance indicators (KPIs) in their campaigns including open, click through and conversion rates from leads to opportunities.

Check out our 40 Must-See Charts for more benchmark data to help you maximize your event marketing!

6 Ways To Maximize Your Webinars With Automation Technology is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing

How To Put Twitter Lead Generation Cards To Work With Marketing Automation

Joel Rothman — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:48 +0000

by Joel Rothman | Tweet this

Twitter recently announced an addition to its suite of Twitter Cards called Lead Generation Cards. Twitter cards are the ubiquitous additional information that often shows up under a tweet. Lead Generation cards allow for Lead Generation activities to happen directly from within twitter (both web and support clients).

The Lead Generation Card enables users to easily and securely share their email address with a business without leaving Twitter or having to fill out a form.

When someone expands your Tweet, they see a description of the offer and a call to action. Their name, @username, and email address are already pre-filled within the Card. The user simply clicks a button to send this information directly (and securely) to you.

You can easily embed a call to action inside a tweet. When this call to action is clicked, Twitter can fire information (such as Twitter handle and Email address) directly into an Eloqua Form, where you can take that information and process it just like any other Form submission.

Wondering how Twitter’s Lead Gen Cards can be instrumental in driving a lower cost-per-lead compared with marketing automation? It’s a very streamlined process. The marketer creates a call to action, which shows up as a button. When someone clicks that button, that information is passed over into Eloqua. We capture that interaction as a form submission. It’s a simple interaction that allows for requests for additional information, entering into promotions or just a pass through to sales. And it’s very simple to tie into Eloqua:

1. Create Form in Eloqua

In Eloqua, create a Form. Twitter has the ability to send in the following standard fields:

- Twitter Handle

- Name

- Email address

You also can create certain custom fields, such as “Campaign ID” or “Lead Source”, if those are required for your process. Create the field that you would like to map. Create the appropriate processing step (see this article for information on creating forms).

2. Create the Lead Gen Card in Twitter

In order to use this functionality, you must have a Twitter advertising account and it must be enabled. To enable the account, speak to your Twitter account representative.

Check out this article on Topliners for more information on how to implement Lead Generation Cards in Eloqua.

How To Put Twitter Lead Generation Cards To Work With Marketing Automation is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing

Is Your Industry Hitting the Click Through Rate Mark? [CHART]

John Katsoulis — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 12:22:18 +0000

by John Katsoulis | Tweet this

Our marketing efforts only matter if people respond or click through our requests to engage with them. So for this week’s chart, we got right in the weeds and compared Average Click Through Rates (CTRs) across industries.

Having worked in high-tech for almost 15 years, I assumed that B2B marketing for technology solutions would at least be in the top 5, but the data presented a pleasant surprise (given my role as the vertical product marketing guy at Oracle Eloqua) with a host of great modern marketing activity across industries with Industrial Manufacturing topping the list:

This chart highlights the top 5 performing industries, but the results across all industries also are included at the bottom of this post.

Why would Industrial Manufacturing have click through rates almost three times the average? There is no easy way to answer this question, but taking some facts about how marketing automation is used by this industry into account, my first assumption is the role the channel “plays” – specifically that modern marketers in this industry (as well and Insurance) are primarily marketing to a channel (sales, buyer, etc.) and that the information sent is normally what that keeps the relationship alive. Other variables, including the notion of known sender versus unknown, could impact the numbers. We’ll take close look at how this plays out in my next chart of the week. Stay tuned and feel free to send any questions, comments or ideas.

Average Click Through Rates By Industry (2012 data)

	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
Industrial Manufacturing	7.03%	5.01%	6.79%	5.40%
Real Estate	4.12%	2.41%	3.78%	2.67%
Insurance	3.52%	2.36%	3.49%	2.76%
Travel & Transportation	3.40%	2.29%	2.70%	2.56%
Education	2.75%	1.06%	1.53%	1.64%
Finance	2.71%	4.05%	4.86%	5.24%
Pharma	2.49%	3.06%	5.10%	5.47%
Professional Services	2.45%	1.93%	2.19%	2.23%
High Tech Manufacturing	2.36%	2.36%	1.94%	1.81%
Media	2.20%	1.75%	2.00%	2.78%
Retail	2.18%	2.31%	4.49%	2.70%
Unclassified	2.16%	1.96%	1.86%	1.68%
Entertainment	2.05%	1.62%	2.52%	5.34%
Asset Management	2.04%	1.79%	3.95%	2.08%
Construction	2.03%	0.81%	2.06%	1.86%
Non Profit	1.99%	1.36%	1.39%	2.01%
Services	1.96%	1.33%	1.50%	1.31%
Health Care	1.83%	5.70%	2.89%	1.70%
Energy & Resources	1.74%	6.57%	1.55%	3.20%
Telco	1.43%	1.88%	1.93%	1.98%
Wholesale & Warehousing	1.41%	0.95%	1.42%	1.10%
Medical Devices	0.67%	0.66%	0.72%	0.61%

