That may sound like a straightforward question. But it’s not.

At any given time, marketers use several marketing channels and strategies to attract and convert the most customers. Since each customer goes through multiple touchpoints within the buyer’s journey, pinpointing which marketing channel or strategy is making the most impact in generating sales for your business can be challenging.

That’s where marketing attribution comes in.

In this article, you’ll learn what marketing attribution is and how to build an attribution model customized for your business.

What is a marketing attribution model?

Marketing attribution refers to the process businesses use to figure out which of their marketing campaigns or channels are directly responsible for converting website visitors into customers.

Marketing attribution models guide marketers on evaluating each touchpoint within the sales funnel following a set of guidelines.

By building and implementing a marketing attribution model, you and your team can make more informed decisions on which channels and campaigns you should focus on.

As a result you can boost our ROI while lowering your marketing spend. This is vital since more than 50% of businesses today still allocate less than 10% of their overall budget to their marketing campaigns and activities.

Marketing attribution models fall into two general categories: single-step and multi-step attribution models.

Single-touch attribution models

First-touch attribution

This single-touch marketing attribution model shows you which of your marketing channels caused a potential customer to visit your website for the very first time.

Businesses often use this when they’re planning to launch a marketing campaign focused on brand promotion.

Last-touch attribution

As the name suggests, the last-touch or last-click marketing attribution model assigns the entire conversion credit to the last customer touchpoint before the purchase or opportunity creation.

Multi-touch attribution models

The downside of using a single-step marketing attribution model is that both the first-touch and the last-touch attribution models only pinpoint to a single interaction on the buyer’s journey. They don’t show whether other marketing channels you’re using have also influenced a potential customer’s decision to buy.

Thus, many marketers use one or more of the following multi-touch marketing attribution models.

Lead-conversion touch attribution model

This is perhaps the most widely used attribution model because it shows which channels are the most influential in converting your website visitors into qualified leads.

The reason is simple: generating qualified leads is still the most significant challenge faced by businesses across all industries. By identifying the channels and campaigns that bring in leads that are ready to buy, it will be easier for you to convert them into customers.

Linear attribution model

This multi-step marketing attribution model divides the conversion credit equally across all channels used in the buyer’s journey from start to finish.

The drawback of this multi-step attribution model is that the points are evenly distributed among all the touchpoints, so you can’t identify the top-performing channels.

Time-decay attribution model

Similar to the linear attribution model, the time-decay attribution model shows how each marketing channel you’re using affects a visitor’s eventual conversion into a customer.

The difference between the two models is in the way they distribute points.

Instead of giving equal points to each marketing channel, in the time-decay attribution model the value of the points awarded are based on how close each touchpoint is to the actual conversion. That means that channels used in the bottom of the sales funnel are awarded higher points than those used at the top of the funnel, or at the beginning of the buyer’s journey.

U-shaped attribution model

This marketing attribution model gets its name from the way the points are distributed.

Here, both the first and last touchpoints of your sales funnel get 40 points each, from the total of 100 points or the total conversion value. The remaining 20 points are then distributed to the marketing channels used between the first and the last touch.

This model works if you assume that all your leads complete the same journey, starting at the top of the funnel. But, as this study shows, 74% of B2B customers would have completed half of the buyer’s journey before reaching out to you.

More importantly, not everyone that enters your marketing funnel goes through the entire buyer’s journey. In fact, 79% of your leads never make a purchase.

Custom attribution model

Custom attribution model or algorithmic attribution model is quickly gaining popularity among businesses.

As its name suggests, this model is tailored specifically for your business based on your buyer persona, buyer’s journey, and data from the marketing campaigns you’ve launched.

With this model you have more control over how you credit points to each touchpoint based on how much it influences your customers to convert.

How to choose & build an effective marketing attribution model

1. Audit all your marketing efforts

Conducting an audit of all your marketing channels and campaigns gives you a clearer picture of how many touchpoints spread across your sales funnels. It also helps you and your team decide whether building a custom attribution model will be the best option for your business.

Building a marketing attribution model from scratch, after all, requires a significant amount of resources. So, you want to make sure that it will be worth your investment.

Build a custom attribution model if you:

• Have a big marketing team/access to more resources
• Use multiple online and offline marketing channels
• Previously tried one or more standard marketing attribution models without success
• Need to provide stakeholders with a more comprehensive report on how each touchpoint influences your sales and their ROI

2. Set clear goals

Once you’ve determined that a custom marketing attribution model is the best option for your business, you need to choose the main goal for creating one.

Having a clear and specific goal will guide your marketing team to identify which datasets to analyze and use as references in building your attribution model.

Setting a clear goal will also help your team establish the metrics they’ll use as benchmarks to determine whether or not you’d need any adjustments so you can reach the goals.

3. Map your customer journey

Your customer journey serves as the roadmap of your entire attribution model because it helps you identify the specific marketing channels you’ll be monitoring.

Use your customer journey map to categorize each touchpoint based on its impact on your customer’s buying decisions, then distribute the points accordingly.

4. Incorporate lead scoring

Lead scoring is the process of identifying which of your leads will most likely convert into customers.

This is crucial because once you identify your “hot” leads, you can then identify common touchpoints that resulted in conversion and include these into your custom attribution model.

5. Invest in the right tools

Tracking and monitoring the data for each touchpoint manually can be extremely tedious and time-consuming. Not to mention that it’s going to be prone to errors.

Investing in a unified CRM like Insightly makes it easier to track and automate your custom attribution model. It also enables you to collect data across multiple marketing channels in your buyer’s journey and create dashboards and visual reports of all key performance metrics.

6. Customize your attribution report

If you’re going to build an attribution model for your business from scratch, you’ll also need to customize sales reports in your CRM.

Insightly’s advanced reporting features enable you to create a custom report based on the selected touchpoints and the specific values you’ve established.

