Capitalizing on Marketing Automation Tools for Enriching the Leads

“There are some new platforms out that bridge the gap between personal and corporate identities. These platforms will create standard firmographic and business-demographic segments and convert those to personal identities that can be matched in the social advertising channels,” says Jason Widup, VP of Marketing, Metadata.io, in an exclusive interview with TalkCMO.

TCMO Bureau: Since marketers have constraints with time and resources, how do they innovate and engage with their customers?

Jason Widup: Marketers are constantly being asked to do more with less, so they need to find technologies and processes that can help them scale. This is all happening while customers expect a more personalized and white-glove prospect experience. These two things don’t go well together as personalized marketing means more segments, more content, and more work.

Marketers need to find more time – and can do that by offloading some of the more mundane and repetitive tasks that come with the job. For example, if I want to launch a single campaign across multiple channels, I would normally have to log into each platform, create my campaigns in each (using completely different UIs), measure them in separate tools and then try to optimize them against each other.

There are platforms out there that can do all of this for the marketer. Instead of logging into multiple platforms, they log into one, plug in all of the campaign ingredients, and let the machine launch and optimize campaign experiments across all channels (not just one). Using these platforms, the marketer frees up 10-25% of their time to spend on the things that really require their marketer’s brain.

Also Read: Five Reasons to ditch Obsolete Brand Marketing Pitches

TCMO Bureau: What steps can brands take to enrich their leads before they enter marketing automation and CRM platforms?

Jason Widup: With the availability of data, there are so many ways to enrich leads that will help determine if and when they’re ready to progress in the journey. The most basic include:

• Firmographic and demographic information like the company they work for and all of the details about that company (industry, annual revenue, # of employees, HQ location, etc.), and details about the person (their current and past titles, where they’re located, email address, phone number, etc.)
• Behavioral data like which pages they engaged with on your site, what content they’ve downloaded, and which ads they’ve clicked on. A lot of this type of information is tracked before the user is known, and once they fill out a form, all of that behavior is then attributed to the actual person.

Actually, doing the enrichment is the more complicated piece; brands have to think about the minimum amount of data they can ask for in order to maximize the marketer’s ability to enrich a high percentage of leads accurately. Brands need a technology partner to do this with as they won’t have all of this data. Some of the better vendors can match business and personal email addresses where most don’t have a personal email solution.

TCMO Bureau: How can marketers measure the success of their strategies across the entire funnel?

Jason Widup: Most importantly, it’s critical to measure the right things. All too often, marketers measure the things that are easy to measure: spend, click-through rates, cost per click, cost per lead, etc. However, that only tells a small part of the story. In order to really understand the success (or failure) of marketing strategies, they need to be measured against the metrics that matter to the business. Usually, this means understanding how the specific marketing programs and tactics are influencing revenue.

This is obviously more difficult to do because, especially for B2B, there are so many experiences and hoops a prospect and company have to go through before deciding to buy a product. And given the limitation of measurement, it’s complicated to understand how each of the brand experiences influenced their decision to buy. But that doesn’t mean brands shouldn’t get as close to it as possible. And that means something different for each company depending on the resources they have and the types of programs they’re running.

TCMO Bureau: How can brands build custom audiences across various platforms without having to rely on the cookie and IP-based technologies?

Jason Widup: The only other way to target specific people is by using some form of PII, usually this means an email address. Many of the B2B advertising platforms will allow marketers to use an email address as an identifier; however, they’re likely to have someone’s business email address, and most people use their personal email addresses to log into the platforms (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube) where you want to target them. They also have to have the email addresses to begin with, meaning they’re limited to targeting the people they’re likely already had an interaction with.

Also Read: Top B2B Marketers Focus on Delivering High-performance Digital Experiences

There are some new platforms out that bridge the gap between personal and corporate identities. These platforms will create standard firmographic and business-demographic segments and convert those to personal identities that can be matched in the social advertising channels.