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Is Your Industry Hitting the Click Through Rate Mark? [CHART] is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing

Think Like a Publisher: 5 Storytelling Rules for Marketers [DECK]

Amanda Batista — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:31:14 +0000

by Amanda Batista | Tweet this

Buyers are in control, and that’s a shift marketers have been challenged to roll with across all their initiatives. To fulfill the need for value-based communications and engagement, marketers are leveraging content marketing strategies to support their communities’ information needs and build a relationship as a trusted advisor. A vast majority (80%) of business decision-makers prefer to receive information about a company in a series of content versus traditional marketing tactics, according to Demand Gen Report’s Content Preferences Survey. Additionally, nearly 82% of B2B buyers have less time to devote to reading and research — this puts a premium on buyers’ time. Are you cultivating a role in the ‘circle of trust’?

Our friends at Kapost hosted Content Marketing Bootcamp in Boston this week, where nearly 400 content marketers and demand gen professionals came together for knowledge and information exchange around best content practices.

As if marketers didn’t already wear many hats, “storyteller” has become another task to manage, for brand awareness, audience engagement, and providing value that builds trust. If this sounds like “just another daunting role” to pick up, we’ve got you covered. It’s a must-have role, by the way! Here are 5 storytelling rules for the marketer.

Don’t be vain- Carly Simon said it best: this song is not about you. Effective content is about the goals, problems, and shared interests of your audiences and community. We build connections and relationships with content that delights, educates, and compels people to take action.
Keep it Contextual- Borrow basic journalism principles (who, what, why, where, when, and how) to convey that your content is centered on its consumers and their interests, as well as the information and changes that affect them in their everyday roles.
Find your format- What’s your company’s signature? Think about the structure, design, and delivery methods that are most relevant to your content consumer audience, and keep them coming back for more with inventoried content.
Take cues from consumption- Honor your content consumer’s ‘right to choose’ by providing information that covers different subject areas in multiple formats (i.e. blogs, infographics, white papers, etc.) Empower your content consumer by surveying them directly to find out and adapt to their preferences.
Make corporate compelling- Some organizations have more flexibility than others when it comes to the vibrancy and “color’” of your content marketing. It can be difficult to step outside corporate parameters with limiting marketing realities. But you can easily leverage your social media channels, customer communities, and blogs to create more personalized corporate communications and spread your own word.

Looking for more tips, tricks, and examples of cool content marketing? Check out the deck from yesterday’s Bootcamp presentation, ‘Think Like a Publisher: 5 Storytelling Rules for the Marketer”

Think Like a Publisher: 5 Storytelling Rules for the Marketer from Eloqua

Think Like a Publisher: 5 Storytelling Rules for Marketers [DECK] is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing

European Markie Awards Finalists Announced

Eloqua — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 04:00:04 +0000

by Eloqua | Tweet this

It’s that time again! Finalists for the European Markie Awards have been announced! Winners will be revealed during Eloqua Experience Europe, 25-26 June in London. The Markies honor strategic, collaborative, and tactical marketing and sales innovation. Check out this year’s finalists:

Best Alignment of Marketing and Sales in Europe

Cincom Systems Inc. – tasked with managing pervasive complexity across lengthy sales cycles, the company’s US counterparts had faced similar challenges the year before, so following the “bright spots” methodology outlined in “Switch” the European team adopted their sales enablement practices, and implemented them for its own sales structure. Marketing is now more involved throughout the sales cycle to ensure that the sales team has the materials and messaging required at each touch point, and sales is involved in the creation of marketing materials to ensure they reflect what they hear during their conversations prospect discussions, and it can actually be utilized.

Basware Oyj – Under the mantra of “no lead left behind” Basware initiated a program in 2012 to implement a robust lead and opportunity management regime, defining an integrated process, establishing agreed quality metrics, qualification criteria, and process adherence reporting. The program objective was to provide marketing and sales with a common set of expectations for lead management and conversion to opportunity which was consequently carried through into the design, implementation and adoption phases of the program.

