Audaxium Blog

Audaxium is proud to be a sponsor of the Pardot Elevate 2011 User Conference (Nov. 15-16, 2011) http://bit.ly/uqbXQn

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 

Lead Source: Marketing’s most coveted, and most loathed, data field in a CRM system.

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. Read More »

This webinar took place on June 22, 2011 => Click here to view the presentation

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.

Recently I’ve spoken with a number of companies who’ve been getting decent traffic to their websites, but haven’t been getting as many leads as they feel they should.  This seems to be a fairly common complaint, but the good news is that there’s a few simple steps you can take to improve the number of conversions you get.

Put another way, there’s a few simple steps you can take to make it more valuable, and less painful, for your prospects.

Step 1 – Simplify your Forms

Use conditional fields to keep things short and sweet.With landing pages, less is often more. Nothing frustrates a visitor more than arriving at a landing page, seeing a compelling white paper offer, but then realizing she will have to fill out a long and complicated looking form before receiving anything of value. Companies who ask for more than a handful of data points in the first interaction with a visitor are encouraging form abandonment.

Step 2 – Track User Behavior, not just field data

Track implicit data in addition to explicit data held in your CRM system. Your prospects are telling you a lot more than it seems.You can gain valuable data from prospects on forms, but often even more telling is the implicit information that can be gleaned without your visitors even telling you. Read More »

Pardot recently posted on their blog that they now have a plug-in for Firefox that allows send Pardot-tracked emails via Gmail.

This is great news for Google Apps users who’d like to get off of other paid for email clients and servers and keep everything online.

Rather than repost their content, I’ll link you directly to the page on the Pardot site.

http://help.pardot.com/faqs/add-ons/gmail-extension-firefox

Our Pardot implementation and marketing automation services are in high demand.

With several new customers coming on board recently and more to follow, we’re looking for some additional help to deliver top-notch Pardot marketing automation services.

Ideally, we’d like to find a freelance Marketing Automation Consultant to join our team on a part-time basis.  If you know of anyone, please forward their name to jobs@audaxium.com.

Here’s a description of the role:

Role:  Marketing Automation Consultant (Part-time, Contract)

Overview:
Audaxium is seeking a Marketing Automation Consultant to join our team on a part-time contract basis.  As a Pardot Solution Provider, Audaxium provides not only Pardot implementation services, but also full-service marketing automation campaign outsourcing services to B2B technology companies who are looking to increase their quality and quantity of sales leads and increase their brand awareness.

The Marketing Automation Consultant role involves both project management and consulting/best practices services in the areas of: email and website marketing, lead nurturing, lead conversion, marketing automation, and content marketing strategies.

Skills Required:

• Work effectively and independently from a home office
• Experience in B2B digital marketing (email and web)
• Working knowledge of Pardot or other Marketing Automation platform is required
• Project Management and Client Services experience

Responsibilities:

• Help new customers implement Pardot marketing automation
• Help existing Pardot customers with best practices advice
• Plan and create email nurturing campaigns to drive conversion and sales readiness
• Create lead segmentation strategies and lists based on visitor behaviours and interests
• Implement content, email, landing page campaigns to deliver value to prospects
• Evaluate and create effective lead scoring scenarios
• Plan and create data capture and management strategies using custom fields in Pardot
• Coordinate other project resources such as: HTML web designers, copywriters, etc.

Estimated Amount of Work:

• 2-3 days per week (to start)

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…

Read More »

If your website is an integral part of your lead generation activities, and I hope that it is, you probably use Google Analytics to look at what’s happening on your site on a daily basis.

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.

The B2B world of buying and selling has changed. With the power of Google and other web tools, buyers have access to far more information and they are doing more research on their own long before even contacting the vendors. In many cases, by the time the buyer contacts the vendor, they already know everything they need to know to make a buying decision.

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

Pardot’s a great Application.  Check out the demonstration below.