Here are the Top 5 Reasons to Visit us at our booth:

1) You’re a new Pardot customer, and you could use some help

Pardot is the easiest to learn Marketing Automation system available today. However, there are often multiple ways to accomplish the same objective in the system. It’s great to have powerful software, but it’s even more important to use it in the most effective manner possible to generate quality sales-ready leads.

Audaxium QuickStart implementations help shorten your learning curve, launch your first campaigns quickly, and get you up to speed on best practices and latest trends in the Marketing Automation community.

2) You’ve been using Pardot for a while, but you’re busy

Most Marketing teams have long lists of ideas for campaigns they would like to run, but they don’t have the resources to get everything done. A typical Marketer’s “to-do” list keeps growing rather than shrinking as tasks get completed.

If you feel that you haven’t gotten enough strategic work done in Pardot or aren’t taking full advantage of the capabilities, why not bring Audaxium in to help? We offer development of drip programs, email campaigns, landing pages, and content marketing strategies.

3) You’re a NetSuite customer and you wish the integration with Pardot worked better

Pardot provides, at no charge, an out-of-the-box connector for NetSuite CRM. It automatically syncs data between the two systems and provides basic reporting capabilities. However, NetSuite has some unique ways that it manages data, so there are steps you need to take to increase the amount and type of data that syncs.

Audaxium can help you configure and optimize this integration in order to segment your lists of customers and prospects in Pardot more effectively, and to deliver to your dashboard better campaign ROI reports.

4) You’re a NetSuite customer and you wish NetSuite were easier to use

NetSuite is in fact a leading system for not only ERP, but also CRM and eCommerce. However, some Marketing and Sales teams are not in love with the capabilities or the ease of use of NetSuite.

This is NOT because NetSuite isn’t a capable CRM tool, but rather because many NetSuite implementations are focused on the requirements of the Finance or Operations team, with little focus on Sales & Marketing.

When NetSuite is configured properly for Sales & Marketing, your team becomes much more productive.

5) You like craft beer or good wine

We really like craft beer and good wine, and we’re always looking for an excuse to buy new friends a drink at the bar at the end of the day. Drop by our booth to say hello, have a chat about Pardot marketing automation, then let’s meet up at the bar to celebrate great software!

READ MORE: http://bit.ly/u0bf2b 

The Importance of Measuring ROMI

It’s stating the obvious to say that B2B marketing teams are being held accountable for a direct relationship between marketing spend and revenue generation. With limited budgets and resources, measuring ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) is critical for determining the best marketing channels to generate quality sales leads that convert to revenue.

Since there’s no “silver bullet” for reaching everyone in a target market, marketers are using multi-channel marketing approaches to build their brands and generate sales leads. SEO, PPC, webinars, whitepapers, eBooks, video, tradeshows, print ads, direct mail, social media… you name it. The question is: How best to divide up your limited marketing budget and overworked resources among all these channels?

The Challenge in Measuring ROMI

The challenge is that rarely will a prospect buy from you because of a single marketing touch, such as a webinar. How did they end up registering for your webinar? Perhaps by clicking on your PPC ad after searching online for something you sell. Then, maybe they read a few pages of a whitepaper you paid a copywriter to write, or watched a short online video you hired a production company to develop. They may even have picked up one of your fancy pens at your tradeshow booth in the past.

What’s the Lead Source? Who knows…

Some CRM systems only allow you to attach one lead source to a closed sale.  Other CRM’s allow multiple lead sources per closed sale, and some even allow you to assign different “weights” to the various marketing touches that contribute. However, as the marketer, do you really know which of these marketing touches is the main reason they bought from you?

The only way to know is to ask the customer directly. Sometimes you can get that information from them or from the sales team, but most of the time they either forget or they chalk it up to something in the sales process that convinced them to buy.

In the end, it’s very difficult to directly associate a 1-to-1 relationship between a specific marketing campaign and a specific closed deal. Also, attempting to accurately track all these specific lead sources from campaign through to closed sale is a daunting task and either difficult or impossible to track in CRM systems. Thus, the challenge in measuring ROMI.

