So how is it that today’s B2B Marketing professionals think? Enter the 4Cs:

• Campaign: Think “outbound”… the catalyst to the chain of events that leads to a conversion at the end of the funnel, ie. tweeting, PR releases, email campaigns, etc…
• Customer: An anonymous web visitor, Prospect, Lead, Contact, or Opportunity.
• Channel: Inbound marketing avenues used by your customers to reach your content, ie. PPC ads, twitter, facebook, organic search engine results…
• Content: Web assets and artifacts such as website pages, landing pages, whitepapers, case-studies, or streaming videos.

More importantly, what led to this new method of B2B Marketing process?

A decade ago I might have said that marketers think in terms of Customers and Campaigns. The web wasn’t as inter-connected as it is today, the ability to track advertising spend was minimal, Google hadn’t made your content relevant, and email marketing was in its infancy. Today, marketers wrestle with the daily challenge of being able to identify which Channels are leading Customers to high-value Content, initiatied by Campaigns. Or to put it simply, which combination of the 4Cs is leading to the highest rates of conversion and sales. This can be a daunting task if it weren’t for the growth of marketing automation systems that tie all of this data together.

Central to the process, is a marketing organization’s ability to create, launch, and measure results. Marketing Automation systems today eliminate much of the heavy-lifting required to get a process such as this in-place. The primary benefit gained from a consolidated marketing platform, is that a marketer can launch a campaign, track customers through channels, analyze content and measure results (ROI) all in one place.

End the Status Quo in Marketing Automation

Last week marked a dramatic turning-point for us at LoopFuse and the general Marketing Automation sector, with the unveiling of our Free Marketing Automation offering, FreeView. The release of FreeView and a new low-cost, zero-risk pricing model, marks an almost year’s-worth of work in  planning and infrastructure investment geared to accelerate the adoption of Marketing Automation.

The Value to Marketers

While most in the industry often reference a Forrester report claiming 5% penetration in the Marketing Automation sector, the unusual thing is that no one seems to wonder (publicly) why the rate of growth isn’t much higher given the value Marketing Automation provides.

So allow me to rain on the price-gouging parade. Many of our competitors would have you convinced that Marketing Automation is reserved for marketers with million-dollar budgets, dedicated staff to manage the tools, and a bus-load of expensive professional services representatives to “help” them manage it. “Oh, marketing automation is much too complex for you mere mortal marketers…”, the million-dollar-quota sales-rep claims. In many ways, our competitors are distorting the market by projecting their own enterprise-sales commission structure on to you. The model works for them, at the cost of the consumer (your arm, and your leg). In a market with single-digit penetration, and many competitors continuing to follow Eloqua in to the realm of pricing-out the masses, it is evident that many marketers are simply priced-out of the market. And so now the high price barrier to entry for marketers wanting to adopt marketing automation is lowered to ZERO.

The benefits to marketers under this innovative model are clear:

• Zero-Risk: Sign-up and use a full-featured marketing automation product for FREE. Forever.
• Easy-to-Use: A complete wizard-based user-interface will have you up-and-running in minutes, identifying high-quality leads, sending email campaigns, and tracking lead conversion rates.
• Help at your fingertips: Our comprehensive knowledge base and community site is backed by LoopFuse support staff and community members exchanging ideas and best-practice advice.

The value in “free, forever” to marketers is clear with a zero-risk, easy-to-use, supported, and proven product.

The Value to Partners

As individual marketers benefit from a free offering, so do our Partners. The benefits are actually much more clear to partners, as they are now able to fully-implement a customer for FREE and not have to worry about the product vendor affecting their pricing structure. To a Partner, the relationship becomes pure-profit, and not revenue-sharing, as our competitors would enforce.

Last week, the status-quo of distorting the market with overpriced products ended. Marketing Automation is now open to any and every marketer, to use it for Free Forever. No strings attached, no bait and switch, no credit cards required. Just Sign-up and you’re ready to go in minutes.

Thoughts on the announcement, by others:

• LoopFuse Offers Free Marketing Automation System: Another Step Towards Industry Consolidation
• LoopFuse Removes the Budget Barrier from Marketing Automation
• LoopFuse Ignites Freemium Strategy
• LoopFuse FreeView: Free Marketing Automation

“3. Identify which marketing channels, or combination of marketing channels, have the greatest impact on lead conversion and revenue.

With so many marketing channels, it’s difficult to tell which combination of channels to build into the marketing mix and how much budget to allocate to each of them.   By measuring customer acquisition across marketing channels, the CMO can determine which channels are more likely to impact top-line revenue and allocate budget more effectively based on tangible results.  Conversations with the CFO become much more meaningful when the cost per customer acquired can be linked to expected revenue targets and to the marketing spend.  It’s difficult for finance to reduce overall marketing budget without also reducing revenue targets when marketers can demonstrate the relationship between cost per acquisition and revenue.

The marketing mix can be analyzed based on the tangible impact specific marketing channels have on cultivating prospects.  This allows the CMO to make better decisions about where to allocate budget based on tangible metrics, not gut feel.  At the same time, marketing automation tools become a central database with marketing campaign information and sales information allowing organizations to calculate return on marketing investment by campaign, period, or marketing channel.

Job Security Scorecard:

• Justify marketing budget by demonstrating exactly which marketing channels drive the highest conversion rates.
• Calculate customer acquisition by marketing channel
• Forecast more accurately by linking customer acquisition rates to overall marketing budget.  “If we spend this much money in the following channels, history tells us we can achieve the following revenue.”

Download a free copy of 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers

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