It also allows you to schedule when these reports will be generated and automatically shared with your team. These regular reports will help you to monitor, evaluate, and make adjustments to your custom attribution model and keep you and your team on track with your goals.

Conclusion

Implementing a marketing attribution model—standard or customized—takes a lot of time and effort. But it’s going to be worth it in the long-term.

For starters, a marketing attribution model helps you and your team to identify top performing channels and focus on them, instead of worrying about ROI every time you launch a new campaign.

Ultimately, marketing attribution models allow you to maximize your marketing budget, improve your customer engagement, and generate more revenue and scale.

Of course, having a marketing attribution model isn’t foolproof, especially if you’re using one that you’ve built from the ground up. So, test regularly, use data to adjust your attribution model, and keep your goals in mind.

The post How to build an attribution model for your business appeared first on Insightly.

So, how do you actually run an integrated campaign?

Here are seven steps to help you get started.

1. Define your goals, strategy, budgets, & channels

Benjamin Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

That’s certainly the case when it comes to launching an integrated campaign. Remember, your integrated campaign will rely on a variety of stakeholders, teams, creatives, and channels to accomplish your stated goal. Take time to properly prepare and set the groundwork for a successful campaign. At a minimum, consider these key areas:

Overall campaign goal(s)

Be specific. The more specific, the better. For the purposes of discussion, let’s assume that your primary objective involves capturing market share from a well-known competitor. How much market share? What does that look like in terms of net new accounts? Will any account do, or are you targeting a specific customer type, such as mid-market IT companies? What would motivate your buyers to switch?

Start an internal conversation and collect ideas from stakeholders across multiple teams and departments—especially from team members who will be supporting this campaign.

Strategy

Your campaign strategy provides a high-level overview of how you intend to achieve your campaign goals. It answers important questions about timelines, messaging, special offers, key milestones, software requirements, outreach cadence, and marketing channels. Many companies formulate their campaign strategies as simple slide decks. You can also use a project management tool to map and visualize campaign strategies.

Budgets & channels

Two of the most important elements for finalizing your campaign strategy include budgets and channels. They’re closely intertwined, which is why it’s prudent to think about them simultaneously. For example, if your company already runs pay-per-click ads, you may be able to use historical data to forecast a fairly accurate cost of acquisition. You can then work backwards to develop a budget that will generate enough leads for that channel.

2. Get customer data

Simply sending email blasts to your entire database will not deliver results. To win business from the competition and achieve your campaign goals, you need to target prospective customers who align with your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas. And, to target at scale, you need reliable data in your CRM. Here’s how to get it:

Segment your current lists

Some CRM and marketing platforms offer advanced audience segmentation rules, which allow you to create dynamic and static lists for targeted campaigns. For your competitive switching campaign, you may want to build a list of people who:

• Decided to go with your competitor instead of your company
• Switched from your company to the competitor
• Are known customers of your competitor but have never entered your sales pipeline

Identify a trustworthy data partner

B2B data providers and enrichment services can be worth a look, especially if your contact database is thin or has obvious gaps. Just be careful to partner with a data provider who guarantees reliability and takes privacy seriously.

3. Review, refresh, & create sales and marketing collateral

Relying on generic collateral is not a winning strategy. To maximize performance, you’ll need a library of web and design assets that align with the central theme of the campaign. For a switching campaign, your collateral must make a compelling case for why prospects should consider your company. What’s in it for them? Can you help them save money or deliver better service? If you were the customer, what would make you switch?

After carefully assessing your campaign objectives and messaging, you may need to develop one or more of the following:

• Landing pages
• Marketing drip emails
• Email templates for sales outreach
• Product and data sheets
• Graphics for social media
• Product demo videos
• Savings calculators or other interactive tools
• Case studies that feature customers who have already switched
• Downloadable assets, such as whitepapers or checklists

Note: To save time, repurpose existing collateral rather than starting from scratch. For example, a product overview could be tweaked to include campaign-specific copy. Just be sure that everything fits together and tells the same story.

4. Design your outreach journeys & lead follow-up rules

Integrated campaigns use intent signals to guide buyers through multi-touch journeys. Prospects who click several emails, visit your landing page, and download a case study should be further along in the journey than someone who only clicks one banner ad.

Creating journeys for thousands of prospective customers is challenging without the right tools. That’s why taking a unified approach to sales and marketing—one that makes it easy to build and manage buyer journeys—is key to running integrated campaigns at scale. Here’s how a unified CRM helps your campaign planning and execution.

Design visual journeys from start to finish

A unified sales and marketing platform with visual mapping capabilities, like Insightly, empowers your team to design workflows that engage buyers throughout the entire journey.

Easily collect & use buyer intent data

Anonymous user interaction data from your third-party analytics platform is not useful for integrated campaigns. You need live campaign data—at the user level—in your CRM to identify the prospects who are the most engaged and most likely to buy.

Use signals to engage sales at the right time

Collecting and organizing prospect interaction data in your CRM makes it possible to alert the sales team when a user reaches a predefined engagement level. For example, you might configure your CRM to automatically notify sales and assign a follow-up task once a prospect reaches an engagement score of 50 out of 100 points.

5. Develop search intent & remarketing campaigns

Online search can be an excellent source of new leads for your integrated campaign—especially if your competitor has significant brand recognition. Remarketing can be a cost-effective way to re-engage people who previously interacted with campaign assets. Consider the following questions as you develop your search intent and remarketing campaigns:

Which search terms exhibit actual intent?

Bidding on search terms requires a certain amount of intuition. Does it make sense to bid on every term that pertains to your competitor? Or, does a refined approach work better? Bidding on “you vs. competitor” and “competitor a vs. competitor b” terms are bound to deliver higher-quality clicks. That being said, is there enough volume?

Where should you retarget?

