Speaker 0: Alright. So once the counters come in zero, I’ll enter everything. K.

Speaker 1: Just wanna test the kinda click through. Okay. Make sure everything is it’s not laggy. It seems good.

Speaker 0: Yeah. I’m here. Good to chose. Hey, everybody. Welcome to MarDreaming. We’re really excited to have you all here today. Uh, if this is your first session or you’ve been joined already this morning, my name is Julian from Sercante, and I’ll be moderating today’s session. Couple housekeeping items to cover before we get started. This session and all others will be available on demand after the event. We’ll send a follow-up email with those details. If you do have a question for our speaker today, please use the q and a tab, uh, on your screen on the right hand side. And with the last five, ten minutes of the session, we’ll we’ll answer those live. Um, use the session chat. Otherwise, have converse with your colleagues there. We wanna hear more from you. But I’ll go ahead and turn it over to our speaker today, Lauren Nadis, director of marketing at Smalley, who has an awesome session ready for us to say all about how to discover what marketing automation really is and how to get started. Take it away, Lauren.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Jillian. Thank you, everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here this afternoon. I wanna say a warm welcome to all my fellow trailblazers. I wore, uh, the sweatshirt today to represent. So I am here today for, um, from now until 01:15 to share with you a little bit more about what marketing automation is and how to get started. It’s a question that I’ve received in many conversations, especially with a lot of the beginning level, uh, digital marketing specialists or marketing, uh, specialists. So let’s go ahead and get started. First slide, I just wanted to say, uh, thank you to all of our incredible sponsors. So if this is your first session in Marjorie, uh, this may be the first time you’ve seen this, but just a quick moment to say thank you to our incredible, uh, sponsors for this event. Agenda for the meeting. So I wanted to make sure we had a upfront contract as far as the intention of this session. So a couple, uh, areas to cover, preparation, uh, in more detail. Why do you need an MAP or marketing automation platform? How do you get started? So the implementation stage. Optimization. We have it. Now what do we do with it? And then the last and most importantly for all of us marketers is success. Is it something that we can just let it ride, or do we need to actually put some more effort and continued, uh, investment in marketing automation? So with that agenda, there’s a few goals that I’d like you to take away from the session, and we do have a chat, uh, available as Julian mentioned. And I do hope to leave about five minutes towards the end for q and a. So when you leave, my intention is for you to have these four goals, um, covered. You feel prepared to start, uh, your marketing automation initiative at your company. You feel confident that you could implement with ease. Uh, once you have it, you can learn how to optimize it and make sure that it’s getting the most bang for your buck. And then related to that, that you can prove the investment to whoever in the company said, yeah. Let’s give this a try. So I wanted to start out with a short story just to for you to get to know me a little bit more. So I’ve, uh, had the last over ten years spent in marketing automation strategy. So implementing them, implementing different programs and software. And, um, quick story for you. So about ten years ago, I was working at one of the nation’s largest online retailers, and everything looked great. They had me in come in for an interview. It sounded like a a great, you know, great opportunity, great potential, and they wanted somebody to help implement their inbound marketing strategy. Said, okay. Sounds good. So day one, I meet with my manager, and he says to me, hey. You know, we’ve got this Pardot tool. We don’t really know what to do with it. Can you just take this and and run with it and figure out how we can we already spent money. Can you figure out how we can use it? And I said, alright. Yeah. I’ve used Marketo in my past, you know, position. I can I can figure out this one? I can figure out how to use it. Marketing automation, you know, methodology is the same no matter what system you use for the most part. So I said, alright. So I did eventually figure it out. And one of my first email campaigns, luckily, uh, yielded a $150,000 order that came from it. So the ROI was there and everyone was happy and it was sunshine and rainbows. So coming out of this, um, there was a lot of pain and, you know, sleepless nights and trying to figure out what I could do with this. So my intention for you, for the audience here, is to not have that same experience that you know how to get through this and come out the other end successful. So step one, preparation and selection. If you aren’t familiar with, uh, MAP or marketing automation, uh, the marketing automation platform, that acronym there’s always a lot of acronyms in marketing. Essentially, what it does is automate many of your marketing processes and procedures. So it allows you to do more with less and work smarter. Uh, AI is prevalent nowadays, and there’s all these different ways that we can work smarter, work faster. Not everyone here has huge teams. If you’re a team of one, which happens sometimes, this is something that can help you get a lot of things done. So consider these areas. Right? Things in your marketing operations that are time consuming or they take a lot of labor or manual work. They’re not performing well, they’re not integrated or they’re poorly integrated, if they’re too simple and you need to kind of expand them to reach your goals. And then, generally, if you have campaigns that are not built to target your audience, that’s a big problem too. Right? So you