Relative Revenue Contribution

Stop trying to report on how much revenue the Sept. 27th “How to Make a Widget” webinar generated. Instead, flip marketing ROMI reporting on its head and look at it the other way around.  Look at how much revenue each marketing channel “touched”, “helped”, or “contributed to”.  For example… Show me all the revenue that Webinars touched.  Show me all the revenue that Tradeshows touched.  Show me all the revenue that Marketing Automation touched…  etc.  It’s much easier to measure the “Relative Revenue Contribution” of your various marketing channels than it is to measure the discrete ROI from a specific campaign.

Look at each marketing channel in your mix and ask yourself: How much did the channel cost and how much of our total revenue did it “touch” or contribute to, compared to the other channels?

Here’s a very basic example Relative Revenue Contribution ROMI report that illustrates this concept: Sample ROMI report

IMPORTANT NOTE: many (if not all) of the closed deals will have been touched by more than one marketing channel or campaign, so the total revenue touched by all those channels will add up to FAR MORE than your company’s actual annual revenue. Don’t worry about it; that’s not the point. The point is: relatively speaking, which channel contributed the most ROMI?

Relative revenue contribution is much easier to track and report in CRM systems.

Campaign Effectiveness

“But Craig, I still need to know which specific marketing campaigns are more effective than others.”  I agree… absolutely.  You definitely need to know if the “How to Make a Widget” email campaign was more effective at generating leads than than “Top 10 Reasons to Buy New CRM Software” email campaign.  You need to know which messaging, creative, and calls to action are working better than others. Your Marketing Automation or CRM system should give you those reports out of the box, or with minor tweaks. I suggest you stop beating your head against the wall to figure out exactly how much revenue each specific campaign generated.

So what do I do with the Lead Source field?

If you adopt the Relative Contribution ROMI strategy, the dreaded “Lead Source” field becomes less critical. You’re going to be tracking all of the channels/touches that contribute to a deal, rather than trying to decide which is the correct lead source.  You’ll “stamp the passport” of each prospect with the various marketing touches/channels they engage with and that will allow you to easily generate Relative Contribution ROMI reports.

If you need to put something in the Lead Source field, reserve it to track the way you first obtained that Contact or Company information. Did it come from a purchased list, a web form, a tradeshow, or otherwise? Don’t try to use the Lead Source field to measure ROMI.

To make your life easier and learn more about how to setup Relative Revenue Contribution ROMI reporting in your CRM / Marketing Automation system, please contact us.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Have you outgrown NetSuite’s email marketing capabilities?
• Are you tired of low open and clickthrough rates on your email campaigns?
• Still sending generic marketing emails to large lists?
• Need to deliver a higher % of sales-ready leads to your Sales team?
• Don’t have time to deliver the 10+ email touches required to nurture potential leads?

The #1 Challenge in B2B Marketing

Studies have shown that 80% of inbound leads through your website are not ready for a conversation with a salesperson.  Often, when a person fills out a form on your website to learn more about your solutions or your industry, they’re simply doing preliminary research on an issue and it’s not high enough on their priority list to spend time on the phone with you.

The problem is that today’s marketers are charged with doing more with less.  Most marketers just don’t have the time or resources to manually send multiple targeted emails to a lead until they are sales ready.  It often takes months, or even years, to nurture an early-stage lead until they are ready to “shop”.

Marketing Automation Can Help

That’s where Marketing Automation and Lead Nurturing come in.  Pardot is a cloud-based Marketing Automation add-on for NetSuite that provides website and email marketing automation.  Leads are scored, graded, and nurtured until they are deemed sales-ready, and shows your sales team exactly where to spend its time.  That way, they can focus on the leads that are the best fit and the most interested in finding a solution to a problem.

Why Attend the Webinar?

Learn automation best practices, including:

• Send more targeted messages with automatic segmentation of your leads by persona
• Increase lead conversion rates with progressive profiling on web forms
• Automate multi-touch lead nurturing and knowledge marketing campaigns

Pardot is a fully integrated add-on for NetSuite

As a certified SuiteApp partner, Pardot integrates tightly with NetSuite at no extra charge.