Best European Lead Scoring Programme

DocuSign – To increase conversion, DocuSign implemented account-based scoring with Eloqua. DocuSign ramped up its lead scoring model by applying the engagement scores across leads of the same account to form an account-based score. The team uses the new account-based score to predict and validate which likely opportunities sales should focus on. For every additional active lead on an account, DocuSign sees a 23% increase in the chance that the deal will close. With greater visibility into lead flow, the company can accelerate the pipeline by helping the sales team focus on deals more likely to close.

Swiss Post Solutions – Focused on improving its lead handoff process, the organization implemented an agreed-upon lead scoring model generated by all stakeholders to improve lead quality confidence. As a result the marketing team has implemented a multi-solution lead scorning that’s fully integrated with the CRM system.

Best European Lead Nurturing Programme

Swiss Post Solutions – Challenged to support marketing for a new solution to its UK portolio, the marketing team created a fully‐integrated program with the CRM system to provides sales visibility into marketing qualified leads by measuring content engagement. The company has seen an “enormous” increase in the number of sales converted leads, the value of these as opportunities in the sales pipeline (up 291%) and the overall ROI on the campaign (up more than 500%).

European Event Nirvana

Moog Industrial Group – The SPS/IPC Drives Exhibition is critical to Moog’s market positioning, because is the trade show to be face to face with clients and provides the opportunity to touch base with partners, customers, vendors and applicants. By leveraging marketing automation, the company enhanced its event management process and aligned sales and marketing to increase business impact.

Thermo Fisher Scientific – Prior to Eloqua and the AppCloud for Adobe Connect, customer facing product webinars were conducted using five separate software applications. This method caused frequent errors and was complicated, laborious, and extremely inefficient. With the advent of Eloqua and its AppCloud for Adobe® Connect®, webinar campaign deployment and management are fully automated including all aspects of the notification, registration, and follow-up processes. Building the webinar assets and “programming” the Campaign Canvass (E10) has significantly reduced development time, reduced errors, and enhanced staff productivity. With the implementation of automation through Eloqua and the AppCloud for Adobe Connect, webinars have become the largest source of sales qualified (sales-ready) leads for our division.

European Rookie of the Year

Rautaruukki –Within the first three months from Eloqua set-up, the marketing team tripled the number of leads generated, launched hugely successful awareness and nurturing campaigns, and create buzz in new markets. Starting with the challenge of routing leads to the sales team who don’t use smartphones and spend their days out on site – the team built an intricate automation program that sends form generated leads directly to the mobile phones of the salespeople as an SMS.

Royal Philips Electronics – Philips Consumer Lifestyle, as part of Royal Philips Electronics, recognizes the value of CRM, and has a multi-year CRM B2C strategy in place to fully capitalize on this. This strategy moves Philips CRM capabilities from basic email marketing to differentiated and consistent multi-channel experiences with the support Eloqua. In 2012 the program was started with proof of concept to assess which value Marketing automation can bring to Philips. This proof of concept resulted in the approval of a global rollout to 40+ countries by the executive committee.

Most Creative European Marketing Campaign

Atos – Atos became Worldwide IT Partner to the IOC in 2002 but had never run a sales enablement campaign around a specific Olympic Games. The Atos London 2012 Campaign combined the ultimate in visibility and hospitality with a multi faceted communications programme, including the media masterstroke of the Games: lanyard sponsorship resulting in the prominent display of Atos branding around the necks of the world’s most influential figures. For the first time the marketing team used an automated digital sales enablement strategy to leverage the huge awareness and goodwill generated by the company’s Olympic involvement to capture and nurture leads, directly generating new business. This was a stunning success, already providing an amazing €131m of new business representing an immediate ROI of 44:1.

PTC – Tasked with growing brand awareness, brand perception, and related adoption of a newly introduced product and release (PTC Creo 2.0), PTC created the “Engineering Excellence” marketing campaign. This marketing initiative took a unique and innovative approach to promoting the product brand, focuses on how PTC customers (rapidly-evolving, globally distributed manufacturers) positively impact the lives of their customers with their products. Delighting their needs and wants, the campaign highlights how each manufacturer’s excellence in engineering is fundamental to meeting the needs of their customers, and how PTC and PTC Creo support that.

