Marketing Automation For Dummies (2014)

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Leveraging Social Media with Marketing Automation

Social media has recently taken on a new form. For the purpose of this chapter, and all future marketing, you should consider anything that happens online to be social. For example:

· Your blog allows for social sharing

· Your Twitter feed is social

· People are copying your white papers to LinkedIn

· People are talking about your company on Facebook

The next sections show you how these social interactions tie in with marketing automation.

Syncing social media with marketing automation

You have two ways to sync your social media with your marketing automation tool:

· Syncing social media when your marketing automation tool can execute social campaigns. Some marketing automation tools have social media post abilities in their tool sets. Others don’t. If your tool does allow you to execute social campaigns, you don’t need to take any actions to sync your campaigns; the syncing should already be done for you.

· Syncing social media campaigns to marketing automation when using separate tools. If you’re using different tools, you can connect the two by syncing the URLs, as shown in Figure 11-1. In this figure, I created a custom URL in my marketing automation tool and pasted it into HootSuite. This allows my marketing automation tool to track the link clicks but allows HootSuite to send it out across its network.

Figure 11-1: Integrate your disconnected marketing automation tool with social sites.

Leveraging LinkedIn with marketing automation

LinkedIn is a very powerful social media channel for most businesses. For consumer packaged-goods brands and other non-B2B companies, it has little value. If you run marketing for a B2B brand, here are some ways to use LinkedIn and marketing automation together:

· Posting to groups: This is the most effective way to use LinkedIn and your marketing automation tool. A LinkedIn group is a content channel. It does not create content for you, but helps you distribute it. So if you are following the trends in a group, all you need to connect the group with your marketing automation tool is to make sure that you have a way to track the URL posted to LinkedIn. To make this connection, you create a dedicated landing page for the content, using custom redirects, or create special versions of the content only for LinkedIn. Regardless of which approach you choose, the goal is to make sure that you know where your leads are coming from and can get this information into your marketing automation tool. The URLs allow you to do this.

· Posting to a timeline: Timelines in LinkedIn are just like a Facebook feed or a Twitter stream. When you post to LinkedIn, you have the option to post to a group or a timeline. Figure 11-2 shows this option that appears from using the social sharing buttons on a blog post. Remember to make sure that you are using traceable URLs so that you know where your leads are coming from and so that you can feed the required data into your marketing automation tool and track your leads that are generated from LinkedIn.

Figure 11-2: Posting to a timeline or group is an option in LinkedIn.

Building programs to connect to Facebook

B2C brands tend to understand the value of Facebook, but convincing many B2B brands of Facebook’s power is very difficult. If you can use marketing automation to track your engagements, it can easily show you the value Facebook provides. You have a few ways to build and connect your marketing automation tool to Facebook. Some are easier than others:

· Basic integration: Basic integration is the same for Facebook as any other social media channel. If you can control your URL, or the destination of the URL, you can connect the two systems and track your lead flow. The most basic way to use Facebook is to have a page and allow people to Like your page. Receiving Likes can help provide social proof of the viability of your company.

· Intermediate integration: If you are a more advanced Facebook marketer, you might be using Facebook ads. If you are using Facebook ads, they integrate with marketing automation in the same way as any other paid search medium. You need to make sure that you’re using custom URLs or driving leads to a specific landing page. Either of these methods allows you to track effectiveness. I call this intermediate integration because it requires you to know how to do paid placement ads in Facebook. This knowledge is not something most people have.

· Advanced integration: If you’re an active marketer in Facebook, you can get into very advanced integrations. Facebook allows for the insertion of iFrames into your pages. That way, forms created in your marketing automation tool can be posted to your Facebook page, giving you a lead capture form inside Facebook. Because a lead capture form is already native to your marketing automation tool, no integration is required for setup. I call this advanced integration because posting iFrames into Facebook requires IT help if you’re not familiar with the use of iFrames.

