We just finished a webinar on the basics of lead nurturing and as an accompaniment to that presentation, we thought we'd post some of our tried and true tips for building successful lead nurturing campaigns.

1. Start simple. Before getting into complicated branching scenarios within your campaign, just implement a few basic multi-step campaigns that send 3 or 4 emails on a time delay.
2. Don’t wear out your welcome. It is important to remember when creating a campaign and determining time intervals that you want to be careful about sending too many messages. The quickest way to destroy a relationship with a lead, is for them to feel bombarded by your touches. 
3. Just like regular email campaigns, the offer is critical. We can't emphasize this point enough. If your offer isn't properly stated and relevant to your audience then your campaign is useless.
4. Regular segmentation is your friend. Build tailored lead nurturing campaigns for each of your key sub-segments to ensure that your campaigns remain targeted. 
5. Test thoroughly and carefully before deploying. This is especially critical if you’re using automated tools. The advantage (and sometimes disadvantage) of using automated tools is the idea that you can, "set it and forget it,". Sometimes this can lead to neglect in regular testing and that can be detrimental to the overall success of your campaign.
6. Work out the hand-off between sales and marketing. How does sales add leads to nurturing programs? How does sales ensure a prospect doesn’t get nurtured? For your Lead Nurturing process to run smoothly, it's important to ensure that  your sales and marketing teams have a clear plan for the different aspects of your strategy. 
7. Measure and tweak overtime to improve results. Analytics for your campaigns are an important way to test your conversion rates, and to improve your campaigns for the future.

We just finished our webinar "Lead Nurturing 101" and as usual, we like to give a recap for everyone who attended and those who were unable to join us today.

Today's webinar was presented by our VP of Marketing, Richard Sharp, and our VP of Product Management, Ryan Stocker.

The webinar covered the key fundamentals of lead nurturing including:

• The definition of lead nurturing
• Trends for buyer communication
• Is lead nurturing right for your audience?
• The anatomy of a lead nurturing campaign
• The business case for lead nurturing

A few of the main points we'd like you to take away from the presentation are:

1. Lead Nurturing is the process of building relationships with prospects overtime by sending relevant messages and creating meaningful conversations.
2. It takes on average 5 to 8 touches to convert a suspect into a prospect
3. Lead nurturing may not be right for your audience, but if it is, a good strategy can help you increase your wins without increasing your lead generation budget

If you'd like see the full webinar recording you can access it here.

Friday is Web  Marketing Digest Day here at Marqui. I hope you're ready for the interesting things we found for you this week!

Everyone who works on computers has experienced data loss (relax, we know it's a painful topic). That's one of the many benefits of SaaS based content management solutions like Marqui. Your data is in data centers with redundant hardware and managed disaster recovery so you never have to worry. Whether you're already using a SaaS solution, or you like to live life on the edge, we're sure that you'll appreciate this post from Gizmodo on the "5 Stages of Data Loss Grief".

We seem to have found quite a few of these lately, but it doesn't make them any less useful. Here are 35 great social media infographics to help you visualize the social media landscape!

Do you know if you're customers are engaged? Here's a great article on 10 of the key customer engagement metrics that everyone should be tracking.

Finally, my favorite find of the week. I can honestly say I found this video to be mesmerizing. A composer held a scholarship competition for amateur singers. He took video submissions from thousands of would-be-performers, each individually singing different parts of the same song which he composed, and then put all those videos together to create a choir-like effect. If you haven't seen this yet you should definitely check it out.. This video is a great example of how someone can use social media to being people together and create something beautiful.

Image from Flickr

A common problem we hear a lot about from our customers is: how can we get more qualified leads to our sales team?

If you've been wondering the same thing (but were too afraid to ask) don't worry, there are many people out there who are having the same issues, and,  because those people did ask, we're offering a webinar on the subject.

The webinar will be presented by our VP of Marketing, Richard Sharp, and our VP of Product Management, Ryan Stocker, and will cover several different aspects of lead nurturing:

• Defining lead nurturing
• Understanding if lead nurturing will work for your audience
• Tips for designing and executing nurturing campaigns
• Calculating the ROI for lead nurturing

Sound like something your interested in? You can register for the webinar here.

Hope to see you there!

This week's Web Marketing Digest post has a great infographic, some good information on Twitter's newest feature, and a how to guide for the social media landscape.

Everybody loves a good infographic. This one, from Mashable, shows the current state of Twitter today from how many people use the service per month to the most popular hours a day to post tweets.

For all of those who were a little confused about Twitter's new feature, @anywhere, we found a great article explaining the ins and outs and what you can expect from this feature in the future.

Any CMOs out there who want a better idea of the social media landscape? This graphic from CMO.com is a great resource on some of the most popular social media sites today.

Everyone who came to our webinar this Thursday will know what we mean when we say this: here's a link to the WeWe Test, to help you figure out just how "customer-centric" your website really is.

We just finished our webinar, "Marqui's Recipe for Compelling Content" and we think it was a definite success.

