Marcu Taylor's Blog, page 3
March 3, 2021
SaaS Customer Retention: 19 Strategies To Keep Users Paying For Your Software
Two-thirds of companies experience churn rates of 5% or more but the numbers often look worse for SaaS companies. According to The SaaS Report 2019 from Reply.io, the average churn rate for monthly contracts is 14% and slightly higher on annual contracts at 15%.
Studies also show a correlation between revenue and churn rate with many startups and smaller businesses reporting churn rates in the region of 60% while high-growth startups generating more than $10 million per year hit a much lower average of 8.5%
So it’s not unusual for SaaS companies to experience churn rates significantly higher than the 5% figure often reported as an average across all industries and business types.
More importantly, separate studies show that reducing churn by 5% can increase profit by 125% and this means more revenue, a stronger brand image and more resources to put into optimising for customer retention – at which point, you’ll hopefully start to see some of that correlation between revenue and lower churn rates for yourself.
And, to help you get there faster, this article features 19 proven strategies for increasing customer retention, reducing churn rates and increasing revenue for SaaS companies.
What are we looking at in this article?This article compiles some of the most important customer retention strategies for SaaS companies and we’ve grouped these strategies into the following five sections:
Product / service strategies: Retain customers with a quality SaaS product and service.Customer experience (CX): In-app UX and CX techniques for maintaining engagement and retaining customers.Incentivisation: Giving users reason to want to keep using your software product.Customer support: Solving issues, keeping customers happy and showing them why they’ll struggle to get a better service elsewhere.Email marketing: Campaign ideas to retain customers and maximise revenue.These five sections cover each stage of the customer journey after a user signs up and starts paying for your software product. So we’re so interested in generating new leads or optimising the onboarding process for new users.
This article focuses on strategies that will keep your customers paying for your product so that new customers are driving real growth – not simply replacing your old ones.
Product / service retention strategiesCustomer retention is about psychology more than anything else – especially when it comes to SaaS products where your customers are paying monthly or annual fees.
Basically, your aim is to nurture their perception that your product is still worth paying for. So let’s start by looking at retention strategies you can build into your product or overall service.
#1: Optimise your pricing strategyEarlier, we referenced a report published by Reply.io that showed the average churn rates for different SaaS contract lengths and you can see how much of a difference this has on customer retention.
So it’s not only a question of how much you’re charging your customers but how often you’re billing them, asking them to renew or automatically renewing them to new contracts.
Generally speaking, annual contracts have a lower churn rate than monthly ones. Users are unlikely to cancel when they’ve already paid for the full year and annual contracts provide fewer opportunities to churn without “losing” money – see our article on sunk cost bias to find out why this psychological trap keeps customers paying.
So, the first strategy we can talk about is encouraging users to sign up to annual contracts and you’ll generally see this strategy employed on the pricing pages of SaaS products.
As you can see on this Buffer pricing page, it’s standard practice for SaaS companies to list monthly prices based on annual contracts where users pay for the full 12 months upfront.
In the top right corner of the pricing interface, there’s a toggle switch where users can choose to pay every month but the prices are 20% more expensive.
This incentivises users to sign up for an annual contract, which puts 12 months’ worth of money in the bank and gives you a year to nurture this customer so they stay signed up when the next contract is due to start.
The surprising truth about SaaS pricingLogic might suggest that lower prices are the way to go if you want to keep more customers paying up for your software. However, price isn’t the only factor people consider when they buy products; they also have certain expectations in terms of quality and they inevitably associate higher prices with a higher level of perceived and expected quality.
As this study – published by the University of Texas at Arlington – shows, consumers rely on price to determine the quality of products.
As this Psychology Today article explains, high prices attract consumers when assessing quality is difficult and this is very relevant to SaaS products. The same article references a pricing test by one company’s R&D team that found the most expensive price attracted the most customers.
“So, $12.99 was really good, $15.99 not so good, $18.99 great. We found that at $18.99, we were starting to get consumers who would shop in both channels. At $18.99, it was a great value to a prestige shopper who was used to spending $30 or more [for a similar product]. But $15.99 was no-man’s-land—way too expensive for a mass shopper and really not credible enough for a prestige shopper.”
So don’t be afraid of raising your prices with the aim of attracting new customers. The challenge is keeping your existing customers happy with paying higher fees but there are a number of ways you can address this:
Keep existing customers on the same rateRelease new features to justify the expenseAccept temporary churn and focus on retaining new customersIncreasing your prices for existing customers is always likely to result in temporary churn but the increased revenue may justify this. More importantly, you set a higher bar of perceived value for new customers and existing ones that keep paying after the initial increase – they’ve voted with their money that the product justifies the price increase and there’s a good chance they’ll continue to do so.
#2: Release regular updates & new featuresSaaS companies face constant pressure to deliver the latest and greatest technology to maintain the perceived value of their products. Not only do the needs of your customers change but the list of competitors only ever seems to grow so you have to work hard to keep your product exciting to new and existing customers alike.
A key strategy for this is releasing updates and new features on a regular basis. At the very least, new releases help prevent existing customers from getting bored with the same old product but you can add in some healthy anxiety by announcing updates and features ahead of launch to build up excitement and keep users engaged.
The image above shows part of ConvertKit‘s roadmap page where it lists all of the upcoming features and previous releases so that existing customers can see what they’ve got to look forward to. And you can send emails or in-app notifications to tell users about upcoming features, announce rollout dates and build up some hype ahead of launch.
Updates and feature releases are also an opportunity to address the concerns of your customers. You can fix bugs, introduce requested features and improve the user experience by listening to user feedback and testing design tweaks.
This way, you’re not only maintaining the perceived value of your product but also showing your customers that you listen to them and care about their needs – a great characteristic for retaining customers.
#3: Prioritise securityOne topic that isn’t discussed enough when it comes to customer retention is security. However, data from Cisco (pdf), 85% of companies rate cybersecurity as “extremely important” or “more important” than before the coronavirus pandemic, which is attributed to the increased security risks of working from home.
So customers are increasingly concerned about security and regulations like GDPR mean companies are more liable than ever for data breaches. At the same time, consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about security and privacy but, as shown by the latest research from McKinsey, few take adequate protective measures – instead, they expect companies to protect their data for them.
So B2B SaaS companies aren’t the only ones who have to show users they take security and privacy seriously – and you only have to look at WhatsApp’s ongoing struggles with updating its privacy policy, which prompted millions of users to ditch the platform.
The truth is, SaaS companies are expected to set a higher standard for security due to the nature of cloud technology and increased speculation over how tech companies like Google and Facebook handle data.
There’s no getting away from it: if you want your customers to stick around, you have to prove that their data is safe in your hands.
Customer experience (CX) retention strategiesNow, let’s delve a little deeper into the product itself and look at strategies you can use to retain customers by enhancing the customer experience (CX) to maximise engagement and keep people excited about using your software.
#4: Implement in-app guides, tips, etc.In-app guides, tips and other prompts are a great way to maximise engagement from the very first session. Right off the bat, you can help new users get to grips with your product, reducing early churn from users who experience teething problems or find your product a little too overwhelming.
Slack is among the many SaaS products to provide this kind of introduction for new users with prompt messages or product tours that help people get to grips with the platform.
Depending on how complex your product is and how advanced you want to get with your in-app prompts, you can use real-time user data to send targeted prompts to users based on how they interact with your product.
For example, Userpilot allows you to contextually highlight features at the appropriate moment. So, let’s say your product is a landing page builder and one of your customers has just published a new page – you could highlight the A/B testing feature in your software to let users know that this is the next logical step to take.
Not only are you encouraging further engagement here but you’re helping users get the best out of your product and reducing the risk of them not being able to find a feature they’re looking for.
#5: Gamify the experienceGamification is a powerful strategy for maximising engagement, helping users get to grips with new features and regular updates, and maintaining the desire to keep using your software product.
Here’s a quick explanation from HubSpot about why gamification can be so effective for SaaS platforms:
“Gamification is effective because it takes a boring or mundane task and makes it exciting and reward-driven. People love the feeling of accomplishment, so gamification rewards them with mini incentives while they progress towards an overall goal. This keeps the user continuously engaged and makes it more likely that they’ll accomplish the task at hand. This system is particularly effective when encouraging participants to complete a long-term or complicated task.”
Should SaaS Businesses Invest in Gamification? by Clint Fontanella for HubSpot
That same HubSpot article references The 2019 Gamification at Work Survey, published by training software provider TalentLMS, which finds the vast majority of employees prefer gamified software and feel gamification improves their performance.
According to the study:
97% of those aged 45+ said gamification improves work87% say it makes them more productive85% say they will spend more time on gamified softwareSeparate studies also show that gamification is becoming an even more effective engagement and retention strategy as Millennials (Gen Y) climb the ranks at companies.
According to a study from Accenture, entitled Making SaaS successful Through Gamification (PDF), anyone born after 1971 (half of Gen X) responds well to ramification, having grown up in the post-arcade game era.
“Gamification has become increasingly relevant because today’s workforce is shifting to Gen Y, a generation for whom playing video games is the norm. In fact, gamification is the new normal for anyone born after 1971–in other words, the bulk of today’s workforce and our economy’s key spenders.”
In the same study, Accenture outlines the following three key goals of gamification in SaaS software:
Rapid initial adoption: They must motivate their employees to make the switch from working with the legacy application to the new system.Sustained engagement: They must drive continuous usage over time so employees form new behaviours and ingrain the SaaS application’s usage into their daily work.Data accuracy: They must ensure information is entered and updated into the new application regularly.A common example of gamification in SaaS software is rewarding users for completing their profile with the data you need to segment and nurture different types of customers.
A lot of platforms simply place a percentage counter to illustrate how much of their accounts is complete and gently encourage them to hit the 100% mark. Alternatively, you could reward users by gradually unlocking features as they fill out their profile, work their way through your in-app tutorials or complete certain tasks.
You can also gamify engagement by implementing progress counters for task completions, achieving goals, racking up usage minutes and other benchmarks.
Microsoft Teams has even built an Incentives App into its platform to help businesses gamify the system and workplace with points, leaderboards and digital bragging rights.
The most amazing thing about gamification is that you can incentivise engagement without rewarding users with anything of real value. The same emotional triggers that make simple games like Candy Crush and Angry Birds so addictive can entice customers to keep using and paying for corporate SaaS software.
#6: Encourage users to set goals & targetsEven if you don’t go as far as gamifying your software with points and leaderboards, you can still incentivise engagement by encouraging users to set goals and targets.
And, instead of rewarding users with badges or level-ups, you can trigger the same dopamine hit of satisfaction by ticking tasks off their to-do list, showing progress bars for ongoing tasks, sending prompt notifications to encourage users back to your platform and showing performance data to compare recent usage to their most successful or productive days, weeks and months.
Showing users the best of their session data can trigger self-competitiveness, setting their best performance as the default target for ongoing usage.
You can also reinforce this with emails and notifications showing them all of the great things they’ve done with your product so the benefits of staying on board are always fresh in their mind.
#7: Open a beta programmeOpening a beta programme is a great way to keep your audiences engaged with new features before they officially roll out. There are several psychological triggers this satisfies and one of the most important of these is the sense of exclusivity users get from being involved in a small priority group.
Exclusivity is a powerful thing and we looked at how several of the likes of Facebook and Gmail used this to build huge user bases in a previous article, What is Growth Marketing? With 30+ Examples, Tactics & Hacks.
Aside from this sense of exclusivity, a beta programme also promotes an active sense of inclusivity where your customers are involved in the testing and feedback process of new features and updates. This, in turn, shows members that their feedback is valued and that platform changes are informed by the feedback of real users.
On a more practical level, beta programmes give members access to new features sooner, allowing them to achieve more with your software and get to grips with new features by the time they make official rollout.
Incentivisation as a retention strategyA great software product is always the best tool for keeping users engaged but you can sweeten the deal by incentivising customers to continue using your platform, such as rewards or even gamified achievement, as we looked at earlier
#8: Reward users for their engagementThe most direct way to incentivise user engagement is to reward them for ongoing usage and there are countless ways you can do this. You might reward them with credit, a discount on their next payment or some kind of financial incentive that rewards continued usage.
Alternatively, you could implement a VIP programme for heavy or high-spending users to tap into the pull of exclusivity and you could require users to maintain their usage to hold onto VIP status to keep incentive high.
This process begins at the onboarding process with Box where new users are rewarded for completing introductory tasks and the length of their free trial is extended based on how many tasks they complete.
We’re venturing back to gamification here but this is an effective strategy, especially when the financial incentive of your rewards is small or there’s no financial aspect at all.
#9: Run a loyalty programmeWhile there’s an obvious overlap between loyalty programmes and rewarding users for engagement, the key characteristic of loyalty schemes is that you’re rewarding purchases, not simply usage.
This might be in-app purchases, product purchases or continued monthly/annual payments – and perhaps a combination of the three. Either way, you’re rewarding users on a per-purchase basis or at spending landmarks – eg: every $1,000 spent.
Uber Rewards is a perfect example of this where users gain points for every completed ride (ie: every payment made), which contribute to future “rewards and benefits”.
Not only does this reward ongoing usage but also incentivises users to continue using the platform, use it more often and use it ahead of other rival platforms.
Likewise, Foursquare’s Swarm app launched Swarm Perks in 2016 to reward users with real-world prizes, offers and discounts for checking in via the app, creating a gamified loyalty programme that both rewards and incentivises ongoing usage.
#10: Track & respond to user dataWhen your aim is to maximise engagement and retention, timing is a crucial factor in delivering incentives, notification or rewards before users lose so much interest that it’s difficult or impossible to bring them back on board.
For this reason, incentives are most effective when they’re delivered based on user data that shows drops in engagement or signs that customers could be about to churn, allowing you to respond before they stop using your software or cancel their subscription.
For example, if you know that usage tends to drop mid-way through the second annual contract, this data suggests that you might want to put incentives in place ahead of this period to boost engagement through to the latter stages of the subscription and, then, you can focus on securing the renewal.
Better yet, you want an automated system for tracking engagement based on session data to compile user engagement scores and flag up indicators of engagement drops and potential churn – and this is one of the many roles ActiveCampaign plays for us here at Vertical Leap.
We use ActiveCampaign to track user session data, manage customer health and automate responses to drops in engagement through triggered notifications, emails and cross-platform messages.
This allows us to react to churn dangers before they materialise and keep users engaged while interest is still relatively high and they’re typically more responsive to our messages.
Customer support retention strategiesUnderstanding why software users stop using SaaS products and cancel their subscriptions is key to implementing effective retention strategies.
Source: SuperOfficeTime and again, studies show that the vast majority of churn is attributed to the perception that software companies don’t care about customers and their individual needs.
So, with this in mind, let’s look at how you can use customer service strategies to show users that you’re a SaaS company that genuinely cares about them.
#11: Online documentation & supportThe first line of defence for a SaaS company is having sufficient online documentation and support resources that users can easily find and navigate online.
This documentation helps users get the best out of your software products and solve basic technical issues without needing to get in touch with your support team. Not only does this improve the customer experience and reduce the danger of churn, but it also lightens the load on your support team which is able to prioritise their efforts on more pressing issues.
ActiveCampaign provides extensive online documentation to help users get the best from its software and solve basic issues.Another key benefit of having this kind of extensive online documentation is that you can automate first responses through chatbots, notifications and emails, pointing users to relevant online documentation while your human support team works through tickets.
Depending on the quality of your online documentation, you should be able to close a significant number of cases before your team even picks them up. This relies on striking a careful balance between extensive documentation that’s also easy to navigate and understand.
This, combined with an automated system that directs users to support content and asks them if this documentation has solved their problems, can handle a decent percentage of cases without support team members needing to get involved – a win for customers and your support system alike.
#12: Automate customer supportWe touched on automation in the previous section and this is a key technology for SaaS companies, especially when you have large user bases to take care of with a finite support team.
The more you enable users to solve problems for themselves, the happier they are and the less strain is placed on your support team, which can focus all of its resources on cases that can’t be automated.
Source: Groovehq.comCrucially, studies show that users want to solve problems for themselves, without getting in touch with a technical support team – and why not? Self-service systems allow users to solve problems faster and get back to achieving better things with your software product.
