PR focused agency.

San Francisco 8 California St. 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94111 415.402.0230 info@atomicpr.com Directions

San Francisco Los Angeles New York London World

Agency that focuses on digital media.

Ocean Media, Inc.
2100 Main Street
Huntington Beach, CA 92648

714-969-5244 ph
714-969-6589 fax

Digital direct agency.  Execute email, search, and social media monitoring.  Will partner to do program fulfillment.

Zeta Interactive

99 Park Ave
23rd Floor
New York, NY 10016

T 646.834.9400
F 646.834.9390 U.S. and Worldwide Office Locations

• Florida
  2253 Green Hedges Way, Suite 102
  Wesley Chapel, FL 33544
  T 813.929.3131
  F 813.929.3011
• New Jersey
  1639 Route 10 E, Suite 200
  Parsippany, NJ 07054
  T 973.753.0600
  F 973.267.5887

  25A Abe Voorhees Drive
  Manasquan, NJ 08736
  T 732.612.3500
  F 732.612.3504

• Texas
  Dallas
  T 646.483.2736
  F 214.975.1439
• Idaho
  848 Fulton St.
  Boise, ID 83702
  T 208.345.7076
  F 208.345.8665
• California
  80 South Lake Avenue, Suite 725
  Pasadena, CA 91101
  T 626.577.2024
  F 626.577.2706

  12730 High Bluff Drive, Suite 260
  San Diego, CA 92130
  T 858.764.7100
  F 858.764.7101

• India

The interdisciplinary approach provided by the Customer Engagement Agency is not just words or marketing hype.  Customer Engagement Agencies bill differently, they have different account management strategies and project management approaches.  While Customer Engagement Agencies see and do things differently one thing that is consistent with change is leadership.  Customer Engagement Agencies tend to be led by strong leaders; leaders that can paint a vision and enable their teams to follow that vision.  Leaders that aren’t afraid to change the process, the people, the skills and the deliverables.  Leaders that will take risks such as pay for performance models, or new ways to evaluate and manufacture meaningful data.

As the emergence continues we suspect that some service providers will suggest they are Customer Engagement Agencies, however saying a firm is a customer engagement agency requires the appropriate skills compilation, but we shouldn’t forget that with emergence comes change, and while change can be managed, it is more often led.  We continue to look for emerging leaders that will carry on forcing the development of the Customer Engagement Agency.

With all the effort put forth to execute the campaign, a key point of failure for campaign effectiveness lies with the tracking and analysis.  Just getting the message out isn’t sufficient.  How was that message received?  What does the overall response to the message say for future campaigns?

Managing Your Results

For an email campaign, the last post talked briefly about using embedded codes in the response URL to aid in customer/response matching.  Assuming this has been taken into account, the management of the results should be much easier.  The responses will be tied to the customers and the results analysis will be much more robust.  If however, the response data requires manual intervention, it is imperative that this data be collected and entered quickly in order to be able to provide campaign response analysis.  Without this data, there will be no valid way to determine whether or not the campaign was worth the time, effort and expenditure and either future opportunities to repeat a successful campaign will be ignored or excessive costs will be squandered repeating unsuccessful campaigns.

Analyzing Your Results

Just counting the positive responses isn’t enough.  Also including the negative responses is not sufficient either.  Even the non-responders should be counted.  For example, an email campaign is executed and 10,000 emails are sent.  A control group of 1000 exist who were not sent the campaign message.  The goal of the campaign was to generate an order.  Of the 10,000 who were emailed, 700 ordered a product.  300 replied no thanks or just clicked through without ordering.  And 9,000 did not respond.  Of the 1000 control population, 50 ordered a product.  70% of those who responded did so positively.  That’s good, yes?  Yes, depending on the expected response rate.  For an expected response rate of 5%, that’s quite good as the response rate was 10% and 7% of your responders were positive.  What elements of this campaign worked well?  Can these be replicated next time?  If your expected response rate was 15%, then the results are not as good.  The message was good for those who responded, but what needs to happen next time to drive the response rate?  And consider an example where 300 responded positively, but 700 responded negatively of the 10,000 respondents.  Careful analysis of how and why the message was received so negatively is in order.