This was the first webinar that I co-presented since coming to Marqui, and as a web content specialist here, many of the pains marketers face creating content hit really close to home for me. I hope that you all found our tips and insights helpful, and that our strategy pointers work for you as well as they work for us!

Content creation can be a major pain point for a lot of marketers, and we know from personal experience that creating a successful strategy for content can be a difficult and time-consuming task. To help out we decided to give a webinar which discusses the web content ecosystem and some tips for how you can create a sustainable content strategy that works.

The webinar focused on several major aspects of content creation:

1. What is the value of compelling content?
2. What does compelling content look like?
3. The common content creation challenges most marketers face.
4. Our recipe and ingredients for compelling content which included: frequency, consistency, consumption and expertise among others.

If you were unable to make the webinar, the recording is now available in our resource section.

If you did attend, please take a moment and let us know how we did. We love to hear from you!

This week's post has some great informative data on the state of the internet today and its usage over time, a game that puts your twitter stats to use, a creative way to open marketers' eyes to content marketing and something we truly thought we'd never see.

Intrigued? Read on.

From Captains of Industry, an innovative contest which should hopefully help some marketers realize that their content is a little lacking. The Incredibly Boring Web Content Challenge is over now, but if you go to the website you can see a video with some of the entries. Should your content have been entered in the challenge?

Believe it or not there is now an iPhone game called  Tweet Defense  which combines social media and mobile gaming. The object of the game is to build up defenses and kill zombies and it uses your twitter stats (number of followers, friends tweets etc.) to up your power in the game.

A study about the internet done by the BBC which has some great facts including one which states that 4 out of 5 people believe the internet is a fundamental right and an interactive graphic showing the change in internet usage over time.

And finally, as promised, a warning that we never thought we would need to see.

Have a great weekend!


image by FedeSK8

One of the most important aspects of any marketing strategy is proper content management.

By developing sustainable creation strategies and understanding your visitors, you can engage your customers in meaningful conversations and help build relationships with prospects.

To help you develop a successful content creation strategy, we're holding a live webinar on Thursday March 18th at 10:30 am PST. During the webinar we're going to cover ways that you can:

• Create content your visitors want to read
• Engage your customers in a dialogue with meaningful content
• Ensure that your content is always "fresh" 
• Develop a plan to maintain your ongoing content creation efforts

You can register for the webinar here.

Alright, it's Friday again and so it's time for the latest installment of  our Web Marketing Digest series. This week we have a video on the state of the internet today, a few stats about the Olympics (we are located in Vancouver after all), the best custom 404 page we've ever seen and for all our readers looking for something more informative than entertaining, a great article on conversion optimization. Here they are:

If you like video representations of facts, you'll love this video on the state of the internet today made by JESS3. Here are just a few of the facts the video shows:

• 1.73 Billion internet users worldwide
• 90 trillion emails sent in 2009
• 81% of the emails sent were spam

We don't want to ruin the surprise, so you'll have to check out the video to learn the rest.

Want to learn which Olympic athletes from N. America had the most online buzz surrounding them? This report from Neilsen shows the internet buzz surrounding different Olympic athletes who won gold, and the most talked about people might surprise you!

I know it's hard to believe, but 404 error pages can be cool! Don't believe me? Check out this custom 404 page from imjustcreative and tell me that it's not the best one you've ever seen.

As promised, here is a great article, The Five Rings of Conversion Optimization, from Search Engine Land on how conversion optimization involves more than just your website.

Have a great weekend!

image by christianyves

We held our webinar on planning for website success today, and it went great! For those of you who couldn’t attend (we’re sure you did your best to try and get there) I've included the main points from the webinar below:

• Who is the intended audience?
• What is your audience looking for?
• When do visitors seek information?
• Where do your visitors come from?
• Why should visitors consider you?
• How do they prefer to build relationships?

Understanding the points above can help you optimize your website for success. While website design is important, it should play a secondary role to the 5 Ws of your site. If you use keywords, SEO, web analytics, and personas to establish information about your audience and their needs, you can help meet your visitors’ web expectations, engage with prospects and improve your website’s ROI.

You can see the full webinar recording of 5Ws of Website Success here.

Here is Part 2 of my Top 10 Marketing Automation Must Haves post. You can read Part 1 here.

A while back I began tweeting my top 10 list of features that I would look for in any marketing automation solution. This was based on my experiences accumulated over the last 8 years, being responsible for demand generation at various technology companies. During that time I've used a mix of tools from simple web content management and email marketing solutions, to full blown marketing automation suites from various vendors.

Spreading the 10 tweets out over my time-line wasn't very helpful, and the 140 character limits made things a bit cryptic, so I'm going to split them over 2 posts with a little explanation and rationale this time.

#6: De-dup of leads. Salesforce.com web-to-lead forms create chaos. Don't ask reps to check duplicates.

There are a couple of problems with web-to-lead forms as they come out of the box from Salesforce.com. First of all, the forms don't offer any data validation unless you have a web developer to write some javascript for you. Secondly Salesforce.com will happily create duplicate leads all day long.

This creates chaos for sales reps who end up working the same lead. Even if they remember to manually search for duplicates, figuring out which way to merge leads isn't simple.

