From segmentation and personalization to PPC and social Media, this webinar has it all. Check out expert ways to attract and engage more leads through inbound and outbound marketing.
Transcript: New from BookNet Canada for 2024: Loan Stars - Tech Forum 2024
Inbound and Outbound Marketing Strategies
1. Attract More Customers with
Inbound and Outbound
Marketing
Mike Tomita
Sr. Mgr., Web Marketing
Lizzy Funk
Sr. Marketing Specialist
2. • This webinar is being recorded – keep an eye out for the
slides and recording sent to your email later today.
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• Stick around for your chance to win a copy of Guy
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Housekeeping
4. Attract Engage Close
Drive more
inbound
website traffic
Convert web
visitors to
leads
Right message
Right person
Right time
Accelerate the sales cycle
Increase quality leads
to sales
Win more deals
49. Content Consumption Website Page Views
300%
Website Lead Conversions
201%
Percona Boosts Site Engagement and Lead Generation with
Marketo RTP Content Recommendation Engine
“Marketo RTP Content Recommendation Engine auto-
discovered our content, analyzed performance, and then
utilized predictive analytics to recommend relevant content
to inbound prospects. The results have been phenomenal.”
-Terry Erisman, Chief Marketing Officer
17.8%
51. Attract Engage Close
Drive more
inbound
website traffic
Convert web
visitors to
leads
Right message
Right person
Right time
Accelerate the sales cycle
Increase quality leads
to sales
Win more deals
There are others such as geographic performance, device targeting performance, and expected CTR. These are the basics though. Start here!
How quality score affects
Auction eligibility: better quality typically makes it easier and cheaper to enter an auction and also help determine whether your ad is qualified to appear at all.
Cost-per-click (CPC): Higher quality can often lead to lower CPCs. That means you pay less per click when your ads are higher quality.
First page bid estimate: Higher quality ads are typically associated with lower first page bid estimates. Your keyword's top of page bid estimate: Higher quality ads are typically associated with lower top of page bid estimates.
Ad position: Higher quality ads lead to higher ad positions, meaning they can show up higher on the page.
Striking the right balance is very important when selecting your keywords. Especially if you’re working with a limited budget.
You should definitely be as comprehensive as possible when doing your keyword research, but when deciding which campaigns and ad groups to fund, and how much budget to put behind them, these factors will need to be taken into account.
You can spend, and will, spend a lot of money very quickly through PPC so you want to spend it as effectively as possible.
You may have a keyword with low search volume, but high ROI, so it makes sense to go for it.
For example one of our terms, “marketing automation” has a low search volume, but those who are using it a search are very valuable for our business
Conversely there may be terms with huge volume, like “marketing software”, that may not be as valuable because of the broad nature of the term. That’s where relevance comes into play.
Yes, even branding has a role in PPC
There might be some evolving usage or new terms that coming into play. Keep an eye on these and plan accordingly.
Writing good, compelling, and unique ad text for PPC is an incredible challenge.
Your text needs to be relevant to the search term, aligned to the intent of the search, and compelling enough to get that user’s click.
It also needs to accurately describe the content of the destination page when clicked.
An all this needs to be done with VERY concise language.
You only have a TOTAL of 95 characters, plus 35 for a URL.
Headline: 25
Lines 1 & 2: 35
URL: 35
No, not really. But these are the foundation and should be nailed first, so start here.
At it’s core SEO really just boils down to a set of guidelines that make sure your website provides an easy and valuable user experience for your visitors.
What exactly does the algorithm take into account? No one who know will ever tell. It’s Google’s secret blend of 16 herbs and spices.
Keywords
You want to target particular keyword themes by aligning the broader content of your site to those target keywords
Website performance
Performance (site speed, server errors, code errors, mobile support)
Configuration (META tags, OG/Twitter tags, robots.txt, sitemaps, crawl-able code)
User experience
When a user does find your website in a search and clicks on the listing your site should load quickly, without errors, and present a clear and focused user experience.
Content
Finally, the content on the site should satisfy the intent of the user’s search. Whether that’s looking for a information, or a service, or a product.
This slide should look familiar to everyone
Many of the same considerations go into selecting your SEO keywords as your PPC keywords
The only other factor added to the SEO equation is how difficult a keyword term is to rank for. That is how much competition is there and how long will it take to challenge that competition.