Search engines aren’t the only platforms that offer retargeting. Social media sites, including Facebook and LinkedIn, provide a variety of retargeting tools to help you re-engage buyers. Your ICP and personas should guide your retargeting placement decisions. Retargeting C-level executives may look considerably different than retargeting gatekeepers.

Does your CRM make it easy to collect ad-level engagement?

At a very basic level, your CRM should tell you where a prospect record came from (i.e., online search). Ideally, your CRM would also offer comprehensive visitor tracking that monitors buyer interaction with off-page campaigns, such as remarketing ads.

6. Run your campaigns

If you’ve taken Ben Franklin’s advice and adequately prepared, then running your integrated campaign should be relatively straightforward.

Enable your outreach journey

If you’re an Insightly customer, running a journey can be done in two clicks.

Turn on your search intent & remarketing ads

Most ad campaigns can be enabled with a few clicks. For example, here’s a helpful guide for starting and pausing your Google Ads campaigns.

Let your sales team shine

Your data-driven campaign empowers sales to use buyer interaction data to prioritize outreach and follow-up. If you’ve set up everything correctly, your reps will be automatically notified when leads are ready for engagement. User-level insights from your CRM provide context to help reps engage prospects with meaningful conversations. Meaningful conversations lead to pipeline, and pipeline produces revenue.

7. Develop a near real-time feedback loop

No integrated campaign would be complete without a continuous, near real-time feedback loop between sales, marketing, and other teams.

Marketing relies on lead conversion and disposition insights from sales to continuously refine channel mix, advertising creatives, and email copy. Likewise, sales leans on marketing to identify the interactions, channels, messages, and content that influence sales. Achieving this level of reporting is difficult when your organization lacks a single source of truth for managing buyer journeys. Life is much easier when you have data-driven transparency into each step of the buyer journey.

Time to integrate your campaigns

Aligning multiple teams around a shared campaign objective can be a healthy and productive decision for your company—especially in today’s business environment of remote teams.

It’s time to define your goals, build your strategy, develop a cohesive message, acquire the right mix of skills and technology, and build a successful integrated campaign. Your bottom line—and your people—will thank you.

Read more like this:

• What is an integrated campaign?
• What is account-based marketing (ABM)? A beginner’s guide
• Intuition vs. data-driven decision making in business today
• How to find the right decision-makers for B2B sales outreach

The post How to launch an integrated campaign appeared first on Insightly.

Unlike multi-channel campaigns, which typically focus on pushing a common message across multiple marketing channels, integrated campaigns have a broader scope and integrate the talents of a wider spectrum of people. Sales, sales development, product, IT, leadership, and, of course, marketing all play an important role.

Here are a few best practices for planning and running an integrated B2B campaign.

Benefits of integrated campaigns

Before we get into the “how” of running integrated campaigns, let’s examine the “why.” After all, your people are already busy enough. The last thing they want is another project without understanding the potential rewards.

Here are three major reasons why integrated campaigns—when done the right way—can help your company and your people become more successful.

1. Maximize your reach

As a marketer, I’m a big proponent of inbound marketing. Creating compelling content helps potential clients solve their immediate challenges and, simultaneously, become familiar with your brand. That being said, content cannot be your only source of new business—especially if you sell to mid-market and enterprise customers.

There are much bigger decisions being made out there that are not influenced by online search, which is why smart companies develop processes for identifying and intercepting those deals through integrated campaigns.

Takeaway: You’re missing out on deals if you’re relying too heavily on inbound. Integrated campaigns help you reach more high-value leads and, ultimately, close more deals.

2. Foster cross-functional alignment

Creating cross-functional alignment has never been more challenging than in today’s prolonged virtual work environment, especially for teams that used to work exclusively in a physical office environment.

Integrated campaigns, by their very nature, foster elevated levels of alignment. For example, let’s assume your goal is to increase customer upgrade revenue by 25% within the next six months. To achieve this goal, marketing must work with customer success (CS) to build segmented lists of customers who are likely to engage. CS and sales must align around a process for flagging and following up with customers who express interest. Sales needs to provide continuous feedback so marketing can track campaign effectiveness and respond to ongoing collateral needs.

Takeaway: If you’re seeking a better way to encourage cross-departmental alignment, look no further than an integrated campaign.

3. Elevate the quality of output

Aligning teams and campaigns around a data-driven view of success leads to meaningful conversations that yield ever-improving results. Sales begins to rely even more on marketing to produce higher impact landing pages, case studies, remarketing ads, emails, and collateral. Marketing becomes accustomed to receiving first-hand feedback as to why customers engage (or fail to engage) with messaging. CS gains new insights to improve the quality of support documentation and agent interactions.

Rather than operating in silos and taking educated guesses, campaign data serves as the foundation for enhanced decision-making across multiple teams—and, in some cases, sparks ideas for new integrated campaigns.

Takeaway: Alignment around a shared campaign can unleash the creative genius of your teams.

Ask these questions to form an effective strategy for your integrated campaign

So, what’s the first step in implementing an integrated campaign?

Before you have your marketing team create a bunch of banner ads and email blasts, ask yourself the following questions to form a comprehensive campaign strategy.

Consider where your business has been and where it is going. Use a central message or narrative to align the right mix of people, processes and channels.

What is your primary revenue objective?

Aiming to simply “increase sales” is too broad of an objective. Does the lowest hanging fruit come from new customer acquisition or a “land and expand” approach? Use your own data to understand which revenue sources have been reliable in the past and where the greatest opportunity lies.

How will this campaign align with your ICP and related personas?

Integrated campaigns should focus on one type of customer—typically your ideal customer profile (ICP). If you’ve never formalized your ICP and personas, now is the right time. Creating high-impact content, ads, and outreach programs requires an in-depth understanding of the targeted customer. Simply blasting a common message to everyone will result in de minimis returns.

How are competitors leveraging integrated campaigns?

