0:00
Sapir Segal
Hello everyone and welcome to another one of our customer Webinar Series, Marketing Automation 360 Using social data to improve your lead, nurturing, scoring and attribution. I'm Sapiyeh Segal, the Content Marketing Manager here at Oktopost and just in case this is your first time joining us then, Oktopost is a social media management platform for B2B marketers. I'm also proud to announce that we've recently joined the Marketo Accelerate program. So that's been really exciting news for us. But before we get started, I just have a couple of housekeeping items that we'll go over. So firstly this webinar is being recorded and we'll send you the recording as soon as we conclude. Also, if you have any questions throughout the webinar, feel free to use the chat box on the right hand side of your screen and we'll get back to them during our final Q and A session. Also, if you're posting through social media, then it would be great if you would use our custom hashtag or octowebinar. Alright, so now to tell you a little bit about myself. So besides being the content marketing manager at Oktopost, I actually grew up in Australia, so I lived in Sydney and also in Brisbane or as we like to say, Brizzy. But I'm not here alone. Joining me today are two brilliant marketing leaders from Saseto and Marketo. So we have Adam from Saseto and Lisa from Marketo. Welcome guys.
1:25
Adam Hutchinson
Thanks Sapir. Thanks for having us on the webinar today. I'm Adam Hutchinson, I'm the senior Marketing manager at Socito where I run demand generation and our marketing automation platforms. So Marketo and also do a lot of work with Oktopost. But in my spare time I'm a writer actually. So fun fact About Me I produced my first play back in January. I have a deep interest in communications and writing and actually that's how I ended up in marketing. So very happy to be here today with all of you.
1:53
Lisa Marces
Great. And I'm Lisa Marces and I head up our social media archetto. And a fun fact about me is that last year I traveled over to Ireland and got to kiss the blarney stone. So I'm happy to be with you guys today.
2:09
Sapir Segal
We're happy as well. And Adam, Lisa, thank you both again for joining me today. And I think that we can all agree that a lot of B2B marketers who use marketing automation are struggling to align social media with the rest of their customer converting channels. For example, Email and landing pages. So we're here to address some of these key pain points and provide a high level view on the what, why and how of marketing automation. Because you've got to know the basics. Also, we'll discuss how social data is currently the missing piece of marketing automation. And most importantly, we'll discuss how you can take advantage of your social data to enhance your lead scoring, nurturing and attribution programs in marketing automation. And specifically, we're going to focus on marketo. So Lisa is going to start us off with a basic introduction to marketing automation.
3:01
Lisa Marces
All right, so let's take a look at a deeper dive into what marketing automation is. So you've probably heard a lot about marketing automation, but what is it exactly? Marketing automation allows companies to streamline, automate, measure their marketing tasks and work workflows to increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. It essentially acts as a central marketing database, engagement marketing engine, and an analytics platform. So we like to kind of think of it as a one stop shop, right, for marketers. It's our basebone and where we really are going to have that one tool that aligns with every aspect of demand gen and sales and marketing alignment. Nowadays, marketing automation technology, it's, you know, it's essential to scale, especially with the increasing number of channels that we're required to use. Go ahead and go to the next slide. So I wanted to talk a little bit about why companies are adopting this. You know, with all these additional channels that we have. There are several key reasons to consider adopting a marketing automation software platform. The average decision maker or buyer receives 3,000 messages per day and they have a lot of people vying for their attention. Buyers form opinions and draw conclusions long before they interact with your brand. And so in order to remain competitive, you need to have a strong presence online and make sure you stand out from the competitors throughout the entire sales funnel. And marketing automation helps you get ahead of and cut through that noise and get ahead of the crowd by creating relationships with your buyers over time. So let's talk a little bit about the three Ls of marketing automation. Lead scoring, lead nurturing, and lead attribution. And these are basically the three things that we're going to be needing to have touch points on as we're looking at why we're adopting this and how we can meet our goals. So let's dig a little bit deeper into lead nurturing. Once you have qualified leads in your database, how do you further engage and create a relationship until those leads are ready to buy? You know, the next step is to drive them further down on the sales funnel. That's obviously our goal. So we can do that with nurturing, building relationships with the buyers regardless of their timing to buy. And this is a critical step in your full funnel marketing process. And one thing to attract potential buyers, but you know, it's one thing to attract them, but another thing to keep them engaged and interested. Right. Because we have such short attention spans, how do we continue those touches to keep people interested in what you have and move them through that buyer's journey? On average, only 20% of leads are sales ready