Although there are simple point solutions which solve these issues, consider it a must have for any marketing automation solution.

#7: Ability to execute integrated marketing campaigns across channels, not just email.

Creating killer topics for marketing campaigns is tough and requires imagination and empathy for your target customers. Developing compelling content based on your winning concept is far from trivial. Marketing campaigns get more powerful and efficient when you integrate several tactics across multiple channels.

Email campaigns are extremely effective, but don't forget direct mail, pay-per-click, banner ads, traditional media / trade publications. Each of these require landing pages with friendly URLs and tracking.

As marketers look to integrate social media tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter into integrated marketing campaigns, look for marketing automation vendors that recognize that this is another channel that needs to demonstrate ROI.

#8: Flexibility to match your customer buying process. Some folks need nurturing, some want all the information now.

A large part of the value of marketing automation comes from the fact that many potential customers are not yet ready to enter the sales process. They are looking to understand a problem or get educated about a topic and being engaged by a sales rep too early isn't productive for either party.

That doesn't mean everybody wants to be drip fed information one whitepaper or email campaign at a time. Some people want to consume as much information as you have on a subject at one time, but asking them to complete the same form twenty times doesn't build enthusiasm. I've noticed that technical buyers in particular like to load up on information before they engage in a real conversation.

Look for a marketing automation solution that can support gated resource sections that still track individual activity so you don't lose vital sales intelligence.

#9: Dashboard view of closed-loop campaign performance from lead source to opportunity and closed revenue.

Marketing Automation also promises to deliver big picture clarity into what demand generation strategies are really working. That doesn't mean counting how many leads come from what lead-sources, but rather identifying what sales revenue can be attributed to specific programs.

Doing this manually gets unmanageable very quickly, so look for a marketing automation solution that can give you visibility right through the customer funnel - from first click (from pay-per-click, for example) right through to closed deals.

#10: Make running web seminars that feel like part of an integrated nurturing program simple.

One of the most popular demand generation and nurturing tactics employed today are web seminars, aka webinars. Popular tools like GoToMeeting, LiveMeeting and Webex make it simple and cost effective to run online meetings, presentations and product demonstrations.

Whether somebody registered, attended or asked questions for a particular web seminar is important lead intelligence to use for segmentation and ultimately for sales context. Make sure your marketing automation solution integrates with your preferred web seminar platform, or at least offers a simple a quick approach for importing the data into your central marketing database.

I hope you found this helpful. I'd love to hear your comments on what I included and what you feel should have made the cut.

Recently Marqui went through a complete web redesign to better represent who we are as a company and what products and services we can offer to our customers. We’re ecstatic about how it turned out. To celebrate our new website we’re going to write some consecutive posts with input from our entire team on the six crucial aspects of a website redesign to help anyone else out there who is planning a redesign for 2010. Today’s post is just a brief introduction about what we will be talking about in the future, and little bit about why you should think about redesigning your site as well.

Any website needs continuous improvement to be a worthwhile marketing tool. Too many sites on the web today look old and obsolete, which does nothing but degrade the company’s web presence and their brand authority in general. If you feel that your website is detrimental rather than advantageous for your brand and marketing strategies, perhaps it’s time for a redesign.

Before undertaking a redesign, it is important to determine why you’re doing one (and because you’re bored with your current site isn’t a good reason). Just because you look at your website everyday certainly doesn’t mean that your visitors do, so it is important to look at your site through the eyes of a first time visitor; does your site still come up lacking? If you’re not sure whether your site is still competitive or not, here are some good reasons to do a website redesign: 

1. The size of your website has grown dramatically. Most websites will continue to grow with your business. If your company and subsequently your website have grown significantly but you haven’t redesigned your site, some important information may be buried where potential customers won’t be able to locate it. 
2. You need to introduce a content management system (CMS). A website redesign is a good reason to revise and review the current content on your site to make sure it is still relevant. Implementing a CMS can help you keep your content fresh and compelling and can help your site get found more easily by search engines. 
3. Your website is too hard to navigate. If you’re beginning to feel like this is the case it is almost certainly time for a redesign. Often, navigation issues arise when the amount of content on a site grows but the website design doesn’t. You need to evaluate how easy it is for customers to locate information and take the next steps towards buying your product. 
4. Your site design doesn't reflect your current business objectives. As companies expand and evolve so do their business objectives and brand. Does your current website communicate the depth of your business? Does it portray your current brand message? If you have changed your services, added new products or changed the scope of your business in general and are still using the same site design, you’re not doing your business justice.

There are many reasons to redesign your site, but no matter what your reasons, a website redesign shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. If you think that your company is ready for a new site, and is willing to do the required leg work to pull it off, then you should keep in mind these aspects of a redesign that are essential to creating a quality web presence.

1. Website Audit
2. Site Design: Brand and Theme
3. Content Creation Strategy
4. Usability and Navigation Planning
5. SEO Strategy
6. Maintenance Schedule

We’ll be discussing each of these steps in more depth over the next couple of weeks so make sure you come back and read them all to get a comprehensive, in-depth look at the different stages of a redesign.