• View all prospect activity right from within the CRM system (useful for Salespeople)
• Bi-directionally sync Contacts, Companies, and Custom Fields to keep data current
• Track Opportunity statuses and values for closed loop ROI reporting

View the webinar presentation to learn how Marketing Automation with Pardot can help you deliver a higher percentage of sales-ready leads to your Sales team.

Here at Audaxium, we have been spending a great deal of time talking to customers about how to get off on the right foot when implementing marketing automation software, in this case, Pardot.

These discussions are as unique as our customers, but there are a few constants in the equation that add up to a successful implementation. It’s important to give these careful consideration.

As point of reference, all of our clients sell to other businesses, and they typically have a lot of customers and contacts at those customers. But they also have a keen desire to both generate new leads, and manage leads sent to them by their partners. Our advice below makes the most sense in that context.

So what’s first? Where do we begin?

What first happens is a discussion of the value of marketing automation tools. Times have changed. It’s no longer appropriate to download lists of email addresses and spam them. It’s not valuable to email your entire customer base each week with every message you want to broadcast.

In a nutshell, you’ll be using an application like Pardot to achieve the following:

• Capture Lead Information
• Track Lead and customer behavior on your website and content
• Measure the “sales readiness” of contacts
• Manage the hand off of sales ready leads to the sales team
• Give customers content and offers they are interested in

But you already knew all that. You’re here to learn about your first steps.

Data Scrubbing

The first step is an analysis of your existing data. Just how good is it? This breaks down into two essential questions. How much data that you need to use to segment your database, is missing? Address, email, company size, industry etc. are typical but there may be others. The second question is, how much duplicate information is there?

While improving data quality should be an ongoing task in your organization, and not a one time program, you’ll need to make sure it’s happening as you move ahead with marketing automation. Clean your data.

Make sure you’re removing or merging duplicate email addresses. Put in place metrics in your CRM system to warn users when they are working with incomplete records.

Your database will never become perfect, but place a high degree of importance on the effort to make it so.

Click the green button to read more…

Segmentation

Next is the topic of segmentation and it can be a very easy thing to do, and very difficult at the same time. Whole books are devoted to the topic but we’ll stay focused.

Step one, write down all the ways in which you can categorize your contacts. This includes both the people themselves, and the companies they work for.

I won’t go on and one listing the possible ways to do this. That’s your homework.

Step two, figure out how these categories intersect to create a defined group.

Step three, step back and figure out what segmentation criteria is most important to the selling and marketing process. It’s very important, at this moment, to be able to turn to some data to give you some insight. Belief is not enough to make decisions. What is the profitability of your major segments? What is the revenue contribution from each segment? What is the potential revenue from them?

If you don’t know, go find out.

Now, understand. You don’t have the time or resources to market differently to 57 different segments. You must follow the KISS principle and match your sophistication with your ability to provide value to those segments over the long haul.

Now, what do you have? Perhaps you have your database organized by status, (Customers/Prospect/Leads), Geography, Recency, Product Ownership. Website Behaviour Scoring.

Whatever you have, you should have segments that are identifiable, profitable, and fairly distinct with little overlap.

Finally, try and identify what percent of your database falls outside your segments. You should be comfortable in not marketing to these people. If not, re-evaluate your segments.

Campaign Planning

Now it’s easy. How do you want to engage with each identifiable segment? Just ask yourself; What frequency?, What Content?

But then there’s a myriad of questions. What if they click through? What if they don’t? When should a rep get notified?

Before you get ahead of yourself, you’ll first need to prioritize your nurturing campaigns. You’ll likely find that any particular contact might find themselves qualifying for a couple different content streams. Make sure that admission to one list removes them from others.

As you plan your different campaigns make sure that they all include two things. First there’s the “Do you really want to get stuff from us?” message, and then there’s the “We noticed you haven’t been engaging with what we’ve sent you, do you want out?” message. Both of these are important lest you spam people forever.

