Posts Tagged ‘heinz marketing’

Planning for marketing automation success in the year ahead

Wednesday, November 13th, 2013

We had a great session with Brian Hansford of Heinz Marketing yesterday talking about the critical success factors for marketing automation and what you can do now to get things pointed the right direction for the year ahead.  The full replay of the webinar is posted below and Brian has made his slides available for download on Slideshare.

Download slides: http://www.slideshare.net/brianhansford/marketing-automation-success-in-2014-loopfuse

Upcoming Webinar – Marketing Automation Success in 2014

Tuesday, October 29th, 2013

Join us Tuesday, November 12th at 1pm ET/10am PT for this Q&A session with marketing automation expert Brian Hansford of Heinz Marketing.  Brian will share insights on how organizations need to plan and prepare their marketing automation initiatives to support a demand generation strategy.  Topics we’ll cover include:

  • Build your Demand Generation Strategy
  • Focus on the Metrics that Matter
  • Database Health – Take care on your database now.
  • Content Strategy – content is the fuel behind any marketing automation initiative.
  • People – Your most important resource. Make sure they’re trained and supported.

Register for the webinar!

Five keys to successful marketing automation content

Monday, August 19th, 2013

This is a guest post by Brian Hansford who is an account director with Heinz Marketing.  He maps the stages of a successful marketing automation initiative and this is the 4th installment of a four part series: Part 1 details building a successful process. The second part presents the importance of people. Part three looked at marketing automation vendor selection criteria.  In this last installment, Brian covers content.

Content helps prospects find an organization, learn and engage. Content even helps customers and non-customers alike become advocates! With a marketing automation initiative, content drives engagement and conversions which ultimately accelerates revenue!

Content often presents the biggest challenge for organizations that pursue a marketing automation initiative. Unfortunately content is often treated like a ‘Marketing 1.0’ task that a solo marketing communications writer should produce. I adopted a saying a few years ago that is “content is the fuel that launches the marketing automation rocket.” Without content, a marketing automation initiative will simply sit in limbo on the launch pad.

A well run marketing organization must have an annual campaign strategy and calendar, regardless of whether or not a marketing automation system is employed. Without a strategy, lead flow will be inconsistent, the content requirements will be unknown, campaigns will falter and the investment in marketing automation will be wasted.

Consider the content required to run each stage of a campaign in the buying cycle. Additional content will be required to support nurturing campaigns that help prevent leakage in the marketing funnel. Depending on which industry in B2B marketing, there will be different individuals at a target company that will require content suited to their roles and influence. Develop the right content for the right audience to be delivered at the right time using a marketing automation platform.

Great content helps organizations build credibility, awareness, and sets the standard that competitors must react to in order to keep up. That’s a position of strength!

Here are five considerations for developing and implementing a successful content strategy to support a marketing automation initiative.

1.  Audience: Who are the influencers and decision makers that will consume the content? Do you also have to reach partners, media, and analysts?

2.  Content Types to Steps in a Buyer’s Journey:Map the stages buyers take from pre-funnel, top of funnel, mid-funnel, final decision and beyond as existing customers? The buyer and customer journey has requirements for each phase. Here are some ideas to consider for different types:

  • Educational Content: Information designed to help prospective customers better understand the segment and solution. Well-developed content that educates also establishes credibility. Industry reports, webinars, keynote event presentations, blogs, social media user groups, and white papers are excellent formats for educational content.
  • Awareness Content: As prospective customers become more educated on the segment and solutions they will evaluate how vendors address their needs. In addition to the formats used with educational content, customer evidence through case studies is fantastic in this area. Also, content that focuses on “how-to” or “best-practices” is a perfect fit in this area.
  • Affirmation Content: As leads are nurtured into opportunities for sales follow up, they need information that helps lead them to a confident purchase decision. This is the area where vendors can define the terms of an evaluation that competitors must follow. Develop an RFP model or template. Provide more case studies and best practices. ROI models are also valuable and help develop a business case. The goal here is to build confidence that YOU are the right one to work with.
  • Advocacy Content:The sale has been won but now is not the time for complacency. Develop the content and delivery channels that help your hard-earned customers squeeze every drop of value from your solution. The more value you provide with strong communications and content, the stronger the relationship and the less chance of a defection.

3.  Content Sources and Contributors: Don’t treat content development and curation as a task for a single marketing communications writer.  Compelling, educational, informative, and entertaining content can be provided by multiple sources inside and outside of an organization.  High value content can be developed for little or no cost!  Executives in the C-suite, VP’s and directors should all understand this by now and even provide content themselves.  Customers, industry experts, channel partners, analysts, and independent bloggers are also great sources of content!

4.  Nurture Campaign Requirements: Understand content requirements when building campaign strategies and themes.

5.  Frequency and Channels: Content delivery methods are incredibly varied and many can be managed with a marketing automation platform. Proper planning helps identify whether enough content, or too much is planned for an audience.