Ask your sales team to share any first-hand knowledge they have about successful integrated campaigns run by competitors. What types of emails, ads, or outreach programs did the competitor(s) use to target customers? What can you learn from competitors to make your integrated campaigns more effective?

What is the best method for reaching your targeted audience?

Make a list of all the ways that you could deliver your message to the intended audience. Depending on the target market and industry, your list might include: sales calls, automated emails, LinkedIn ads, online search ads, in-app product banners, and retargeted display ads. Get specific. Then, begin the process of elimination to identify the tactics for each channel and set goals.

Do we have the right mix of tools and data?

Sharing timely campaign data between sales, marketing, CS, and other teams is difficult—if not impossible—when you lack a unified CRM. Likewise, coordinating collateral and content is challenging when each department uses its own project management system. Set the stage for a successful campaign by aligning around a common source of truth.

Stay tuned for tips to launch your integrated campaign

So far, we’ve defined what an integrated campaign is, why it’s beneficial, and how to develop a successful strategy. In my next post, we’ll explore best practices for launching an integrated campaign.

In the meantime, be sure to check out Insightly’s five-part series on how to encourage greater alignment between sales and marketing teams.

Ready to explore a unified CRM? Request a free CRM needs assessment and a demo.

Request a demo

The post What is an integrated campaign? appeared first on Insightly.

Such strong demand is not surprising, especially when you consider the potential benefits of a properly implemented system. From an efficiency standpoint, marketing automation overcomes operational bottlenecks by eliminating many time-consuming and tedious tasks. From an engagement standpoint, marketing automation can help a company deliver the right message to the right people at exactly the right time — at scale. From a business standpoint, marketing automation will help you grow faster by helping sales build pipeline.

Despite the many benefits, selecting a marketing automation system can feel like an overwhelming task. What features are actually necessary? How much will it cost? Is the cost worth the benefit? How can we guarantee marketing automation success? Questions like these can be difficult to answer without a proper game plan.

Here’s a quick checklist for selecting the right marketing automation system for your needs.

Define goals & objectives

Your first impulse might be to jump straight into a detailed comparison of vendors. Though it may be wise to do preliminary exploration to familiarize yourself with the market, doing so should never be at the expense of your goals and objectives.

Organize a cross-functional team and collect feedback from stakeholders in marketing, sales, and other departments that will likely use (or be impacted by) the marketing automation system. Work together to formulate a simple team mission statement that fosters alignment and prevents distractions. Here’s an example of a team mission statement to get your creative juices flowing:

“Select and implement the most intuitive marketing automation system that aligns with our unique customer journey and plays nice with our tech stack.”

Your more specific goals may include all or some of the following:

• Generate more leads with the same budget
• Empower marketers to easily build campaigns, without outside help
• Gain visibility into the entire customer journey
• Manage the lead funnel more effectively
• Help sales build more pipeline
• Integrate sales and marketing to share a single source of truth on customer data
• Calculate ROI and prove the value of marketing efforts and spend

Audit in-house capabilities & technology

Even the most innovative software features are useless to your organization without the right mix of talent. Implementing a marketing automation system should eventually make life easier for staff, but there is an upfront learning curve to consider. Does your team have the capacity to learn, operate, and fully leverage a new system? Or, will this endeavor inevitably lead to a headcount expansion or more consultants? Be honest, and as you look at different options, consider the ease of setup and use in your decision-making.

Your existing tech stack is another key consideration. Is your sales team adamantly opposed to switching CRMs? If so, you’ve just dramatically reduced the number of marketing automation providers, as not every system integrates with your existing CRM. Would it make more sense to get a unified platform for sales and marketing, eliminating the need to manually sync systems?

Identify vendors

It’s finally time to begin your search for the perfect vendor. As a seasoned marketer, you already realize that the first solution in the search engine results is not necessarily the best fit for your needs — they just happen to have the largest cost-per-click budget at that moment in time!

All jokes aside, your search engine research should always be supplemented by:

In-network referrals: Reach out to your colleagues in similar roles at similar-sized companies. Which marketing automation platforms do they use? You can also ask for input from members of shared (and relevant) LinkedIn groups.

Review site data: Software comparison sites, such as Capterra and G2 Crowd, can be excellent sources of information for almost any product category. They’re also a great way to gain candid feedback from satisfied (or dissatisfied) customers.

Industry journals & reports: Do you operate in a niche market? Check to see if your industry’s trade organization offers any software recommendations or endorsements.

Compare features to your needs

As you begin to compare different marketing automation systems, you’ll likely notice feature overlap from vendor to vendor. However, as you dig deeper into the specific functionality of each system, less obvious differences begin to present themselves.

For example, several marketing automation systems allow users to configure time-based “drip” campaigns for lead nurturing. The logic usually goes something like this:

• Day 1: Send welcome email
• Day 7: Send some helpful blog links
• Day 14: Send more helpful blog links
• Day 21: Send some videos
• Day 28: Send more helpful videos
• Day 30: Try to get the lead to engage

The problem with this linear sequencing is twofold. First, it presupposes that each lead is in the same phase of the customer journey just because he or she has chosen to opt in. Second, time-based campaigns often overlook more relevant criteria, such as the recipient’s actual engagement or perceived interest. When compared to modern marketing automation systems that are built entirely around customer journeys and provide more flexibility, the drawbacks of time-based automation becomes even more apparent.

As you can see, feature comparisons can quickly turn into a fairly nuanced discussion. It’s therefore important to dive into the specific functionality of each system in order to understand true alignment with your goals, objectives, and capabilities.