Integrating Video into Social Media

Video is a massive social media tool. It can be used on any medium. If you are not doing video now, you should be. Videos are the hottest engagement method currently online. You can read tons of stats on their power. Do you think your prospects watch more TV or read more books? Answer: They watch more TV. That’s why video is such an awesome tool with social media. You have three ways to integrate video into your marketing automation mix:

· Basic: The most basic integration you can have between your videos and your marketing automation tool is to simply post video to your website. Because your marketing automation tool knows what pages a person looks at, you can easily see whether someone visits the page your video is on. This visibility allows for all automations such as scoring, routing, and nurturing.

Posting video to your website is not the best way to use it, but it is better than nothing. It also is the easiest to set up, and you can do it with any video platform, from YouTube to Vimeo. Your call to action can be on the page or you can embed it at the end of the video. You can even have a form below the video without editing your video file at all. All these options are easy, and you can handle them without any technical knowledge.

· Intermediate: If you want a tighter integration between your videos and your marketing automation tool, you can embed calls to action within your video. This functionality depends on your video-hosting tool. More advanced tools such as Wisita are very specific for B2B marketing and have simple tools to allow you to insert forms into your videos. These video-hosting tools do not require you to have any special software or video equipment.

· Advanced: Advanced integration requires that both your video platform and your marketing automation tool allow for this type of connection. You can check with your vendor to see which video platforms the vendor integrates with. By connecting your video platform to your marketing automation tool, you can see how much of a video each person watched and then run automations and scoring based on a person’s engagement with a single video. This technique is super powerful and not that hard to set up.

Driving Leads to an Event with Automation

Marketing automation can lend a hand in advertising and managing your event. You can market offline events without marketing automation; however, you’ll have a harder time keeping up with registrants, and you’ll likely lose valuable insights into who is coming from where. You’ll also struggle with keeping your communication consistent across all marketing channels. Using marketing automation helps you save large amounts of time, gain valuable insights on people so that you know what is relevant to people, know where they came from, and be able to do a much better job at lead follow-up and reporting on the effectiveness of your event.

The following sections show you how to use marketing automation to promote an event across multiple channels, send out email invitations, manage the event, and send post-event communications.

Setting up event registration

To begin marketing an event, follow these simple steps:

1. Create the event registration page.

I suggest using Eventbrite to manage your events. Eventbrite has connections to many marketing automation tools, making events very easy to manage. It’s also free to use if your event is free to attend. Figure 11-3 shows Eventbrite’s tool.

2. Build the landing page.

After creating your event registration page, you need to put your registration form onto a landing page. Figure 11-4 shows an Eventbrite registration form on a website landing page. If you are doing a webinar, you need to use the webinar registration page given to you by your webinar platform. If you’re not doing a webinar or using Eventbrite, I suggest creating a form in your marketing automation tool to capture registrations.

Figure 11-3: Use Eventbrite’s event management solution.

Figure 11-4: Embed your registration form on a landing page.

3. Create a custom redirect.

You need to create a separate URL redirect for each channel you plan to market through. Having a separate URL is critical only when you want to know which channel drove the highest registration for a particular event. Seeing which link was clicked the most makes reporting on your most productive partners, channel, or medium very easy.

Using multiple marketing channels to promote your event

In 1950, only five marketing channels existed: word of mouth, direct mail, print, television, and radio. In 2013, we have more than 60 different marketing channels, including webinars, virtual worlds, wikis, paid search, and so much more. Determining which to use can be somewhat of a chore, and managing all these channels can add even more stress to your already stressful day. Using the following automations across multiple channels helps you drive higher attendance to your next event.

Create a separate traceable URL for each channel. A traceable URL makes reporting on the ROI of each channel easy. Creating the traceable URL, and being able to associate it with revenue, are activities that you cannot do without marketing automation!

