So unless you live under a marketing rock, I’m sure that you are aware that Marketo is now a publicly traded company with stock already increasing in value up to 78%. Plus, along with Tableau, Marketo helped push total IPO pricings in May to 22, the most since November 2007, when 26 deals were completed. Much respect for boosting the world of marketing technology and the economy in general.

Marketo’s community includes over 2,300 customers, 27,000 online community members, over 370 employees and over 100 partners. Its record breaking growth is very encouraging for the marketing technology market, but one question is on all of our minds: What road will Marketo take now?

There are two possibilities for Marketo, one is the acquisition road, which Eloqua already paved the way last year. Or, Marketo could take the road less traveled, and continue its unprecedented progress to take its seat as the revenue performance management suite. There are indicators that either is in the cards at this point.

Eloqua and Marketo almost always share the same breath when discussing marketing automation platforms. Last year, both had the distinct honor of being the leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant in their CRM Lead Management report. Eloqua was also in the same neighborhood as Marketo when it went public last year and traded at around $13 per share. It was a quick six months before Oracle snatched them right up. So by these estimations, a big player could plan a Marketo acquisition right around November.

And there have been rumors. Let’s take a cue from one other important note in the Gartner report, Marketo was cautioned on its focus on Salesforce users. However, maybe this is just a glimpse into the future for Marketo?  Maybe this is another Eloqua/Oracle situation. However, Salesforce isn’t the only company rumored to have its sights set on Marketo. Another big player or Salesforce competitor would surely find it appealing to acquire Marketo with its many SalesForce customers.

There are just as many clues that Marketo may truly be on its way to found the Marketing Nation on a much larger scale. Marketo’s ecosystem includes platforms such as their LaunchPoint, which show that Marketo is building the foundation for a far reaching platform that offers end-to-end solutions for relationship marketing. (Also, keep in mind that Eloqua was taking similar steps prior to being acquired by Oracle.)

Another fantastic indicator for Marketo’s future is the huge spike in stock price it experienced last week. MKTO closed out last week at $23.10 — about 78% above the $13 listing price. If this trend continues, Marketo will launch itself into another realm. It also reveals that the public have faith in this company and its future.

But most importantly, what does this mean for the future of marketing technology? If Marketo goes the distance, it will be set up as a large marketing technology vendor ensuring that marketing automation isn’t merely a passing phase or yet another packaged feature from technology companies. It will mean that it has a stronghold within the technology landscape and the digitization of marketing holds lasting value.

Gone are they days when marketers believe that future customers behave in an undeviating fashion. The reality of the customer decision journey (CDJ) has taken over and B2B marketers have adapted to the new model of the four stages in the customer journey: awareness, education, analysis and initial decision.

Right now there are prospects at every different stage of the CDJ interacting with your brand. Not only are they at different levels of awareness, interest and education, but they each have a different buyer persona as well. That is a lot to filter through, segment and decipher the best engagement strategy. For now let’s delve deeper into the top-funnel aspect of the customer journey.

Map Out the Journey

The awareness stage is the most top-funnel level of interaction with your brand. Perhaps the prospect was referred to you by a friend, maybe you met at an offline event or they discovered your offerings while trying to solve a problem. This is where the marketers’ primary job is to be found by the right prospects.

Your team must be at the forefront of your industry, nicely seated on the pedestal of thought-leadership. Enticing your prospects to consume your value-adding content is your way of sliding your foot through the awareness door and making a place for a proper introduction at the latter stages of the sales process. But beware, strike too soon with over promotional content and you can scare away the nibble on your line.

This leads to the education stage where curiosity or need propels the prospect to dig further into your offerings. What makes your products special? What’s new about your company? This part of the journey can stretch for a very long period of time while prospects educate themselves. As a vendor its your job during this stage to direct the potential customer to the best content to move them along the journey.

The analysis stage signals the impending decision time and by now, you should have made the cut of the top 3 choices your prospect is investigating and comparing. It’s important to note that at every stage of the customer decision journey your prospects will visit your site multiple times. They want to know why they should choose you, so tell them. (We’ve got some solutions for you.)