Process Mapping

As you map out your campaigns you’ll naturally be thinking about what happens when the contact your’re engaging with becomes interested enough to interact with a human. You’ll want to ensure that you’ve got these rules well defined, and the rules will likely be slightly different for your different segments, especially your leads versus customers.

During the lead nurture to sales handoff you’ll want to get the company data over to your CRM system, and, you’ll want to assign someone to follow up with the company and contact. You’ll be scoring and grading the lead during this process and ensuring that, if they don’t respond, that they get put back onto the appropriate nurturing campaign, or removed and flagged as not interested.

For your existing customers who want to get engaged regarding a new product or service, your primary focus is ensuring immediate notification of the appropriate sales rep, or account manager. Should you create a new opportunity in CRM? Is an email enough? How does sales indicate that they’ve accepted the “Lead.”

Content Creation

Now, you’ve got your segments, and you know your processes. Let’s be conservative and say you’ve got 5. And you’ve got 6 nurturing campaigns. YOu might need 6 different touch points per campaign before the nurturing ends, but likely more. That’s 180 bits of content you’ve got to prepare.

It could be as simple as an email, or it could be an email with a link to a whitepaper. That’s a lot of content no matter how you slice it, even if you re-use some of the content throughout the different nurturing programs.

Ask yourself; Who’s going to write all the that?

Since we can’t simply blast promotions, what content do people want? Do you have access to case studies, whitepapers, and buyers guides that you can re-use? Ensure that everything you send offers some value to the recipient.

The point is, you’ll need to ensure that you have some resources dedicated to the task.

A great way to develop content over time is via your blog. It’s dynamic, and the main link to it will have fresh content, and, the blog can be used as a way to push information out via other mechanisms such as Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook etc.

You’ll need to ensure that you’ve got some smart people, who are adding real value, post regularly to it, but you’ll also need to ensure that the basics like email copy, and case studies and whitepapers are kept up to date.

As you collect all this great information, it’ll be an ongoing project to keep your programs fresh and responsive to what people want. Look at the data as to what drives results, that is, profitable sales, and do more of that!

Summary

If you can get through this post, you’re obviously motivated. If you can get through the steps above with your team, you’ll be well on your way to succeeding with your marketing automation implementation.

If you’ve got good data, know who you want to target, have good stuff to say, and know what to do as people interact with your content, you’ll be a star in 6 months from now.

Should you like to have a conversation about this topic.  Please, contact us.

But what about the details?  Just who exactly is visiting your site?

If you’re selling to other businesses wouldn’t it be great to know what potential customers were reading your content?

Pardot is now offering a very small subset of their functionality, for free, that enables you to see what companies are visiting your site, and what they are doing while they are there.  As long as a company can be identified from a reverse lookup, you’ll get their name in a report.

Not only can you see who’s visiting, and potentially spot opportunities before they contact you, but you can also examine specific visitor behavior, to see if your site is working as intended.  Sometimes overall stats are nice, but sometimes you need to look at the anecdotal behavior of one user.

From the Pardot Site:

Real-Time Reports Online

Log in to your VisitorID account at any time to view up-to-date reports on your identified website traffic.

Tracking which companies are visiting your website can help you both gauge interest for deals that are in progress and identify new target customers.

Detailed Activity View

Dig deeper in to a lead’s activities and see which pages were viewed, how long they spent on each page and what search terms they may have used. The detailed activity view gives the sales team greater insight in to a prospect’s area of interest.

Daily Activity Emails

For a simple way to keep up with your visitor reports, you can choose to activate daily activity emails. Each morning open your inbox to find a report of all visitor activity for the past 24 hours. Easily forward the reports to your sales reps or share with others in your organization.

If you’re interested in signing up, contact us, or sign up at Pardot’s site.

Step #1: Identify the high traffic pages

If you are using some sort of website analytics tool you will be able to easily identify the pages where the majority of your traffic is landing on your site. If the bounce rate for the page is high then you need to work on the page.

Don’t get confused with exit rate and bounce rate, if your page has a high ‘exit rate’ then this could be a good thing, especially if it is a step in an online store checkout process. The bounce rate is the measure of effectiveness, this is the percentage of visitors who left your site after landing on the page.

