Unlock the power of a lead nurturing funnel for Communications & Media

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good to meet you all thanks for dealing with my voice first time my career that I've ever had speaking challenges for those of you that know me um we're gonna talk about mid funnel and I'm gonna go right into that I just want to let you guys know that put together talking about content brought together a book that I wrote on lead management so if any of you have marketing automation like eloquent Marketo or thinking about getting it pick up a copy of the book outside there's a lot of great content about I'm really how to leverage that tool as Toby said I've been in the marketing automation industry for about eight years now six of them professionally running demanda and helping clients with these systems and what I want to share with you today is a lot of the learnings and experiences from from those client engagements I thing about marketing automation is it's a system it's like getting a copy of basic or C or whatever programming language that you might get there's nothing in it when you get it you have to build everything it's everybody's journeys a little bit different as far as the what they want to do with it the one thing that I want to focus on today is using marketing automation in this theme of content is creating a conversation and a dialogue and automating that through nurturing so let's talk a little bit about that let's make it interact I'm going to ask you guys questions because that lets me talk less but let me ask you a question how many of you have those of you that have marketing automation raise your hand if you're not doing any nurturing whatsoever and be honest come on they're all lying just so you know okay they don't want to raise their hands a lot of people have marketing automation they don't do nurturing but for someone who's not doing nurturing or maybe doesn't feel they're doing enough nurturing what's one of the reasons that you're not doing nurturing or doing enough content okay what's a good another good reason or a bad reason sometimes a your time segment great great one segmentation so how do I know who to put in the nurture when is this person still above the funnel or at the top of the funnel and what what nurture should they be in and if I want to do persona nurtures how do I know how to track them because how do i segment my database into those different personas so a lot of people stall and creating nurtures because they don't know how to do the entry criteria they don't have enough content resources I heard somebody say it's another reason I would suggest that one of the reasons a lot of people don't do nurturing is because they don't know how to have a conversation so I have a good little cartoon I have a whole bunch of good cartoons talking about content I have a little calendar that has a great cartoon for every month of the year and this one really kind of speaks to I think the challenge is like When Harry Met lead and they don't know how to have a conversation and are we having conversations with our leads when we do these batch and blasts when we come up with the next campaign to jour and we send out this email to you know a hundred thousand of our closest leads are we really having a conversation so a lot of people don't know how to have a conversation so what I'm gonna do today is really focus on how to systematically do that most of the presentations you've heard a very high-level strategic good recommendations got some good tactics out of the last one as well I'm gonna get even more tactical on how to build these nurtures so you can truly walk away with a recipe although you mentioned this problem not having enough content I wish this guy worked outside all of our buildings that would be great but we have a lot of great resources like Cathy down here in the front to help us with our content strategy it's not that easy to create content so where should you create nurtures I call this hourglass nurturing you need to do it at the top and below I start with the folks from Agilent and one of the things that they were sharing was about that their focus is below the funnel they're in the services group at Agilent so they want to market to people who have become customers I want to ask you to raise your hands and continue to do that but I bet a lot of you out there feel that this is a place that we really ignore is below the funnel right we're so busy filling the funnel so busy trying to generate leads at the top of the funnel we forget that especially if we're a SAS company that a lot of our revenue is below the funnel expanding into that so where should you start if you've never done any nurturing whatsoever where should you start enquiries and mq ELLs MQL I don't know if that's a term everybody's familiar with stands for marketing qualified lead that's for someone who's not just a hand raiser that's an inquiry but someone who's really showing interest in your products and services normally done through lead scoring so those are two great places to start because the funnel is really wide up there and if we can continue the conversations automatically at the top of the funnel then we're gonna move more things down and ideally convert to a lot more customers below the funnel those really great too because that's we're gonna create what not market share but actually wallet share now let me tell you how to start and I'm just gonna reveal to you guys some behind-the-scenes secrets at the mansion this is our very sophisticated super duper content marketing management system also known as Excel everybody has a copy of it somewhere we actually do use Kapost but this is before Kapost and this is a system that works it simply does in inventory down the left-hand side of every piece of content that we call our greatest hits and if you notice and I think Jill is gonna come up later and talk about that lower part of the funnel sales it's broken out to content for marketing and content for sales just has a row for each piece of our greatest hits then what you see down the right-hand side is a column for where that content is best used okay where's the free trial you guys know this where's a free trial good to use is at the bottom of the funnel above the funnel