Discern Digital Behavior

Implementing the appropriate top-funnel sales intelligence (it’s out there, read here to learn more) will allow you to see how different companies interact with your site. What blogs/ebooks/whitepapers are getting the most attention? Where do these prospects visit next? Do they go immediately to your product page? Are multiple people from the organization visiting your site before they make contact? These are all indicators of where your prospects are and what content can help propel them down the sales funnel based on their industry, company and location. Personalization counts.

Certain referral URLs and search terms used to arrive at your site are a dead giveaway into the customer journey. Let’s take a look at some good indicators.

Behavior Onsite

Has your prospect just visited your homepage and features? They are just beginning to understand who you are. Maybe 5 people from the same company are inspecting your very technical drill down pages right now. This indicates the analysis stage in the journey. Perhaps your prospect has read your past 10 blog posts? Continue to educate them with webinars, white papers and eBooks. They are finding your content valuable, so give them what they want.

Referral URLS

Referrals to your site stemming from byliners, press releases and the like may indicate the beginning of the awareness phase and this the ideal moment to present more in depth educational material, or relevant case studies that correlate with the topic discussed from the referral.

If your prospect arrived from a portal listing competitors, you better show off your advanced features and most competitive content. These prospects are comparing you to the competition and exploring your wares to make an initial decision.

Search Terms

Search terms that are very specific to the technology such as “API Financial Solutions for Enterprise” for example, indicate the education phase for your prospect. Supporting the learning process and offering up clear, information content will keep them coming back for more.

If your prospect found you by searching for alternatives to your competition, then they are more advanced. If you dare present fluffy content at this critical point, you will lose this golden opportunity. This is when you need to aggressively show why your solution is the best fit. Most likely, this prospect has already exhaustively inspected the competition.

Timing and Relevancy for Success

Unfortunately, getting the right customers/prospects to view the right content is viewed as an extremely hard task for marketers. There is a window of opportunity where your ideal accounts are onsite, this is the time to engage them. By gating content and pushing the lead gen too quickly you can throw back to the sea a huge fish.

Determining how to nurture top-funnel leads based on their journey is an art that any marketing artisan can master with the right analytics and real-time tools. Rediscover content for the customer journey and figure out what changes to your current assets to best suit the needs of your prospects throughout every stage in the journey.

We live and breathe websites here at Insightera. After all, we personalize them for B2B companies. So when we sought out to do an entire overhaul of our website, personalization was always on our mind. Last week, I went through the 5 key steps to a website redesign. Today, I want to review and revamp those five steps to explain how personalization played a factor in our redesign process.

1. Think BIG (personalized) Picture!

When you focus on the big picture (your product, target market,  customer journey), there are so many different directions that you can steer your website redesign. During our market research, we kept in mind that personalization was always an option. When there was a fork in the road where various features needed highlighted to different demographics, boom, the personalization solution. Because of this, we alleviated the pressure to choose general messaging from the onset. Our message could be tailored based on our visitors and we could skip the tedious debate about who is our target market while doing website optimization.

2. Navigation and Sitemap

Navigation is always a key step in the redesign process, one that lays the foundation for the execution of your new site. While generally, navigation isn’t thought of as something to  personalize, we really wanted to include a call to action in the navigation that we could both A/B test as well as personalize. We included a “Request Demo” CTA that changes based on the visitor on site. Have a target CTA for any segment? Done.

3. Product Storytelling: Content and Graphics, Personalized

While deciding on how to tell the story of our product, through both content and graphics, we knew there were several places on our site that we wanted to make dynamic. For example, the structure of the site is very fluid and conducive to changing, personalized content. Want to present a case study or a specific feature? The structure allows each section of the website to allow for changes without affecting the general flow of the website.

4. Personalized Calls-to-Action

Personalized Calls-to-Action are the crux of personalization. Whatever the message, being able to dynamically change calls-to-action on the fly has completely changed the way we look at our customer journey. Because we knew that we could personalize each of our CTAs throughout the website, it was more about placement of CTAs, rather than the specific message on that page. We could think about the varying customer journeys that our prospects were taking, without thinking generally by clumping all of our visitors together.