don’t wanna turn into the Michael Scott here where your audience is everybody everywhere, and it’s a really challenging thing for marketers. So the marketing automation platform really helps you turn this kinda cringe face into cool. I can segment. I can target. I can reach my goals. I don’t know if there’s any office fans in here. I’m a big office fan, so I thought that would be a a good tie in so you get the the real feeling of it. So what does marketing automation platform do? Right? I’ve got a couple slides on this. It helps you measure and track your online and offline marketing activities. So I work in the manufacturing space, and we still do some print publications. So we do use marketing automation to have custom redirect links so that we can still track some of those offline activities. So marketing automation helps you do that. One of the essential things that it does is store, segment, and nurtures your entire prospect database. So it should potentially be connected to your CRM so that you can have data flow both ways and build this really robust database of context that you can nurture and market to. It also includes asset creation for web forms, email templates, landing pages, um, native forms. There’s so many different things that you can build within the app, and most of it is in that WYSIWYG format. So you can, without much HTML or coding background, still create assets that you can use for your, uh, marketing campaigns. A few other things that it does, it would automate a lot of the things that you may be doing manually. So there’s actions and triggers that you can build in for operational workflows to send notifications or sign things in your organization and also outside. If you have distributor partners or manufacturers reps or other consultants that you need to get engaged in your lead follow-up. A lot of connection for internal, um, and external applications. So within your organization or if there’s outside, you know, database that you need to connect to, it will also have the ability to do that. It’s it’s essentially a software. It can also save you lots of time and money because there’s so many things that it can automate. That’s the the key, you know, word in this whole software is marketing automation. Saves you time and money. Alright. So be the champion. If you are involved so if you’re one of the people on your marketing teams that has experienced some of those challenges that I mentioned earlier, so you’re feeling the pain. Right? You can be the champion. It may not need to be you on your own. Get a group together of people who said, yeah. We need to do better. We can do better. Let’s figure out how we can get this marketing automation into our our company, into our organization. It will help you you know, our your marketing operations will go light years ahead, and you just need one person to kind of initiate the start. So let’s talk about the four steps to marketing automation success. Lock down your inbound strategy. If you don’t have one and you say, I’m just gonna implement this software and hope that the strategy comes afterward, that is not that is not the way to go. We don’t wanna go the route like the story that I told earlier. Um, make sure that you have a solid inbound marketing strategy defined before you say, I wanna, you know, integrate it with the marketing automation platform. Your inbound strategy is gonna be this the foundation to the software. If you have one in place, just review it and make sure that it aligns with everything that you want before you say let’s invest in this this new software, this new program. Here’s just a quick, uh, nice visual from growth hackers. They have some awesome content on LinkedIn. I follow them and, um, really good stuff. So this is just a very brief high level view of an inbound strategy. Right? So you have three different phases, and in some, it could be way more, uh, attract, convert, and close. So you have these strangers that are visitors on your, let’s say, website, for example. Um, they haven’t been identified. They’re just an IP address. Then they turn into a visitor. You convert them, get their contact information. Now they’re leads. So your marketing automation system will be at the beginning of this where they’re just tracking visitor activity by IP. They complete a web form. They turn into an actual lead with contact information, and then you use them in the system to nurture and qualify so that you can eventually turn them into customers and close the deal, close opportunity, close the business. There’s another part of this where, um, if they are a customer and you get referrals, you wanna hopefully have them loop back so that they recommend somebody else who turns into a stranger. So you kinda have that 360 degree view. Getting sales involved. So this is an area where I think a lot of marketers may not think about. You know, there’s always this kind of pain between sales and marketing. They don’t see, you know, how we look at it. We don’t see how they look at it. So before you get involved in initiative like this, step back and make sure that they’re a part of your adoption. You need them in the buy in. And having United Front, um, will make it a lot easier for you in the future. Make sure that they have similar goals as you are and that you kind of explain to them how this will help them. It’ll make a big difference, uh, future future on. Build all your business requirements. So you have a head start. You kind of ask yourself some of those questions earlier. What are some challenges? What, you know, what do we need to improve? So when you build all your business requirements, don’t rush this step. It will take time, but it will help you out in the long run. So do this step before you start looking at solutions. Make sure you have a road map built out and a realistic plan and that you communicate that and share that. A few more considerations to think of. So when you’re building out your business requirements