middle of funnel where's a free trial once a calendar free trial where would you use it top of the funnel wrong answer it's never wrong answer but you can tell Jill that's the wrong answer where is it after MQL yeah it's not not that free trial is not a good thing to put out there because some people may have done a ton of research on the web and they're ready to just you know try it on so it is a very effective way but should never be ignored mid funnel if they didn't sign up for trial and they entered and took another piece of content it's an absolute key ingredient to your nurture to let them know that you have a free trial and today after I give you a little bit of theory I'm gonna take you through an actual nurture for a company called vidyard who makes a video platform and show you exactly where they use their free trial and how they do that conversation so what you see is the different columns for all the different pieces of content and you'll notice that some content can be used in many different places it doesn't have to be used just in one place but once you actually have this designated out then this thing I don't have enough content for my nurture you're gonna demystify whether you actually have it or not so once you do a little Content inventory and you think about building a top of funnel nurture you can say hey I actually have some content that's pretty good at the top of the funnel that's the content that I'll string together into a conversation now if any of you want a little recipe let's get started - to nurture as I said that you should start with inquiry nurture and an MQL nurture and I'm glad he's videotaping this because I will never show this on our website because of my voice but you guys can enjoy it so today's contents not useful for me but thank you for taking the picture four to nine touches is that excessive is that too little too much really depends on the conversation that you're having depends how long your buying cycle is maybe nine touches isn't enough maybe you're like Acela which Don and I were talking about earlier who does a one year to two year buying cycle that's a long time so maybe you need nurtures that lasts a lot longer but right here what you see is what I call a either twenty one and done model or going out to 90 days three months is a long nurture why is that a long nurture cuz it's hard for you to think about having a three month conversation with a prospect it's hard for you to develop a nurture that lasts that long you might actually want to do some bite-size nurtures and string them together but if you weren't create one what you see that recipe the two five seven fourteen seven three five fourteen or fourteen 1051 those are the number of days between every touch what do you notice about those date patterns it's not one one one one one it's not seven seven seven seven seven it's a conversation someone enters into your funnel two days later they were Seve a follow-up communication not five minutes later but two days later is it wrong to do it five minutes it depends if they signed up for a webinar you absolutely want to give them a confirmation five minutes from now okay that's an appropriate tactical type of nurture but if you're going to string content together over extended period of time notice that there's a lot of value in a little bit of frequency and then some silence and then some frequency we don't want to become white noise to the people that we're trying to communicate with there's nothing worse than talking to someone and they don't stop talking to you right and if they talk to you and then you engage with them another time the conversation can continue so there's just a little pattern for you we were talking about this during the break during the expert session we talked about the movie swingers and it was with Vince Vaughn and I don't remember that movie for a long time ago guy gets a girl's phone number at the bar and he says he goes so so guys when should I call her they go three days it's like what do you mean three days he goes it's industry standard you wait three days to call her because well how long do you guys wait and they go five days so it's a funny little movie but the the reason to bring up the funny little movie is everybody's mileage is gonna vary I just want to give you a little recipe but if you're gonna nurture over 21 to 90 days you know use a pattern of frequency and then be gone for a little bit and then come back short content how many of you love raise your hand because I know not one hand will go up how many of you love long emails it has tons of information and lots of links anybody know we hate long emails the longer the email the heavier it is you don't even want to read it you don't know what I'm trying to find the action items in it you know nobody a company sends really long emails so why do we want to stand out from the crowd and write these big huge brochure emails guess what the best thing about nurtures it's the least amount of copy you've ever written in an email typically it's short and I'm gonna show you some because that's what people want to look at here's the takeaway here's something you can tweet if it's that good think of email as an invitation to your content think of email as an invitation to your content meaning that it's the thing that they get and it's the click-through is the opening of the invitation take them to your website take them to a piece of content don't tell them all about the content in the email that's a guaranteed way to reduce your click-through rates and it's a guaranteed way if you write long copy to start reducing your open rates because nobody wants to read those very long emails okay short content personal tone MQL nurtures you know should be really from a person at that point you're trying to create engagement with the company don't keep sending emails from marketing at acne com nobody wants to get emails from a machine or a department they want to get emails from people they'll get higher open rates higher read rates I wouldn't necessarily suggest you create fictitious people but I'm not saying you shouldn't create fictitious people I think it is valuable to send your emails from someone if you're trying to engage them with your lead development team then use the names of the