5. Testing 1, 2, 3…

In a previous post on homepage design, I spoke about how the website redesign process is a continual evolution. Because it always is. So when it comes to testing out our content and graphics, we make it our business to test continually, not just in the initial redesign stage. Thankfully, Insightera not only has A/B testing capabilities, but also has Auto-Tune, which will automatically select the best performing campaign to show on site.

As you can see, personalization definitely impacted our redesign process. It allowed us to think more big-picture, rather than focusing on one specific target segment while doing the website overhaul.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is becoming the most effective way to fuse sales scores and personalized marketing to engage your most desired accounts in a smarter more efficient way. With Marketing’s insights and Sales’ understanding of the most desired accounts, you can create a fast lane to personalize your interactions with these companies to ensure that you don’t miss hot opportunities.

Here are 5 practical tips to get your account-based marketing strategy up and running.

Build Criteria for Highly Desirable Accounts

You’ve heard over and over about how sales and marketing should be one unified, fully communicative team. Sometimes this happens, but we all fall short. For ABM, the most important thing you need from sales is a  list of the top-priority organizations they are targeting. Understand what, if any interaction has occurred so far. Do your homework, and compose this wish list of prospects that meet your “gold standard”.

Some good designators for strategic or key organizations to focus on with ABM are: revenue history, account history (if applicable) margins and profitability and also the projected interest in a long-term business relationship.

Marketers can also contribute by assessing the top-funnel analytics which should reveal these organizations that perhaps Sales isn’t even aware are visiting the site. Remember that 70% of the Sales process is over before contact has ever been made – on either side.

Clearly Define Personalized Messaging

Do your research to understand how to group these top-tier organizations so that the targeted messaging they receive will be the most effective guaranteed. This is a good time to review past campaigns targeting similar companies and reuse, revise and reboot the best converting versions.

If you happen to be using a learning platform for your personalization needs, then reflect on the most successful campaigns that Auto-Tune selected and review the outcomes of A/B testing.

Determine Optimized Channels

Map out every touchpoint and create a nurture plan. Don’t be afraid to think out-of-the-online-box. Some outbound efforts may seem antiquated, but what’s old can become new again. Perhaps sending a personalized brochure or gift via the post would best engage your strategic accounts. Maybe launching a very targeted personalized landing page is the best tactic to follow up.

Personalized website, email, landing page, calling and offline interactions can capture your “golden prospects’” attention and help propel them along the marketing funnel. Relevance is the key to maximize these opportunities. Just set up a plan and evaluate engagement after each interaction to determine if these accounts should be passed on to sales at any point.

Prepare for the Golden Opportunities

A recent study by ITSMA reveals that executive decision makers are open to relevant outreach.

• 75% of executive respondents said they would read unsolicited marketing materials that contain ideas that might be relevant to their business
• Of those respondents, 92% would pay attention even if it is from a company they have never done business with

That means there is a window of opportunity for you to catch these big fish if you do your homework. Don’t let that one time that your prized future account comes to your site be the time that they see a generic message. Be prepared and be personalized. Every interaction when doing ABM (and all other marketing for that matter) should add value to the prospect. Entice them with relevancy and value in real-time.

Measure ABM Success

Marketing’s contribution to ABM can sometimes be overlooked when Account-Based Marketing is successful. Earlier sales involvement can detract from the nurturing that marketing accomplished in order to convert these prospects. Implementing top of the funnel tracking and analytics is crucial in order to attribute the defining campaigns that made the difference. And remember B2B marketers, ABM accounts are a long-term catch, be sure to measure interactions and influence.

When we sought out to create a brand new website, there were so many things going through my mind. (By the way, have you checked out our awesome new site yet?) We had to consider not only how to explain our product, but highlight our personalization platform by using it on our own site. After all, we personalize websites for a living. In this–the first of a two part series–I’ll review the 5 key steps to  website redesign. Stay tuned for the second part of the series, where I’ll reveal how personalization made an impact on these same five steps.