At the very least, your marketing automation system should include:

• Prospect segmentation and list creation
• Lead scoring and grading
• Forms and landing pages
• Intuitive email template builder
• Graphical customer journey builder
• Email automation
• Analytics, reports, and a single-view dashboard with all key metrics

Request demos from shortlisted vendors

Participating in live, personalized product demos is vital for three reasons:

1. You get to see the product in much greater detail. Online videos and product tour pages are helpful, but they rarely provide enough information to finalize your decision. Ask for a live demo of the product. Of course, by doing so, you’ll be put into the vendor’s sales pipeline and receive all of their marketing emails. If you don’t receive any emails, perhaps their marketing automation platform isn’t so great after all!

2. You get faster answers to your questions. Come prepared to each demo with a list of platform-specific questions and don’t wait until the end of the call to ask them. In advance of the call, you might even send an email that contains a list of questions. A good sales rep will view this as an opportunity to custom-tailor the demo to your specific needs.

3. You learn whether or not the vendor actually cares about your needs. Does the sales rep seem more focused on getting you to commit to a certain number of user licenses instead of understanding your marketing automation goals? Did he or she bother to learn anything about your company prior to the call? If a vendor doesn’t take you seriously during the sales cycle, how do you expect to be treated after you sign on the dotted line?

Make an informed decision

You’ve done your due diligence, participated in multiple product demos, received proposals from the top vendors on your shortlist, and discussed everything extensively with your team. Armed with the information that you need to make an informed decision, it’s time to move forward.

If the decision still seems too close to call, create a vendor comparison checklist that uses data to weigh the pros and cons of each solution. Score each platform based on all of the criteria that matter to you, such as price, must-have features, nice-to-have features, ease of adoption/ease of use, scalability, contract terms, vendor responsiveness, and product reputation.

Here’s a quick example of using a scoring system. In the example below, 1 = the least and 10 = the best matched criteria.

Unlock the power of automation

Selecting a marketing automation system is a process that your organization should take seriously. Carefully identify your requirements, only consider vendors that align with your needs, and then make an informed and objective decision.

Once you have your checklist ready, request a demo with Insightly. You can also schedule time with Insightly to think through your marketing automation needs and get a bit more guidance.

Request a demo

*Q&A: B2B Marketing Automation Platforms 101, Lori Wizdo, Forrester, November 21, 2018

The post How to select a marketing automation system: Here’s a checklist appeared first on Insightly.

Now what?

In this article, the last in the launching digital marketing series, we’ll explore how to convert a solid plan into a successful digital marketing program.

Host a kickoff meeting

For an avid sports fan like me, summer is an awesome time of year. Baseball season is in full swing. Golf is, too. Hockey and basketball seasons have just recently come to an exciting conclusion. And, football season is just around the corner.

Now, you might be asking yourself what my love of sports has to do with your digital marketing. Allow me to explain.

Sporting events can teach us something useful about project management, especially when it comes to kickoffs. Take a football game, for example. Before play can commence, captains from both teams meet at the 50 yard line to shake hands, exchange pleasantries, discuss venue-specific ground rules with officials, and perform the coin toss.

Why do football games begin this way? Wouldn’t it be better to take care of such formalities in the privacy of the clubhouse, thereby saving everyone an extra ten minutes? In truth, the pregame meeting serves several key roles. First, the meeting’s public and ceremonial nature tells everyone in the building — from offensive line coach to hot dog vendor — that something momentous is about to happen (in this case, the start of a game). In a more practical sense, the pregame meeting also provides vital information to players, coaches, and referees, such as which team will kick off and which team will receive the ball.

Bringing all of this back to your digital marketing, the importance of a project kickoff meeting cannot be understated. A well-run kickoff signifies to all contributors that the project is ready to start and is worthy of everyone’s undivided attention. The meeting should iron out any remaining questions and reconfirm your assumptions pertaining to goals, dates, budgets, and tasks. A successful kickoff meeting brings together key stakeholders, clears up any confusion, and gets everyone buzzing about the project.

Implement a daily check-in

Even the best kickoff meeting provides little value without the proper follow-through. After all, most digital marketing projects aren’t begun and completed in a day. Many, if not all, require weeks or months of continuous work, collaboration, and refinement.

Brief daily check-in meetings are an effective way to keep projects on track without creating unnecessary red tape. When I say “brief,” I mean 15 to 20 minutes max. The team leader should use this time to cover three main issues with each team member:

1. Work that has been recently completed
2. Work that is up next
3. Any issues that are preventing work from getting done

Having managed many digital marketing teams over the past decade, I’ve seen daily check-ins occur through a variety of formats, including:

• Chat-only meetings: No spoken words are exchanged. Instead, instant messaging services, such as Skype or Slack, are used to share updates and provide feedback. This type of meeting is particularly helpful when managing teams in different global time zones or for overcoming language barriers. Team members can post updates as they occur rather than trying to coordinate a fixed time for everyone to connect. Chat-only meetings can be very time efficient, except when you’re dealing with complex technical issues that are better resolved through verbal communication and screen sharing.

• Voice and/or video conferences: Daily check-ins can also be hosted as voice or video conferences using online platforms, such as Zoom or GoToMeeting. This type of meeting fosters a greater sense of alignment, especially among remote teams who rarely experience in-person interactions with their colleagues. Unfortunately, in my experience, online conferences tend to run long and consume additional time that could otherwise be used for completing work. It helps to let all participants know that you have a hard stop at a certain time, and unless there is an urgent issue that requires more time and attention, you’ll be wrapping the meeting.
• In-person conferences: Unless your entire team is based in a corporate office, in-person check-ins are increasingly rare. With the advent of online freelancing and virtual teams, even small and midsize companies are embracing a distributed workforce structure. If you’re able to and prefer to hold in-person meetings, then figure out the best place and time and set up a recurring meeting. Having a standing agenda or a meeting format can also help to keep in-person check-ins brief and productive.
• Hybrid: Perhaps part of your team is in a corporate office and everyone else works from home. Or, perhaps most check-ins can be done via chat, but you still like to get everyone together once a week. Taking a hybrid approach to daily check-ins can provide a healthy mix of flexibility and efficiency.