Step #2: Assess the page from a visitor’s perspective

Try to look at the page from your web visitor’s point of view, your visitor entered a keyword or phrase into their favorite search engine and landed on your page (note that your web analytics tool should also tell you what the most common keywords were entered to reach your page). Answer a couple of questions…Is this what I expected to see? And, I’m interested, what now? If your bounce rate is high then your page design is probably not providing the answer to the first question and a change in the design is required. If you want to provide an answer to the second question move to Step #3.

Step #3: Decide on the business goal for the page

Unfortunately when delivering web pages to visitors you provide a lot of options in the hopes that what they want to achieve is available to them.  Sometimes the best approach is to focus on one business goal and provide a means for the visitor to take the desired action. Here are some typical business goals and the desired visitor action:

Some of those goals may seem obvious, and the trick is to make it obvious for the visitor to complete the goal.

Step #4: Make it easy for your web visitor to complete the goal

Once the goal has been identified deliver the call to action in a prominent location on the page (if possible without having to scroll down, sometimes called above the fold), here are some customer examples:

• If it is a button make it an obvious clickable button with a short, concise, call to action message e.g. Buy Now, Download White Paper etc. Use universal symbols like Play Buttons if you want a user to watch a video as shown in the example below:

Landing Page Example 1 - Prominent Play Button

• If you want your visitor to fill out a form try putting it on the page rather than relying on the visitor to pick a button/link in order to go to another page to fill out the form; that way you are reducing the number of clicks required to achieve the goal. The example below shows a form to request a quote for the special offer:

Landing Page Example 2 - Prominent Form

• If possible try to reduce the amount of secondary calls to action, or at least reduce the prominence on the page. Make sure that the obvious choice is your main call to action. In the example below the ‘Choose a SolidWorks Bundle’ call to action is a red highlighted area to try and draw the visitor to the call to action options and button:

Landing Page Example 3 - Obvious Call to Action

After making these changes to your high traffic internal pages you should find that your leads/sales will increase and the bounce rate for your pages will go down.

Need some help converting your high traffic pages into landing pages? Contact us we would be happy to help.

If you are looking for more information about best practices for landing pages download our white paper: ‘Guide on how to double your Qualified Leads’

What is Web Visitor Analytics?

However the major thing that is missing from the popular web analytics tools is you don’t know what each individual visitor is doing on your website. For instance you have a product page on your website, from your web analytics you can determine that 850 visitors landed on the page last month, and 245 of those visitors picked on a link to watch a video. But can you identify an individual visitor from the 1,000s that visited your site? Where did each visitor go after watching the video? Did they download a white paper? Did they visit your blog or read a customer success story?

This is where Pardot Web Marketing Automation can help you. Pardot is able to track what an individual visitor is doing and how they are using your website.

How does Web Visitor Analytics work?

Pardot seamlessly attaches a cookie to your web visitor’s browser and then tracks their interactions with your site. The visitor reporting will tell you where the visitor came from, and what pages/content they are interacting with. This provides you with immediate insight into what an individual visitor is interested in. In the example Pardot visitor analytics report shown below  you can see a list of the pages that a visitor looked at, the type of action carried out , time spent on each page, and the date and time of the visit.

Visitor Website Interactions Report

When a visitor fills out a lead form on your site to gain access to content, like a white paper, or to contact you for a quote; your visitor then becomes a Prospect. Pardot will store each prospect in a hosted web database (Pardot will sync the prospect data with your CRM system, and works with NetSuite, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Sugar CRM).

How can Web Visitor Analytics help me?

Every time your prospect returns to your site and interacts with your web content their activity is tracked, as shown in the figure below.

Prospect Activities Report

Pardot can then help you to nurture your prospect with web marketing automation based on the activity with your website. For instance, if a prospect read a specific customer success story, Pardot could then send them a related white paper or product data sheet automatically without them having to fill out another form or make a request. Or your prospect registered for a webinar and downloaded a guide after the event a salesperson in your company could be alerted automatically by Pardot to contact the prospect.