1. Think BIG Picture!

This is the ultimate brainstorming stage, backed by analytics and some good ‘ole research. We had great data that detailed people’s online behavior of our original site, but now we had to scrutinize this data and decipher the pros and cons of our current site. We also looked to Jakob Nielsen when thinking of the big-picture design of the site– ‘what would Nielsen say?’ became an Insightera mantra. This stage was definitely a fun one. As you can imagine, I loved finding inspiration from some of my favorite sites out there on the worldwide web.

• Brainstorm. Use your current site as a starting point, then white-board through everyone’s big picture ideas.
• Consult with Analytics. We actually use our own product for this, because we have more detailed analytics than Google. However, Google Analytics can be a good resource as well.
• Find websites that inspire you. I like to keep a bookmarked folder in my browser labeled “Awesome Websites” and whenever I pass through something I think deserves that awesome sticker, I throw it in the folder. (And if you want to see some homepage inspiration, check out my post on top ten homepage designs.)
• Research best practices. A great place to start is the legend himself: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/

2. Navigation and Sitemap 

After thinking about the big picture of what I want our site to accomplish, who our target segments are and what our overall vision is, my next step is figuring out navigation. Why? Because this is the ultimate game plan. What better way to organize that great, big vision than an old fashioned sitemap?

• Create a Sitemap. Powerpoint works great for this, make sure to answer all the important questions: What pages do you want to include? Not include? What kind of hierarchy?
• Check the Competition. Be sure to see how your competitors organize their site. But don’t fall into the trap of using this as the rule, put your prospects and good usability first.

3. Product Storytelling: Content and Graphics

You now have your structure thanks to your sitemap, which is definitely part one of the story telling. Now it is time to drill down and figure out how you want to lay it all out. Decide what style content, images, fonts, and design best suit your story. This embodies how you are going to tell that award-winning story about your product or service.

• Title all sections. Want 6 sections on your product page? Great. Give them titles as a jumping off point.
• Layout the vision. Which text / graphics / video go within each section?
• Write your amazing content. Then edit. Then write. Then edit. And edit again. And of course, recruit multiple eyes for editing.
• Create all media: graphics, videos, etc.

4. Calls-to-Action

Creating killer Calls-to-Action is its own step because it is too important to throw to the wolves. This is your grand finale. You have just laid out your story and now you need to finish the page and get your visitor to take the digital plunge. How will you accomplish that? Be creative with your Calls-to-Action and be diverse across your website. Make sure each CTA describes exactly where you are taking your visitor. 

• Create Calls-to-Action for each page. Be descriptive and active. No one clicks on boring CTAs. And of course make sure they are beautiful with the right colors to do the job.

5. Testing 1, 2, 3…

Once your developers have implemented your vision, and you have inputted all your wonderful new content and graphics into your CMS, then it is time for a huge test-run. You are going to want some outside people to take an impartial, untainted look at your site for feedback, which was very important in our redesign process. You will also want to QA test your site to make sure it looks good and performs on every browser.

• Get fresh eyes to test.  Review content, graphics and overall feel.
• QA every browser. This includes, but not limited to: Internet Explorer 8 & 9, Safari, Mozilla 20.0.1, Chrome, Android, IOS (on both iPhones and iPads).

Be sure to check out our new Insightera website:

As marketers continue to expand their use of customer data in the creation of content, personalized recommendations and promotion are also becoming more prevalent. While this has helped many companies such as Amazon, Zappos, and Target, it can sometimes cross a fine line and become somewhat invasive. Here are three ways that personalization can cross the line and become creepy.

Use Personal Social Media Info

While this one seems straightforward and within reason, if I am a B2B customer and your company uses my Facebook or Twitter profile to market to me, there is a decent chance I will not be too happy. Switching into a B2P mindset is imperative for marketers, but it is important to keep those boundaries and make sure that the marketing targets the customer side, and not the social side.

 Over-personalize

Personalization is key for success, but if it’s too obvious or clunky, it can be disconcerting. For example, if a small company visits your site and you automatically use their name and location, it almost loses its appeal. Instead of showing how your company is able to smartly assess visitors, it may scare off potential users who do not like their information used without their consent.