when they first come in. So it's pertinent that you have a disciplined process to develop qualified leads until their sales ready. So a few examples of lead nurturing that we use here at Marketo. Using behavioral information for your marketing automation platform to collect and send relevant messages. Personalized retargeting and highly targeted ads triggering workflows based on behavior. Those are just a couple of the things that we're doing. Done well, nurturing can result in 50% more sales leads and 30% higher, or, excuse me, lower cost per lead. We found huge benefits in doing highly targeted campaigns. Let's jump into lead scoring. So marketing automation includes lead scoring capabilities to help marketers make sure that they give sales only leads that have a strong chance of becoming customers. We really want to pass over the low hanging fruit to sales and not waste time. Right. And so lead scoring helps the sales teams know where to focus their energy and is generally based on three basic factors. Fit based on demographics or firmographics like location, company size and industry. Does the leads seem like a good candidate to be a customer interest? If they're consistently downloading content, viewing webinars, asking for product demos, obviously they're interested in your brand, so it's probably going to be high buying stage. It's important to kind of assess what stage they are in the cycle, the buyer cycle, and where that lead is. So some companies may not be in the position to make a decision yet, but if they aren't ready to make that decision, the lead might need to cycle back into the marketing funnel for more nurturing. All right, and then let's jump into lead attribution. The more insight you have into how your marketing campaigns affect the outcome of the sale, the better you can use that information for future campaigns. And so one of the things that we always talk about at Marketo is data. First we want to be knowing exactly what's working and not working. We're consistently AB testing, we're always out there trying new things because we want to make the most informed decisions moving forward. So here's a few ways to measure campaign success. First Touch Attribution, which gives credit to the first activity, even though the lead also maybe attended your trade show booth or went to a webinar or downloaded a white paper. Last Touch Attribution, which only gives credit to the last activity, even though they may have participated in several previous activities. And then Multi touch attribution. And this is the one that we use most frequently at Marketo because it spreads the attribution over all of the activities and all of the touches.
8:28
D
Lisa, thank you for that wonderful introduction. And that leads us to our next question in our webinar, which is where do marketing automation platforms are like Marketo gather all of this data and which data is currently missing? So essentially the data that you see in marketing automation actually comes from three major data sources. Firstly, you have your email visits. So this is where Marketo tracks every page and interaction that happens on your website. Then you have your email and this includes actions like opens and clicks. And finally you have all the data that is synced from your CRM platform like Salesforce. And this can be all kinds of personal information about your leads. So for example, demographics, as Lisa mentioned in the lead scoring section. And as you can see from this very basic chart at the moment, there's one bubble or one circle that's missing and that's all of your social media data. And so basically any action that your lead or prospect is taking on social media, whether it's clicking on your content, creating, converting from and liking or sharing it, is either missing or at best it's inaccurate and vague. And so the focus of this webinar is to understand why this is such a big problem, but also how you can easily overcome it. And so to do that, I'm going to pass the torch to Adam who's going to give us a much broader explanation of this.
9:49
Adam Hutchinson
Great. Thanks Sapir. So siloed social data mainly applies to lead and prospect level activities that are flowing from social media channels to third party websites. So one kind of great example of this is when you're curating content, imagine that you're sending out a LinkedIn post from Oktopost that links to the Wall Street Journal article and you want to know who's clicking on that post to actually read the content. Or another example might be if you publish a guest post or a column on a third party blog or publication, you want to know who's actually sharing that content on social media. So in other words, marketing automation right now is basically blind to all of that third party data and activity that's happening on social media. But another layer of social data that's currently missing, or at least incomplete, is engagement with all of the relevant activities online, like competitors, partners, industry influencers, and kind of other entities in your ecosystem. So when you stop and think about it, your target audience is already spending a lot of their time on social media. They're following influencers online, they're discussing business issues, and they're discussing technologies that they use on social media. You can use all of these types of behaviors to identify which individuals and accounts are good prospects for your business. And you can use all these behaviors to add new contacts in your database. You can also continue to monitor all of your leads in your database and see who they're following online, what topics they're talking about, what they care about on social media. So that way you can get more insights into what they care about.