Actions To Be Taken from the Results

Our learning and effectiveness comes from an iterative cycle.  We learn from our successes and our mistakes.  A good positive response, but low overall response rate means several things were done right – but the efforts for next time should focus on improving the response rate.  Analysis of the expected response rate should be considered too.  Was the original response rate too aggressive?  Or was the expectation not aggressive enough?   A poor positive response, coupled with a low overall response rate will require a re-focusing on the message as well as the methods in order to drive both positive response and overall response.  A more detailed look into specific examples will be covered in future posts.

Timing

If you’ve collected your leads from a trade show, you’ll want to take advantage of the fresh contact and execute the campaign as soon as possible after the show.  Even if it may take several days to qualify all the leads, a simple post-show communication keeps the contact cycle fresh.

Email campaigns could benefit from strategic timing as well.  How do your customers use email?  Are they traditional 9-to-5 workers or constant shift coverage?  Are they mobile email users or traditional office email users?  Think of your own inbox for a moment.  How much attention does each email that is queued up from the weekend get?  Can you click on links if you get your email on your phone and if so do they always work?  If possible, schedule the execution so the emails do not get lost in the weekend shuffle.  Also, if embedding links, take steps to ensure that the links will work on any browser platform.

Ease of responding

When your lead responds, what is their experience like?  Does their response pre-populate their data in either the order form or survey form for them?  Or does it require manual registration and data entry from them?  The more manual intervention required, the more likely the response will go unfulfilled.  Could you embed in the response URL customer ID codes for lookup or tracking purposes?  Or is it a just a generic link to a site?  Again, having the customer’s data already available to the lead helps increase the likelihood of a successful response.  A future post will go into more detail on the technical details of embedding IDs into the URL to better populate and track your responses.  Consider your own experiences with email offers you’ve received and the responses (or lack thereof) that you’ve given?  Which ones did you find to be more effective?

Even if the message is the right message to the right contact at the right time, a bad response experience could jeopardize the sale.

A b2b channel specialist.  If many of your campaigns or programs are of this flavor someone to check out.

Salt Lake City, UT

Corporate Headquarters

TreeHouse Interactive, Inc.
1111 East Draper Parkway
Suite 350
Draper, UT 84020
P. 801.576.8428
F. 801.576.8429
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San Jose, CA

TreeHouse Interactive, Inc.
P. 408.892.4662

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Although demand generation platforms started to come into their own nearly two years ago, the space didn’t really start to take off until this past year.  While some of this can certainly be tied to the economic downturn (a.k.a. burning pit of inferno) and the increased pressure to do more with less, it is also driven by the fact that the demand generation platforms have tapped into a latent pain in the marketing world – marketers are not technologists and overly complex tools have proven to be a barrier to engagement.

Download a .pdf version here: theMarketingMojo – Demand Generation Pyramid

Currently, all eyes are focused on the B2B and considered purchase markets.  A lot of energy is being expended widening the engagement channel (e.g., SMS, RSS, SFA, mail drops, etc.) and improving nurturing / drip capabilities.  For those unfamiliar with a drip campaign, essentially it is a branching decision tree whereby you can string together a series of treatments (or messages, or campaigns depending upon your lingo) based upon situational feedback.

From a short term perspective alone this coupling of capabilities is pretty provocative as it simply offers a better way of doing things than how most sales and marketing organizations operate today.

Where the real excitement lies, however, is over the long term how this refined way of operating can impact the thinking and approach of marketers.  While the notion of flipping the funnel is well established, to this point there hasn’t been a way to consistently translate it into activity.  Resultantly, marketers have largely stuck to traditional approaches.

Campaigns have remained a top down affair.  Start with a universe of prospects, and refine that down through suppressions and filters until you have a manageable target list that can be executed against.  Performance is driven by playing the averages and pushing frequency.