to, you know, invest in this new marketing automation platform, think about the out, uh, outside software or services that you need to integrate to. That may or may not be something out of the box, so you wanna make sure you’re considering that well in advance. Think about what native features that you need right away. So those are your deal breakers. We have to have this. Uh, there are more haves than wants. Also consider what are some future plans that are happening at your organization that you should think about. So one thing, you know, in my current experience is we have, uh, ecommerce coming down the road, uh, relatively soon. I wanna keep that in mind as I’m looking at marketing automation, how that going how’s that going to factor in? Is there a native integration already with the software that we’re looking at? These are just some good things to keep in mind. And your CRM, obviously So if you’re using, um, Pardot or the engagement cloud and and sales cloud, how are they gonna interact? Think about kind of the data flows between the two. Consider your resources. So if you’re just a team of one, you you don’t have many, but that doesn’t mean you’re on your own. There are plenty of consultants that are out there that can work with you and help you to still implement this, uh, initiative for your company. But think about your resources. So think about your budget, uh, your project charter. Who’s gonna be leading this? Are there other internal resources that you can leverage? Maybe you have an IT team that has a few people that have some experience in this that can that can help you and be your partners in this. Uh, fill the gaps. If you need external resources, that is something that’s available. It won’t be an additional, uh, add to the budget, but it may be something that is needed based on, um, the resources that you have available. And create a stockholder analysis. That’s a really good one too to help so you make sure you have everything kind of covered. Identify your solution. There are a lot of different tools out there that will give you user ratings. Some of these you you may have known about or you may have heard. So if you’re trying to figure out what solution is best for me and my business, getting, uh, user feedback, uh, is really critical and ratings so that you can get firsthand experience on what those platforms really do based on the people who use them. So a few ones that I recommend are Gartner, g two, and Capterra. All of them are great for kind of doing a comparison. This platform has these features, but this one doesn’t. Um, I would not necessarily recommend those to be the one to make sure that you’re getting accurate pricing. Pick your top choices, maybe using some of those tools, and then go to the actual software vendor, um, and then get the the concrete pricing from them. Build your project road map. You’ve got milestones. This is typical with any project, so this is just a reminder. Make sure that you have clear goals on what you wanna achieve. I don’t know if we need all the one, three, six month, one year, three year. Uh, do what makes sense for you, but make sure that you have a road map and you have a plan of what you want to accomplish. Another continuation, a few good questions to consider, um, when you’re building your road map. So what features do you need to start using right away? What software do you need? What features look promising? What goals do you need to assign? Um, these are a few good things that you can go reference later on to, uh, with the recording. Present your final business case. So pull together all of your information, and don’t forget a couple things that are pretty critical. You may need to do a total cost of ownership analysis, an ROI analysis, present your road map for future for long term, maybe three to five years, and then, um, sharing examples of how it’s gonna benefit the company, those quick wins. Right? Those low hanging fruit. Um, how can we make things better right away? And And include some examples from your sales organization because the leadership team will love that, and it’ll show your unified front. Preparation do’s and don’ts. So let’s start with the do nots. Don’t tackle your asset building when you’re implementing marketing automation. You You wanna have your content and things built beforehand. And don’t assume that all the templates that they they have ready for you are gonna cover everything that you need. So you may need to plan some time for the consultant to help you build out your landing pages, email templates, all of those things. So don’t wait till the last minute on those. More preparation. So the dues. Right? Um, keep a track record. Keep a list. Keep a checklist of all the different items that you are gonna need to have made in the marketing automation platform or tracked. Uh, if you have a multilingual website, then you have to consider every page that has a form and every field in that form that isn’t gonna need to be created in the marketing automation platform. So these things take time. Same thing with your automation rules and your procedures. So let’s say you have a, uh, once a lead gets to a certain score, they’re now considered a hot lead. Who does that go to? Does it get assigned in your CRM? Does it need to have a operational procedure within your company? All these things kinda need to be considered a little bit beforehand so that you’re not overwhelmed at the end. Implementation strategy. So ask yourself, uh, three questions. Can you do this on your own? Are you hands on? Are you knowledgeable enough about it that you think you can be alright? And then do you have in house some partner that can help? If yes, you can probably implement the, uh, marketing automation on your own. If not, I would seek some consultant help. Alright. Step two, implementation. Clarify your project plan. So this little guy here is a scope creep. Make sure that you have your project plan in place. You’ve got a kickoff. You