11:29
Sapir Segal
Thank you, Adam. And I'm just going to add to what Adam said, and that's that the more behavioral data you have on leads, the better you can manage them with marketing automation. Now, many of you may be thinking, why do I even need all of this social data? Because social media is often seen as kind of a top of the funnel brand awareness channel that's used mostly by millennials and maybe junior level employees. So individuals who are not exactly the decision maker in the company that you're targeting. But actually, social media is extremely valuable. It's an extremely valuable channel, especially when you consider some of the following statistics. For example, 55% of B2B buyers search for information on social media, while 84% of C level and VP executives use social media to guide their purchasing decisions. We also see that research from CEB shows that by the time a potential buyer reaches your website, They've already done 60% of the research elsewhere online. So this could be on your Facebook, your LinkedIn, or even your Twitter profile. So essentially, if we look at the worst case scenario, failing to track the activity a potential buyer takes on social media means that you're missing out on the first half of their research process. So also let's not forget that the lack of lead data hinders your lead nurturing, lead scoring and lead attribution programs. However, if we look at the upside or the positive scenario, then you can easily solve this issue by connecting your social media data with your marketing automation platform. So to demonstrate this, Adam is going to walk you through our final part. Of our webinar, but which is how you can use your social data to enhance your lead nurturing, scoring and attribution. And as promised, he's going to provide actionable examples of how Sacedo is using their social data from Oktopost as well as from their own platform to gain a 360 degree view of their lead journeys. I'm also going to take this chance to mention that Oktopost and Saucedo are both platforms which feed actionable data to Marketo. If we look at the Oktopost Marketo integration, you're actually able to track lead engagements across every social channels and then use this data to trigger smarter Marketo programs. But if we look at the Sacedo Marketo integration, then any lead found on social media can be directly pushed to Marketo. Also, you're also able to enrich existing leads with social engagement data. All right, so back to you, Adam.
13:59
Adam Hutchinson
All right, thanks. So before I dive in, I want to start with Socito's mission so you can understand a little bit more about who we are and who we target. So Socito helps businesses of all size better communicate and engage with their target audiences by leveraging social media data. And so as such, Digital Marketers in B2B industries are really our core customers. And while we're doing well at using our own platform to target this audience at the top of the funnel, we really needed a solution to help us understand how our audience and specific leads were engaging with our content over time on social media. And so that's where Oktopost comes in. Now, as we mentioned earlier in the kind of what's missing section, Socito and Oktopost play an important role in helping B2B companies gain a 360 degree view of their buyer journeys by adding actionable data into Marketo on everything relevant that happens in in the social media sphere. So there are four kind of key opportunities that we identified here in our own marketing team that we wanted to seize by integrating social data directly into Marketo. And so the first one is lead generation, acquiring net new leads at the top of the funnel, always top of mind of course for us. Then lead nurturing, tailoring our relevant emails based on leads, social engagements, how can we be more relevant to our customers? Lead scoring, prioritizing leads based on social engagement and understanding that there's a whole other realm of lead activity taking place outside of just our website and just our emails that helps us find the best leads possible for our sales team. And then finally lead attribution, understanding where social impacts the buyer journey at Every step in the funnel. So let's start with lead generation. Now, internally here on our marketing team, we still run most of our marketing and sales pipeline from inbound leads. So lead generation is a key, key focus for my team and part of our top level KPIs. With the Oktopost and Marketo integration, we actually know which posts are driving traffic to our website and which posts are converting people into leads. And so once we have this data, it allows us to create better content which helps us generate more leads. And then we use our own platform as a lead generation source directly. So we've created campaigns that map to different intent categories, such as social media influencers, influencers in the Martech space, different events that we sponsor. And so Socito helps us find people who meet our criteria, our MQL criteria that are talking about these activities and we sync this audience into Marketo to start nurturing them via email. Now, my favorite thing is lead scoring. I'm kind of a nerd about lead scoring, so let's talk about this for a little bit. We use behavioral scoring primarily in our lead scoring model in Marketo. So that way we're sending only the most active leads to our sales team because we want to keep our buying cycle as short as possible. So before we were using Oktopost, we were only able to