Annoy with Online Ads

As useful as online marketing is, we should be careful not to create a similar issue to telemarketing, which grew to be so intrusive that the government stepped in and created a Do Not Call list. Online marketing can be especially easy with remarketing, search engine optimization and Google’s line of services. It’s easier than ever to target online prospects with specific ads based on different criteria. It is just as easy to inundate their webpages and feeds with annoying ads that follow them around the web. Using personalization, optimization, and Auto-Tune can lead to better conversion rates without irritating users.

As we all know, personalized data is a game-changer in the world of online marketing. It can take a simple webpage visit and turn it into a virtual sales pitch. When done right, conversion rates increase and sales go up. However, it’s imperative to have a solid plan in place and think about the prospect’s mentality when creating content and target pieces. When balanced correctly, personalization takes your entire marketing strategy to a new level, so be sure to think in a B2P mindset and put your best content out there.

Public Relations is a tricky business with its fair share of spin-doctors and big talkers promising record-breaking results. Unfortunately, all you end up with often times are some skewed “soft-numbers” consisting of Retweets by Twitterbots on barely read press releases. Good public relations means bridging the gap between your company and their desired audience. This can only be accomplished with intelligent, valuable news that begs to be organically shared.

Big PR Goals

Of course anytime I plan a news release the goal is big distribution. I want coverage and I want quality pick-up from credible sites that our desired prospects frequent and respect. I feel a pang of joy anytime this happens and give myself a silent pat on the back. Afterward I may feel that I’ve reached my own personal benchmark for success, but the next week is comprised of crunching numbers of shares and impressions to evaluate the success of the piece.

Perhaps someone will take the time to reach out to me to learn more, but unless the Press Release centers on groundbreaking news, don’t hold your breath. Of course any Marketing Director worth her salt prepares a whole marketing plan around news worthy of a press release.

A Personalized Approach

When I stepped into the position as Marketing Director at Insightera, I was most excited to see firsthand how the platform works. Upon the release of my first Insightera PR, I had my team create a relevant blog post, video, email campaign, landing page and a personalization campaign on our own site.

Every prospect coming to our site from all referral links of the published press release, or from relevant search terms to the release saw an adapted version of Insightera.com. The homepage revealed a call-to-action with content relevant and expounding upon the press release’s topic. As I watched the prospects trickle in faster to our site from the PR, I reveled at watching our Insights tool to understand where these previously anonymous prospects were coming from, their industries and what they clicked on once onsite.

Finally, Hard Numbers

Then something I wasn’t accustomed to happened. I got a call from our Head of Sales informing me that prospects coming from the press release had filled out a request form for a personalization demo. One week later 2 customers had converted from this press release. Never in my career have I been able to pin hard numbers/direct acquisition of customers on a news release.

PR professionals are often stumped by non-compliant clients who don’t understand the value of Public Relations. Or don’t focus their marketing efforts to complement PR and create a full-circle funnel. Without a dedicated marketing team supporting with fabulous Social Media marketing and a steady stream of valuable content, beautiful graphics and optimized campaigns that deliver great results, even the most stellar press release would be in vain.

I’ve been interested lately about the marketing concept of narrowcasting and how it relates to digital marketing. Narrowcasting is the idea of broadcasting your marketing message to more intimate audiences through localized TV, radio, print and digital mediums. Compared to mass broadcasting, narrowcasting focuses on a target segment of a few thousand or perhaps a specific location or an industry.

For example, a company who targets the international banking industry could focus their campaigns in New York, London or Tokyo and advertise in the local financial magazines and sponsor the financial radio shows in order to reach this target.

Lately, I have seen interest from our clients regarding the idea of being able to target specific organizations by using Insightera’s personalization platform. This takes narrowcasting one step further to account-based B2B marketing and the ability to focus on specific, identified key prospects. Taking the idea of casting your message from the broad, to the narrow, to the individual. It’s segmentation to the one.

For example, the possibility of identifying several banks in New York and targeting these specific banks with an individual, personalized marketing message whenever a visitor from one of the banks engages with your digital assets.

Personalization Platforms

Personalization platforms have the ability to run narrowcast and account-based campaigns by being able to identify onsite prospects and target them in real-time with relevant content. The account-based approach may be time-consuming, but well justified in nurturing effort and ROI when that large key-account deal is signed.