Measure progress with data

Companies large and small are leveraging data to accelerate growth and achieve more goals. If you’re using a data-driven project management system, such as Insightly, you can convert your business data into meaningful insights to ensure digital marketing initiatives stay on track.

Since you’re just getting started with digital marketing, your project-level data may not be very insightful yet. As we discussed in my previous article, however, a project is nothing more than a collection of smaller tasks and milestones that share a common goal. A well-structured project management system should therefore make it easy to monitor progress by presenting task and milestone activity data in a clear and concise manner. See below an example of a project setup and tracking in Insightly CRM.

As tasks and milestones are completed and projects advance toward completion, your project-level data becomes more meaningful — especially if you’re using a tool that offers interactive business intelligence modeling.

Note: No project plan is perfect. As a project progresses, you’re bound to encounter unforeseen tasks, milestones, and changes that cause delays and create frustration for the team. Although some changes are to be expected, a good project leader resists major extensions to the project’s original scope. Anything beyond the original scope should be added to the backlog for future sequencing. This will help to keep existing priorities on track and avoid watering down your in-progress project data.

Document your lessons learned

Closing out a successfully completed project is another great opportunity for the team to connect and grow.

Having tracked all activity and documentation within an online project management system, you have the luxury to compare actual results against your original digital marketing plan. Challenge your team to identify data-driven answers to important questions, such as:

• How accurate was our original timeline and budget?
• What could have made this project even more successful?
• Where did you deviate from the plan?
• What was the main cause of deviation (either positive or negative)?
• Was there a specific task or milestone that caused a delay?
• Did we get sidetracked by a different project?
• Do we need to add new team members in order to build additional capacity?
• What expenses did we incur that were not factored into the plan?
• Did we learn any new facts or acquire new skills?
• What, if any, recurring tasks should be created and assigned moving forward? For example, website maintenance, site backups, etc.
• Do we need to create work instructions for certain processes that have been established?
• Should we recycle this project as a template in order to accelerate similar projects in the future?

Be sure to document all of your lessons learned within your project file. Documentation is not useful unless it’s easily accessible for future reference. Linking your documentation to your project keeps everything nice and tidy.

Celebrate your team’s success

As projects move across the finish line, it’s also time to celebrate your victories. Your team worked hard to achieve their goals and they appreciate your recognition of their efforts. So, when that shiny new website goes live, consider making a big deal by:

• Sharing the news on an internal Slack channel
• Sending a company-wide email
• Giving a shout-out in an upcoming company meeting
• Publishing a blog post that marks the accomplishment
• Boosting the news on social media with an ad or two
• Doing something fun as a team

Showing your appreciation makes your team all the more willing to exceed your future expectations. Plus, it’s just the right thing to do!

Digital marketing success

With the right strategy, team, technology, and resources, almost any company can leverage digital marketing to increase pipeline, accelerate growth, and enhance its bottom line. My hope is that this multi-part series has inspired you take action and make digital marketing a strategic asset for your business.

Here’s to your future success!

Skipped the first two articles in the series or want to revisit the steps to digital marketing success? Here are the articles:

Step-by-step guide to launching digital marketing (Part 1)

Step-by-step guide to launching digital marketing (Part 2)

The post Step-by-step guide to launching digital marketing (part 3) appeared first on Insightly.

Today, we’ll cover the next step in the process: preparing for a successful launch.

Slice your top projects into bite-sized chunks

A digital marketing project, such as overhauling your website, can seem like a massive endeavor with no clear starting point. In fact, you may have more questions than answers:

• Should your graphic design team begin working on original concepts?
• Does it make more sense to buy a prebuilt template?
• What’s the best content management system on the market these days?
• Do we have the necessary in-house skills to get everything done?

With so many variables to consider, it’s easy to get stuck in the weeds.

The good news is that most projects can be broken down into smaller chunks ⁠— even when certain aspects of a project remain uncertain. Try not to get too hung up on the “who” or “when” of the project (we’ll cover that later). Rather, stay focused on the “what”; that is, what actually must get done in order to move the project forward. In the case of revamping a website, your list of priorities might look something like this:

• Decide on the design plan (template vs. original design)
• Agree on a revised menu navigation and site architecture
• Set up the development site
• Kick off web development
• Identify and optimize the graphics
• Develop a plan for transitioning content to the new site
• Identify content to delete and redirect (or optimize)
• Thoroughly test the development site
• Transfer tracking codes
• Take the site live
• Test

View this list as a work in progress. You’ll probably think of many other to-dos before the project draws to a conclusion. That’s totally normal. Just be sure to add each item to your project management system in order to create visibility and prevent things from slipping through the cracks.

Tip for Insightly users: Use tasks or milestones to break big projects into manageable steps.

Align your needs with the right skills

Having outlined a basic game plan for each sequenced project, it’s time to align your needs with the right mix of talent. If you’re totally new to digital marketing, you may need to seek outside assistance from an agency or team of freelancers. Or, perhaps it’s time to hire a full-time digital marketing manager who can oversee day-to-day operations, perform adequate due diligence on your marketing tech stack, and build a team of in-house experts.

Keep in mind that the field of digital marketing is an increasingly specialized industry. Improving your site’s conversion rate by merely 1%, for example, could deliver substantially more pipeline for your business. So, in today’s world of rapidly evolving buyer journeys, your company can no longer afford to rely on a “jack of all trades” who does all of the work. Effective digital marketing teams possess great depth and breadth in terms of their skills and knowledge. They’re also motivated by data-driven metrics.

Tip for Insightly users: Check to see which team members already have access to your Insightly instance. Inviting team members and outside collaborators is straightforward, as outlined here.

Agree to reasonable timelines

Even the most detailed plan of action can fail without proper accountability. To ensure the success of your digital marketing projects, it’s therefore wise to assign each task to one person. Projects should also have one owner who is responsible for managing the overall success of the initiative. (Assigning multiple owners creates confusion and might diminish accountability.)