people that are assigned to that account obviously integrating marketing automation with your CRM have tracks by personas when watching my daughter watch a show called catfish and I realize there's way too many personas out there in the world that's not the kind of personas that we're talking about we're talking about different buyer personas so um you should use different personas because there's different messaging that you can use again I'm going to show you one an example how should you get started I wish this wasn't as small as it is but it's a document so it's time to scrunch it down so I'll just describe it to you remember to create a brief we all use them right this is a nurture brief it's a document that's designed specifically for creating nurtures what's the one thing the most important thing the nurture brief does it says what the goal is of the nurture guess what the goal is not to string together four pieces of content and deliver it in 30 days that's not the goal of a nurture the goal of the nurture should be to pursue a desired outcome like getting someone to sign up for a free trial you might have a nurture that is just the objective is to get the recipient of this set of communications to sign up for a free trial that's a goal it's a measurable goal and you can tell if your nurture is working or not because you're measuring it against the goal maybe your nurture is to try and get someone for a free consultation there's a doctor in in Texas he told me once he's a plastic surgeon he said 85% of people who come into my office will become a client I said that's the goal of your nurture is to get them into your office do you offer a consultation he goes I do I go how much is it he goes I normally charge one hundred ninety five dollars I go why would you charge one hundred ninety five dollars if 85 percent of the people they're gonna come and he goes - good point so that became a free consultation and his nurture was getting him into the office to answer their questions about plastic surgery the nurture brief talks about who is in the nurture good data sitting up here in the front I forget your name Michele Michele said you know about who goes in there so the thing that the nurture brief says is who should enter the nurture what's the criteria that they enter should a customer enter your top of funnel nurture know so you'd want to create filters that say if type equals customer exclude them you have to actually systematically program what filters are gonna go into that nurture so you need to decide who goes into it okay that's the hardest part that's why there's companies like us to help people with marketing automation system it's not a selfish plug well maybe it's a little bit but it is really to say that this stuff's not easy and you have to figure out who's going to enter in the nurture program you also have to figure out who exits the nurture program right if we have this free trial' nurture and I've string together six touches I should immediately come out of the nurture once I've signed up for the free trial it's just bad marketing if you're still telling them about your free trial after they've already signed up okay so entry criteria exit criteria you're gonna get a copy of the slides so it's a little bit easier to see but this really breaks out who should go into there and what decisions they should come out so that's the nurture brief let's drill down a little bit more to the recipe anybody like Vizio Vizio should become your friend or at least an iPad flowcharting program or a whiteboard or something when I first got marketing automation back in 2004 I bought little whiteboards for everyone on my marketing team I didn't seem using too much but the idea was a good one that you'll save yourself a lot of time if you draw out the flow of the nurture tons of time a lot of heads shaking from people have done it before okay you sit there and you right at the top start and then you write email one and you can make it look like a little envelope and you should put in how many days you're going to weigh then you have a decision rule what would the decision rule be should they exit okay one decision rule you want to say is you know should they be exiting the nurturer now and taking them out okay another type of decision rule you might ask is did they do the thing that I wanted them to do if they did maybe you're gonna move them into the next nurturer if they didn't then maybe you're gonna continue them on a path you might use the decision rule to say did they open the email did they click through the email you can use their digital body language to either accelerate the nurture if they're responding or maybe possibly slow it down if they're not but you're gonna string together in a little Vizio flow that thought process of who enters who exits all the different action steps and the time that will save you a tremendous amount of time when you sit down with the system and build it what will it also enable you to do see it you've got a recipe book now so when you want to know if it's time for you to update your inquiry nurture you don't have to go into your marketing automation system and say what does my nurture look like I can't remember what I built how many touches how long does it take you've got a recipe book for that each touch is an ingredient okay so you should define the objective of the touch you should talk about who it's coming from and what the tone is saw part of the nurture brief you should make sure that you define what the call to action is the CTA and whatever copy requirements and whether there's any former landing page requirements by writing this out and putting this into your nurture brief then when you hand it to the copy team or whoever's gonna be working on this they know exactly the flow of the nurture and they know each touch and think of each touch almost like a mini creative brief but it's a conversation so they all have to work in in concert together let's take a look at video art anybody heard that it vidyard some hands going up okay great so they make a video platform for marketers I don't know in stock in the company but I am a customer now but 90 days ago I wasn't and I want to tell you how they got me to be a customer by dissecting their nursery program this is what