Difficulty shouldn’t exclude a keyword term, but it may affect the priority that you assign to it
Again, it’s all about balancing your needs, resources, and expected return
The performance of your website is critical to your SEO success
Google’s rankings are determined by a machine that analyzes your site and plugs different factors into an algorithm so the site that make it easy and error free for that process to happen have an advantage
Also note that HUMAN factors are also a part of the equations. Those are thinks like click-through-rates and engagement. That’s where the user experience part comes into play.
Just because Google is a machine, your content should be not be written for it. It should be written for humans.
That means does try and game the system by stuffing in keywords or repeating them over and over
Those are old tactics that Google has caught on to
The best way to create good SEO content is to create good content.
Does that mean it doesn’t matter if you use your keywords?
Not at all, humans relate to content that speak their language. Just don’t over do it.
SEO requires a lot of focus, because SEO takes TIME. You need to keep your eye on the prize, even if you can’t see it yet.
It’s everyone’s job, not just the SEO manager.
It takes discipline across departments and buy-in from all levels.
Choose your keywords wisely
Build internal buy-in
You’ll need cross functional support. You will also need to insert yourself into other people business.
Focus on content
Be patient
Really, these are the big 3 for B2B.
Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn offer the most advertising options at the moment.
But the questions remains, should I invest in PAID social media advertising?
If this is where my target audience can be found, I’ll spend some money to get in front of them.
And yes, they do work for B2B lead generation.
LinkedIn is the obvious choice due to the very granular targeting options and business information
However Facebook and Twitter are surprisingly effective as well. Especially Facebook.
Twitter – Organic vs Promoted reach
Facebook – Organic vs Promoted reach
Invest in promoting your social media content if you want to be seen
Don’t forget about mobile traffic!
Mobile usage on social media channels
Great, thanks Mike! I am going to spend the next few minutes to talk to you about some other not as well known channels for bringing in new names.
First off – I want to make sure we are all on the same page on what I mean when we are talking about paid programs. Paid programs are a way you can get your content in front of you targeted audience you wouldn’t normally reach. The great part of paid programs is you can use any content you have already generated – you just have to put it on other sites to expand your reach.
The four programs I am going to be talking about are content syndication, sponsored emails, channel takeovers and sponsored content. I will go a little deeper into each of these next.
Content Syndication – as the name suggests, is the process of syndicating your content assets (like white papers, ebooks, blog articles, videos) on 3rd party websites; we agree with CS vendors on the price we want to pay for each lead who downloads our content; the vendor provides us these leads at an agreed upon price based on certain targeting criteria. In this example, one of our definitive guides is on a marketing website for people visiting this marketing website to see and download. This is a great way to get your content pieces on other websites in front of tons of new potential customers.
Before you get started with content syndication – here are some tips for you to be aware of before you get started.
First, make sure you choose a vendor or a website that specializes in your industry. For example, when I am looking for a new content syndication vendors – I will look for high traffic marketing sites with a lot of content. However, if I was in law, I would be looking for websites with legal content.
Next, most content syndication vendors allow you to be very targeted for the leads or names you receive. For example, you can often specify the job title, location and company size for the leads you receive. Make sure you get the right leads that fit the persona of a potential buyer for your company.
And finally, the great thing about content syndication is your can pay for leads and not just impressions. You can pay for a guaranteed amount of names in your target filters so you are guaranteed to get leads you need to hit your goals.
Another channel I am going to touch on is sponsored emails. This is when a vendor sends out your content to their database on our behalf.
In this examples, we sent our a content marketing asset to the Web Marketing Today audience. For sponsored emails, the price is often based on the number of people you are sending your email to.
A couple tips before you get started with using sponsored emails.
First – do your research. IF you are going to send out an email to a new audience, make sure you research the type of content that the audience will enjoy. For example, I would send out a demand generation content piece to a sales audience through email.
Also, make sure you track your links in the email you have the vendor send out. Especially if you are sending your audience to your website – you want to make sure you are able to attribute the sponsored email program to the leads that are generated through the program.
Another option you have for paid programs is channel takeover. A lot of websites with a ton of content also have different channels. You can choose the channel that best fits your business and takeover the whole channel with your ads. This gives you a lot of brand awareness and you can set it up to generated a lot of leads too.
A few tips for channel takeovers.
First find a website that has a lot of traffic- you want to make sure your takeover is getting seen by a significant amount of potential buyers.
Next, a way to make this into a lead generation program is by pointing your ads to a landing page with a trackable form to collect leads.
And finally, if you are taking over a whole channel, test the site before it goes live and make sure your banners are everywhere and you get the most impressions as possible.
