By Chuck Leddy
We hope you’ve made a solid start towards a productive, highly-successful 2019. As you look forward, we’d like to briefly harken back to what blog posts grabbed the interest of our readers in 2018. We’ve compiled our Top 10 most viewed blog posts in 2018, brought to you by our trusty, user-friendly Google Analytics dashboard. The list represents a strong mixture of topics relevant for B2B marketers, including marketing automation strategy, customer success stories, and tips on working smarter with your applications. We’ll count down from 10 to 1 in order to build-up suspense:
Marketing is largely about nurturing and converting leads into loyal, long-term customers. This post explains how marketing automation can help you (1) understand your customers more deeply through data, and (2) offer your customers more relevant, data-driven customer experiences that keep them with you, instead of leaking out of your funnel.
Planning and designing a marketing campaign is arduous work. By leveraging marketing automation, marketers are compelled to think through the entire campaign and all relevant activities prior to setting it to “go live” in the automation workflow. Marketers need to design the journey and prepare the content as part of enabling an automated campaign, so they need to think deeper while getting more organized and coordinated before the journey begins. The benefits of doing this are clearly explained in this post.
A great success story about how one B2B company automated its email renewal campaigns to drive efficiency and free up its sales team to perform more higher-level activities, such as finding new prospects and upselling existing customers. Among the many measures of success cited herein, Naylor went from capturing 95% of its renewal revenue in an average of 87 days prior to automation to doing the same in 24 days (or 63 days faster) with automation. This post dives into all the details.
Sojourn’s Karin Pindle has seem a lot of customers bewildered by the lack of functionality in their sandboxes. She shares some of her practical insights on Oracle Eloqua sandboxes and offers tips for users who leverage them, including these gems: “You must rebuild anything you create/edit in the Eloqua sandbox in Eloqua production, so factor that into your project tasks and timelines” and “if you have users in your Eloqua sandbox that are not also in your Eloqua production, they will be removed from your sandbox in a “Refresh.” Remember to re-recreate them in the sandbox after the refresh is complete.” Smart, actionable tips here.
If you’re like most Eloqua marketers, you’re using Google Analytics as one of your analytics tools. By integrating Eloqua and Google Analytics, marketers can gain valuable insights into customer behaviour, campaign impact and ROI. Sojourn Managing Partner Adam Mitrosz offers you three of his favourite techniques to get more from your Eloqua/Google Analytics integration. He’ll have you working smarter in no time.
The May 25, 2018 implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation has changed the way marketers manage customer data around the world. GDPR compliance requires marketers to be more careful in gaining and maintaining consumer consent/permission. No more marketing at or marketing to consumers: now you’ll market with customer permission. How can you build your audience and acquire new contacts after GDPR? This post offers seven solid prospecting approaches.
We go into the lab and run some tests to determine the effectiveness of integrating your Facebook lead ads with Eloqua. Our “chief scientist” Kristin Connell explains the results in this eye-opening, action-oriented post. She closes this enlightening post with some great advice: “I suggest testing Facebook Lead Ads with Eloqua’s Facebook Lead Ads app for yourself and let us know how they perform for you . . .different platforms and ad types are going to work differently based on products/services, even campaign goals. That’s why it’s important for you to experiment to determine what works best for you.”
A primer on what marketing attribution is (connecting marketing activities to revenues/ROI), why it’s important for marketers, and how to make it happen. As marketers, our available investment options are almost infinite. When you don’t have visibility into what works, you’re prone to pin the tail on the donkey’s face or against the wall, investing in everything under the sun and accepting a high degree of waste (“spraying and praying”). With marketing attribution, you know exactly what’s working, can figure out why, can optimize and better coordinate your activities, and can make ongoing changes that better reflect the story your data’s telling you. In addition, you gain credibility in the C-suite.
Another great customer success story about how one global company successfully migrated to the Marketo marketing automation platform and saw huge benefits to their bottom line, including a 75% savings on campaign migration costs to Marketo. In the end, the S&P Global Platts migration project was recognized with a prestigious 2018 Revvie Award. As the Revvie Award press release explained, “[S&P Global Platts] automated their subscription and information distribution process, saving more than 15 weeks of people-hours annually” and gaining huge cost benefits. We love telling these sort of stories of customer success.
By far the most popular Sojourn Solution post of 2018, this one explains the many benefits a marketing automation platform can provide B2B marketers, from efficient campaign planning & design, better lead tracking, effective lead nurturing to close leaks in your funnel, significantly enhanced customer experiences, increased ROI, and more. As today’s marketing landscape gets more complex, marketers can leverage marketing automation tools to work smarter, letting technology do what it does best while liberating marketers to do what they do best.
Thanks for all your support for the Sojourn Solutions blog in 2018 – you really motivate us to be creative and many of our blog posts come from YOUR ideas. We ask, you answer, then we research, write and publish.
Here’s to creating even better, more helpful content in 2019! If you’d like to contribute to our blog, just contact us.
The post Sojourn Solutions’ top 10 blog posts of 2018 appeared first on Sojourn Solutions.