When you’re putting on an event, you need to make sure that people know about it. Here are some easy ways to use marketing automation to help promote and track your event:

· Facebook: Facebook has proven to be a very viable way to market events for some businesses. Use a custom redirect set up specifically for Facebook, as shown in Figure 11-5. The redirect drives people to your landing page to sign up.

· LinkedIn groups: Make sure that your LinkedIn group allows you to share URLs. Some do not. If they do, set up a custom redirect to track leads coming from LinkedIn.

· Twitter: You want to advertise your event multiple times on Twitter. The larger your Twitter audience, the better your results will be. Figure 11-6 shows a tweet advertising an upcoming webinar.

Figure 11-5: Use a custom redirect to drive Facebook visitors to your event.

Figure 11-6: Tweet your events to a large audience.

· Vine: Vine is a social media channel launched in 2013. You can use Vine to capture video and promote it via other social channels. Consider shooting a six-second video explaining what people can expect at your event.

· YouTube: You should use video in your marketing regardless of whether you choose YouTube or another video site to host your video. Consider mixing shots from your other events. Try to show as many people as possible in every shot, and highlight keynote speakers and their accomplishments. Basically, you’re creating a trailer!

· Direct mail: If you’re advertising with print media, make your custom URL short and specific so that people who read it on paper can easily type it into a web browser. Also consider using Quick Response codes, better known as QR codes, to make it easier for your prospect to access the URL with a mobile device. These codes are easily scanned with a smart phone to pull up a customized experience on a person’s mobile device. So, for example, you can have someone scan a flyer and instantly play a video on that user’s phone.

· Blog: If you don’t have a lot of people reading your blog on a daily basis, don’t expect a lot of people to see your posts. To increase engagement with your blog, paste registration information directly into the post. There are many ways to do this, as shown in Figure 11-7. You can do this by using a sidebar HTML block in WordPress or your chosen blog tool. Or you can paste the registration form directly into the HTML of the page via the HTML editor in your blog platform.

Figure 11-7: Blog posts promoting an upcoming event should include easy registration.

You can remove the need to click off the page by embedding your registration form on the page you are advertising. You’ll capture more leads than you would by asking prospects to leave the page and register on another page.

Staying relevant after an event

Your event is only one part of your marketing automation campaign. If your event generates leads, you need to follow up with them. A typical event also has many more registrants than actually attendees. Don’t follow up just to say thank you to those who attended. Use marketing automation to deliver content to those who couldn’t attend, as well. Your follow-up should be broken up into three parts:

· Content: Take as many photos, videos, and audio recordings as possible at your event. Capture every speaker and get a copy of the speaker’s slides. All this content becomes great follow-up material. Break your content into long- and short-form content. Long-form content is any content that exceeds a few pages. Usually this content consists of ebooks, white papers, and full analyst reports. Short-form content is very short.

If you take a white paper (long form) and break it down into specific sections, you have a short-form piece of content. Using both forms of content results in a lot of content for both inbound marketing and outbound emails. Your long-form content helps you identify more sales-ready interest, and your short form content works as teasers for the long-form content.

· Follow-up nurturing program: Try to kick off your nurturing campaign the day after your event, and run it for seven to ten days after the event. This length of time should allow you to have two to three follow-up emails delivering content around your topic.

· Automation rules: You need automation rules to help you manage all your follow-up. Your automation rules add people to nurturing campaigns, change their scores based on attending the event, and pass sales-ready leads over to sales. Ensure that you have the following automation rules set up to help you manage your leads correctly:

· Score leads for signing up. Your score depends on the sales readiness of your webinar. If the webinar presents a product demo, score higher. If it is an educational webinar, score lower.

· Notify salespeople if any of their leads attend a webinar.

· Put everyone who signed up on a drip nurturing program.

· Identify sales-ready leads and pass them to sales. (You should have already created this rule, but if not, make sure to do so now.)

· Attach the leads who signed up for your webinar campaign so that you can track its effectiveness.