lead score on on what we call first party activities that were collected by Marketo, which includes website visits, content downloads, webinar views and email clicks and email opens. Now unfortunately, we found that only 20% of our database had ever taken one of these types of actions ever, and less than 10% were taking these actions on a monthly basis. So when we only send leads to the sales that meets a certain lead scoring threshold that limited the amount of leads we could pass over the line. So basically our marketing was only about 20% effective across our database. However, a significant portion of our leads had taken an action on social media, such as clicking on one of our social posts, tweeting about a relevant topic, tweeting about a conference that they were attending, and in fact, when we analyzed a 30 day period, on average, we found that a lead took about six and a half social actions, clicking, tweeting, et cetera, but only opened one and a half emails and only visited three pages of our website. So by understanding the important role that social media plays in our buyer's journey and the decision making process, we were able to redesign our lead scoring model to prioritize social engagements. So for example, any known lead in our database that clicks on A social media post that we posted through Oktopost, whether it's on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, that actually gets 15 points, which is a pretty high score. That's how we score an email click, because again, someone's clicking on a post or a piece of content to go read it. Now we also lead score a couple of dozen other relevant contextual social actions. So for example, leads who follow or tweet about key events in the space, someone who tweets Marketing Nation because they're going to go to the conference, we can score that action. If they're tweeting about influencers as they're following certain topics on social media, we score all of those activities. Those kind of top funnel more interest level activities. We score five points because they can happen really at any stage of the buying process, but over time they add up. Once we started looking at all of this social data via the Oktopost integration, we were able to increase the coverage of scorable actions in Marketo to around 80% of the leads in our database. That's a huge difference in the amount of leads that we can score and send over to sales. Now what's even greater about this is it actually has had a tangible impact on our funnel. So the new scoring model that we've implemented with all these social actions has helped us deliver more MQLs to our SDR, our sales development representative team that primarily turns our leads into opportunities. And now we're seeing that 24% of all the MQLs that we pass over to this sales team are coming from social media. That's huge. And that's actually equal to the amount of leads that are converting into opportunities from our emails and our blog combined. So additionally, we've actually found that these socially engaged leads are closing at a 22% higher rate. And so now that we've actually filled our pipeline with even better leads. But before we can send a lead over the line, we have to nurture them a little bit. Right? So this is something really unique that we've been able to accomplish with the Oktopost Marketo integration. And so it has to do with the way we send out emails. So here at Socito, we have two different ways primarily that we use social data to nurture our leads, both of which utilize trigger campaigns in Marketo to send emails at the exact right time when a lead is showing interest in a certain topic. So on one hand, at the top of the funnel, when we have net new leads in our database, we send interest based emails around various Social actions that leads are taking online or the keywords that they're using in their posts. So the content that we send here is similarly top of funnel content. It helps us build awareness while the lead is still kind of showing relevant interest in our space. Then once a lead is already in kind of the buying cycle passed over to the sales team. Marketing's job is still to provide context on every lead and help our sales team nurture their leads at scale and reach out at the right time. So we continue to track how leads are engaging with us on social media and we push these actions over to the sales team so they can send hyper personalized email outreach and have better engagement rates. So let's dive into a couple of examples about these. So as for the first type that kind of top of funnel nurture emails, it's based on social actions or keywords. And we ran this campaign specifically here around Content Marketing Institute. So as soon as someone in our database that we've synced in starts following the Content Marketing Institute Twitter handle CMI content, we triggered an email via trigger campaign in Marketo with a link to some blog posts that you see here that we had written around content marketing as well as one that we had actually published on cmi. You see here. That's kind of a top funnel email. Pretty light, low call to actions, but very relevant content to someone who's following Twitter handle. And we actually found that these emails delivered in real time are around two times more engaging than our typical nurture emails in terms of click through rates. And the open rates on these emails are also about 50% higher than typical nurture emails. Now for the next example. This is primarily about how our sales team uses social data, but marketing