have your users involved along the way. And it can take sometimes several months between we’ve selected the system and now we’re doing a kickoff. There can be a good amount of time for preparation. So make sure that you’re documenting what you need to achieve so that you don’t have this cute little skull creep fella, uh, coming after you. You wanna stay on target. Prioritize. There will be, like I mentioned earlier, that checklist. Right? You’re building a checklist of all the things that you’re going to need to think about before you implement the marketing automation platform. So prioritize the things that are the most important so that you make sure that those get done first. And some things need to be sequential anyway. So your website code tracking should be like one of the first things that you set up so that it starts monitoring all of your websites. Same thing with the lead scoring model because you want to start testing that in advance. And then also connecting to any third party software, those are things you want to do right away and make sure that you don’t run into any issues. Start building. You’ve got custom form fields to build, form handlers, automation rules. Um, the building phase can take a good amount of time in this implementation step. So if you did a good job at step one, kind of making your checklist, you’ve got a head start and it shouldn’t be too overwhelming. I had a massive Excel spreadsheet that just had everything categorized. And is this done? What’s the status on this? If you have a Gantt chart or project management tool that you can use, that’s awesome. That’ll help you. Confirm your key metrics. With reporting and dashboards that you have in the MAP, make sure that it aligns with what you’re gonna need right after launch. So the things the key things that you wanna track, is it opportunities, uh, close? Is it number of hot lead? Is it your conversion rate? Whatever those key metrics are, make sure that you have some of those reporting things built out in advance so that you’re good to go. Start testing and test again. So the testing phase, typically, I would say takes two maybe two weeks to three weeks depending on how much you have built in your MAP, but there’s a lot of things to to to track and test. So here’s just a quick checklist of some of those things that you can always go back to. Just make sure you’ve got them covered. User permission and access. So you will have somebody who’s an admin. It may be marketing. It may be somebody in IT. That person should also have familiarity with your CRM and how the data needs to be structured and flowed. Um, data security, uh, data consent, having a background in that definitely helps too. So approvals of different users in the system and creating new users should go through that that person or that small group of members. User training. So usually the admin is also the one that does the training for the users. So you, uh, uh, lot of things to do all at once. Right? So you you’re implementing, you’ve got your project, you’re trying to get your MAP online, um, but you need to have a training program too. So, you know, enlist some help from IT if if you need to have a training program built so that you can get the users active in the system and starting to test before it goes live so that they can play around, build some segmentation rules, do some test email campaigns, make sure all your domains are working properly. You gotta do a lot of testing. And with that, you should have a good amount of users, uh, in there trying to test some things. And then keep in mind too, if you are using a Salesforce tool that they have the spring, summer, winter releases, and that does affect, um, engagement cloud or what other marketing automation platform you’re using. So they have to keep up to date too with some of those changes and new features that are coming. Communicate your launch. This one is a given. Make sure the shareholders know what’s going on, the dates, um, you know, project completion. Make sure your team knows, and any cross functional team sales probably given. Sometimes customer service, sometimes you’re quoting or estimating group. Make sure that they’re aware that this is coming and how it’s going to affect them and why the company is investing in it. Alright. Optimization. In the session information, I I mentioned, you know, set it and forget it. So if you remember those old school infomercials with that, um, oven that was on the TV guide, it was set it and forget it. Uh, that was their their tagline. So marketing automation is meant to automate and make things easier for you, but it still needs to be monitored and supported and invested in as long as you have it online. So it really isn’t set it and forget it. There are a lot of rules and automation you can build, and it will run until you change it or tell it to stop. But if you wanna get the most out of it, you need to continue investing in it and integrating it into all of your marketing operations. That’s when you will see the true benefit. Data cleansing is also given. So for all the marketers out there, every three months, you should be doing some sort of data cleansing in your marketing automation platform. Take out the people who are inactive or unmailable. They can always come back in, so don’t worry about that. So there’s a quick tip here. You can build an automation rule based on score and activity to kind of make it easy for you. Rehash your strategy. Ask yourself these three questions. Am I tracking what I need? Does the program cover all my different funnel stages? My lead scoring model working? Just make sure as you’re going through, you’re asking yourself these questions and confirming that they’re they’re working okay. Data integrations, I talked about this a little bit. If you can’t find an out of the box connector, there are other tools out there. Zapier is one of them so that you can get the data that you need within the the system. Data security, the