Demand gen campaigns are totally inverted.  They are bottoms up, starting with a singular customer and then trying to walk them through the stages of their lifecycle.  It’s a totally different way of approaching the customer.  To be successful a marketer must truly think like the customer, understand their pains, and layout a path of valuable engagements that deepen the relationship with the individual.  At the core, this is fundamentally what customer centric marketing is all about.

A byproduct to this of course will be the growth in demand for customer analytics.  As marketers will come to find, it will be the analytics that arms them with the insights they need to relate to their audience.  To draw an analogy you could imagine it’s like trying to choose a restaurant for a friend.  The more you know of that friends likes and dislikes the greater the probability you can recommend something to their liking.

In summary, if you are a B2B marketer or are focused on a considered purchase the answer is simple – you need one of these platforms.  And even if you are not, the minimal investment represents an excellent opportunity to begin socializing customer centric marketing within your organization before the arrival of behavioral personalization makes it a requirement.

Capability Pyramid ^TM

What separates the demand generation platforms from big brother marketing automation tools is their ability to put the power of technology directly in the hands of marketers while sacrificing as little functionality and stability as possible.  The most important dimensions this can be analyzed on are their ability to nurture leads, execute multi-channel messaging, and leverage a data rich environment.

Nurturing – One of the central value propositions of the demand generation platforms is their ability to empower marketers to communicate unaided directly with customers.  Whether presented as a visual workflow or a hierarchical choose your own ending, the platforms also enable marketers to craft multi-step dialogs where specific messages are delivered based upon past behavior.

Mutli-Channel – Building on nurturing, the platforms can also widen marketer’s reach.  As more and more channel execution technologies like email (ubiquitous), messaging, search, mail drops, robo calls, etc. are integrated the marketer can reach the customer in a new way without engaging technologists.

Data – this is a bit of a catchall category that captures how firms interact with the data.  This covers everything including their ability to: transform and cleanse data on the inbound; perform comprehensive segmentation and behavioral analysis; support complex, multi-product scoring models; and a robust technical architecture that enables scalability.

Vendor Summaries

Although some of the larger marketing automation vendors, namely Aprimo and Unica, have some demand generation capabilities their focus and strengths lie in other areas.  For this reason we have concentrated on vendors who focus on the space and offer the most complete functionality.

Fast Facts

• Email address is pretty universally used as master key
• Atlanta is home to 4 demand gen platforms
• Typical startup capitalization runs about $2 million

5 Buckets

5 Buckets may not be the most graphically pleasing option, but they do an excellent job on delivering on the critical features for a demand generation platform.  They have a robust, open API model that enables them to easily integrate with a wide range of channel execution partners and they have a thoughtful campaign nurturing tool that is well integrated with Salesforce.com.  On the whole, a well conceived product that is well worth checking out.

Eloqua

Demonstrates how a Saas platform can deliver enterprise class capabilities.  Eloqua has the chops to compete with the big boys like Alterian and Unica, but also lead the way in the demand gen space offering visionary new products.  If you can afford them, they are the Cadillac.

FirstWave

While FirstWave has had some solid showings, and has a decent client roster, but they appear to be running out of steam a little bit.  They are a solid competitor who maybe also one getting ready to roll out some significant new features.

Genius

Genius’ value proposition is really driven by their tight integration with SalesForce.com.  While nearly all the demand gen tools offer some form of SFDC integration – that is how Genius differentiates.  They have very weak analytical and campaign functionality, but are baked into SFDC.  If your team loves SFDC and really are only looking to push limited email campaigns then Genius would be a good fit.

Genoo

Cheap and easy.  No need for any IT involvement.  Designed for users to self serve their digital presence and marketing efforts.

InfusionSoft

InfusionSoft’s main differentiator is that they were one of the first vendors to offer drip functionality and they continue to be one of the best at it.  If you have a small support team, but want to run complex programs they are a good choice.

Something worthy of a callout… InfusionSoft 2x Guarantee.  If you don’t double you sales within the first year they refund your money.

IntelinkOne

Has a full offering including back office functionality.  Probably better bucketed with someone like Netsuite.  Not a real strong play with the demand gen capabilities however.

LeadGenesys

In SF.

LeadLife

New entrant from the Atlanta area.

