Using your marketing technology to enhance marketing interactions

Good quality marketing interactions help you gain trust with your target audience, push a particular value proposition, and drive leads down the marketing funnel towards being a qualified and useful lead.

By using some fundamental approaches and a variety of technologies you can identify the right time to talk to people, what to talk to them about, and how they would like to be spoken to. With this in mind, we’ve put together a handful of hints and tips to help you create good quality marketing interactions.

When looking to generate quality marketing interactions, there are 3 key factors that must be taken into account…

1. When – the time that a marketing lead interacts with your marketing campaigns can give you crucial insight into when to approach them next or when they are qualified for follow up.
2. What – what a marketing lead interacts with indicates a subject of interest and potential focus area to market to them.
3. How – a marketing lead’s habit of interacting with certain formats or marketing channels gives insight into how best to approach them in the future.

There are lots of ways you can use marketing technology to support your quest for good quality marketing interactions. However, going forward, it’s important to note that the necessary foundation for these technological solutions is supported by the marketing technology spine – your website, your marketing automation (MA) tool and your CRM.

Top tips

Your ideal end result is gaining full visibility over all of your marketing channels and activity in one place, to allow you to see what a lead is interacting with, and when they are interacting with it.

Website visits

By tracking visits to key web pages using an MA tool, you can identify key buying signals. This can include visits to product web pages, pricing web pages, ‘how it works’ web pages, or even visits to critical web pages with forms (where forms have not been completed). These visits can provide an insight into when a lead is researching your company or what subject or product they are interested in.

Webchat

Webchat interactions can also be linked back into an MA platform and used as a key driver to capture further intelligence on the lead. This route can offer more candid insight into the reason a lead is interested in your product or service, and can also be used as an indicator of when to trigger a more direct follow-up.

Form completions

Form submissions can be graded from simple blog sign-up forms, to content downloads through to contact form completions. This will allow you to prioritise a lead’s level of interest and, in turn, allow you to respond to each scenario in the right way. A blog sign-up would lead to an automated acknowledgment email, whereas a contact form submission would result in a personal email inviting them to a face-to-face meeting. By using forms hosted by your MA tool, or linking web forms to your MA platform, you can see when the submissions have taken place and act accordingly.

Direct responses

Direct responses to emails are valuable but often overlooked or undervalued marketing interaction. Email response management can be time-consuming and absorb a lot of resource, meaning it is not taken as seriously as it can be. However, it can be a key indication of interest from a lead, which like a web chat or form submission, warrants a direct follow-up in person or via email. By setting up a method for identifying email responses, and tagging them in your MA database, you can use this marketing interaction to drive further activity to the lead.

Social media

Directing leads to landing pages and forms from social media posts, sponsored adverts or digital and programmatic adverts, which means you can capture form submissions, which allows you to trace your reach through to impressions, and onward to actual tangible leads. This closes the loops from the ‘anonymous to the known’ and allows the digital channels being used to be tracked alongside the wider marketing mix.

Social listening

Social listening tools (such as HubSpot’s social monitoring) enable you to identify people who have shown interest through social media (such as retweets or mentions on Twitter) in the last week. This can be labour intensive, but equally, it can provide visibility over an even wider set of marketing interactions.

Video and webinars

Integrating webinar (i.e. On24) and video platforms (i.e. Vidyard) enables you to see who has attended the webinar or viewed the video. Additionally, you can also see how much of the video they have viewed or how long they attended the webinar for – to gauge the level of the lead’s involvement. This can provide an idea of their genuine interest in the subject matter and also their curiosity in your company, product or service.

Interactive content

If you have ventured into the world of interactive content (using tools such as Ion Interactive), you can profile leads throughout their journey and provide greater insight into their interest areas and intent to buy. By tracing a lead’s journey through the piece of content, you can also ascertain what they are interested in, and if they are interested at that particular moment in time.

Where does this all lead?

Identify implied interest

Seeing the full scope of everything a lead is interacting with enables you to identify what they are interested in. With this data, you can talk to them more about that subject, and improve the quality of the interaction at the same time. Focus on categorising all potential interactions into identifiable groups. That way, when a lead interacts with certain touchpoints and identifies themselves as part of one of these groups, you can respond with the best message.

Gain wider interaction insights

Have a full understanding of who is (and who isn’t) interested – and when they are interested too. By seeing the full picture, you can gain more informed insight into who is at each stage of your marketing funnel, and who has become a MQL.

Maximise ABM activity

An ABM tool (such as Marketo’s ABM module) can help you gain an organisational view of the interactions captured through Marketo by aggregating all interactions by every lead from one organisation into a single usable set of intelligence.

Predict outcomes

With predictive scoring tools (such as Mintigo) you can use an AI approach to analyse an even wider set of data signals to identify contacts and organisations who are showing interest – from areas even outside your own marketing technology.

The end result

The intelligence gathered on all interactions allows you to make decisions on:

• When to follow up with leads
• What to follow them up with
• How they like to receive information
• What stage in the buyer’s journey they are at
• Whether they are qualified or not

All this priceless data and information allows you to give them the right marketing message, at the right time, and eventually identify the best moment to pass them to sales for a purchasing conversation.

What to actually hear form Ash in person? Great! You can on 19 March at Get stacked the B2B Martech Conference taking place in London.