Don’t let a marketing automation falter because of a lack of a content development plan. Content helps drive revenue when delivered with marketing automation platforms. The better the plan and implementation, the greater the return on the investment!

How are you implementing a content strategy with your marketing automation initiative?

We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.

To find out exactly what LoopFuse does, click here.

You can try Nearstream for social lead generation here.

To add LoopFuse to Salesforce.com, click here.

You can follow LoopFuse on Twitter here or join us on our Facebook fan page here.

Eight ways to double lead volume from your blog

Monday, June 24th, 2013

This is a guest post by Matt Heinz, President, Heinz Marketing. Read more on his Marketing blog.

Sometimes the simple, tactical solutions work best.

If you’re creating blog content in part to drive traffic and convert it into registration for gated content and warm leads for your sales team, here are a few tactics to increase lead production significantly with the same volume of content.

1. Integrate offers as text links right into the copy
Offers on your blog are great, but they aren’t hitting readers who primarily get your content via RSS feeds on third-party sites. But if you integrate offers right into the copy, or at least as contextual hotlinks in the copy, you’ll get more clicks and conversions from your non-visiting readers.

2. Add offers to the sidebar
I’m always surprised at how many blogs give great content and clearly drive significant volumes of readers, yet fail to offer clear calls to action in a right-hand sidebar. This should be table stakes.

3. Add italicized offers at the bottom
If you’re nervous about being too aggressive about adding offers into a post itself, add something at the end in italics, so that it’s clearly differentiated from the body copy but still part of the post itself. Everyone who reads to the bottom will also see this.

4. Add integrated ad links custom to the content towards the bottom
If you’re publishing a blog post specifically about sales, offer a sales leader-specific asset at least halfway down the post, via an integrated graphical ad. Check out an example of how we’re doing that here.

5. Measure which topics get the most traffic and conversions, and increase your volume of that type of content
For example, when we write about sales, we get far more traffic, retweets and leads vs. when we write about marketing. And we know that specific topics and types of posts also get far more traffic, which translates into more leads as well. Know your analytics, and use the trends to your advantage.

6. Repurpose past blog posts into best practice guides
Check out the guides on the right-hand sidebar of this blog, and you’ll find primarily content that’s been published as individual blog posts before. Better yet, build your blog’s editorial calendar with future best practice guides in mind. Great way to get more leverage out of a finite amount of content-development bandwidth and/or budget.

7. Google+ authorship
Seriously no brainer. If you’re already active with Circles, you’ll see an immediate bump in blog traffic.

8. Use InboundWriter or similar to optimize posts as you write them
Even if you haven’t done your SEO research in advance, tools such as InboundWriter (integrated right into WordPress) can give your blog post draft an “SEO quality score” and offer specific suggestions for how to improve it’s findability.

Would love to hear more best practices from those that are actively optimizing blog posts, pages and traffic to increase lead registrations.

We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.

To find out exactly what LoopFuse does, click here.

You can try Nearstream for social lead generation here.

To add LoopFuse to Salesforce.com, click here.

You can follow LoopFuse on Twitter here or join us on our Facebook fan page here.

Secrets to Successful Marketing Automation [report]

Monday, September 17th, 2012

The smart folks over at Heinz Marketing have released a new report on the “Secrets to Successful Marketing Automation.”  This is required reading if you are considering marketing automation or have implemented a system and are looking to get more out of it. From their description:

“The 23 pages in this special report go deep to provide several strategic and tactical best practices for introducing, launching and executing a lead nurturing or marketing automation effort for your organization.”

Check out the full report!

Secrets to Successful Marketing Automation from Heinz Marketing Inc

To find out exactly what LoopFuse does, click here.

To add LoopFuse to Salesforce.com, click here.

You can follow LoopFuse on Twitter here or join us on our Facebook fan page here.

Slides from Today’s Webinar: How to Find, Influence, and Convert More Prospects Into Customers

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Thank you to everyone who joined us today. Great questions and feedback for Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing. As promised, here are the slides from today’s event and you can sign up for a free marketing brainstorm with Matt by clicking here.

Webinar: Tuesday, January 17 – How to find, influence and convert more prospects into customers

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

We are very excited to have Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing, leading this discussion about strategies and tactics for converting prospects into customers.

Please join us on Tuesday, January 17 at 1pm ET/10am PT!

It’s harder than ever to get your voice heard, find prospects who need what you’re selling, and get their attention long enough to close the deal.  But successful businesses nationwide are doing just that, often at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising and marketing.

This webcast will walk through a specific framework your business can follow to find the right prospects, earn their attention & trust, then convert them into long-time, loyal customers.  You’ll walk away with specific plans, best practices and strategies to impact your sales & marketing results right away.

Register here.