it looks like from a bird's eye view the video artists was a set of inquiry touches they exhibited at Eliquis perience in florida and i went by their booth and I gave them my business card and I obviously showed enough interest that they started to Munich ate with me so I got a series of emails after that and I would call that their inquiry nurture you can see when that started 15 touches they did with an average of one a week it was over 90 days they use five different senders in the nurture wasn't the same person every single time wasn't marketing at video comm it was actually Patrick I don't know Patrick I've never talked to Patrick I still became a customer but Patrick was my little ambassador into the the company this is what some of the inquiry touches look like notice they're a little heavy say hello to video they talk to me about video and how it works with Alec well why do they tell me of that it works with elico maybe personas maybe they're saying hey this guy uses Eloqua I'm going to talk to him about it eloquent as that they talked about their analytics notice some very short emails some longer ones some colorful ones they really mixed it up and did a did a very nice job then all of a sudden I enter the free trial what do you think those nurtures look like big huge pieces of copy about everything about their software how to use it no they're invitations to content so it says I don't have my glasses on and I can barely speak so that's great says hello I think it's Dave it's me thanks for creating an account on vidyard we're here to help you that's nice and get the most out of the software since you're new here which I'm glad that they knew that I was let's get started and then some links were to go and this one was from the team at video art it's like the concierge at a hotel like hey thanks for coming in glad to have you as a customer and now here's what you can do although I'm a prospect so then they sent another communication that's a pretty short one very nice then another one with a little longer now they're telling me hey hopefully you like it by now and you want to tell other people about it maybe you can share it or tweet about it and they were telling me that I have some great news my video art account is all set up well we all know that it was set up immediately when I signed up for the free trial but they want to let me know the good news why are they doing this they're staying top of mine why is that because how many people actually use free trials this many lots of people sign up for free trials very few people move in and they do video hosting what's the hurdle they have to get me over I got to either make a video or to video and stick it in the system because there's no way I can experience how good their platform is until I actually move in and use a video and what you'll find with their nurture touches which I won't read all of them to you that they varied the content but always trying to be helpful and now it's time for Patrick to weigh in and he wants to you know be there to support me then the holidays came and I stopped using my free trial I stopped logging in their systems told me that my digital body language was not very conducive to moving along with my free trial why because I had no content and I had no time and so my video free trial was expiring and I was nearing the end but they sent me a nice little holiday touch why did they do this wasn't part of the nurture but because I was in a segment of a non customer or a broad segment they still felt it was okay for them to send it to me and what did they do they used their own product to give me this holiday card so it was a really nice reinforcer I'm like hmm that's a really clever use of their technology and look how nice that is showing their little team on the day before Christmas by the way when's the best days to send emails now b2b emails anybody no best days Don yeah Saturday and Sunday shame on all of us for reading our email on the weekends none of the other marketers have figured out that those are great days because there's not a lot of noise in your inbox will all be emailing on Saturday and Sunday pretty soon they'll be terrible all right so now we're moving forward and they're back hi again I took a quick look at your account and I think it says that they've set it up but they're telling that I haven't put any video in and so they continue to nurture me and make sure that I move in and then what happens after all that nurturing I finally use it and success has occurred and they're telling me congratulations for using the platform and loading up my video and now how to get it onto the website very very effective and I became a customer so does this look hard no it's not Howard nurturing is actually quite easy because it's a conversation the hard part is coming up with a conversation that's the hardest part and in terms of you know creating content what I showed you earlier with my fancy Excel workbook is you guys have tons of content I bet I bet there's tons of content that someone would use during a buying cycle if you don't know that content talk to your customers okay Jesse and Joe and the rest of the team a telecoil you know they crank out all this content look at the content they create it resonates with their customers very well they understand that you guys are interested in topics around lead nurturing around lead scoring the use of marketing automation on how to generate content yourself their contents always very topical to what your needs are and that's very helpful I was sitting with the folks from Ray's systems ray makes you know equipment to detect noxious gases and evil things like that and bad things can they create content absolutely because I bet they have some great case studies about what happened in Japan a year or so ago and how their products were used to save lives and so there's always great content no matter how mechanical or boring you think your product is there's a lot of great content so nurture in and around the funnel don't have one nurture be proud of it if you guys were honest before and didn't raise your hands because you are doing nurturing I'm really proud of you that's awesome but I don't know if you're a nurturing at the top middle and bottom of the funnel so you bought this