Conclusion

As you can see having web visitor analytics in addition to your existing website analytics means that you can better utilize your web site, understand how visitors use your site, automate your lead generation activities and nuturing campaigns based on how a visitor interacts with your site.

Want to learn more about Pardot? Contact us to schedule a live demonstration or click here to watch a video and download our Web Automation Guide.

The problem is… will they be contacting you? Or will they be contacting your competition? Making your website into a lead generating machine rather than an electronic brochure is now more important than ever!

View our presentation below to learn how the Pardot Web Marketing Suite can help you to obtain more qualified online leads for your sales pipeline. Our presentation includes…

• How to nurture your leads until they are sales-ready.
• How to enhance your website with search tracking, landing pages, and lead capture forms.
• Being perceived as a thought leader, rather than a spammer.
• Automating the process of nurturing a potential buyer through their investigation process.
• How to track what your prospects are doing on your website

The real goal is to get the reps more efficient by putting lower margin items online, and have reps spend their time on the larger, more consultative, opportunities.

Here’s a few of the tips I gave them during my presentation on how to properly market their webstores.

Channels

Your Website – This is an obvious one but a few had started with completely separate URLs for their store.  Integrate the store with your regular website, and link product/item descriptions to the appropriate item over in the store.

Sales Force – With large, and strong, sales teams, these companies need to ensure that their customer facing folks are on board.  But, aside from doing the legwork convincing reps that this is in their own interest, they should also:

• Move low margin items to be “Store Only”
• Include a link to the store in email footers
• Include items in the store that don’t have pricing, but are items that must be quoted by a rep

Email Marketing

These companies send a lot of blast type email, so they know how to craft a message, but some are simply including a link to their main storefront in emails to customers.

• “We have a store” doesn’t work
• Be Focused with the message
• Highlight products in Newsletters/Tech Tips
• Drive to a “Landing Page” (including an store item)
• Should be integrated with current email program
• Allows for more “news” as product line expands
• Add rules based drip marketing

Segmentation

Segmentation when thinking about your webstore may be  different than normal.  Breaking down by industry, or region, no longer matters.

• Large Existing Customers
  • Can get value from a store if it allows information on ordering history, cases, etc
  • Need to be able to purchase at pre-negotiated rates
• Small Existing Customers
  • Store is focused on these customers
  • Want detailed information, Quick Purchase
  • Set expectations on process following purchase
• Recent Customers
  • Use Store Promotions at time of Initial Sale
  • Drive to store for additional training and other items
• Leads and Prospects
  • Initial Training, Stand Alone Software
  • Store is primarily a research tool
  • New Avenue for lead generation via:
  • Shopping Networks
  • Natural Search

SEO and Inbound Marketing

We can all do a better job and getting our site found.

• Extended Natural Language Descriptions
• Feature Lists
• Images should click through to products
• Blog Articles/Tech Tips on store products
• Proper Use of Meta Tags, Alt Image Text etc
• Limit Flash Animations
• Subscribe to Online Product Catalogs
  • Froogle
  • NexTag
  • Shopping.com
  • Shopzilla

Paid Advertising

• Works better for Training and Software (in this industry)
• What works changes over time
• Focus on Geography
• Ensure you use an analytics service (Google)
• PPC vs Pay for Conversion
• Ads lead to landing pages to convert immediately
• Ads and Landing pages are very focused

Focus on Conversion

• Focus on your Site Conversion Rate
  • # Buyers/# Visitors
• Every section of your site should lead to:
• Product in Store
• Contact me Form
• Download Information Form

Drip Marketing

• Use it to segment your customers by interest
• Use it to test messaging
• Use it to time offers to your customers
  • 3 months after purchase – Product A
  • 6 months after purchase – Product B
  • 12 months after purchase – Service A
• Cart Abandonment Emails

Who Owns the Store

Treat your store as a Sales Rep

• It needs to be productive
• It needs to be fed traffic
• It needs to be informative
• It needs to be easy
• It needs a quota

It’s not “Just Marketing”

There’s a few bullets to think about.  There’s a lot behind those simple lines of text.  If you’d like to have a conversation about your e-commerce desires, send us a message.