sparkly and shiny, um, fun area that everyone loves to talk about, that is super critical, still in MAP. It is a software as a service. Email compliance is big. Data storage, data security, you need to have some understanding of that or make sure that you work with IT so that this database is protected and covered. Not the most fun, but it’s important. Alright. Step four, success. So we’re getting close to that five minute mark, and I wanna make sure that we have time for questions. So a quick case study. Uh, this is considering a medium sized organization. Right? So we, uh, I led an initiative where we migrated HubSpot to Pardot, and we have integrated, uh, marketing automation platform into all of our operations. So here’s a couple of things that we did and some wins. Um, we’re tracking our CMS, our content management system, on all eight language websites, generated a really robust prospect database with, like, 200 custom fields to track all the different specific data points to our company so we can better target, built form handlers to collect all the data that we need, automation rules to qualify, and then, like I mentioned earlier, kinda track those offline advertising. So with this and many other things that happen behind the scenes, uh, here’s some of the wins that we gained. Describing or I’m sorry. Decreased visitor prospect time by 16%, increased conversions, made things a lot more automated and easier to do, and increased our open rate for emails too. So there’s a lot of wins that you can gain after you do this investment. Analyze your success. Opportunities should be rolling in. Look at your reports and make sure that everything is performing, and you’re starting to see the benefits. Communicate and document your wins. You’ve got your who, what, when, where, why. After about three months, present it to your execs. Let them know what’s going on and and show your wins. Quarterly reviews are important. Sales needs, what are the integrations, cleansing, and compliance. Just make sure every few months you’re going through and making sure that everything is covered. These are some of the critical areas. Uh, brainstorm how to expand. MAP is a living, breathing thing. More effort and care you take into it, the more you can get out of it. So integrate it everywhere you can. Uh, one of the last slides I have in here, get certified. So Salesforce and some of the other marketing platforms out there, um, have certification programs. So I’m a certified marketing cloud, uh, account engagement specialist. It’s a long name. Um, but it’s a great badge to have, and it really will help you get the most out of your system. Thank you. I have one slide left, uh, that that will be in the recording with helpful resources, but I will leave it open to Julian in the q and a.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Thanks so much, Lauren. This was a really great session. A lot of info I wish I had when I was starting out in this in this Yeah. A great a couple of questions in the q and a. We have one from Anna here. Started this thing. Um, kind of the understanding whether when to allow your marketing automation platform to update and overwrite CRM systems. Any thoughts on that?

Speaker 1: That’s a good one. That’s a that’s a long that question could take me a long time to to answer, to be honest. Yeah. That this goes back to, you know, your single source of truth. Right? If you talk to your IT team or your CRM owner, for the most part, any account information shouldn’t be overwritten by the MAP, with the exception of some things that will help because the data gets outdated quickly, like email address, like industry, like, um, their address or where they work. With COVID, everything happened after COVID, People are still working from home, so their mailing address may be different if you need to get a hold of them. Um, phone number is one that changes regularly, so you can let phone number override what’s in your CRM. It depends on if the data is gonna be really beneficial, but it can definitely be a battle. I’ve had this conversation with sales many times. I’m happy, Anna, to connect with you on LinkedIn, and we can talk about it more later.

Speaker 0: Definitely. Yeah. One more question from Kyra. I’ll push here, but I’ll note in case we get cut off. Please feel free to reach out to Lauren on the chat on LinkedIn like she said.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Please.

Speaker 0: But yes. Any best practices for starting out on the lead story model?

Speaker 1: Yes. There, um, this is another long question to answer, but the best thing I could say is you’re gonna need outside resources and inside resources. So one thing I would say is, like I mentioned, have the united front with sales and marketing. Ask the sales or engineering team, um, what actions they see that trigger a customer to be ready to buy? Is it a certain form that they fill on your website? Start with the call to actions first and the conversion points and then work backwards. What happens before a person completes your RFQ form? Right? They did these typically, they do these five things. So once you start tracking in your MAP, you can see the journey. That’s how you wanna build your marketing, um, your lead scoring model. Start with the conversions, the big winners. Like, how do those turn into opportunities and work backwards? And, yeah, I feel free to share with me, Kyra, um, after this, and I can I can offer some more too?

Speaker 0: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Lauren. Uh, really appreciate all sharing your all of your insight with everyone attending today. Connect with her on LinkedIn. Um, we’ll be moving on to another session shortly in a few sessions. When this ends, the next one on this track, or you can go back to your agenda and choose a different session to hop out to next. Thank you so much, everyone.

Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you. Thank you all. Bye bye.