marketing automation system loaded up with some great programs hopefully some of those insights I gave you are gonna be very helpful and then you know write a project brief and draw the flow out not only does that serve as good planning tools and I'll help you think through the process much easier but it does serve as the family recipe book let's face it unless you're some you know strange individual you're not going to do your job at your company for the rest of your life someone else is probably going to come in and take over that for you or your team's going to expand so having more this tough document and put together is really critical it's time to change we're modern marketers now we've gone through a major transformation over the last couple years we've got technology and tools that make us the best marketers that we've ever had the capabilities to be if you don't have those tools go get them because they will help you be more successful they will help your career if you have those tools then use them and if you want additional resources on how to use them those people are out there willing to help you and so I hope you enjoy that Toby if we have some questions and just a reminder again I guess the slides will be out but if you'd like a copy of the book that goes into a lot more depth on this feel free to take a free copy there they're yours and enjoy presenting thanks so much David's coming around on the quad Dave did a great job surviving that voice I think you wore yourself out trying to manage your content marketing in that spreadsheet I'm sorry I know that can be debilitating but I'm glad that you made it through are there any questions okay you guys are brutal asking me questions so we were talking about lead nurturing in the middle of the funnel if you will brands that are engaging on groups such as LinkedIn groups where they have to engage on a regular basis with a community it could be a group that they've set up or a group that they're looking to engage in where in the process do you think that type of activity fits in so let me make sure I understand so if you created a LinkedIn group and you have members for that group is that what you're saying that's right or or in fact you may not have created the group but you're just participating in a group where the topic aligns very closely to the products or services that you provide okay I'm not sure I still totally understand the question but I'll give you a couple sound bites and then let's let's see if that's it if membership to this group is gonna help further the education of prospects then getting them to join and become members of those groups would be a great thing to suggest and touch if you're trying to recruit people if you're talking about are you talking about communicating with the members of the group that's right okay so with the members of the group and getting them to be more active participants okay do you have would you would you have the email addresses of those people or are you talking about maybe stimulating the group conversation on LinkedIn so it could be a LinkedIn or it could be another platform but essentially stimulating conversation and associating your brand to to that cop to the topic area I'm showing you're saying couple of short ideas and we can talk more because it sounds like that's a very specific question but when you have something like that like a community and I know a lot of you have community portions of your website you want to get people to be active in the community and and come back on a regular basis so you know that type of social communication is going to be both manual and can be automated give an example I have a small community that's growing the the book site so when I wrote the book I created a website for the book and we have a community there's a nurturer that's been built that's three touches they look a little bit different but it actually just runs in perpetuity its touch touch touch packed to the top again and it's spread enough out that the human brains not gonna remember that the third email was like the first email and so it's constantly saying hey just want to let you know there's some new content on the website if you haven't been to the blog in a while go check it out and it's only sending that if they haven't been in a while so I'm using in that case their digital body language to know whether they should receive it and mixing a set of automated communications and since I'm talking about automated nurturing I'm giving you that kind of an answer but it sounds like we get it to talk more about it but um you know keeping people active in the community and letting them know what's topical is is valuable and I'd also say you know use a platform that has some of those social communication tools built into it as well if for those of you that don't use LinkedIn if you want to talk more though give me a shout okay one more question then we're gonna have to move on here you go hi Lisa Martin global demand Janet NetApp my question is our own CTAs you talk about obviously the importance and the low-hanging fruit of the pre MQL nurture versus the post 7ql nurture do you have a recommendation for the number of CTAs in an inquiry stage pre MQL nurture versus a SM heal the s al nurture sure question like that a lot thanks Lisa in an email the best call to action is one call to action so there's the temptation sometimes when you're writing this email they're just why don't we stick in this extra link here and this extra link here but we've got the other goodies how many of you like getting emails where there's five different roads that you can drive down it's frustrating right it's difficult she's shaking her head so really one call to action when Toby did all the marketing for this event did he tell you any about anything else other than the event no he drove you to the event maybe there was a link to driving directions maybe there the link with the hotel but that would really be the most of it and there in context of the other things so I would say when you've got a message and if you write out a nurture brief and there's a goal of the nurture less is more drive one to maybe call to actions thanks for the questions I'll be around later outside if you want to have some more and again thanks everybody