Simply assigning a task or project to someone offers no guarantee that the work will actually get done. That’s why clearly defined due dates are so vital for keeping everything on track.

A word to the wise: Don’t assign due dates based on what you’d like to see happen. Rather, engage your team in a healthy discussion about the work that needs to be done, keeping in mind their current capacity. Use the discussion to elevate alignment around a shared set of goals and objectives.

Tip for Insightly users: Link your tasks to the correct parent project record in Insightly. Doing so will make project management much easier, streamline your stand-up meetings, and deliver total transparency into what must get done.

Identify and collect cost data

As you develop a shared understanding of what must get done (and by when), you’re bound to discover a spectrum of project-related expenses ranging from software to professional services. Ask your team to add notes, files, and/or tasks to your master project file as soon as such needs are identified. Time tracking apps can also be an effective source of cost data, especially for larger projects that require significant investment of human capital.

Tip for Insightly users: Encourage your team to use the project-specific mailbox address to collect all correspondence related to each project — particularly emails containing service quotes, invoices, and purchase receipts.

Let’s take action on your digital marketing plan

Having invested adequate time to plan for a successful launch, you’re now ready to mobilize the troops and begin the implementation process.

Stay tuned for my next post that explores how to implement your plan, empower your team, hold people accountable, and leverage data to measure progress.

In the meantime, check out Insightly customer stories to learn how real businesses manage projects and processes to reach their goals.

The post Step-by-step guide to launching digital marketing (part 2) appeared first on Insightly.

Today, we’ll explore the first two steps for building and implementing a digital marketing plan that delivers results:

• Performing a digital marketing audit
• Sequencing your best opportunities

Let’s get strategic!

Performing a digital marketing audit

The term “audit” has gained a negative connotation in today’s business environment, perhaps rightfully so. Having your financials audited by federal or state authorities can be a painful, time-intensive process, even for those who play by the rules.

When it comes to digital marketing, however, an audit shouldn’t make you feel stressed. On the contrary, performing a digital marketing audit can be an enjoyable process that provides you with more clarity and accelerates the effectiveness of your marketing operations.

What is a digital marketing audit?

Similar to financial audits, marketing audits involve the careful collection, analysis, and interpretation of data. Unlike financial audits that look at receipts and tax return filings, marketing audits measure the impact of your existing digital footprint by examining a variety of data sets, such as:

• Website traffic analytics (users, pageviews, referring sources)
• On-page engagement (bounce rate, time spent, events, goal completions)
• Social media trends (follower growth, engagement)
• Email marketing statistics (opens, clicks, list growth, campaign performance)
• Inbound links (quality, quantity)
• Search engine rankings (keyword position, site visibility, domain and page authority, competitors)
• Paid advertising (cost per click, cost per conversion)
• CRM reports (customer lists, prospect lists, lead volume by source, conversion rate, and more)

If you’re totally new to digital marketing, you may not have much data to audit. That being said, most companies at least have a website and social media profiles. Start by making a list of your digital assets (such as your website) and develop a plan for collecting as much data as possible for each asset.

What tools do you need to perform a digital marketing audit?

Unlike offline forms of advertising, such as billboards or direct mail campaigns, digital marketing initiatives are intrinsically data-driven. Of course, this statement assumes that you have the correct tools in place to collect the data.

Notice it’s “tools” and not “tool.” In my experience, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” digital marketing audit tool. To perform an adequate audit of your website, for example, you should use data from several sources:

• Website analytics platforms, particularly the Google Analytics service
• Webmaster tools, such as the Bing Webmaster Tools service
• Site spidering tools, especially the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool and crawler
• Advanced SEO software, such as Moz SEO software

Auditing your social media or pay-per-click advertising will likely require additional tools. The good news is that digital marketing is a hot industry, so there’s no shortage of affordable online services. With a little research, you’re bound to find a plethora of solutions that meet your needs and budget. Keep in mind that spending some time and money on these tools will save you resources in the long run and help you reach your target customers.

What does the data say?

Data provides little value to your business unless it helps you to accelerate growth. To maximize the usefulness of your digital marketing data, use SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis.

What is working? What’s not working? What are competitors doing that you could do better? What is the risk of maintaining the status quo? Use your SWOT analysis to identify data-driven answers to these important questions.

Sequencing your best opportunities

For the productivity-minded person, this step can feel tremendously monotonous. After all, your marketing audit uncovered dozens of great ideas that could deliver substantial impact. Why not just get to work and worry about the details later? Why waste time “sequencing” your next steps?

Here’s why sequencing is so important

The truth is that your organization, regardless of headcount, has a fixed capacity. Simultaneously tackling a website upgrade, tripling content production, and completely overhauling your social media presence could spread resources too thin. When resources are spread thin, nothing gets done the way it should — and your digital marketing suffers.

With a leaner approach, you acknowledge your organization’s finite resources and then sequence your top priorities accordingly. Leveraging a kanban board, such as the one available with Insightly’s kanban view, can help you do exactly that.

Structuring your kanban board for success

Let’s assume that the following actions are your most important digital marketing opportunities:

• Upgrade website template
• Increase search engine marketing
• Launch monthly newsletter
• Ramp up content marketing
• Begin using marketing automation
• Do more guest blogging
• Create whitepapers for lead generation

Let’s also assume that your marketing department does not have enough bandwidth to do everything at once, so you’ll be using Insightly to sequence your team’s work. In this situation, I would recommend creating a dedicated Insightly project pipeline that contains four stages:

• Backlog
• Up Next
• In Progress
• Done

Each digital marketing opportunity should have a matching project card in Insightly. Collaborate to identify the cards (aka projects) that offer the greatest impact with the least amount of effort. These projects should be sequenced and worked on first.