In addition, I see personalization platforms becoming more intelligent and automated in the near future, by accumulating the big data gathered by real-time identification and online behavior and learning from the best performing campaigns in order to automatically deliver optimized reactions.

Put your money where your onsite traffic is

In order to succeed with the account-based approach, I believe more focus and resources need to be spent on onsite traffic. A large proportion of budget is spent and wasted on traffic drivers to website. A recent study notes that every $92 spent online to acquire site traffic or build awareness, only $1 is spent to proactively convert this traffic. According to an IDC report, 42% of a digital marketing budget is spent on SEO, PPC and Display campaigns. Encouragingly, this report notes that trends in 2013 show more budget and emphasis on website development and onsite technologies.

By focusing on onsite traffic, I mean investing in the right tools to be able to identify, monitor and react to traffic on your website and provide the visitor with valued content (webinars, forums, case studies). This will negate the “spray and pray” idea of one message wide broadcasting and focus on a refined narrowcast or even specific account-based solutions for B2B marketers to achieve higher returns on their investments.

In today’s digital marketing age, content is the most important part of your arsenal. Good content can be the difference between a customer finding your company or you losing a potential client. Content can also be at the crux of marketing and sales, helping both departments push messaging and move leads down the sales funnel. This is especially true in the B2B arena.

B2B Marketing Today

B2B customers complete 70% of a typical purchasing decision before even having a conversation with a supplier. So if there is so much focus on creating great content, why aren’t more companies pushing for creativity and ingenuity? How do you differentiate your company and content?

The truth is that most companies are improving their marketing and learning how to connect with their targets. The amount of content being pushed out that is informative, intelligent, fun, and smart is constantly growing. Marketing campaigns cannot be linear and scheduled anymore. Campaigns that react to individual users intuitively are the next development in online marketing. They use analytics to create strong segmentation and allow for genuine personalization. Real-time marketing does this while the user is active on your page, which is the best time to capture attention and leads. A new feature, auto-tune, automatically determines which versions of your campaign are the most successful, and pushes those out more frequently.

Taking a Cue from B2C

Marketers have seen the positive benefits of online personalization in several industries. In the B2C field, Amazon has been at the forefront, using specific customer data to recommend purchases based on viewing history, purchase history, location, and target sales. Email marketing has also reaped the benefits of targeted, personalized campaigns as companies notice higher open, click-through, and conversion rates when compared to standard emails. Personalized content does not have to be difficult to create, but it can be a game-changer when it comes to your marketing plan.

Overcoming Challenges

There are challenges, of course, to establishing good personalized content. According to CrownPeak, marketers cite budget issues, lack of support from management, and difficulty creating enough content that is engaging as their main problems. While these are real and substantial difficulties, here are some solutions to ease their impact:

1. Have strong analytics, as this will help in knowing your customers and designing effective segments;
2. Limit the amount of IT and website customization, a key for reducing budget concerns;
3. Allow your marketing and sales teams to have a hand in the design and execution of the campaigns, so that they can work together to achieve results;
4. Repurpose existing content to save even more money and get your best messaging across.
5. Use several different personalized approaches, such as landing pages, emails, etc.

Now It’s Your Turn

Marketing is no longer just a B2B or B2C proposition; it has evolved into a B2P cycle that involves multiple individual users making a purchasing decision. The emphasis should be on getting relevant content to potential leads during their discovery process. The best time to do this is when they are on your website and engaged. For example, landing pages can be an extremely useful tool to find out more about anonymous visitors and moving them down the sales funnel. If your content is dynamic and personalized it can and will successfully target, educate, and engage key users.

In case you missed Mike Telem’s webinar last week about personalizing and optimizing your landing pages in real-time with Auto-Tune, never fear! Here is his presentation reviewing all of the ways that you can optimize your email and PPC campaigns with adaptive, auto-tuned campaigns that learn which landing page versions convert the best and truly engage your prospects while the campaign is still alive and running and you still have their attention. Creating multiple content versions is the easy part, and Insightera’s machine-learning platform does the rest.

Check out this great presentation and stay tuned for Insightera’s next webinar to learn more about the power of personalization.

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