Austin Texas Demand Generation Expert

Four Stage Nurture Campaign in Eloqua 10

 

Marketing Automation Campaign Pilot: Launch Preview Meeting

Attendees:  Core Marketing Team Members

Time: 09:00 hours

One of the most exciting parts of my job is being present to watch the light bulb turn on in people’s minds – that moment when their fear of the unknown starts turning into recognition of possibility. This morning’s meeting, one where we typically preview a client’s first automated campaign, was one of those moments.

Along with the promise of better performance, introducing marketing automation into a large organization creates insecurity, defensiveness, and politics.  One moment it is business as usual, just another day of trying to execute your projects, and then BAM!, suddenly we’re having conversations about how bad alignment with sales is, how the content you produce for the campaign team sucks from a strategic standpoint, or how the campaigns don’t nurture people throughout their buyer’s journey. Buyer’s journey?  Really?

In my role as a best practice methodology and automation platform implementer, I’m usually the one delivering this message.  The stress of it affects all stakeholders, immediately casting campaign marketing, sales, product marketing, field marketing and web teams into a tizzy as they try to determine what all of this change means to them. This is why I relish days like today: I enjoy witnessing how the “automated campaign wireframe” helps everyone to see the massive undertaking in its simplest form.

This  flowchart, which we usually show directly from Eloqua 10’s campaign canvas, is the logic for an automated campaign.  It contains the emails, landing pages and business rules that apply to a particular marketing segment we wish to communicate with. Seeing a campaign in the simple logic for the first time does wonders for illustrating the ease and benefits of systematizing demand generation.  As I take the team through the automated campaign wireframe, you can almost hear the gears in their head turning:

“Hey!  It’s just a simple automated email campaign, with landing pages where we can collect pertinent buyer information!  Alright, I can see from this series of email invitations to our posted content why our topics need to be more strategic – to tell a story rather than be so tactical. The flow of information, this way, could facilitate a buyer as they educate themselves through a purchase decision.  Hmm, and I can also see from the content offers, and the various persona wireframes how the sales teams would want us to score these people before sending them to the sales CRM. We can do this.”

Before I can even finish demonstrating the user experience, really intelligent questions start flying, like: “Hey, can we use this to automate our partner on-boarding process?  Do you have a tool to help us figure out how to map the right content to the different stages the buyer goes through?” With every additional question more and more people are engaged and excited. Possibility abounds.  And while a deeper understanding of the work that needs to be done may cause some uncertainty around “the how,” any fear of the unknown that was in the room at the beginning of the meeting is all but gone.

Maybe I’ll let them enjoy this for a day or two before I start talking about CRM integration…