Anything that is not “in progress” should be moved to “up next” or placed in the backlog. Remember, if everything is in progress, very little is actually getting done. Focus on doing a few things well instead of trying to do it all at once.

Next up: when the work really begins!

So far we’ve looked at using data to identify and understand your digital marketing opportunities. Everything is neatly organized on your Insightly kanban board, which means it’s time for the work to really begin.

Stay tuned for our next article that provides detailed steps for building your digital marketing team, timelines, budgets, and implementation plan.

The post Step-by-step guide to launching digital marketing appeared first on Insightly.

As a digital marketing consultant, I’ve heard many clients make this exact statement. The benefits of a #1 ranking are obvious: more clicks, more pageviews, and — hopefully — more customers. In reality, showing up first doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes a well-orchestrated digital marketing strategy that requires a substantial investment of time and, yes, money.

So, what is digital marketing? As the term implies, digital marketing involves the promotion of goods or services through digital channels, such as websites, social media, mobile ads, and other online media. But how can it impact the growth of your company?

Let’s discuss some basic truths about digital marketing.

Digital marketing is multi-faceted

New clients often ask me, “How much should we spend on digital marketing in order to achieve our goals?”

Although budgeting is vital to any business endeavor, it’s not the best starting point for a digital marketing conversation. A better place to start involves exploring all of your digital marketing opportunities, such as:

• Search engine ads (aka pay per click/PPC)
• Remarketing ads
• Search engine optimization (aka SEO)
• Email marketing
• Paid social media ads
• Organic social media
• Video marketing
• Podcast marketing
• Paid promotion on industry websites
• Webinar marketing
• eBook and whitepaper marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Review site marketing

As you explore your options, you’re likely to find dozens of subcategories within each digital marketing category. Take, for example, search engine optimization (SEO). Unlike radio or TV advertising, you can’t just budget $10,000 for SEO and expect anything meaningful to happen. SEO involves a myriad of labor-intensive tasks that include content marketing, link building, on-page optimization, and other technical performance enhancements. Furthermore, SEO is increasingly linked to and reliant upon other digital marketing categories, such as webinar and eBook marketing. A website that generates significant organic traffic but fails to convert visitors to leads isn’t very effective. Therefore, smart webmasters design compelling digital assets that engage and convert.

Digital marketing is buyer-centric

A recent study by Forrester Research, Inc. found that 99% of respondents start their searches for products and solutions online (66% do so via search engines).* Regardless of the industry, B2B buyers are increasingly dependent upon digital information to make informed purchasing decisions.

How can your company capitalize on this trend? Enhancing your website, social media presence, and email communication is certainly a step in the right direction. After all, you can’t attract customers digitally when your digital footprint is virtually nonexistent. That being said, some companies stop short of considering their digital marketing in the context of the buyer journey. As a result, they spend a lot of time and effort building digital assets that do not actually resonate with potential customers.

A better approach starts and ends with a detailed understanding of the buyer’s needs. Think about your ideal customer with these questions in mind:

• What specific problems do our buyers have?
• What search terms would they use to find solutions to their problems?
• What tools do we need to identify related search queries?
• Are there specific websites that our buyers go to when solving problems?
• How can we help buyers solve their challenges without forcing them to talk to sales?
• What types of digital assets (blogs, whitepapers, infographics, etc.) could help buyers?
• Where does our product or service fit into the solution?
• How do competitors use digital marketing to solve buyer problems?
• How can we help buyers become aware of unrealized needs?

In short, buyers are seeking reliable partners who can help them solve their biggest problems. Although some buyers are ready to make a purchase, many — if not most — are not. Your digital marketing mix should contain a healthy blend of educational and promotional content that aligns with each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Digital marketing is data-driven

Aligning your digital marketing with the buyer journey necessitates a data-driven approach. The good news is that digital marketing (unlike most “traditional” marketing formats) is intrinsically data rich.

To illustrate my point, let’s compare two marketing initiatives.

Traditional marketing campaign: postcard mailer

Print-on-demand services have made postcard campaigns more affordable than ever before. For a minimal amount of effort and cost, your company can rapidly design and implement a postcard mailer that reaches thousands of potential clients.

The tricky part with direct mail has always been measurement. How many postcards were successfully delivered? Did the postcard make it to the intended recipient? Did the headline, creative, and offer grab the recipient’s attention? How many times did the recipient look at the postcard? How many recipients came to your website or called for more information?

You can configure vanity URLs and QR codes to answer some of these questions, but, ultimately, you’ll only have a partial data set.

Digital marketing campaign: email newsletter

Compare the postcard example to an email marketing campaign. In most cases, an email campaign requires much less cost and effort than direct mail. Better yet, most email marketing systems offer in-depth campaign analytics that provide insights into deliveries, opens, clicks, and user-level activity. With a few clicks, your marketing team gains all the data they need to measure campaign performance and ROI. Ideally, this data should synchronize to (or, preferably, reside in) your CRM, preserving a 360-degree view of each prospective buyer. Of course, if you use an integrated or unified sales and marketing CRM, then it’s easier and faster to design targeted marketing campaigns and reach customers at the right time with the right message, keeping your sales and marketing teams aligned.

Data is an accelerating force in today’s marketing world. Digital marketing programs expand your pool of corporate data, which, if properly utilized, can lead to smarter decisions that scale your business.

Digital marketing is a business asset

Blog articles float around the web until you decide to unpublish them. Emails get clicks for weeks or months after they are sent. Recorded webinars provide buyers with in-depth answers even when your office is closed for a holiday weekend.

With the right strategy, digital marketing can be a lifelong asset for your business.

What steps should your company take to turn digital marketing into an asset? Stay tuned for a step-by-step guide to launch your digital marketing strategy!

*Take L2RM To The Next Level With A Pivot – From The Funnel To Your Customer, Forrester Research, Inc., December 18, 2018

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