Sponsored content is another way to generate leads and drive brand awareness/preference with 3rd party content. You can collaborate with that third party on content development – essentially co-author that content, and it will appear on their web site as “native” This is a great way for your to get new content for you to use and generate new leads and brand awareness. The content piece usually says ‘sponsored by xyz’ and the vendor typically promotes the content and you get the leads from the promotion.
A few quick tips on sponsored content.
First – if you have an in-house content team, make sure to consult them first. You’ll need to make sure it is on their radar and it fits the company’s messaging.
Also – make sure place links that go back to your website in the new content piece to increase traffic to your website.
And finally – if you can, try and make your new content piece go viral! Make your content shareable for social channels.
Next mike is going to go over how you can optimize the experience for your audience once you get them through social, ppc, seo or paid programs.
So, you’ve driven traffic to your website, now what do you do with them?
Personalize their experience of course!
Personalization is a very effective way of engaging your visitors right off the bat by surfacing the content that is most relevant to them.
It will help both with your website engagement (good for SEO!) and your conversion rates.
Company
Provides consulting, support, and managed services to >2,000 MySQL and OpenStack software users worldwide
Situation
Diverse set of products and solutions
100,000s of visitors to sites but no way to get most relevant content to visitor
Wanted to target and engage leads based on profile and behavior
Evaluation Process
Seeking easy-to-use, scalable solution
Solution to leverage “smart” machine learning
Marketo RTP perfect fit
Solution
RTP predictive analytics and machine learning connect visitors and content in self-optimizing manner
Discovers content on website then learns how different visitors respond to various content
Results
17.8% uplift in content consumption
312% increase in average time spent on site
315% more pages viewed
201% increase in website lead conversions
So this is great and all – you have now optimized getting all these amazing new names into your database, but how do you know whether or not these new people will actually buy your product.
A quick look back at the funnel – so today we have been focusing on the attract part of the funnel. But we want to make sure these visitors and leads actually close the deal with you. I will give you some tricks on how you can track each of your top of the funnel programs to the end of the sales cycle to the bottom of the funnel.
First, you need to make sure you are tracking and measuring the right metrics. This will set you up for success.
If you are tracking the right metrics, the analysis part will be 10x easier.
Here are some of the important things we track at Marketo:
Lead Source – tracks the channel in which a lead enters our database – this could be PPC, Social, Sponsored Email or even the website
Acquisition Program – tracks the specific program that brought the lead into our database, for example if a new lead was brought in via PPC, the lead source would be PPC and the acquisition program would be the specific program that brought it in whether that is a keyword or geography
Successes – measure engagement within each channel. We classify successes differently for each channel. For example, if someone registers for a webinar – they are not a success, but if they attend, they are a success. Successes track how much our leads are engaging with us directly.
Cost – you want to constantly track cost so you can keep track of how much each channel and program is costing you
Revenue – by tracking revenue, you can track which programs and channels are contributing the most revenue to your business
Once you have tracked each of those metrics you can start to analyze each program and each channel on how it performs at the top of the funnel including the number of new names, number of qualified new names, cost per new name and % of new names.
The top performing programs will bring in a large number of new names and qualified new names at a very low cost. Also, channels that bring in a high percentage of new names shows that you are targeting the right audience that you haven’t reached yet.
And at the bottom of the funnel, you can track the performance by measuring the amount of pipeline and the number of opportunities each channel brings in. Also, seeing how fast these channels are generating opportunities is important to track. And finally how much real revenue is generated from each channel.
Once you have figured out your top programs and channels for ROI – how are you to decide where to invest.
The first piece of advice I can give you is don’t stick to a single channel or program. Even if some channels and programs aren’t very top performers, you’ll still need to include them and optimize them. This is because your audience consumes content in different ways – some of your potential buyers prefer facebook and others will prefer browsing marketing sites where they will see your content.
But how do you figure out where to put your money in each channel and program at the top of the funnel?
Here at marketo, we determine how to split our budget based on the opportunity performance for each channel. However, you can choose which ever metric is most important for your business. It could be subscriptions, trial sign ups, etc. In this example, Content syndication brought in 24% of all opportunities for top of the funnel programs, so they will get 24% of my budget.
And with that, we’ll head into a quick summary and then into questions.
Looks like we have some questions from the audience:
(shawn) How do you know what to personalize when new leads first enter your database? = MIKE
(jared) how do you decide where to invest when you are first starting out? = LIZZY (try out each channel and then see which ones perform the best in the beginning based on the number of new names and cost per qualified new name to decide which channels to give more budget to in the beginning)
(kaitlyn) how do you figure out volume, ROI, etc when selecting SEO/PPC keywords? = MIKE