TalkTalk Business – The ‘What’s Your Business Grade?’ Campaign was a multi stage strategy conceived to achieve the dual goals of generating leads qualified to a very high standard to aid the sales process, and promoting the TalkTalk Business brand towards our desired position of telecoms and IT industry thought leaders. Stage one aroused the interest of the market with an industry telecoms and technology benchmark survey. Stage two enticed them to reveal their own position so they could compare their performance against their surveyed peers. Stage three used the information captured to invite recipients to participate in a tailored ‘Future Fit View’ delivering a conveyor belt of highly qualified leads to the sales team. An Eloqua automated email strategy nurtured leads through the campaign delivering a revenue pipeline of £1.3m at an ROI of 20:1.

See you at the European Markie Awards during Eloqua Experience Europe 2013 in London! Follow the event discussion on Twitter #EE13

European Markie Awards Finalists Announced is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing

5 Tips for Creating Effective B2B Marketing Videos

contributor — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 09:43:30 +0000

by contributor | Tweet this

Today’s blog post comes courtesy of Phil Donaldson, Director of Marketing at PropelGrowth, a B2B financial services marketing firm in Princeton, NJ. He provides marketing strategy and tactics that drive content marketing programs for companies seeking to provide value to their customers. Phil is also a composer and musician who will use any opportunity he can to create music.

Video presents another unique challenge in content marketing, and B2B marketers are discussing and blogging on the topic with increasing fervor. In fact, a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs cites video as a leading marketing tactic used by B2B marketers. Because it saves time for buyers — especially busy senior executives — video has become a significant “go-to” content asset. As buyers become decreasingly trusting in sales content, capturing the voice of the customer helps support value add relationships.

With more tech buyers conducting research over mobile devices, video is easier to consume than, say, a white paper. According to a Forbes study, viewers retain 50% more information from watching video. Now, that’s efficiency!

YouTube garners around 4 billion views daily. For tech marketers, video has become a “must have.” With such growth and attention for video, you can believe that competition for audience attention will be high. Here are five tips to help you leverage video to gain attention, get customers to the next step of the buying journey, and shorten sales cycles

1. Know Your Buyer, Identify Their Need

Your company’s “best of breed” claim or long track record of [place boastful claim here] is not what buyers are looking for. It’s about their need to solve a business problem; not your need to brag. Try interviewing customers to find out why they purchased your solution. Get with Sales and find out what they’re hearing from prospects and customers. Meet your audience where they are with valuable content that enlightens and entertains. This may seem like a “well, duh!” issue, but you’d be surprised at how many people are talking about themselves.

2. Be Aware of the Buying Stage Your Video is Targeting

Are you looking to target the top or the bottom of the funnel? Do you seek to build awareness or facilitate the evaluation process? If you’re looking to be strategic in your marketing, each video needs to be informed by where in the buying process your target buyer happens to be. For instance, IT buyers prefer product demos at the evaluation stage. So, providing brief demos of specific capabilities can be very helpful. While you’ll want to educate from a higher level at the research stage, you don’t want to miss a golden opportunity for later-stage buyers.

3. Place the Video in a Continuum of Content

Many marketers create single standalone content assets and expect them to do all the heavy lifting in generating leads. This does not work. IT tech buyers tend to engage with 5 content assets before speaking with a salesperson. Your marketing message or story needs to live and build across various content elements. Your buyers will need access to a continuum of content to help them understand their needs and make a buying decision. C-level executives prefer video that is presented with supporting content. A short video embedded in a landing page as an intermediate step to an article or white paper can an effective way to drive conversions.

4. Make It a Tool to Be Shared

Video is a powerful educational and storytelling tool. It helps to create advocates within a target organization. Senior level executives frequently share video with their teams. Likewise, it’s a great tool for customer advocates to use to share content with their managers. Because it’s so easy to share and so quick to watch, video has the potential to deliver your message to people in the prospect organization that your salespeople can’t access.

5. Add Graphic Links to Your Video in Email Content

Adding a thumbnail graphic in an email which links to an online video helps to increase click through rates by 96% over non-video email. Sending emails with embedded video links can help drive conversions. The emails are also easy for the recipient to forward, making it even more likely that the video will gain access to others in the buyer committee.

Video can be a powerful tool in the hands of the right team with a solid marketing strategy and a bit of creativity. When we look back at a future B2B content marketing timeline, no doubt that this point in time will show a tick labeled, “The Age Of Video” (the video version will have lots of echo added when it’s read). What will be your company’s contribution?

For more information on how to captivate buyers with video, check out the white paper, “Promotional Video for Customer-centric Marketing.”

5 Tips for Creating Effective B2B Marketing Videos is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing