B2B Marketing: Where does the Funnel begin?

November 4th, 2010 by Roy Russo

In a previous post I described how B2B Marketing professionals today view online marketing, employing the 4Cs: Campaign, Customer, Channel, and Customer. For this new content-driven strategy to function properly, a Marketing Automation system is essential, as it automates many of the labor-intensive tasks associated with deploying multi-channel campaigns and other outbound marketing tasks.

Since customers are able to find your content via different channels (twitter, google search, PPC ads, linkedin, youtube, etc…), it is paramount to include inbound marketing whenever we discuss the marketing and sales funnel:

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Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation Funnel

It should be made clear to everyone reading, that online B2B Marketing absolutely requires the marrying of inbound marketing and marketing automation data. A complete view of marketing campaigns is impossible without the ability to analyze customer-content interaction data. Making matters worse is the fact that disjointed systems lack the capability to inform marketers on what campaigns are producing the highest-value leads via different channels.

Inbound Marketing alone will not cure a marketer’s ills. Without the ability to automate and analyze the qualification of Leads in the funnel, siloed inbound marketing vendors, such as Hubspot, attempt to tackle only one part of the problem – where leads come from. Systems such as these fall flat when marketers seek to understand lead behavior once the customer is inside the funnel (or inside the CRM).

Marketing Automation alone will not cure a marketer’s ills. Marketing automation vendors such as Eloqua and Marketo, lack the ability to provide insight to marketers needing to view the entire funnel. This myopic view of the marketing and sales funnel hurts marketers more than anything else, as it completely ignores interactions with customers as they happen farther up the food-chain, thus leading to disastrous results when trying to answer what’s working, and what’s not.

In an ideal world, Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation would be made available from the source, removing the silo-effect we see today. Until now marketing automation vendors have neglected to focus on the mouth of the funnel and inbound marketing vendors have neglected interations deeper inside the funnel. The latest LoopFuse OneView release, offers a comprehensive marketing automation system, plus inbound marketing capabilities designed to track and analyze all touch-points with a customer, thus providing a complete view to marketers on what’s working and what’s not…

lfinboundmarketingfunnel

Marketing Automation + Inbound Marketing with LoopFuse

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