is really responsible for making sure they get this in an actual way. And so our sales development representatives can personalize their conversations with leads at scale based off of relevant social actions. So whether it's clicking on one of our posts that we scheduled out of Oktopost or following our own Twitter handle tweeting about an industry topic, we have different trigger campaigns set up in Marketo to push this data to our sales reps via Marketo Sales insights that show up in Salesforce and then our sales reps actually use this data to create hyper hyper relevant outreach emails. So you see in this email here our sdr, Jesse, he mentioned the tweet itself actually in his email, I saw you tweeted Marketing Nation a little bit ago. Are you attending summit this year? And he goes on to explain about our integration with Marketo and it has a little light called action in here to set up a time to talk. Once our SDR team started referencing social actions in their emails like this one, their response rate actually doubled. And so we've been able to set more appointments every month. All right, so we've talked about lead generation at the top of the funnel, talked about lead scoring and nurturing to move leads through the middle of the funnel. But we can't forget about tying it all together with accurate and complete attribution. So, as a general rule, Socito tracks first touch attribution for lead generation. And that's because we run so much of our pipeline through inbound marketing. We really need to know where these leads are coming from. But we had a huge problem before we implemented the Oktopost Marketo integration. If a lead converted through a webinar, then the webinar or the website visit would receive all of the credit. But how did this lead actually get to the webinar landing page in the first place? Did they search for it on Google? Did they click an ad? Did they come in through an organic social media post? We didn't know we could solve some of these questions from the URL refer and other integrations that we had, but we really had no visibility if a lead came from a specific social media post. Now, we also, in addition to first touch attribution, we kind of use a multi touch attribution model as well to track how many MQLs and opportunities were influenced by each program at any step in the funnel. But again, we have the same problem. We could really only attribute success to website, email and webinar campaigns, but not to social media. But with the Oktopost and Marketo integration, we can now track leads that come from our own social media posts, giving us a more complete picture of the lead journey. So once we started tracking social data, we found that we were misattributing 4% of MQLs that were actually sourced from our social content. And at the top of the funnel, that might not sound like a lot, but at the top of the funnel, 4% for us represents thousands of leads that we weren't attributing correctly. Now, what's even more crazy is that a staggering 24.9% of our leads take at least one relevant social action per month. So almost a quarter of all of our leads that are being passed over to sales, and that's a lot of credit to give to social media. So after we actually saw these results, we shifted the way that we allocate resources within the marketing team to give more emphasis and about a quarter of our budget and time specifically to social media.
26:22
Sapir Segal
Well, those are some amazing results, so thank you very much for sharing them with us. So I just want to wrap us off and give our audience a quick summary of everything that we discussed so far because as really been a lot of information to take in. So first of all, I mentioned at the beginning of the webinar that at the moment social data is siloed. So your audience is engaging, they're clicking, they're converting, and they're liking all of your social content. But at the same time, your marketing automation platform is essentially blind to all of these activities. Now why is this a problem? Because between a third and two thirds of your buyer journey is complete well before talking to a salesperson. So. So essentially the majority of your buyers are turning to social media as their main platform to learn about your company. So if we feed this data into Marketo, not only do you gain a 360 degree view of your buyer journey, you can also do a better job as a marketer to educate your buyers in a more personalized way. So overall, if I have to kind of nail down the main bullet point of this webinar, it's that by adding the missing layer of social data to your marketing automation platform, you can actually tweak and improve the way you score, nurture and attribute leads and improve those models in marketing automation. And as a result, you can actually generate more relevant leads. You can deliver more MQLs to your sales team. You can also nurture leads with highly hyper personalized content that's tailored to their needs and interests. You can also personalize your sales conversations with leads to double your response rates. And finally, you can More accurately attribute MQLs to social media and really give social media the credit that it deserves.
28:07
D
All right, so that's all the time that we have for today. Thank you all for joining us. And a very special thank you to Adam and Lisa for co hosting this webinar with me. It's been a lot of fun. If you have any questions or you want to hear more about the Oktopost Marketo or the Saseto Marketo integration, then feel free to get in touch with us.