LoopFuse

One attractive feature of LoopFuse is that they’ve done a great job embracing the open source market with available integrations for both SugarCRM and Drupal.  They recently shored up their financial standing by taking on an A round of funding that should help them accelerate the growth of their customer base and platform.  The next few quarters will be instrumental for them.

Manticore Technology

Manticore has done a great job of differentiating themselves by offering the most complete scoring system in the space.  Most vendors limit a lead to a single score where Manticore enables the development of multiple scores tied to specific offerings.  For example, one client may score highly for a light truck, and another for a motorcycle.   They are both good leads, but need to be handled differently.  If you have a diverse product offering then Manticore is a very good fit.

Market2Lead

Market2Lead has a vertical specialization in high tech. Functionality wise they do some interesting things around routing rules and advanced scoring.  Their architecture, however, is in issue – with it being entirely based upon sevlets they will have performance issues as load and data size scales.

MarketBright

MarketBright does a good job at combining WCM with deep analytics, but their core campaign functionality isn’t as rich as some competitors.  While they are good at importing inbound datasets, they aren’t as fluid with integrating with the SFA’s.  If data analysis is important for you then they should be on your list.

Marketo

What sits at the crossroads between SFA and marketing automation? A hybrid offering like Marketo which is tailored to driving b2b2 prospects through the funnel using both sales and marketing tactics. Tailored to mid-sized enterprises, or divisions, they have a well executed program. One thing that bodes well for Marketo is its founders, who were some of the original brains behind the success of Epiphany.

Marqui

How does a small laggard fall into the sweet spot?  By demonstrating some real intellectual leadership, building a nice product, but then running out of cash and going out of business.  Technically Marqui was purchased by another software firm in the fall of ’08, but it still is going to take some time to see if they can rise from the ashes.  Keep your eyes on them, but for the time being they are to be avoided.

NurtureMyLeads

NurtureMyLeads has a strong story about the strategies related to the demand generation platform, but they still need some more time to fully build out all the functionality.

Office Autopilot

Office AutoPilot is targeted on smaller organizations that need a blended SFA / automation tool. A bit campy (“Easy on Sunday Morning” anyone?), but they do cover a lot of the basics.  A couple of nice features are their ability to push voice messages.  On the whole OAP is a great offering for an individual proprietorship.

Pardot

Pardot may not lead the way in any specific functionality, but on the whole they pull together a very robust offering.  When combined with an intelligent pricing strategy they make a compelling offer that should be part of your consideration set.

Silver Pop (Vtrenz)

Formerly vTrenz, SilverPop takes a very lead centric perspective.  While the recent acquisition by SilverPop certainly ups their email delivery capabilities, their limited channel integration, and lack of effective inbound data management doesn’t bode well for their offering.

TreeHouse

TreeHouse focuses on b2b channel programs.  A unique differentiation in the space.

Valtira

Valtira has an interesting, integrated platform, but relies on partners for most of the heavy lifting related to demand generation.  What they do offer, however, is a centralized keying system that allows for coordination of activities across the partner components.  They also specialize in a WCM like system used to host the actual site, and in turn drive content personalization based upon their consolidated persona.  Finally, they offer a pretty competitive price.

Having trouble corralling and measuring all your social (blogging, face book, viral video, etc.) efforts?  Then take a look at ShoutLet.  They offer a consolidate platform that lets you administer and execute campaigns via the social channels.  This is a great tool that can be extremely helpful in monetizing the payback of your social investments.

MarketingMojo Vendor to Watch!

Sway, Inc.

8313 Greenway Bvld., Suite 100
Middleton, WI 53562

+1 (608) 833-0088

info@shoutlet.com

support@shoutlet.com

Sway Europe

Mellangatan 66
239 30 Skanor
Sweden

+46-733-119599

per@shoutlet.com

Rauxa is a small agency focused on CRM and direct campaigns.  They can handle the strategy, creative, execution, and all the way through to the analytics.

Costa Mesa (HEAD OFFICE)

275A McCormick Ave.

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714.427.1271

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San Francisco, CA 94105

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San Antonio

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