The challenge is to automate as much of the customer support system as you can without dehumanising by it removing too many personalised interactions. Don’t forget that 68% of customers say they stop buying because they feel the company doesn’t care about them – so, once again, you have to strike a balance here.
As mentioned earlier, user data is your friend here and using a system like ActiveCampaign to automate customer support with personalisation helps you find this balance.
#13: Respond instantly (with value)A key part of this is responding to customers instantly to demonstrate that you are dealing with their concern. Unfortunately, there’s another compromise here because a human support team can’t respond to every support ticket right away so you need a system that can deal with the inevitable delay between users submitting cases and team members picking them up.
Automating instant responses is easy but delivering meaningful replies that don’t simply tell customers that their ticket has been submitted and someone will be in touch as soon as possible.
This is why it’s so important to have that online documentation and supplementary resources that you can direct users to while their ticket is waiting to be picked up by a team member.
Email isn’t your only channel to deliver instant responses, either. You’ve also got chatbots and live chat widgets to work with, which we’ll look at in more detail in the next section, but the important point, for now, is that delivering meaningful, instant responses is key to satisfying user needs while your support team works through cases.
At the very least, you want to direct users to relevant support documentation that might help them solve their issue before a support team member steps in. First of all, this provides users with actionable steps that they can take while their ticket works its way through the queue and this buys your team crucial time to reduce any negative impact as the result of waiting times.
You can also optimise this process to increase the percentage of users who solve problems for themselves without any input from support personnel.
#14: Chatbots / live chatChatbots are an excellent way to deliver instant, interactive responses to technical issues on your website.
Once again, the aim here is to help users solve issues for themselves wherever possible but you can also use chatbots to collect crucial information that will help support team members to solve problems – eg: which browser or OS customers are using, which version of your software or any other relevant info you don’t already have access to.
We’ve tested out a lot of chatbots and live chat solutions and the big winner for us is Intercom, thanks to its intelligent system that continues to learn from every customer interaction.
We can also integrate bots with our human support team who can pick up cases when they’re available or when the automated conversation reaches a point where human intervention is necessary.
Zendesk is another great solution for automating conversational support.Another benefit of the conversational experience is that it actually takes longer for users to progress through the basics than it would through automated email responses where all of the same information is delivered in one message, rather than a series of segmented questions.
Despite this, engagement is actually higher, thanks to the interactive and segmented, personalised interactions – all of which builds a more satisfying experience, even though it takes longer to achieve the same outcome.
Again, psychology plays a huge role here.
#15: Customer feedbackAsking users to provide feedback shows them that their opinion matters and it also provides the opportunity to discover meaningful problems/improvements that will keep all of your customers happy for longer.
The obvious challenge is that getting this feedback from users adds friction to the experience so this is something you have to manage.
The good news is there are plenty of customer feedback tools designed specifically for SaaS companies and UserVoice (above) is a standout choice. The platform makes it easy to implement unintrusive feedback prompts into your software platform and collect insights without manually working through every response.
You can also capture feedback from Slack, Salesforce and Zendesk without switching apps.
Refiner.io (above) is another option you might want to look at, which combines plenty of feedback options so you can find the preferred method of your user base.
Whatever tool you choose, the aim is to implement intuitive feedback prompts and a reporting system so your team can view responses in bulk and take meaningful insights without trawling through loads of data.
#16: Account managersAccording to a survey carried out by Gartner, 88% of account managers say that servicing accounts to a higher standard than customer expectations is a crucial growth strategy for software companies.
The same study admits that “account managers have a big job” on their hands in the modern SaaS business.
“Account managers are now expected to provide service, resolve issues and maximize consumption and ROI — all while selling additional new products and services. Account managers are also expected to achieve growth by connecting multiple products together into complex solutions.”
As Gartner says, account managers are there to keep existing customers happy, resolve any issues they experience and help them get the best out of your software products. However, they also play a key role in upselling and cross-selling relevant customers to more expensive plans and other products.
Email marketing retention strategiesOur last set of customer retention strategies focuses on email marketing campaigns that aim to keep users engaged, maximise customer value and prevent churn.
#17: Cross-selling campaignsIf you sell multiple software products, then cross-selling is an important strategy in terms of maximising customer value and preventing them from using similar products from rival providers.
For example, HubSpot offers separate software products for marketing, sales, customer service and a premium CMS, in addition to its free CRM and a range of other free tools.
Clearly, HubSpot wants customers signed up to its Marketing Hub to also buy into its Sales Hub rather than get this functionality from an alternative provider, such as Salesforce.
It’s not only a question of getting as much money from each customer as possible but also locking them into as much of your offering as possible. A customer signed up to multiple products is far more likely to keep using all of them, especially if these products integrate together seamlessly and make life easier when used together.
#18: Upselling campaignsUpselling is a key marketing strategy for any SaaS company where the aim is to bump users up onto more expensive plans. Of course, the main aim here is to maximise revenue but incentivising users to upgrade is also a powerful strategy for keeping them engaged with new features and capabilities.
This typically starts with campaigns designed to turn free users into paying customers, whether you’re running a free trial or a 100% free plan as a lead generation strategy.
Here’s a classic example from Airtable:
Upselling email campaigns are the staple strategy for SaaS companies but this isn’t the only approach you can take. For example, Zapier triggers modal windows within its app when a user clicks on features reserved for higher plans, prompting them to upgrade in order to unlock the feature for themselves.
Better yet, you can combine both strategies and implement in-app prompts with upselling email campaigns although you need to be careful not to overwhelm and irritate users with constant appeals to spend more money.
#19: Re-engagement campaignsAll SaaS companies face the challenge of keeping users engaged but there comes a point where usage inevitably drops.
All of the strategies we’ve looked at in this article help to extend the period of engagement for as long as possible but there comes a point (or multiple points) where your customers show less interest in your product.
Your task here is to remind users of why they signed up in the first place and reignite some of the excitement that kept them using your product until their recent dip. You might try to incentivise re-engagement like the Skillshare example above but the aim is to inspire lasting re-engagement rather than short-lived, quick fixes.
Drive growth through customer retentionChurn rates are a problem for every SaaS company but, as mentioned in the intro of this article, increasing customer retention by 5% can boost revenue by up to +125% – not to mention the fact that you can grow if you’re losing customers for the sake of replacing them with new users.
Customer retention is the key to SaaS growth, which starts with holding on to your existing customers and, then, welcoming new ones to a growing user base. So apply the strategies we’ve covered in this article to maximise customer retention and keep an eye out for our next article on SaaS marketing for more tips.
The post SaaS Customer Retention: 19 Strategies To Keep Users Paying For Your Software appeared first on Venture Harbour.
February 16, 2021
9 Marketing Calendars & Planning Tools Compared
Makeshift marketing campaigns, messy spreadsheets, and haphazard cross-channel communication—just another stressful day at the office for most organisations. The deeper you fall into the chaos, the more you waste resources and swallow up productivity. Yet the looming deadlines, budget quotas, and revenue goals do not go away.
Marketing calendar or planning software can be the solution to help you scrap the inefficiencies, and rest easier knowing all of your marketing processes, communication, and people are all in one place, and easy to access. Organised marketing increases productivity, and allows you to move faster and achieve your ROI goals without chaos.
What is Marketing Calendar Software?Can you download a simple calendar app and use that to streamline your marketing campaigns? Not exactly.
If you are just looking for a virtual calendar to track a few activities, marketing calendar software might not be for you. You can’t just rig an online calendar into a robust marketing planning and collaboration tool. They are two completely separate applications.
Marketing calendar software has less to do with scheduling and more to do with simplification, planning, and alignment. It connects, aligns and streamlines marketing activities, so the entire organisation (even external stakeholders) has visibility into your marketing processes. And that’s just the beginning.
Essential Features of Marketing Planning SoftwareUnlike generic project management tools, marketing calendar software needs to simplify your marketing process and helps you plan your marketing activities and campaigns from goal and initial planning to delivery and tracking.
The software provides:
Internal and external visibility – Your entire team should be able to view your marketing calendar, from top-level to multi-channel activities, with permission levels for security. Also, the software should make it easy to share data and communicate with external stakeholders.
Team organisation – Your marketing calendar software should also allow you to see who manages each aspect of your marketing campaigns. If a team member creates an idea, the software should assign the idea to the person and keep assignments visible throughout the platform.
Goals – A successful marketing strategy starts with goals, so the software should give you the ability to set goals for your campaigns and organise your data according to those strategic initiatives. So in addition to a calendar view, you also want to view activity from a business perspective so you can determine whether the campaigns are meeting (or not meeting) company goals.
Team collaboration – The platform should focus on team collaboration so all users can keep relevant discussions inside the platform, instead of in many different external locations, which causes confusion and wastes time.
In addition to the above features, ensure the marketing calendar software is user-friendly, intuitive, easy to navigate, and comes with premier support.
Though all of the tools we mention are somewhat interchangeable in their features, we did our best to categorise them so you can more easily make your choice.
Here is how we are separating the tools:
Note that there will be overlap among the software. For example, with TrueNorth, you also can track and plan your marketing campaigns in addition to managing your team and calendar. We recommend you dig deeper into each tool’s features to find which ones can manage most of your needs.
Content Planning and Management – These tools are known for their ability to help marketers plan, organise, and manage content, with the ability to create robust editorial calendars, and in some cases, automate workflows.
KapostCurataWelcomeAirtableRetail or Franchise Management – If you are looking for a tool for your ecommerce, retail, or franchise, CrossCap may be a viable option. Note that the other tools will also cater to ecommerce stores, but CrossCap will focus on capabilities that transition into retail and franchise needs.
CrossCapMarketing operations – These platforms can help streamline and organise your data, resulting in a more efficient and productive shop, allowing you to move faster through campaigns and stay organised.
TrueNorthMonday.comCoScheduleWrikeBelow we will go into more detail on nine of the best marketing calendar software tools designed to help you organise and streamline your marketing efforts.
TrueNorthTrueNorth is one of the only planning tools built specifically for marketing teams.
TrueNorth was created on the agile framework to help marketers speed up their marketing processes so they can easily demonstrate ROI, gain insights faster, and course-correct sooner, saving time and money in the process.
One of the features that make TrueNorth unique from other marketing planning software is that everything is connected to a simulation of your growth. By simulating a path between where you are now and your goal, you can ensure that all of your ideas, campaigns and results help you stay on track to achieve your goal.
Gather ideas from your team and create marketing plans based on your final choices. Track your campaigns on a unified dashboard, including your simulation numbers, current ROI, assignments, priorities, budgets, KPIs, and more.
TrueNorth also provides what it calls Playbooks, an idea bank that automatically extracts data from your campaigns and keeps them in a database until the tool recalls the insights to inform future campaigns.
True to the agile framework, TrueNorth is designed to help you break down your campaigns into short iterative cycles, so at the end of every cycle, you can review the results and make changes to stay on track with your simulations. TrueNorth slashes time from your marketing initiatives and allows you to remain 100% aligned so you can spend smarter, stay on track, and grow faster.
TrueNorth Features:
Simulated funnelsPre-launch planning and ideationAgile frameworkWorkflow and campaign templatesAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsMarketing playbooksPrioritisation frameworkSoftware integrationsTrueNorth Pricing:
TrueNorth costs a flat $99/month for teams of all sizes and has no per-user fees.
WrikeWrike is a project and work management platform that helps teams collaborate and streamline activities. Though Wrike does not focus on facilitating just marketing teams, its marketing capabilities provide businesses with the tools to organise and collaborate on campaigns.
Wrike offers varying project management styles depending on the users’ preference. You can customise workflows to suit your style and see all of your team’s activity at a glance. Keep all of your activity in one place, making it easy to collaborate and move quickly on projects.
View all of your marketing campaigns’ results in one place, where stakeholders can review and collaborate without switching back and forth between several spreadsheets and tools. Bring all of your marketing campaigns together under one roof.
SourceWrike also provides templated forms, workflows and roadmaps for campaign management, marketing operations, go-to-market planning, agile marketing, content creation, and event management.
Wrike Features:
Agile featuresGantt chartsKanban boardsWorkflow and campaign templatesAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsSoftware integrationsWrike Pricing:
Wrike offers a Free limited plan for up to five users, including basic task management, file sharing, a spreadsheet view, real-time activity stream, cloud storage integrations and 2GB of storage space.
The Professional plan starts at $9.80 per user / month for up to 15 users. It adds on Gantt charts, advanced integrations, shareable dashboards, collaborators, task and subtask management, and 5 GB of storage space.
If you want some of Wrike’s advanced features such as custom fields and workflows, report templates, user groups and permissions, advanced user access controls, and more space, you will need to purchase the Business or Enterprise plan. The Business plan is $24.80 per user / month for up to 200 users. The Enterprise plan allows unlimited users, and pricing is available with a custom quote.
KapostKapost is a product of the Upland Software suite. Similar to Wrike, it helps marketing teams plan and manage content from ideation to ROI. Upland offers multiple products to help organisations plan and manage their workflows. In this section, we will discuss Kapost for content management.
Similar to other software, Kapost provides campaign marketing calendars so users can view all of the active campaigns and activities.
Kapost also helps marketing teams create and manage content for customers at all stages of their journey. In addition to seamless collaboration and workflows, Kapost enables you to align your content with your personas, their buying stages, and interests, among other factors. Map content for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
SourceKapost also provides automated workflows to streamline marketing activities and make processes more efficient. In addition, it integrates with social media platforms and provides an analytics dashboard that can track all relevant content metrics (leads, links, views, conversions, etc.)
Kapost Features:
Workflow and campaign templatesContent calendarAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsSocial media integrationContent publishingSoftware integrationsKapost Pricing:
Kapost does not publish pricing on its website, but you can request a free demo.
CurataCurata is another marketing calendar focused on content marketing planning, management, and tracking. The platform provides an editorial calendar, account-based marketing, analytics and reporting, data-driven insights and content curation software to help you find trusted, industry-leading content.
Curata’s customisable editorial calendar keeps all content-related tasks organised and visible to all team members, making it easy to streamline your content programs and incorporate data-driven insights.
SourceUse Curata’s content analytics to dig deeper into the results to evaluate marketing tasks by activity and funnel stage. Discover which type of content works best at a particular stage of the sales funnel. Create customised reports by content type, writer, buying stage, and more.
SourceCurata Features:
Editorial calendarContent templatesAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationCustomisable reportingContent curation softwareAccount-based marketingSoftware integrationsSoftware integrationsCurata Pricing:
Curata pricing is available by custom quote. Contact Curata to get a demo of the software.
CoScheduleCoSchedule is a work management software platform for marketers. The solution consists of two separate products based on your needs: Marketing Calendar and Marketing Suite.
Marketing Calendar includes a real-time marketing calendar where you can schedule projects and automate your social content publishing. Marketing Suite organises your projects and processes, monitors their progress, and automates team workflows.
CoSchedule’s marketing calendar allows you to quickly reschedule, get a full view of your marketing projects and progress, reschedule them easily, and share your progress with stakeholders.
SourceCoSchedule’s Marketing Suite elevates your marketing calendar and organises your content so you can maximise resources and boost output. Create custom workflows your team can follow and collaborate on, while tracking project progress.
SourceNote that CoSchedule is more of a content planning and project management tool. It includes five agile marketing tools: marketing calendar, social organiser, content organiser, work organiser, asset organiser.
CoSchedule Features:
Agile featuresWorkflow and campaign templatesUnified dashboardSocial publishing and schedulingTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsSoftware integrationsDigital asset managementCoSchedule Pricing:
CoSchedule’s Marketing Calendar is $39 per user / month, with a 20% discount for annual billing. The plan includes up to 10 users and 10 social profiles and offers a real-time marketing calendar, task and workflow templates, social publishing and scheduling, social campaign templates, and numerous integrations.
The cost of CoSchedule’s Marketing Suite is available upon request and includes all Marketing Calendar features plus automated team workflows, team calendar sorting, asset and file storage, team progress tracking, and management of marketing requests.
CrossCapCrossCap is comprehensive marketing planning and workflow software that can serve as a central hub for your retail or ecommerce MarTech stack. The software offers four separate products: Marketing calendar, Distro, Promo Planning, and Online Proofing.
Multi-channel campaigns can be challenging to track without switching from different interfaces and dashboards. CrossCap solved this problem with its multi-channel calendar view that can be customised with filters and tags for user preference and visual style.
SourceDistro enables stores and franchisors to manage vendors and bids more efficiently, integrate reorder and shipment tracking, and unify communication across internal and external teams with its end-to-end distribution tool.
Promo Planning is an omnichannel promotion management platform for marketing and merchandising teams that includes customisable workflows with seamless SKU management.
Organise and fast-track approvals with CrossCap’s Online Proofing which provides easy management of proof cycles (can run more than one simultaneously) and the changes, tracking, and approvals that accompany it.
CrossCap Features:
Marketing calendarPromotions managementDistribution managementOnline proofing managementAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsSoftware integrationsCrossCap Pricing:
CrossCap does not advertise its prices on the website. You can request a free demo to learn more about the product suite.
Monday.comMonday.com provides workflow management capabilities for many different departments: project management, marketing, task management, construction, CRM and sales, creative and design, software development, IT, and more.
Create boards, which are customisable tables where you can create multiple workflows trackable by your entire team. Use the pre-done templates or customise them for your organisation. You can also view the data in different ways (bar charts, kanban, etc.).
SourceMonday.com provides automated workflows for marketing teams to speed up processes and workflow. For example, send a notification to your team when you achieve a campaign goal.
Monday.com also provides a real-time analytics dashboard that reports data on your campaign metrics so you can monitor progress and spot bottlenecks. All team members can gain visibility into what’s working and what needs to improve.
SourceMonday.com Features:
Agile featuresMarketing calendarGantt chartsKanban boardsWorkflow and campaign templatesAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsSoftware integrationsMonday.com Pricing:
14-day free trial
The Basic plan costs $10 per seat / month with discounts for annual billing. The Basic plan offers unlimited boards with templates, 20 column types, and a dashboard for one of your boards.
The Standard plan is priced at $12 per seat / month with discounts for annual billing. It includes all Basic plan features plus timeline and Gantt views, calendar view, automations (250 actions per month), integrations (250 actions per month), and a dashboard that combines up to five boards.
The Pro Plan costs $20 per seat / month and adds on private boards, chart view, time tracking, up to 25,000 actions per month each for automations and integrations, and a dashboard that combines up to 20 boards.
The Enterprise plan cost is available by custom quote and adds on premium support, enterprise-level automations and integrations, security, multi-level permissions, advanced reporting and more.
Welcome (Formerly Newscred)Welcome is a full content marketing management platform. Over the years it has transitioned from a more focused content platform (Newscred) to a rebranded all-inclusive CMP (content management platform), MRM (marketing resource management), and DAM (digital asset management) tool.
Welcome helps you keep track of all of your marketing activities and the people who are managing them. Project management happens inside a unified workspace with integrated workflows and the ability to duplicate processes to make future work more manageable.
SourceWelcome is known for its content marketing platform, the foundation upon which the platform was built. The content calendar allows you to streamline operations and measure results to align with your business goals. Its features include SEO and keyword research, content optimisation and distribution, content scoring, advanced tracking and analytics.
SourceIn addition to marketing resource management and digital asset management, Welcome also serves as a data orchestrator, an iPaaS that connects your MarTech stack, enabling seamless integration.
Welcome Features:
Marketing calendarGantt chartsKanban boardsWorkflow and campaign templatesAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsDigital asset managementSoftware integrationsWelcome Pricing:
Welcome does not advertise pricing on its website, but you can get a free account to try most of its features, and request a demo.
AirtableAirtable is a project management and collaboration workspace platform that can help anyone plan and manage projects and campaigns. While you can use Airtable for multiple purposes, we will discuss its application for management and editorial planning.
The editorial calendar template keeps track of your content and task assignments. You can also switch between different views depending on your preference: kanban, grid, calendar, and gallery.
SourceInput your Google Analytics into Airtable’s marketing campaign template to get a holistic view of your campaign variables, results, ad creative, and more. Compare results from each campaign and review your progress to prioritise the ones that bring you the highest ROI.
SourceAirtable also offers workspace automation capabilities and over 50 prebuilt apps (SendGrid, Gantt, page designer, scripting) to enhance your experience and build out the platform’s functionality.
Airtable Features:
Gantt chartsKanban boardsWorkflow and campaign templatesAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsSoftware integrationsAirtable Pricing:
Airtable offers a Free plan that includes 1,200 records (rows) per base (database), 2 GB attachment space per base, 100 automations per month, real-time collaboration, and more.
The Plus plan costs $12 per user / month and adds on 5,000 records per base, 5 GB of space, 5,000 automations per month, and more.
The Pro plan is $24 per user / month and adds on more records and space as well as advanced applications, calendar features, custom branding, permissions, among other features.
There is an Enterprise plan available which includes some advanced admin and security features. Cost is available by custom quote.
How to Choose the Right Marketing Calendar SoftwareUltimately, trying each tool will help you decide which one is right for you. While most of the tools above have similar functionality, each offers varying features, and your choice will depend on your preferences.
Note that if the tool you want does not have a specific functionality, it may provide integration with your other software tools. Most of the marketing planning software market integrates seamlessly with other tools in your MarTech stack.
If you are focusing more on content planning and management, start with researching Kapost, Curata, Welcome, and Airtable.
If you are looking for a tool for your ecommerce, retail, or franchises, CrossCap is one to research. Note that the other tools will also cater to ecommerce stores, but CrossCap focuses on capabilities that transition into retail and franchises.
If you are looking for a marketing planning and operations platform for your marketing campaigns, try TrueNorth, Monday.com, Wrike, or CoSchedule.
Note that all of the solutions can function in some way as workflow and project management software to organise your marketing processes and streamline collaboration.
Get Started With TrueNorth TodayWe covered nine marketing software platforms in this guide. We recommend you try each one to see if they suit your organisation’s needs.
The good news is that each platform offers either an API or integrations, or both, so you can easily add them to your current MarTech stack, if needed.
And just a heads up that TrueNorth is currently accepting early beta access applicants. TrueNorth is a powerful addition to any tech stack for teams that want to align better and move faster to prove ROI and grow in a chaos-free environment. Apply here to request beta access.
The post 9 Marketing Calendars & Planning Tools Compared appeared first on Venture Harbour.
9 Best Marketing Calendar Software
Makeshift marketing campaigns, messy spreadsheets, and haphazard cross-channel communication—just another stressful day at the office for most organisations. The deeper you fall into the chaos, the more you waste resources and swallow up productivity. Yet the looming deadlines, budget quotas, and revenue goals do not go away.
Marketing calendar or planning software can be the solution to help you scrap the inefficiencies, and rest easier knowing all of your marketing processes, communication, and people are all in one place, and easy to access. Organised marketing increases productivity, and allows you to move faster and achieve your ROI goals without chaos.
What is Marketing Calendar Software?Can you download a simple calendar app and use that to streamline your marketing campaigns? Not exactly.
If you are just looking for an electronic calendar to track a few activities, marketing calendar software might not be for you. You can’t just rig an online calendar into a robust marketing planning and collaboration tool. They are two completely separate applications.
Marketing calendar software has less to do with scheduling and more to do with simplification, planning, and alignment. It connects, aligns and streamlines marketing activities, so the entire organisation (even external stakeholders) has visibility into your marketing processes. And that’s just the beginning.
Essential Features of Marketing Planning SoftwareEssentially, marketing calendar software simplifies your marketing process and helps you plan your marketing activities and campaigns from goal and initial planning to delivery and tracking.
The software provides:
Internal and external visibility – Your entire team should be able to view your marketing calendar, from top-level to multi-channel activities, with permission levels for security. Also, the software should make it easy to share data and communicate with external stakeholders.
Team organisation – Your marketing calendar software should also allow you to see who manages each aspect of your marketing campaigns. If a team member creates an idea, the software should assign the idea to the person and keep assignments visible throughout the platform.
Strategic goals – A successful marketing strategy starts with goals, so the software should give you the ability to set goals for your campaigns and organise your data according to those strategic initiatives. So in addition to a daily calendar view, you also want to view activity from a business perspective so you can determine whether the campaigns are meeting (or not meeting) company goals.
Team collaboration – The platform should focus on team collaboration so all users can keep relevant discussions inside the platform, instead of in many different external locations, which causes confusion and wastes time.
In addition to the above features, ensure the marketing calendar software is user-friendly, intuitive, easy to navigate, and comes with premier support.
Though all of the tools we mention are somewhat interchangeable in their features, we did our best to categorise them so you can more easily make your choice.
Here is how we are separating the tools:
Note that there will be overlap among the software. For example, with TrueNorth, you also can track and plan your marketing campaigns in addition to managing your team and calendar. We recommend you dig deeper into each tool’s features to find which ones can manage most of your needs.
Content Planning and Management – These tools are known for their ability to help marketers plan, organise, and manage content, with the ability to create robust editorial calendars, and in some cases, automate workflows.
KapostCurataWelcomeAirtableRetail or Franchise Management – If you are looking for a tool for your ecommerce, retail, or franchise, CrossCap may be a viable option. Note that the other tools will also cater to ecommerce stores, but CrossCap will focus on capabilities that transition into retail and franchise needs.
CrossCapMarketing operations – These platforms can help streamline and organise your data, resulting in a more efficient and productive shop, allowing you to move faster through campaigns and stay organised.
TrueNorthMonday.comCoScheduleWrikeBelow we will go into more detail on nine of the best marketing calendar software tools designed to help you organise and streamline your marketing efforts.
TrueNorthYou stumble through siloed spreadsheets, dashboards and profiles, and try to follow team communication scattered across the web in five different places. You spend more time finding data and messages than planning, goal-setting, and business growth initiatives.
Marketing without organisation is inefficient and drains marketing dollars with little output, because you don’t know what’s working and who’s driving what.
To justify budgets, get ideas signed off, and prove performance, you need to work asynchronously, move faster and stay aligned—and you need to be able to prove the true value of marketing.
TrueNorth was created on the agile framework to help marketers speed up their marketing processes so they can easily demonstrate ROI, gain insights faster, and course-correct sooner, saving time and money in the process.
One of the features that make TrueNorth unique from other marketing planning software is its marketing simulations. Simulate a few paths between your goal and where you are now before you even launch your campaign to see which one is likely to perform best. Use this pre-launch data to formulate ideas and build a roadmap to help you track your ideas and campaigns, and course-correct as you go.
Gather ideas from your team and create marketing plans based on your final choices. Track your campaigns on a unified dashboard, including your simulation numbers, current ROI, assignments, priorities, budgets, KPIs, and more.
TrueNorth also provides what it calls Playbooks, an idea bank that automatically extracts data from your campaigns and keeps them in a database until the tool recalls the insights to inform future campaigns.
True to the agile framework, TrueNorth is designed to help you break down your campaigns into short iterative cycles, so at the end of every cycle, you can review the results and make changes to stay on track with your simulations. TrueNorth slashes time from your marketing initiatives and allows you to remain 100% aligned so you can spend smarter, stay on track, and grow faster.
TrueNorth Features:
Simulated funnelsPre-launch planning and ideationAgile frameworkWorkflow and campaign templatesAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsMarketing playbooksPrioritisation frameworkSoftware integrationsTrueNorth Pricing:
TrueNorth is currently accepting beta users onto the platform. Get early access here.
WrikeWrike is a project and work management platform that helps teams of all sizes collaborate and streamline activities. Though Wrike does not focus on facilitating just marketing teams, its marketing capabilities provide businesses with the tools to organise and collaborate on campaigns.
Wrike offers varying project management styles depending on the users’ preference. You can customise workflows to suit your style and see all of your team’s activity at a glance. Keep all of your activity in one place, making it easy to collaborate and move quickly on projects.
View all of your marketing campaigns’ results in one place, where stakeholders can review and collaborate without switching back and forth between several spreadsheets and tools. Bring all of your marketing campaigns together under one roof.
SourceWrike also provides templated forms, workflows and roadmaps for campaign management, marketing operations, go-to-market planning, agile marketing, content creation, and event management.
Wrike Features:
Agile featuresGantt chartsKanban boardsWorkflow and campaign templatesAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsSoftware integrationsWrike Pricing:
Wrike offers a Free limited plan for up to five users, including basic task management, file sharing, a spreadsheet view, real-time activity stream, cloud storage integrations and 2GB of storage space.
The Professional plan starts at $9.80 per user / month for up to 15 users. It adds on Gantt charts, advanced integrations, shareable dashboards, collaborators, task and subtask management, and 5 GB of storage space.
If you want some of Wrike’s advanced features such as custom fields and workflows, report templates, user groups and permissions, advanced user access controls, and more space, you will need to purchase the Business or Enterprise plan. The Business plan is $24.80 per user / month for up to 200 users. The Enterprise plan allows unlimited users, and pricing is available with a custom quote.
KapostKapost is a product of the Upland Software suite. Similar to Wrike, it helps marketing teams plan and manage content from ideation to ROI. Upland offers multiple products to help organisations plan and manage their workflows. In this section, we will discuss Kapost for content management.
Similar to other software, Kapost provides campaign marketing calendars so users can view all of the active campaigns and activities.
Kapost also helps marketing teams create and manage content for customers at all stages of their journey. In addition to seamless collaboration and workflows, Kapost enables you to align your content with your personas, their buying stages, and interests, among other factors. Map content for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
SourceKapost also provides automated workflows to streamline marketing activities and make processes more efficient. In addition, it integrates with social media platforms and provides an analytics dashboard that can track all relevant content metrics (leads, links, views, conversions, etc.)
Kapost Features:
Workflow and campaign templatesContent calendarAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsSocial media integrationContent publishingSoftware integrationsKapost Pricing:
Kapost does not publish pricing on its website, but you can request a free demo.
CurataCurata is another marketing calendar focused on content marketing planning, management, and tracking. The platform provides an editorial calendar, account-based marketing, analytics and reporting, data-driven insights and content curation software to help you find trusted, industry-leading content.
Curata’s customisable editorial calendar keeps all content-related tasks organised and visible to all team members, making it easy to streamline your content programs and incorporate data-driven insights.
SourceUse Curata’s content analytics to dig deeper into the results to evaluate marketing tasks by activity and funnel stage. Discover which type of content works best at a particular stage of the sales funnel. Create customised reports by content type, writer, buying stage, and more.
SourceCurata Features:
Editorial calendarContent templatesAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationCustomisable reportingContent curation softwareAccount-based marketingSoftware integrationsSoftware integrationsCurata Pricing:
Curata pricing is available by custom quote. Contact Curata to get a demo of the software.
CoScheduleCoSchedule is a work management software platform for marketers. The solution consists of two separate products based on your needs: Marketing Calendar and Marketing Suite.
Marketing Calendar includes a real-time marketing calendar where you can schedule projects and automate your social content publishing. Marketing Suite organises your projects and processes, monitors their progress, and automates team workflows.
CoSchedule’s marketing calendar allows you to quickly reschedule, get a full view of your marketing projects and progress, reschedule them easily, and share your progress with stakeholders.
SourceCoSchedule’s Marketing Suite elevates your marketing calendar and organises your content so you can maximise resources and boost output. Create custom workflows your team can follow and collaborate on, while tracking project progress.
SourceNote that CoSchedule is more of a content planning and project management tool. It includes five agile marketing tools: marketing calendar, social organiser, content organiser, work organiser, asset organiser.
CoSchedule Features:
Agile featuresWorkflow and campaign templatesUnified dashboardSocial publishing and schedulingTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsSoftware integrationsDigital asset managementCoSchedule Pricing:
CoSchedule’s Marketing Calendar is $39 per user / month, with a 20% discount for annual billing. The plan includes up to 10 users and 10 social profiles and offers a real-time marketing calendar, task and workflow templates, social publishing and scheduling, social campaign templates, and numerous integrations.
The cost of CoSchedule’s Marketing Suite is available upon request and includes all Marketing Calendar features plus automated team workflows, team calendar sorting, asset and file storage, team progress tracking, and management of marketing requests.
CrossCapCrossCap is comprehensive marketing planning and workflow software that can serve as a central hub for your retail or ecommerce MarTech stack. The software offers four separate products: Marketing calendar, Distro, Promo Planning, and Online Proofing.
Multi-channel campaigns can be challenging to track without switching from different interfaces and dashboards. CrossCap solved this problem with its multi-channel calendar view that can be customised with filters and tags for user preference and visual style.
SourceDistro enables stores and franchisors to manage vendors and bids more efficiently, integrate reorder and shipment tracking, and unify communication across internal and external teams with its end-to-end distribution tool.
Promo Planning is an omnichannel promotion management platform for marketing and merchandising teams that includes customisable workflows with seamless SKU management.
Organise and fast-track approvals with CrossCap’s Online Proofing which provides easy management of proof cycles (can run more than one simultaneously) and the changes, tracking, and approvals that accompany it.
CrossCap Features:
Marketing calendarPromotions managementDistribution managementOnline proofing managementAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsSoftware integrationsCrossCap Pricing:
CrossCap does not advertise its prices on the website. You can request a free demo to learn more about the product suite.
Monday.comMonday.com provides workflow management capabilities for many different departments: project management, marketing, task management, construction, CRM and sales, creative and design, software development, IT, and more.
Create boards, which are customisable tables where you can create multiple workflows trackable by your entire team. Use the pre-done templates or customise them for your organisation. You can also view the data in different ways (bar charts, kanban, etc.).
SourceMonday.com provides automated workflows for marketing teams to speed up processes and workflow. For example, send a notification to your team when you achieve a campaign goal.
Monday.com also provides a real-time analytics dashboard that reports data on your campaign metrics so you can monitor progress and spot bottlenecks. All team members can gain visibility into what’s working and what needs to improve.
SourceMonday.com Features:
Agile featuresMarketing calendarGantt chartsKanban boardsWorkflow and campaign templatesAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsSoftware integrationsMonday.com Pricing:
14-day free trial
The Basic plan costs $10 per seat / month with discounts for annual billing. The Basic plan offers unlimited boards with templates, 20 column types, and a dashboard for one of your boards.
The Standard plan is priced at $12 per seat / month with discounts for annual billing. It includes all Basic plan features plus timeline and Gantt views, calendar view, automations (250 actions per month), integrations (250 actions per month), and a dashboard that combines up to five boards.
The Pro Plan costs $20 per seat / month and adds on private boards, chart view, time tracking, up to 25,000 actions per month each for automations and integrations, and a dashboard that combines up to 20 boards.
The Enterprise plan cost is available by custom quote and adds on premium support, enterprise-level automations and integrations, security, multi-level permissions, advanced reporting and more.
Welcome (Formerly Newscred)Welcome is a full content marketing management platform. Over the years it has transitioned from a more focused content platform (Newscred) to a rebranded all-inclusive CMP (content management platform), MRM (marketing resource management), and DAM (digital asset management) tool.
Welcome helps you keep track of all of your marketing activities and the people who are managing them. Project management happens inside a unified workspace with integrated workflows and the ability to duplicate processes to make future work more manageable.
SourceWelcome is known for its content marketing platform, the foundation upon which the platform was built. The content calendar allows you to streamline operations and measure results to align with your business goals. Its features include SEO and keyword research, content optimisation and distribution, content scoring, advanced tracking and analytics.
SourceIn addition to marketing resource management and digital asset management, Welcome also serves as a data orchestrator, an iPaaS that connects your MarTech stack, enabling seamless integration.
Welcome Features:
Marketing calendarGantt chartsKanban boardsWorkflow and campaign templatesAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsDigital asset managementSoftware integrationsWelcome Pricing:
Welcome does not advertise pricing on its website, but you can get a free account to try most of its features, and request a demo.
AirtableAirtable is a project management and collaboration workspace platform that can help anyone plan and manage projects and campaigns. While you can use Airtable for multiple purposes, we will discuss its application for management and editorial planning.
The editorial calendar template keeps track of your content and task assignments. You can also switch between different views depending on your preference: kanban, grid, calendar, and gallery.
SourceInput your Google Analytics into Airtable’s marketing campaign template to get a holistic view of your campaign variables, results, ad creative, and more. Compare results from each campaign and review your progress to prioritise the ones that bring you the highest ROI.
SourceAirtable also offers workspace automation capabilities and over 50 prebuilt apps (SendGrid, Gantt, page designer, scripting) to enhance your experience and build out the platform’s functionality.
Airtable Features:
Gantt chartsKanban boardsWorkflow and campaign templatesAnalytics dashboardUnified dashboardTeam collaborationAutomated workflowsSoftware integrationsAirtable Pricing:
Airtable offers a Free plan that includes 1,200 records (rows) per base (database), 2 GB attachment space per base, 100 automations per month, real-time collaboration, and more.
The Plus plan costs $12 per user / month and adds on 5,000 records per base, 5 GB of space, 5,000 automations per month, and more.
The Pro plan is $24 per user / month and adds on more records and space as well as advanced applications, calendar features, custom branding, permissions, among other features.
There is an Enterprise plan available which includes some advanced admin and security features. Cost is available by custom quote.
How to Choose the Right Marketing Calendar SoftwareUltimately, trying each tool will help you decide which one is right for you. While most of the tools above have similar functionality, each offers varying features, and your choice will depend on your preferences.
Note that if the tool you want does not have a specific functionality, it may provide integration with your other software tools. Most of the marketing planning software market integrates seamlessly with other tools in your MarTech stack.
If you are focusing more on content planning and management, start with researching Kapost, Curata, Welcome, and Airtable.
If you are looking for a tool for your ecommerce, retail, or franchises, CrossCap is one to research. Note that the other tools will also cater to ecommerce stores, but CrossCap focuses on capabilities that transition into retail and franchises.
If you are looking for a marketing planning and operations platform for your marketing campaigns, try TrueNorth, Monday.com, Wrike, or CoSchedule.
Note that all of the solutions can function in some way as workflow and project management software to organise your marketing processes and streamline collaboration.
Get Started With TrueNorth TodayWe covered nine marketing software platforms in this guide. We recommend you try each one to see if they suit your organisation’s needs.
The good news is that each platform offers either an API or integrations, or both, so you can easily add them to your current MarTech stack, if needed.
And just a heads up that TrueNorth is currently accepting early beta access applicants. TrueNorth is a powerful addition to any tech stack for teams that want to align better and move faster to prove ROI and grow in a chaos-free environment. Apply here to request beta access.
The post 9 Best Marketing Calendar Software appeared first on Venture Harbour.
February 5, 2021
8 Must-Have Digital Marketing Platforms
Ask any successful business what technology they use daily—we promise that most would say their marketing platforms undergird all of their marketing activities and contribute to their success.
One thing that most marketing platforms have in common is that they automate marketing in some way and make processes more efficient. The result? A fast-moving, strategically aligned marketing team that has complete visibility into marketing ROI and customer experiences.
What is a Marketing Platform?Marketing platforms encompass multiple marketing activities depending on their offerings—from social media and email marketing, to lead scoring and management, and everything in between. Many different types of marketing platforms exist, all with varying purposes and features, although many are similar in their offerings.
How do you know which marketing platform is right for you? At a minimum, it should:
Automate your marketing tasksUnify your siloed workspacesFoster efficient team communication, interactions and messagingHave global visibility for your team to see all marketing actions undertaken by your business in one placeTrack sales and progress with automation and powerful analyticsAll of the platforms we discuss in this guide satisfy the above requirements. However, they each offer different features. Choosing the right marketing platform will require reviewing your current marketing needs and trying the different platforms and features that align with your goals. Here are some features of marketing platforms:
Email marketing and campaign managementSocial media marketing and managementSales pipeline managementPredictive marketing campaignsStreamlined operationsResource managementLead managementContent managementA/B testingPersonalised marketing; behavioural dataIn this guide, we will discuss three categories of marketing platforms:
All-in-one CRM – These tools house a full customer relationship management platform where you can manage your contacts and automate your marketing, plus other activities.
HubSpotActiveCampaignMarketing automation and activities – These platforms have marketing automation capabilities, but they might not have an internal CRM. Most allow you to integrate with your CRM, however.
MarketoVBOUTSharpSpringPardotAct-onMarketing operations – These platforms accompany your current MarTech stack (whether all-in-one CRM or marketing automation) and help organise your data so you can be more efficient and move through marketing campaigns faster.
TrueNorthMarketing automation platforms streamline marketing activities and help you stay organised and efficient so you can grow faster and optimise marketing spend. Let’s discuss eight of the best marketing automation platforms, their notable features, and ownership costs.
1. TrueNorthThe days of tracking campaigns across multiple spreadsheets, dashboards, and Trello boards are over. Get more control of your marketing campaigns, so you know exactly what is working and what is draining your marketing budget.
TrueNorth is an agile marketing platform, unique in its category. Adopting the agile framework, it organises marketing and makes it more efficient, helping marketing teams work together asynchronously (and remotely).
There’s a reason why the world’s top tech companies (Google, Facebook) use agile in software development—it works very well. Beyond simply streamlining marketing activities, TrueNorth has brought agile into the marketing scene to help teams move faster and stay aligned.
Conventional marketing campaigns can often last months (or even years) and rely on sub-par data that produce sub-par results, usually after it’s too late to course-correct. In contrast with traditional marketing processes, TrueNorth’s agile approach works with micro strategies and iterative cycles, allowing you to gain insights and adjust your strategy quickly and “on the fly.”
One of TrueNorth’s notable features is its marketing simulations. Compare multiple marketing plans (before you launch them) to identify the ones that will achieve your goals with the best return on your marketing budget.
Once launched, compare your progress against your simulations to assess if you are on track to meet your goals or shifting off course. Stay more in control of your campaigns and identify warning signs early and course-correct sooner, saving time and money in the process.
TrueNorth also offers a Playbooks feature, a bank that gathers your winning campaign ideas over time (in the background) to inform future campaigns. This is your database of insights that you can call on when you launch new marketing campaigns.
TrueNorth’s power lies in its ability to enable marketers to move faster, thereby saving them time and money, instead of wasting resources on marketing campaigns doomed to fail. Quickly spot losing campaigns and gather insights rapidly.
WithTrueNorth, you can easily prove the true value of marketing and throw away guesswork and hunches. Quickly and easily demonstrate ROI so you can spend smarter, stay on track, and grow faster.
Note that TrueNorth is unlike the other marketing platforms we will be discussing in this guide. TrueNorth can be a worthwhile accompaniment to your current MarTech stack to help you organise your campaigns and keep your processes as efficient as possible.
TrueNorth Features:
Marketing automationTeam synchronicityMarketing simulationsAgile frameworkDetailed analyticsMarketing playbooks and insightsPrioritisation frameworkTrueNorth Pricing:
TrueNorth is currently accepting beta users onto the platform. Get early access here.
ActiveCampaignActiveCampaign focuses on helping small businesses create stellar customer experiences by automating the customer journey from lead to retention and beyond. Though ActiveCampaign became famous as an email automation platform, it has developed into an all-in-one CRM with features that far outweigh just email capabilities.
ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is user-friendly and easy enough for the most technically challenged marketer to create automations. The platform also offers what they call automation workflow recipes (templates) you can use as a foundation to build and customise your automated workflows.
SourceIn addition to its customer experience automations, ActiveCampaign also offers omnichannel marketing features that allow you to reach your audience and integrate your communication across multiple platforms. Capabilities include landing page builder, SMS marketing, live chat with automated workflows, and integration with Facebook Custom Audiences.
SourceActiveCampaign Features:
Sales automationCRMSales performance and analyticsCustomisable sales pipelinesContact managementLead management & scoringSite trackingEmail marketing & split testingOmni-channel marketingCustomisable forms and landing pagesActiveCampaign Pricing:
14-day free trial
Pricing is dependent on the number of internal users and contacts. If you have three users and up to 500 contacts, the Lite plan starts at $15 / month, with annual billing discounts. For 500-1,000 contacts and 1,000-2,500 contacts, the Lite plan is $29 / month and $55 / month, respectively. The Lite plan offers email marketing, unlimited sends, subscriptions forms and marketing automation.
Premium plans start at $70 / month for the Plus plan for up to 500 contacts and 25 users, with annual billing discounts. The cost does not increase until you pass 1,000 contacts, which is $125 / month.
The Enterprise plan starting at $279 / month is the most robust and offers everything in the premium plans plus custom reporting, custom domain, custom mail server domain, unlimited email design testing, unlimited users, dedicated account rep, and more.
MarketoMarketo is a popular marketing platform that is flexible enough to cater to small or large businesses or those hoping to scale. Like ActiveCampaign, it has many different automation capabilities and serves, but it is not an all-in-one CRM.
Marketo is still an industry leader and prides itself on helping marketers engage with prospects from acquisition to advocacy.
One notable feature of Marketo is its AI-powered (Adobe Sensei) audience segmentation, lookalike audiences, and insights. Marketo’s predictive intelligence helps you target the right audience to optimise conversions and then replicate future campaigns’ success.
For example, reduce unsubscribe rates by identifying the users who are most likely to unsubscribe with the Likelihood to Unsubscribe Predictive Filter. Slow down messaging for fatigued subscribers or stop engagement with suspended contacts. The power is in your hands.
SourceWith predictive technology, you can also replicate your success with lookalike audiences. For example, capture signups from one of your successful marketing campaigns, and create a similar audience to the contacts who converted. Marketo allows you to create filters to find similar audience members to those you add to a defined list.
SourceMarketo Features:
Customer engagement marketingMarketing automationAI-powered predictive technologyLead generationSocial marketingCRMEmail marketingLanding pages & formsScoring, routing & alertsMarketo Pricing:
Marketo does not list its pricing on its website. But, it is more expensive than many platforms in its category. The Select plan does offer many of the platform’s key features, and it is a more robust starter plan than most.
Like ActiveCampaign, HubSpot is a CRM and marketing automation platform that caters to businesses of all sizes. It offers several additional products or “hubs” so businesses can choose which services they need.
Hubspot offerings:
Marketing HubSales HubService HubCMS HubEach Hub has a monthly cost and minimum contact limit.
HubSpot is also famous for its free, albeit limited plan which provides a good number of basic sales, marketing, and service features and the ability for you to give the platform a try before you buy.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub provides multiple capabilities including a form and landing page builder, email marketing, account-based marketing, social media management, lead and ad tracking and management, and more. HubSpot also offers video hosting and a live chatbot for your website to attract and convert more leads.
With its automation features, it’s simple to convert leads with personalised emails, advanced segmentation, and automated campaign workflows.
SourceOnce those leads convert, reviewing your analytics gives you a complete idea of what worked and what didn’t. HubSpot’s marketing reporting features customisable reports and dashboards and allows you to tie your campaigns to closed deals with multi-touch revenue attribution.
SourceHubSpot Marketing Hub Features:
Marketing automationSales performance and analyticsLead management and scoringEmail marketingCustom workflowsSocial media managementLive chatCustom forms and landing pages
HubSpot Pricing:
14- and 30-day free trials
HubSpot offers a decent Free Plan which includes email tracking and templates, reporting, ad management, contact management and more basic features.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub starts at $50 / month with discounts for annual billing. This Starter Plan includes everything in the Free Plan plus email marketing, ad retargeting, list segmentation, conversational bots, live chat, landing pages, and more.
If you want to take advantage of HubSpot’s advanced marketing automation features, it will cost you a minimum of $890 / month with discounts for annual billing. This Professional Plan also adds on social media, contact scoring, marketing automation, custom reporting, traffic analytics, A/B testing, ABM tools, Salesforce integration and more.
The next tier is Enterprise which costs a minimum of $3,200 with discounts for annual billing.
Note that the cost fluctuates depending on the number of contacts. The pricing above is also only reflective of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, not its Service or Sales Hub. However, HubSpot offers Bundle Suites at decent rates if you want to bundle its services.
VBOUTVBOUT is a simple marketing automation platform that caters to businesses of all types and sizes. Like Marketo, it offers a full suite of marketing tools such as social media management, lead generation and management, email marketing, and landing pages.
VBOUT’s email marketing capabilities include personalised messaging (via merge tags) and dynamic email creation. So, for example, you can add countdowns and animated GIFs for specific events. You can also control email delivery and cadence and automate a workflow based on custom triggers connected to a lead’s score, behaviour or progress.
SourceIn addition to email campaigns, this drag-and-drop visual workflow builder includes automation templates and can also automate marketing tasks and cross-channel communications around leads, tracking, and integration with 3rd party applications.
With VBOUT’s lead generation features, import unlimited contacts, or synchronise your leads with your current CRM platforms. VBOUT allows you to segment your leads with filters, track their activity from the first to last touch, and gather insights with its analytics and tracking tools. Use lead scoring to focus on the hottest leads, and use custom labels to monitor their progress through your pipelines.
SourceVBOUT Features:
Marketing automationLead scoring and managementEmail marketingSocial media managementForm and landing page creationSales performance and analyticsCustom workflowsCRM integrationsVBOUT Pricing:
14-day Free Trial
VBOUT’s Starter Professional Plan starts at $100 / month for all of its features (email marketing, social media, automation, analytics, landing pages, and lead management), with annual pricing discounts. Pricing is a la carte for four of the six features. For example, if you were not interested in social media or landing pages, the price would reduce to $80 / month for email marketing, analytics, lead management, and automation.
The Premium plan (Enterprise and Agency) pricing is only availably by a custom quote. These plans offer additional features such as customised stack and integrations, dedicated IP warmup and dedicated account manager, white-label options, and more depending on whether you are an agency looking for opportunities to serve your clients.
SharpSpringA close competitor to VBOUT, SharpSpring is a B2B sales and marketing automation platform that caters to small to medium-sized businesses.
Like other marketing automation platforms, you can automate email campaigns and create custom behaviour-based workflows for various customer journeys. Use SharpSpring’s built-in triggers and filters to set up automated personalised, relevant emails at specific times to engage with consumers and leads and encourage them to convert.
SharpSpring also allows you to create powerful marketing automation workflows with its intuitive interface. Use branching logic to create your lead’s pathways to conversions and follow them every step of the way.
Track leads with SharpSpring’s dynamic list feature, a behaviour-based segmentation tool that automatically updates as contacts satisfy your custom list criteria. So, for example, you can create a segmented list for every prospect who performs a specific action (submits a form, visits specific product pages, reviews your pricing page, etc.)
SourceGet more information from anonymous website visitors with SharpSpring’s VisitorID. It tracks your visitors’ IP addresses and pulls back identifying information. VisitorID also tracks time on page, browsing behaviour, where visitors came from, and what they searched for before reaching your site.
SourceSharpSpring Features:
Marketing automationVisitorID lead trackingLead scoring and managementEmail marketingSocial media managementForm and landing page creationSales performance and analyticsCustom workflowsBlog builderCRM integrations and features
SharpSpring Pricing:
14-day free trial
SharpSpring doesn’t advertise its prices on its website. Pricing has been reported to start at $550 / month for the Basic plan, which includes 1,500 contacts. All plans offer access to all features. The plan costs increase as the number of contacts and emails increases.
Salesforce PardotIf you’re looking for a marketing platform, Salesforce would be overkill. Pardot is the marketing automation arm of Salesforce’s comprehensive suite, perfect for businesses wanting a robust marketing automation platform without signing on to other Salesforce products.
Like other top-rated marketing automation platforms we’ve already discussed, Pardot offers customised workflows, social media management, lead generation and management, email marketing, analytics and reporting.
Pardot is also known for its artificial intelligence feature called “Pardot Einstein” which includes Einstein Lead Scoring, Einstein Behavior Scoring and Einstein Campaign Insights.
Einstein Lead Scoring monitors your lead’s conversion patterns and scores new leads based on previous conversion data.
SourceEinstein Behavior Scoring monitors leads’ behaviour and notifies you when they are ready to purchase, while Einstein Campaign Insights looks for new prospects based on similarities to your highly engaged leads. Pardot’s AI capabilities allow you to attract, convert and find new ready-to-convert leads based on machine learning and ongoing monitoring of your leads.
SourcePardot also feeds its automation capabilities with the data it collects on your leads’ behaviours. Build personalised automations, custom workflows, and engage with leads at the right time to increase the chances of conversion.
Pardot Features:
Marketing automationPardot Einstein (AI)Lead scoring and managementEmail marketingLanding pagesSocial media managementAccount-based marketingSales performance and analyticsCustom workflowsSalesforce integrationPardot Pricing:
Pricing starts at $1,250 / month billed annually for the Growth plan for up to 10,000 contacts. Premium plans (Plus, Advanced, Premium) start at $1,250 / month billed annually for up to 10,000 contacts. Pardot also offers some a la carte add-ons to customise your packages.
All plans include email marketing, landing pages, email A/B testing, marketing automations, lead scoring, custom fields, and more. Premium plans add more sophisticated marketing automations, B2B marketing analytics, dedicated IP address, a developer sandbox, advanced email analytics, unlimited forms and landing pages, and additional upgrades.
Act-onAct-on is another impressive marketing automation platform offering email marketing, social media, analytics and other marketing features.
Act-on’s powerful behaviour-based segmentation tracks your segment’s interactions and engagements with your brand, and scores leads and fuels campaigns based on this data. In addition, use the demographic and firmographic segmentation data to personalise experiences and deliver relevant messaging to increase engagement.
Act-on’s segmentation would not be complete without its dynamic scoring, which follows your lead’s actions and records their steps to empower your segmentation and alert you when leads are ready to buy.
Track buyer pathways on Act-on’s score sheets, where you can outline scoring criteria and rules for your contacts and create one scorecard for each audience for segmentation purposes.
With Act-on’s Automated Journey Builder, customise a communications workflow to construct your multi-channel campaigns and reward your prospects and customers with personalised brand experiences.
SourceAct-on Features:
Marketing automationLead scoring and managementLanding pagesSocial media managementAccount-based marketingSales performance and analyticsCustom workflowsCRM integrationsPricing:
The Professional starter plan starts at $900 / month for up to 2,500 active contacts and includes most features. The Enterprise plan starts at $2,000 / month for up to 2,500 active contacts and adds on CRM integrations, Data Studio for advanced reporting and BI integration, account-based marketing and transactional emails.
How to Choose the Right Marketing Platform
Choosing the right marketing platform will depend on what you need to complete your MarTech stack. These platforms also integrate, so in some cases, it might make sense to use more than one to fulfil your marketing requirements.
For example, if you have HubSpot, but you want a more robust operations platform to funnel in your results data and better optimise your marketing campaigns, you might also want to try TrueNorth, which integrates with HubSpot.
If you already have SharpSpring, but you are looking for a more robust CRM, you might look into HubSpot and integrate it with SharpSpring.
Here’s how to break it down:
OPTION 1: If you are looking for an all-in-one CRM + marketing automation, try HubSpot or ActiveCampaign. We also published an in-depth piece on the best CRMs for small businesses.
OPTION 2: If you are looking for just marketing automation and other marketing capabilities (social media, customised workflows, landing pages, email marketing, etc.), try Marketo, VBOUT, SharpSpring, Pardot, or Act-on. Make a list of the marketing activities you want to automate, and then review each tool’s features to match them up. Not all of them offer every marketing feature.
OPTION 3: If you want to speed up your marketing processes to get results quicker, and make your systems more efficient, try a tool like TrueNorth. TrueNorth can work alongside and above your tool stack as a control panel. You can import your performance results to figure out what campaigns are working and which ones are draining your marketing spend. Use TrueNorth as a first step to evaluate future campaigns and their potential for success even before you run them.
Choose the Marketing Platform That Meets Your NeedsWe covered eight of the top marketing platforms in this article. Take one or more for a test drive to see if they meet your needs.
The great news is that these platforms often integrate so if one does not fulfil all of your needs, you can combine them to create a unique stack that aligns with your company goals.
And remember that TrueNorth is accepting early beta access applicants who want to test drive the platform. This agile marketing platform is a powerhouse addition to any marketing team that wants to move faster and stay aligned with highly efficient processes. Apply right here to request beta access.
The post 8 Must-Have Digital Marketing Platforms appeared first on Venture Harbour.
Best Marketing Platforms
Ask any successful business what technology they use daily—we promise that most would say their marketing platforms undergird all of their marketing activities and contribute to their success.
One thing that most marketing platforms have in common is that they automate marketing in some way and make processes more efficient. The result? A fast-moving, strategically aligned marketing team that has complete visibility into marketing ROI and customer experiences.
What is a Marketing Platform?Marketing platforms encompass multiple marketing activities depending on their offerings—from social media and email marketing, to lead scoring and management, and everything in between. Many different types of marketing platforms exist, all with varying purposes and features, although many are similar in their offerings.
How do you know which marketing platform is right for you? At a minimum, it should:
Automate your marketing tasksUnify your siloed workspacesFoster efficient team communication, interactions and messagingHave global visibility for your team to see all marketing actions undertaken by your business in one placeTrack sales and progress with automation and powerful analyticsAll of the platforms we discuss in this guide satisfy the above requirements. However, they each offer different features. Choosing the right marketing platform will require reviewing your current marketing needs and trying the different platforms and features that align with your goals. Here are some features of marketing platforms:
Email marketing and campaign managementSocial media marketing and managementSales pipeline managementPredictive marketing campaignsStreamlined operationsResource managementLead managementContent managementA/B testingPersonalised marketing; behavioural dataIn this guide, we will discuss three categories of marketing platforms:
All-in-one CRM – These tools house a full customer relationship management platform where you can manage your contacts and automate your marketing, plus other activities.
HubSpotActiveCampaignMarketing automation and activities – These platforms have marketing automation capabilities, but they might not have an internal CRM. Most allow you to integrate with your CRM, however.
MarketoVBOUTSharpSpringPardotAct-onMarketing operations – These platforms accompany your current MarTech stack (whether all-in-one CRM or marketing automation) and help organise your data so you can be more efficient and move through marketing campaigns faster.
TrueNorthMarketing automation platforms streamline marketing activities and help you stay organised and efficient so you can grow faster and optimise marketing spend. Let’s discuss eight of the best marketing automation platforms, their notable features, and ownership costs.
1. TrueNorthThe days of tracking campaigns across multiple spreadsheets, dashboards, and Trello boards are over. Get more control of your marketing campaigns, so you know exactly what is working and what is draining your marketing budget.
TrueNorth is an agile marketing platform, unique in its category. Adopting the agile framework, it organises marketing and makes it more efficient, helping marketing teams work together asynchronously (and remotely).
There’s a reason why the world’s top tech companies (Google, Facebook) use agile in software development—it works very well. Beyond simply streamlining marketing activities, TrueNorth has brought agile into the marketing scene to help teams move faster and stay aligned.
Conventional marketing campaigns can often last months (or even years) and rely on sub-par data that produce sub-par results, usually after it’s too late to course-correct. In contrast with traditional marketing processes, TrueNorth’s agile approach works with micro strategies and iterative cycles, allowing you to gain insights and adjust your strategy quickly and “on the fly.”
One of TrueNorth’s notable features is its marketing simulations. Compare multiple marketing plans (before you launch them) to identify the ones that will achieve your goals with the best return on your marketing budget.
Once launched, compare your progress against your simulations to assess if you are on track to meet your goals or shifting off course. Stay more in control of your campaigns and identify warning signs early and course-correct sooner, saving time and money in the process.
TrueNorth also offers a Playbooks feature, a bank that gathers your winning campaign ideas over time (in the background) to inform future campaigns. This is your database of insights that you can call on when you launch new marketing campaigns.
TrueNorth’s power lies in its ability to enable marketers to move faster, thereby saving them time and money, instead of wasting resources on marketing campaigns doomed to fail. Quickly spot losing campaigns and gather insights rapidly.
WithTrueNorth, you can easily prove the true value of marketing and throw away guesswork and hunches. Quickly and easily demonstrate ROI so you can spend smarter, stay on track, and grow faster.
Note that TrueNorth is unlike the other marketing platforms we will be discussing in this guide. TrueNorth can be a worthwhile accompaniment to your current MarTech stack to help you organise your campaigns and keep your processes as efficient as possible.
TrueNorth Features:
Marketing automationTeam synchronicityMarketing simulationsAgile frameworkDetailed analyticsMarketing playbooks and insightsPrioritisation frameworkTrueNorth Pricing:
TrueNorth is currently accepting beta users onto the platform. Get early access here.
ActiveCampaignActiveCampaign focuses on helping small businesses create stellar customer experiences by automating the customer journey from lead to retention and beyond. Though ActiveCampaign became famous as an email automation platform, it has developed into an all-in-one CRM with features that far outweigh just email capabilities.
ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is user-friendly and easy enough for the most technically challenged marketer to create automations. The platform also offers what they call automation workflow recipes (templates) you can use as a foundation to build and customise your automated workflows.
SourceIn addition to its customer experience automations, ActiveCampaign also offers omnichannel marketing features that allow you to reach your audience and integrate your communication across multiple platforms. Capabilities include landing page builder, SMS marketing, live chat with automated workflows, and integration with Facebook Custom Audiences.
SourceActiveCampaign Features:
Sales automationCRMSales performance and analyticsCustomisable sales pipelinesContact managementLead management & scoringSite trackingEmail marketing & split testingOmni-channel marketingCustomisable forms and landing pagesActiveCampaign Pricing:
14-day free trial
Pricing is dependent on the number of internal users and contacts. If you have three users and up to 500 contacts, the Lite plan starts at $15 / month, with annual billing discounts. For 500-1,000 contacts and 1,000-2,500 contacts, the Lite plan is $29 / month and $55 / month, respectively. The Lite plan offers email marketing, unlimited sends, subscriptions forms and marketing automation.
Premium plans start at $70 / month for the Plus plan for up to 500 contacts and 25 users, with annual billing discounts. The cost does not increase until you pass 1,000 contacts, which is $125 / month.
The Enterprise plan starting at $279 / month is the most robust and offers everything in the premium plans plus custom reporting, custom domain, custom mail server domain, unlimited email design testing, unlimited users, dedicated account rep, and more.
MarketoMarketo is a popular marketing platform that is flexible enough to cater to small or large businesses or those hoping to scale. Like ActiveCampaign, it has many different automation capabilities and serves, but it is not an all-in-one CRM.
Marketo is still an industry leader and prides itself on helping marketers engage with prospects from acquisition to advocacy.
One notable feature of Marketo is its AI-powered (Adobe Sensei) audience segmentation, lookalike audiences, and insights. Marketo’s predictive intelligence helps you target the right audience to optimise conversions and then replicate future campaigns’ success.
For example, reduce unsubscribe rates by identifying the users who are most likely to unsubscribe with the Likelihood to Unsubscribe Predictive Filter. Slow down messaging for fatigued subscribers or stop engagement with suspended contacts. The power is in your hands.
SourceWith predictive technology, you can also replicate your success with lookalike audiences. For example, capture signups from one of your successful marketing campaigns, and create a similar audience to the contacts who converted. Marketo allows you to create filters to find similar audience members to those you add to a defined list.
SourceMarketo Features:
Customer engagement marketingMarketing automationAI-powered predictive technologyLead generationSocial marketingCRMEmail marketingLanding pages & formsScoring, routing & alertsMarketo Pricing:
Marketo does not list its pricing on its website. But, it is more expensive than many platforms in its category. The Select plan does offer many of the platform’s key features, and it is a more robust starter plan than most.
Like ActiveCampaign, HubSpot is a CRM and marketing automation platform that caters to businesses of all sizes. It offers several additional products or “hubs” so businesses can choose which services they need.
Hubspot offerings:
Marketing HubSales HubService HubCMS HubEach Hub has a monthly cost and minimum contact limit.
HubSpot is also famous for its free, albeit limited plan which provides a good number of basic sales, marketing, and service features and the ability for you to give the platform a try before you buy.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub provides multiple capabilities including a form and landing page builder, email marketing, account-based marketing, social media management, lead and ad tracking and management, and more. HubSpot also offers video hosting and a live chatbot for your website to attract and convert more leads.
With its automation features, it’s simple to convert leads with personalised emails, advanced segmentation, and automated campaign workflows.
SourceOnce those leads convert, reviewing your analytics gives you a complete idea of what worked and what didn’t. HubSpot’s marketing reporting features customisable reports and dashboards and allows you to tie your campaigns to closed deals with multi-touch revenue attribution.
SourceHubSpot Marketing Hub Features:
Marketing automationSales performance and analyticsLead management and scoringEmail marketingCustom workflowsSocial media managementLive chatCustom forms and landing pages
HubSpot Pricing:
14- and 30-day free trials
HubSpot offers a decent Free Plan which includes email tracking and templates, reporting, ad management, contact management and more basic features.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub starts at $50 / month with discounts for annual billing. This Starter Plan includes everything in the Free Plan plus email marketing, ad retargeting, list segmentation, conversational bots, live chat, landing pages, and more.
If you want to take advantage of HubSpot’s advanced marketing automation features, it will cost you a minimum of $890 / month with discounts for annual billing. This Professional Plan also adds on social media, contact scoring, marketing automation, custom reporting, traffic analytics, A/B testing, ABM tools, Salesforce integration and more.
The next tier is Enterprise which costs a minimum of $3,200 with discounts for annual billing.
Note that the cost fluctuates depending on the number of contacts. The pricing above is also only reflective of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, not its Service or Sales Hub. However, HubSpot offers Bundle Suites at decent rates if you want to bundle its services.
VBOUTVBOUT is a simple marketing automation platform that caters to businesses of all types and sizes. Like Marketo, it offers a full suite of marketing tools such as social media management, lead generation and management, email marketing, and landing pages.
VBOUT’s email marketing capabilities include personalised messaging (via merge tags) and dynamic email creation. So, for example, you can add countdowns and animated GIFs for specific events. You can also control email delivery and cadence and automate a workflow based on custom triggers connected to a lead’s score, behaviour or progress.
SourceIn addition to email campaigns, this drag-and-drop visual workflow builder includes automation templates and can also automate marketing tasks and cross-channel communications around leads, tracking, and integration with 3rd party applications.
With VBOUT’s lead generation features, import unlimited contacts, or synchronise your leads with your current CRM platforms. VBOUT allows you to segment your leads with filters, track their activity from the first to last touch, and gather insights with its analytics and tracking tools. Use lead scoring to focus on the hottest leads, and use custom labels to monitor their progress through your pipelines.
SourceVBOUT Features:
Marketing automationLead scoring and managementEmail marketingSocial media managementForm and landing page creationSales performance and analyticsCustom workflowsCRM integrationsVBOUT Pricing:
14-day Free Trial
VBOUT’s Starter Professional Plan starts at $100 / month for all of its features (email marketing, social media, automation, analytics, landing pages, and lead management), with annual pricing discounts. Pricing is a la carte for four of the six features. For example, if you were not interested in social media or landing pages, the price would reduce to $80 / month for email marketing, analytics, lead management, and automation.
The Premium plan (Enterprise and Agency) pricing is only availably by a custom quote. These plans offer additional features such as customised stack and integrations, dedicated IP warmup and dedicated account manager, white-label options, and more depending on whether you are an agency looking for opportunities to serve your clients.
SharpSpringA close competitor to VBOUT, SharpSpring is a B2B sales and marketing automation platform that caters to small to medium-sized businesses.
Like other marketing automation platforms, you can automate email campaigns and create custom behaviour-based workflows for various customer journeys. Use SharpSpring’s built-in triggers and filters to set up automated personalised, relevant emails at specific times to engage with consumers and leads and encourage them to convert.
SharpSpring also allows you to create powerful marketing automation workflows with its intuitive interface. Use branching logic to create your lead’s pathways to conversions and follow them every step of the way.
Track leads with SharpSpring’s dynamic list feature, a behaviour-based segmentation tool that automatically updates as contacts satisfy your custom list criteria. So, for example, you can create a segmented list for every prospect who performs a specific action (submits a form, visits specific product pages, reviews your pricing page, etc.)
SourceGet more information from anonymous website visitors with SharpSpring’s VisitorID. It tracks your visitors’ IP addresses and pulls back identifying information. VisitorID also tracks time on page, browsing behaviour, where visitors came from, and what they searched for before reaching your site.
SourceSharpSpring Features:
Marketing automationVisitorID lead trackingLead scoring and managementEmail marketingSocial media managementForm and landing page creationSales performance and analyticsCustom workflowsBlog builderCRM integrations and features
SharpSpring Pricing:
14-day free trial
SharpSpring doesn’t advertise its prices on its website. Pricing has been reported to start at $550 / month for the Basic plan, which includes 1,500 contacts. All plans offer access to all features. The plan costs increase as the number of contacts and emails increases.
Salesforce PardotIf you’re looking for a marketing platform, Salesforce would be overkill. Pardot is the marketing automation arm of Salesforce’s comprehensive suite, perfect for businesses wanting a robust marketing automation platform without signing on to other Salesforce products.
Like other top-rated marketing automation platforms we’ve already discussed, Pardot offers customised workflows, social media management, lead generation and management, email marketing, analytics and reporting.
Pardot is also known for its artificial intelligence feature called “Pardot Einstein” which includes Einstein Lead Scoring, Einstein Behavior Scoring and Einstein Campaign Insights.
Einstein Lead Scoring monitors your lead’s conversion patterns and scores new leads based on previous conversion data.
SourceEinstein Behavior Scoring monitors leads’ behaviour and notifies you when they are ready to purchase, while Einstein Campaign Insights looks for new prospects based on similarities to your highly engaged leads. Pardot’s AI capabilities allow you to attract, convert and find new ready-to-convert leads based on machine learning and ongoing monitoring of your leads.
SourcePardot also feeds its automation capabilities with the data it collects on your leads’ behaviours. Build personalised automations, custom workflows, and engage with leads at the right time to increase the chances of conversion.
Pardot Features:
Marketing automationPardot Einstein (AI)Lead scoring and managementEmail marketingLanding pagesSocial media managementAccount-based marketingSales performance and analyticsCustom workflowsSalesforce integrationPardot Pricing:
Pricing starts at $1,250 / month billed annually for the Growth plan for up to 10,000 contacts. Premium plans (Plus, Advanced, Premium) start at $1,250 / month billed annually for up to 10,000 contacts. Pardot also offers some a la carte add-ons to customise your packages.
All plans include email marketing, landing pages, email A/B testing, marketing automations, lead scoring, custom fields, and more. Premium plans add more sophisticated marketing automations, B2B marketing analytics, dedicated IP address, a developer sandbox, advanced email analytics, unlimited forms and landing pages, and additional upgrades.
Act-onAct-on is another impressive marketing automation platform offering email marketing, social media, analytics and other marketing features.
Act-on’s powerful behaviour-based segmentation tracks your segment’s interactions and engagements with your brand, and scores leads and fuels campaigns based on this data. In addition, use the demographic and firmographic segmentation data to personalise experiences and deliver relevant messaging to increase engagement.
Act-on’s segmentation would not be complete without its dynamic scoring, which follows your lead’s actions and records their steps to empower your segmentation and alert you when leads are ready to buy.
Track buyer pathways on Act-on’s score sheets, where you can outline scoring criteria and rules for your contacts and create one scorecard for each audience for segmentation purposes.
With Act-on’s Automated Journey Builder, customise a communications workflow to construct your multi-channel campaigns and reward your prospects and customers with personalised brand experiences.
SourceAct-on Features:
Marketing automationLead scoring and managementLanding pagesSocial media managementAccount-based marketingSales performance and analyticsCustom workflowsCRM integrationsPricing:
The Professional starter plan starts at $900 / month for up to 2,500 active contacts and includes most features. The Enterprise plan starts at $2,000 / month for up to 2,500 active contacts and adds on CRM integrations, Data Studio for advanced reporting and BI integration, account-based marketing and transactional emails.
How to Choose the Right Marketing PlatformChoosing the right marketing platform will depend on what you need to complete your MarTech stack. These platforms also integrate, so in some cases, it might make sense to use more than one to fulfil your marketing requirements.
For example, if you have HubSpot, but you want a more robust operations platform to funnel in your results data and better optimise your marketing campaigns, you might also want to try TrueNorth, which integrates with HubSpot.
If you already have SharpSpring, but you are looking for a more robust CRM, you might look into HubSpot and integrate it with SharpSpring.
Here’s how to break it down:
OPTION 1: If you are looking for an all-in-one CRM + marketing automation, try HubSpot or ActiveCampaign. We also published an in-depth piece on the best CRMs for small businesses.
OPTION 2: If you are looking for just marketing automation and other marketing capabilities (social media, customised workflows, landing pages, email marketing, etc.), try Marketo, VBOUT, SharpSpring, Pardot, or Act-on. Make a list of the marketing activities you want to automate, and then review each tool’s features to match them up. Not all of them offer every marketing feature.
OPTION 3: If you want to speed up your marketing processes to get results quicker, and make your systems more efficient, try a tool like TrueNorth. TrueNorth can work alongside and above your tool stack as a control panel. You can import your performance results to figure out what campaigns are working and which ones are draining your marketing spend. Use TrueNorth as a first step to evaluate future campaigns and their potential for success even before you run them.
Choose the Marketing Platform That Meets Your NeedsWe covered eight of the top marketing platforms in this article. Take one or more for a test drive to see if they meet your needs.
The great news is that these platforms often integrate so if one does not fulfil all of your needs, you can combine them to create a unique stack that aligns with your company goals.
And remember that TrueNorth is accepting early beta access applicants who want to test drive the platform. This agile marketing platform is a powerhouse addition to any marketing team that wants to move faster and stay aligned with highly efficient processes. Apply right here to request beta access.
The post Best Marketing Platforms appeared first on Venture Harbour.
January 25, 2021
10 Must-Have Marketing Tools for SaaS Companies
SaaS companies face a unique set of challenges when it comes to marketing and this means you need a specialist set of tools to overcome these hurdles and achieve your goals.
From turning free users into paying customers, fine-tuning your sales funnel and retaining users to maximise lifetime value, software companies have a long, complex customer journey to optimise.
The good news is that, with the right tools, most of the marketing activities that’ll help you achieve these goals can be heavily or fully automated. In this article, we look at 10 must-have marketing tools for SaaS companies that’ll help you boost growth through automated lead generation, customer acquisition and retention.
What are we looking at in this article?In this article, we look at 10 of the most important marketing tools for software and SaaS companies. We’re not talking about generic recommendations and you won’t find any vague product descriptions in this article.
These are marketing tools that specifically address the unique marketing challenges SaaS companies face across a complex customer journey that’s intertwined with product development and customer service.
Here are the tools we’re focusing on in this article:
TrueNorth: Marketing planning, forecasting & tracking for SaaS companies.ActiveCampaign: The all-in-one CRM, marketing automation & customer support platform.LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Target high-quality B2B SaaS customers.Hunter: Find & verify email addresses assigned to company URLs.Slack: The communication tool for SaaS teams & remote creatives.Wistia: Video marketing made easier for SaaS companies.Intercom: Automated customer support & lead generation for SaaS companies.VWO: CRO & customer experience optimisation for SaaS companies.UserVoice: Customer insights & user feedback for SaaS products.Databox: All of your marketing & business data in one place.There’s little-to-no overlap with these marketing tools, either. It would be pointless for me to suggest generic tools like Google Analytics and then recommend nine other tools that basically do the same thing.
Each of these marketing tools addresses specific problems unique to SaaS companies and I’ll be explaining how they help you overcome these challenges.
#1: TrueNorth: Marketing planning, forecasting & tracking for SaaS companiesFirst up, we’ve got TrueNorth, which is a relatively new tool, but one that’s built from the ground up to help SaaS companies and software teams achieve their marketing goals. The platform helps you “grow without the guesswork” by planning, simulating and tracking campaigns to help you make successful marketing decisions faster.
With TrueNorth, you can calculate the effectiveness of different marketing campaigns before you launch them. This allows you to compare campaign creatives, check that you’re on course to hit your ROI targets and launch campaigns with confidence.
Key features:
Calculate ROI: Project the ROI of campaigns before they go live.Manage campaign ideas: Create and manage campaign ideas from one location.Project outcomes: Calculate the outcome of campaigns and prioritise them based on the projected results.Allocate budgets based on the projected results of campaigns for a better understanding of where your marketing investment is best spent.Optimise budgets: Track spend alongside results and optimise your budgets to maximise performance as your campaigns mature. Demonstrate ROI: Show stakeholders and executives the impact of campaigns by attributing ROI to the KPIs that really matter.As we’ve explained before, accurately calculating the ROI of marketing campaigns is difficult but TrueNorth helps you project the outcome of campaign ideas so that you can be confident of hitting targets before you put any money on the line.
With TrueNorth’s predictive modelling, you can optimise campaign ideas before you even launch them to achieve your objectives. So, if that email marketing campaign isn’t going to get the results you need, you can fine-tune it, until it reaches your minimum threshold, or ditch it altogether and focus on campaigns with better prospects.
You can also prioritise campaigns, based on their projected performance, to ensure that your marketing budget is being distributed in the most effective way.
With campaigns running live, TrueNorth tracks performance and compares real-world results against its projections. This data constantly improves the accuracy of TrueNorth’s predictions and you can compare results to optimise your bids and prioritise your top-performing campaigns.
This data-driven approach to budget allocation helps you maximise ROI and attribute success/failure to the KPIs that really matter. With TrueNorth’s data precision, you can showcase the performance of campaigns in the language stakeholders understand: ROI, revenue, active users and customer lifetime value.
#2: ActiveCampaign: The all-in-one CRM, marketing automation & customer support platformActiveCampaign is a dozen or more SaaS marketing tools rolled into a single suite of software. We’ve been using ActiveCampaign here at Venture Harbour since 2016 and we’ve never looked back. This is a truly all-in-one CRM, email marketing, marketing automation and customer support platform that addresses most of the day-to-day and quarterly challenges SaaS companies face.
With ActiveCampaign, instead of needing hundreds of tools in your SaaS tech stack, the list is instantly cut down to dozens with no compromise on quality.
Key features:
Built-in CRM: ActiveCampaign includes one of the best CRM platforms in the industry, fully integrated with its fleet of SaaS marketing tools and features.Marketing automation: Automate lead generation, lead nurturing, customer retention and key marketing actions to maximise growth.Email marketing: Advanced email marketing and automation to convert leads into paying customers, keep paying users engaged and upsell customers to more expensive plans.Customer support: Keep your customers happy, resolve technical issues and identify user problems adding to your churn rate.Lead management: Track on-site behaviour, segment leads and deliver targeted messages to automatically nurture them along the path to purchase.Lead & customer scoring: Score leads to prioritise marketing campaigns and manage customer health scores to keep your users happy.Personalisation: Personalise email and page content to address the unique needs of different audience types.ActiveCampaign understands that automation is crucial for SaaS companies to maximise lead generation and customer acquisition but also enabling teams of a fixed size to continue managing their customer base as it rapidly grows.
This is the key to automated growth: significantly increasing user numbers overnight without your sales and support teams being overwhelmed by sudden increases.
ActiveCampaign provides all of the tools you need to automate lead generation, lead qualification, lead nurturing, customer retention and customer support so the manual input of your human teams is minimised while increasing the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, sales interactions and customer support cases.
The end result is more leads, more customers and, crucially, more happy customers who are going to keep paying for your software product.
ActiveCampaign’s native CRM is the home of your lead and customer data while its innovative drag-and-drop automation builder is the force behind your lead nurturing and customer retention strategies. You can start by using pre-built automation recipes for common campaign goals, such as welcome emails or re-engagement campaigns, or build your own sequences from scratch.
You can automatically qualify and score leads, based on your predefined criteria, and create segmented lists in response to their position along the sales funnel. This allows you to send highly-relevant, targeted campaigns to individual users with messages encouraging them to take the next step.
#3: LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Target high-quality B2B SaaS customersLinkedIn Sales Navigator is a crucial tool for any B2B SaaS company that wants to reach key decision-makers at target companies. In a sense, this is an account-based marketing (ABM) prospecting tool that allows you to identify individuals at the companies you want to call customers.
Where it differs from traditional ABM platforms is that it allows you to pinpoint individuals at an incredibly granular level – so you can target the buyers who make the final call on purchase decisions.
Key features:
Identify prospects: Find the decision-makers at your target companies on the world’s biggest professional network.Advanced search: Use Sales Navigator’s advanced search to find new target companies and build your list of target contacts.Lead recommendations: Customised lead recommendations suggest new prospects for you, based on your previous search criteria.Real-time updates: Account and lead data are automatically updated in real-time so you know, for example, when people change jobs and your campaigns need to adapt.InMail Messages: Reach prospects on LinkedIn even if you’re not connected.With Sales Navigator’s advanced search, you can narrow down on prospects based on the company they work at, the position they hold and their seniority level to ensure you’re reaching people with the right level of influence.
You can use the advanced search function to discover new prospects, too, by searching for users based on their location, the company size they work for, the industry they work in and the language of their profile.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator also recommends lead prospects to you and the more you use the platform, the more relevant these become over time.
Another key feature that sets Sales Navigator apart from traditional ABM marketing tools is that its data is updated in real-time so that you know contact details are accurate without any delay when prospects change roles or move to another company.
This is a big weakness for most ABM and prospecting tools but Sales Navigator is far more reliable, thanks to its direct access to LinkedIn account data.
Finally, one of the best features Sales Navigator offers is InMail Messages, which means you can reach out to prospects that you’re not already connected to on LinkedIn.
This is a major boost for SaaS companies that need to reach out to key decision-makers without jumping through all of the usual organic hoops to build connections with people on LinkedIn.
#4: Hunter.io: Find & verify email addresses assigned to company URLsHunter.io is another crucial tool for B2B SaaS companies although it can be a powerful asset for software companies outside of the B2B niche, too. Hunter’s standout feature is its Domain Search tool that allows you to type in the URL of a company and access a list of all the email addresses assigned to that domain.
You don’t get the same level of accuracy or up-to-date data that’s available on LinkedIn Sales Navigator but you do get access to a much larger set of data than LinkedIn alone.
Key features:
Domain Search: Find the email addresses of a company by typing in their URL.Email Finder: Find the email addresses of professionals using their name and company URL.Email Verifier: Verify email addresses are accurate and active before sending any messages.Bulk Email Finder: Submit lists of names and domain names to find bulk email lists for your target companies.TechLookup: Find companies using specific technologies, such as WordPress or HubSpot.Campaigns: Create cold email campaigns quickly from within the Hunter.io platform.Email tracking: Track emails sent from Gmail to see when recipients open your emails (or don’t), track campaign performance and follow up accordingly.Chrome & Firefox add-ons: Quickly find contacts from within your browser using the Chrome or Firefox add-on.Templates: Cold email templates help you create messages and get campaigns running faster.Hunter understands that email address scraping isn’t always the most accurate way to build prospect lists. To overcome this issue, the company has built its own Email Verifier tool that checks your lists to ensure all of the email addresses are accurate and in-use.
You can also find email addresses by typing in the name of prospects and the URL of the company they work for. With the Bulk Email Finder, you can submit a file of names and URLs to automatically generate a bulk list of email addresses and then run these through the verifier to filter out inaccurate and inactive email addresses.
My personal favourite feature in Hunter.io is TechLookup, which allows you to type in a specific software tool, such as Unbounce, and generate a list of companies using the technology.
From here, you can generate email addresses from each company using these tools or head back over to LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find out who the key decision makers are at these companies.
#5: Slack: The communication tool for SaaS teams & remote creativesSlack is one of the biggest SaaS success stories in history, capped off with its $27.7 billion acquisition by Salesforce in late-2020. While the match-up of Salesforce and Slack has raised a few eyebrows, Slack’s continued success deserves all the credit it receives.
For software teams, the tool is an indispensable communication platform that excelled through its own simplicity. This is essentially a messaging app that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in the early 2010s, driven by calculated growth marketing strategies. Now, Slack is the industry standard for workplace communication – an area where Facebook, Google and countless tech giants have failed – while a select few like Microsoft have merely managed to mimic Slack’s innovation.
Key features:
Organised communication: Slack enables SaaS teams to organise communications in channels so that information is always accessible to everyone who needs it.Collaboration: One-to-one and group messaging with instant file sharing remove barriers to online collaboration.Workflow Builder: Automate routine actions and communications to boost productivity and creative output.App & integrations: Slack integrates with thousands of apps like Google Drive, Office 365 and Trello so team members spend less time switching between apps, transferring data, copying and pasting, etc.Search & history: All messages and files are easily found using Slack’s built-in search function and history timelines so you can also access the information you need.For SaaS companies, collaboration throughout the design, development and marketing stages is a convoluted process where departments bump shoulders and teams dynamic can change quite drastically.
Email was never an effective channel for team collaboration but Slack was the first company to truly replace the inbox with an instant messaging format that removed communication barriers, regardless of location – or, at least, it was the first one to take off.
For what it’s worth, I feel the key to Slack’s success is the fact it was built by a remote team of software developers, for teams of software developers, during a time when remote SaaS was booming, while there was a distinct lack of remote team collaboration tools.
This developer-centric approach means Slack works just as well for teams in the office as it does for remote teams working across locations and the Covid-19 pandemic means this is more important for SaaS teams than ever.
While Zoom is writing all the headlines as the video calling app of choice during lockdowns, Slack has offered the same feature for years, allowing you to call team members, set up group calls and share screens within a matter of clicks.
#6: Wistia: Video marketing made easier for SaaS companiesVideo content is crucial for SaaS companies that basically need to make a bunch of code and UI elements look and feel exciting. According to insights from Databox, video ads generate twice as many clicks on social media but software companies have to work hard across every channel to show their products in an exciting way.
Video content is the most dynamic way to showcase your software and Wistia makes video marketing a whole bunch easier with its self-hosted service.
Key features:
Self-hosted videos: Host ad-free videos on Wistia and embed them on your website without hurting the user experience.Video animations: Bring your SaaS pages to life with autoplay video animations that load quickly to keep your loading times in check.Software demos: Create software demo videos using Wistia’s software and embed them on your website to showcase the best of your product.Capture leads: Turn video views into leads and email subscribers by adding CTAs to your videos.A/B testing: Test different videos, placements and customisations to determine which combinations achieve the best performance.Heatmaps: See how users are engaging with your pages and video content using heatmaps.Instead of embedding YouTube videos, you can embed your own videos on your website, completely ad-free, and control the way they appear on your page.
Wistia’s embedded videos are great for placing software explainer demos on your website but you can also embed short video animations that automatically play as the user scrolls down the page. This is a great alternative to using GIF images for animations, which can seriously hurt your loading times.
With Wistia, you can use asynchronous loading to increase perceived page speed, which means short video animations – for example, showing features in action on your homepage – don’t need to cause any loading issues.
#7: Intercom: Automated customer support & lead generation for SaaS companiesAs mentioned earlier, the SaaS customer journey is a long one and the range of interactions with leads and customers is diverse – ranging from first-time visits and email signups to purchases, customer support queries and more.
Intercom helps SaaS companies manage these interactions across the entire journey and compile information that can improve the quality of long-term relationships.
This starts with lead generation, where you can use Intercom to reach out to website visitors with a chatbot widget. Sometimes, asking the right question can inspire action and you can automate your bots to only trigger after a delay or a user’s behaviour looks indecisive.
Key features:
Chatbots: Automate the first stage of customer support using on-site chatbots to provide instant responses.Live chat: Connect users with human support reps at the opportune moment.Instant FAQs: Use support bots to provide Q&A sessions and deliver specific articles to resolve up to 29% of customer questions.Connect with website visitors: Shorten the time between intent and purchase by connecting with your website visitors in real-time.Business Messenger: Engage customers throughout their journey with tours, and messages on your website and in your product.Product Tours: Guide customers through their first steps, highlight what’s new, and give proactive guidance at scale.Announcements: Share product updates or promotions by email, and drive customers to your website or product to take action.Lead qualification: Intelligent bots and routing rules let your teams focus on what they do best – so your website visitors get the greatest possible experience.Intercom is far more than a chatbot system, though. It’s a business growth platform that recognises customer retention and acquisition. This is why it’s the ideal on-site channel of its kind for SaaS companies: it provides all of the tools you need to capture new on-page leads, but also to nurture your existing customers after the initial purchase.
Intercom can provide the first line of customer service with automated bots and FAQs capable of dealing with up to 29% of user queries. This provides an instant response to every interaction while allowing your human team to focus on the most urgent support cases.
This elevates your customer care system, both in terms of efficiency and quality.
Intercom also has a number of specialist features for SaaS companies to help you announce new products and features, provide product tours and interact with users from within your software product – allowing you to manage the customer experience across the entire journey.
#8: VWO: CRO & customer experience optimisation for SaaS companiesEvery SaaS company needs a good set of conversion optimisation tools and VWO offers the vast majority of these in a single platform.
Aside from the usual CRO tools, you would expect for optimising your website, VWO also has you covered when it comes to optimising the software products that are the heart of your SaaS business.
VWO FullStack is the company’s software testing and optimisation suite, allowing you to run experiments within your applications without any noticeable impact on performance. While many tools like this can slow down your software or result in unwanted flickering during tests, VWO’s server-side technology ensures performance remains on par.
Key features:
VWO FullStack: Optimise your software products and test variations to improve the user experience with VWO FullStack.Product / feature deployment: Launch new products and features in stages to or different user types.Onboarding optimisation: Reduce onboarding dropout rates by optimising the steps users have to take between choosing your software product and physically using it. A/B testing: Run A/B tests, multivariate and split URL testing across your website.Heatmaps: Gain insight into what users are doing on your pages and optimise them to maximise conversions.Session recordings: Record video sessions to see what users are doing on your pages and identify UX problems or conversion killers.Funnel optimisation: Optimise every stage of your marketing funnel to maximise conversions and nurture leads across the buying process.On-page surveys: Get feedback from website visitors for user insights on key web elements and new changes.Of course, VWO also offers a full suite of tools for optimising your website to maximise lead captures and convert visitors into software users. You can combine screen recordings with heatmaps and user feedback to gain valuable insights about your most important pages and test variations to maximise performance.
VWO also helps you optimise the sales funnel to nurture leads along the path to purchase, identify any leaks in your funnel and reduce dropouts. There are built-in lead generation tools, too, including hello bars, modals, pop-ups and notifications that you can test on key pages to add incentive at key stages of the funnel.
There are plenty of SaaS-specific features available, too. You can use VWO to deploy new products or features to existing products, rolling out in stages or segmenting to different user types. The platform also has built-in testing tools for optimising your onboarding process, testing different pricing strategies and reducing form abandonment.
#9: UserVoice: Customer insights & user feedback for SaaS productsUserVoice is a dedicated feedback management system for SaaS companies that makes it easy to collect feedback from website and software users without adding too much friction to the user experience.
While there are plenty of user feedback software options on the market these days, there aren’t so many that cater for SaaS companies looking for a single platform to collect feedback from their software products as well as their websites.
UserVoice is by far the best option we’ve used to date.
Key features:
User feedback: Collect user feedback across your website and software products.Turn feedback into insights: Manage user feedback from every channel within UserVoice and generate valuable insights for smarter product, marketing and business decisions.Prioritise product improvements: Quickly understand customer needs, see customer demand, and prioritise features and product improvements.Customer segments: Compile data into segments based on different user types and your marketing objectives to understand which feedback matters to your business most.Product roadmaps: Keep everyone on the same page about product strategy. Create and share an always-up-to-date roadmap across your organisation.Engage customers: Keep your customers engaged with status updates, reactions and 1-to-1 communication.While the primary purpose UserVoice is to help you collect feedback from your website visitors and software users, it’s the back-end feedback management features that make this such an impressive platform for SaaS companies.
With UserVoice, you can add dedicated spaces for users to leave feedback, knowing that your team will take notice. You can also capture feedback from Slack, Salesforce and Zendesk, bringing all of your data into UserVoice to compile insights and make informed decisions.
Team members can share feedback instantly, prioritise feedback in terms of importance and respond to feedback from individual users.
You can also segment feedback by different user types to prioritise the needs of your most important customers. UserVoice also helps you identify users who are at risk of abandoning your software so you can take steps to minimise churn rate and address the most pressing issues with your website, product and customer experience.
#10: Databox: All of your marketing & business data in one placeSaaS companies rely on a lot of data to make informed development, marketing and businesses decisions. Databox pulls all of this data into a single platform so that you can access everyone from one place and create custom dashboards to meet the unique needs of your business.
For example, you can create a dashboard dedicated to customer retention, pulling in data from every relevant source: Google Analytics, your CRM, paid advertising platforms, Intercom and more.
You only pull in the data you need from each source, allowing you to create a concise dashboard featuring the metrics and KPIs that matter most for customer retention, from every relevant channel, and nothing else.
Key features:
All your data in one place: Pull in data from all of your marketing and analysis tools to view and compare insights from one place.Custom dashboards: Build dashboards using data from multiple sources to compile the insights and KPIs that matter most.Dashboard templates: Start with dashboard templates and customise them to meet your needs.Integrate your data: Upload any data, connect an SQL database or send via an API to integrate and visualise your data.Calculate metrics: Easily calculate new metrics from any data source using databox’s drag and drop builder.Goal tracking: Set, assign and monitor goals across multiple channels from one application.KPI scorecards: Keep up-to-date with KPIs in real-time with scannable scorecards.KPI alerts: Receive performance alerts via email, Slack or in-app notification.Given the complexity and length of the typical SaaS customer journey, it’s easy for software companies to drown in data without gaining any valuable insights. Databox brings all of your data into one place and gives you the freedom to create dashboards and reports focused on your marketing goals.
You can start by using Databox’s built-in dashboard templates, like the Google Ads template above, and customise them to meet your needs. Once you’re comfortable with the platform, you can then build your own dashboards from scratch or combine elements from different templates to gain insights from multichannel reports.
Build your SaaS martech stackEvery tool we’ve looked at in this article is the best-in-class for SaaS companies, delivering specialist features for overcoming the unique marketing challenges modern software companies face.
Some of these tools service very specific roles, such as Wistia for SaaS video marketing and Databox for bringing all of that SaaS data into one place.
Others are more extensive: TrueNorth for SaaS marketing simulation, planning and tracking; ActiveCampaign for an all-in-one CRM, email marketing, automation and customer support system; or VWO as the comprehensive optimisation platform for SaaS websites and software products.
This means we’ve covered a lot of ground in this article and, while we’ve only looked at 10 marketing tools for SaaS companies, these are close to the only ones you’ll ever need.
The post 10 Must-Have Marketing Tools for SaaS Companies appeared first on Venture Harbour.
How to Increase MQLs for SaaS Companies
SaaS marketers’ priority is generally to capture as many leads as possible with the aim of converting these leads into users and, ultimately, paying customers further down the line.
The thing is, not all leads are equally valuable to a SaaS company. Plenty of people may engage with your content, sign up to your email lists and even try out a free version of your software without ever buying into your product when the crucial moment comes.
65% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their biggest challenge (HubSpot).Simply generating leads isn’t enough to maximise user numbers and revenue. SaaS marketers need to capture the right kind of leads from prospects who are most likely to buy into the product and spend enough money for you to hit your revenue targets
This is where marketing qualified leads (MQLs) come in.
These are prospects that demonstrate a genuine interest in buying your product and match your target buyer personas (company size, revenue, budget, technology use, etc.).
In this article, we look at how you can qualify leads to improve the quality of prospects on your marketing list and increase the number of MQLs you generate from every channel.
What are we looking at in this article?This article is geared towards SaaS companies and marketers although the same principles apply to businesses of all types. We’re focusing on the typical objectives of a software company (eg: capturing leads and converting them into paying users) but this is a good all-round guide for any company that wants to generate more MQLs.
Here are the sections we’ll be covering today:
What is an MQL?Inbound marketing: Capturing MQLs and leads that can be nurtured into MQLs further down the line.Account-based marketing: Targeting specific companies and decision-makers to capture MQLs from your ideal buyer personas.Lead qualification & scoring: Qualifying and scoring leads to prioritise the most valuable prospects.Increase SaaS MQLs: Key strategies for increasing SaaS MQLs.First, we’ll start by explaining what an MQL is and how you can define them for your business. Then, we’ll explain how you can capture more MQLs through inbound marketing and account-based marketing before we look at how MQLs fit into your wider marketing and sales strategy.
Once we’re done, you’ll understand why MQLs are so important for SaaS companies (or any company for that matter) and how to capture more of them with specific strategies for SaaS companies.
What is an MQL?A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect that matches your target buyer personas and demonstrates real potential to complete your conversion goals.
So, if your ideal customer is CEOs at technology startups, programming students probably don’t qualify as MQLs for you. Likewise, if you need customers to spend an average of $30,000 per year to hit your revenue targets, small businesses with a $<5k annual software budget may not be worth pursuing, regardless of how much they like the free version of your platform.
In other words, an MQL not only shows a proven interest in buying your SaaS product, but also the ability to help you achieve your marketing/business goals – user numbers, revenue, annual spend, customer lifetime value, etc.
By defining, targeting and capturing more MQLs, you can concentrate your marketing efforts on the most valuable leads without wasting resources on prospects that are never going to buy or spend enough on your software product.
How do you identify MQLs?Before you can capture MQLs, you need to define what these mean for your business and this combines two key components of your marketing and sales strategies:
Buyer personas: The characteristics your target customers have to demonstrate their value to your business.Marketing goals: The marketing goals you need these buyer personas to help you achieve.For example, a company like Slack will have a broad range of buyer personas, ranging from CEOs at enterprise companies (the big spenders) to bootstrapped creative teams and freelancers (free users who boost the company’s active user numbers, even if they’re not paying).
There are two very different marketing objectives there: maximise revenue and maximise user numbers (most of whom will presumably be free users).
There’s value in both types of prospects for Slack and, arguably, the free users have been more important in the company’s incredible growth story. However, now that the company has reached a certain size (and, even more so after being bought by Salesforce), there comes a point where the company has to prioritise annual revenue.
When it comes to your own SaaS company and defining MQLs, you have to have a solid understanding of your target buyer personas and which marketing/business goals they’re going to help you achieve.
Defining your MQL criteriaDefining your MQL criteria should be fairly straightforward if you’ve got detailed, accurate buyer personas. Let’s say your most important target customer is small businesses capable of spending $10,000+ per year on your software product.
You need to identify the business characteristics that suggest they’re able to meet your minimum annual revenue per user (RPU).
Your aim here is to rule out businesses that can’t spend this minimum without narrowing your reach to the point where you miss out on leads that could.
For example, your research may find that companies with 5+ employees are most likely to reach the $10k threshold. In this case, you could place businesses with fewer than five employees on a low-priority list and focus your efforts on the MQLs that meet your criteria.
Taking this further, you may find companies in certain industries tend to spend more than others, meaning small finance businesses with 5+ employees top your list of prospects.
Next, you might decide to target companies already paying for similarly priced software with the aim of bringing them over to your own product.
The more specific your buyer personas are, the more complex your MQL criteria becomes. The trick is attributing the characteristics of your buyer personas to the likelihood of them hitting your marketing objectives.
Qualifying your leadsWith your MQLs identified and criteria defined, you need to implement a lead qualification process for capturing the necessary data from leads to separate MQLs from those that don’t qualify.
You also need the right tools to segment MQLs from non-qualifying leads and even different types of MQLs.
We’ll explore this in more detail later, in the lead qualification & scoring section, where we explore the methods of qualifying MQLs and how you can use them to prioritise the most valuable leads to your business.
Inbound marketing: Casting a wide net to capture leads & MQLsFor SaaS companies, inbound marketing is like casting a wide net to build as much awareness for your products as possible and generate large volumes of leads from potential users and customers.
Some software companies (particularly those that prioritise user numbers) want to cast the widest net they can and this is often the case for freemium products where maximising free user numbers is a valid objective.
Obviously, companies like Slack, Trello and Spotify want to convert as many free users into paying customers as they can but high user numbers impress stakeholders and potential investors.
For many SaaS companies, there’s value in collecting as much user data as they can, too, whether it comes from free or paid users.
The tricky thing about inbound marketing is that it’s highly effective for generating traffic and capturing leads. However, generating the right traffic and capturing leads that are likely to use your software is another challenge entirely.
By adopting an MQL process in your inbound marketing strategy, you can control how wide your net is and prioritise all of your resources on leads that can add true value to your business.
Capturing the data you need from inbound trafficTo qualify inbound traffic, you need to capture data from these users to distinguish between prospects with the intent/ability to meet your MQL criteria from those without.
The easiest way for SaaS companies to do this is to create a free account system, encouraging new users to sign up and create an account without putting any money on the line.
The trick is offering enough value via free accounts to capture enough signups.
You might decide to create a free version of your software or a free plan that allows new users to get started with your product and see what it has to offer. While they’re using this free version, you get the opportunity to collect valuable user data, which you can use to qualify leads.
Source: MicrosoftYou can capture this data by encouraging users to complete their profile by adding the information you need to qualify leads and you can ramp up the incentive to complete these profiles by gamifying the process with rewards and progress counters.
Alternatively, you could use a platform like UserVoice to deliver surveys to users within your app.
Of course, you can also take the more traditional route of prompting users to provide the data you need through email campaigns but you don’t need a free product or plan for this.
The downside to offering free accounts, versions and products is that you might generate a higher volume of leads than you would like that don’t meet your MQL criteria.
Now, if you’re looking to maximise growth and free users are going to help boost your numbers, that’s fine – as long as there’s value in that for your business.
Keep in mind, though, that most CRM and marketing platforms charge fees based on the number of leads/contacts you have on the system and the managing a pool of leads that never upsell can be demanding (luckily, you can reduce most of the workload through automation).
Either way, lead volume isn’t always the priority and you might prefer to have a smaller list of higher quality contacts, most of whom stand a strong chance of buying into your product.
We encourage users to sign up for a free trial on the Serene website.So, instead of providing free open accounts that are open to everyone, another alternative is to offer a free trial to your paid product, knowing fewer people will sign up with the added bonus that they’ve already demonstrated a strong interest in your software.
You still get the chance to capture all the data you need through the signup process and you can encourage users to complete their account profile in the same way we explained earlier – the only limitation is you have to capture this data before their trial runs out.
Account-based marketing: Going straight for your target customersUnlike inbound marketing, which casts a wide net to capture a large volume of unidentified leads, account-based marketing (ABM) targets specific companies and individuals that you want to call customers.
According to TOPO’s 2019 Account Based Benchmark Report, 86% of marketers say their account-based strategies win more clients than traditional methods while 80% say ABM improves customer lifetime value and 76% report higher ROIs.
So, while inbound marketing is effective for maximising lead volume and user numbers (especially for freemium models and B2C products), account-based marketing allows you to specify high-value prospects and target the decision-makers who ultimately choose which software products they use.
Don’t take my word for it, though. Here’s how HubSpot describes account-based marketing and some of its key benefits:
“Account-based marketing (ABM) is a focused growth strategy in which marketing and sales collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a mutually-identified set of high-value accounts.
“[ABM] allows you to weed out less-valuable companies early on and ensure marketing and sales are in complete alignment — in return, your team can leap into the critical processes of engaging and delighting those accounts much faster…
“…By doing this — along with personalizing the buyer’s journey and tailoring all communications, content, and campaigns to those specific accounts — you’ll see greater ROI and a boost in customer loyalty.”
The Ultimate Guide to Account-Based Marketing (ABM) – HubSpot
An added bonus with account-based marketing is that you qualify your leads before you even target them. You identify companies within your target industries, of certain sizes, with expected budgets, facing known problems, using specific types of technology and whatever else your MQL criteria wants to see from your ideal customer.
The trick to successful account-based marketing isn’t to target the company, though. It’s to target the individuals at those companies who make the business purchasing decisions – the people who have the final say on whether they’re company buys a product like yours (or the people within that company who influence these decision-makers).
DiscoverOrg features in our list of top ABM tools.To achieve this, you need the right prospecting tools to not only identify companies that meet your MQL requirements but also the individuals you need to reach at those companies.
Take a look at our 10 Account-Based Marketing Tools to Improve Your ABM Performance article for a look at the best ABM tools that will help you identify and reach your ideal customers.
Lead qualification & scoringIf your aim is to increase MQLs, you’re going to need a robust system for qualifying and scoring leads. We look at this subject in detail in our Complete Guide to Lead Qualification & Scoring but, for now, let’s quickly specify what we mean by lead qualification and lead scoring.
Lead qualification is a method of measuring and/or predicting the quality and value of leads, based on the data you have about them and the way they interact with your brand.Lead scoring allows you to assign a value to each lead, based on various criteria. These scores can change as leads progress along the buying process, making it easier for your marketing and sales teams to prioritise leads at each stage of the sales funnelLead qualification is the system that separates MQLs from leads that aren’t worth pursuing or prioritising. Leads that are approved as MQLs are placed on your marketing lists for lead nurturing campaigns while those that fail to make the cut are generally placed on a non-priority list until they demonstrate anything of value.
Lead qualification is basically a yes/no system where leads either meet your MQL requirements or they don’t.
Lead scoring, on the other hand, allows you to place a numerical score on leads, cases and customers to reflect their value or potential value to your business. With lead scoring, you can prioritise your marketing and sales efforts to focus on the prospects with the greatest potential and adjust your bids to invest more in the leads that are expected to generate the highest returns.
Here’s a handy video explanation from HubSpot:
There are two basic key types of lead scoring you need to know about: implicit leads scoring and explicit lead scoring.
Implicit lead scoring: Generally involves scoring leads based on user behaviours – the pages they visit on your site, actions they take and interests they show.Explicit lead scoring: Matches prospects to your buyer profiles by comparing demographic data and other information you collect from users, normally through online forms.Implicit lead scoring uses accessible data from user sessions without people actively handing over information. You’ll get this from your analytics tools, cookies, tracking URLs, events tracking and other tools.
Explicit lead scoring, on the other hand, uses data you collect from users, which requires them to engage with your brand more deeply. Explicit lead scoring is also generally more reliable than implicit – for example, getting users to confirm their location rather than using their IP address.
For a comprehensive breakdown of the different types of lead qualification and lead scoring techniques, go back to our Complete Guide to Lead Qualification & Scoring.
Implicit lead scoring is based on the user data accessible to you without prospects having to actively provide information.Explicit lead scoring is where you capture data from users via web forms or user accounts.Demographic lead scoring values prospects based on characteristics – their age, where they live, what they do for a living and anything else you identify as being important.Organisational lead scoring targets companies and key individuals working at companies identified as ideal target clients.Stakeholder-level lead qualification specifically targets stakeholding decision-makers at your target companies.Behavioural lead scoring assesses the online behaviour of your prospects and uses session data to determine their value.Product & account lead scoring ranks prospects based on the value of the product they show interest in or the predicted account value of having them as a customer.SaaS brands can use a mix of these lead qualification and scoring techniques but software companies are naturally set up for success with explicit lead scoring – so start by making the most of this.
You can build a more intricate lead qualification and scoring system over time, bringing in other techniques such as organisational lead scoring (for account-based marketing), behavioural lead scoring and product/account lead scoring.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the specific strategies you can use to build your SaaS MQL generation strategy.
Maximising MQL generation for SaaS companiesSaaS businesses have the benefit of collecting a depth of user data that most companies could never dream of capturing legitimately. So this is a key theme throughout the most effective strategies for increasing MQLs for software companies.
Strategy #1: The freemium modelThe freemium model isn’t only effective for maximising user numbers, it also opens the door for an effective lead qualification channel by allowing users to create a personal account at the earliest stages of the buying process.
The sooner new users create an account, the sooner you can start attributing data to them individually and comparing them against your MQL requirements. You can also score leads on a more granular level by assigning personal information and session data to draw an accurate picture of their needs/potential.
As explained earlier, the downside of the freemium model is that you’ll also generate a large number of users who’ll never upgrade to paid plans. The upside is, you should still end up with a larger volume of MQLs and paying customers overall but you have to invest in lead nurturing and automation technology to manage non-paying leads, qualify MQLs and nurture them into paying customers.
This is the same strategy used by many of the biggest SaaS success stories of recent times, ranging from Slack and Trello to Spotify and Dropbox.
Strategy #2: Make the most of user account dataOne of the biggest advantages you have as a SaaS company is being able to use account data to qualify leads and this isn’t restricted to the freemium strategy, either.
Whether you provide free plans, free trials or demos for potential customers, you have the opportunity to capture the information you need to qualify leads as soon as they create their account.
How you limit access or features is up to you but make sure you’re taking advantage of user accounts to capture the personal data you need to qualify MQLs and prioritise your marketing strategies.
Strategy #3: Collect session data to qualify & score leadsAnother key factor to consider in your lead generation strategy is the opportunity to collect session data to qualify and score leads. Even if you run a relatively modest free trial period (7 days or less), you have a valuable window to capture user session data and feedback to gain insights into their needs and potential value.
Asana offers up walkthrough prompts as you start using its app for the first time (source).You can enhance this experience by providing in-app guides, tutorials or walkthroughs and personalising the feedback they receive based on the features they engage with.
Generally speaking, the longer your free trials run for the more reliable your session data becomes, as you can track user engagement over a longer period. If you’re running on a freemium model or offering a free forever plan, you can track engagement over whatever timeframe you choose.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that time-limited free trials may increase incentive to use your platform, which can be great for collecting more data in a short space of time but can exaggerate engagement metrics.
Strategy #4: Offer free tools outside of your main productWe’ve discussed this strategy in previous articles looking at B2B lead generation strategies and it’s used by some of the best SaaS companies in the business.
HubSpot takes this strategy to the extreme with its free CRM – one of the best customer relationship management (CRM) platforms around that’s 100% free, forever.
The genius of this MQL generation strategy is that the CRM offers one of the best products in its category but users need to integrate other tools to truly get the business benefits, which leads them to HubSpot’s paid products (limited free versions are also available).
By allowing any business owner to sign up for its free CRM, HubSpot captures user data very early on in the consideration process, allowing it to qualify and score leads based on their user data and session data, as we explain above.#
This isn’t the only free tool HubSpot offers, either.
The company also provides a range of free tools outside of its account-based products that anyone can use, such as its Website Grader tool. Users simply type in their website URL and email address to receive a free report on the performance of their site.
In exchange, HubSpot captures email addresses to send follow-up campaigns to capture more data and tempt users with other product offerings. It also assigns website URLs to the emails addresses captures, which can be added to the new contact’s profile where further data can be added over time.
Strategy #5: Capture the data you need through onboardingOnboarding is an opportunity to capture the data you need to quickly qualify leads, especially if you’re offering free plans or trials. You have to find the right balance between making onboarding as easy as possible (to maximise completions) and prompting users to submit the data you need from them.
You might want to take the Slack route and make onboarding as easy as possible for new users but the downside is you might not capture the data you want by minimising friction as much as you could.
As you’ll see from this Hotjar case study looking at how DashThis optimised its onboarding process, you don’t need to remove every friction point to hit the right balance, though.
Much like the introductory walkthroughs we mentioned earlier, adding friction can actually benefit the user – another concept we’ve looked at in detail before in our 9 Ways to Increase Leads By Adding ‘Good’ Friction to Your Website article.
So don’t be afraid to experiment with data capture in your onboarding processes, especially if capturing MQLs is more important than simply maximising your total number of leads.
Strategy #6: Automate lead qualification & scoringWhichever MQL strategies you adopt, the key to scaling growth is to automate lead qualification to prevent any bottlenecks as your collection of leads grows.
Thankfully, with tools like ActiveCampaign, it’s never been easier to automate lead qualification and scoring across the entire customer journey. Regardless of how many leads you capture, ActiveCampaign allows you to create automated qualification processes so that every lead is qualified without any manual input from your marketing and sales teams.
You can also automatically update lead scores, based on how they respond to your emails, the actions they take on your website and their behaviour within your software product.
This allows you to automate campaign responses to trigger as scores change – for example, when a high-value prospect visits your pricing page after clicking the upgrade button in your app or a new lead unsubscribes to your email list.
Strategy #7: Use prospecting tools to find new MQLsThis will be the core of your account-based marketing strategy if you’re a B2B SaaS provider and, once again, you can find the best prospecting tools in our 10 Account-Based Marketing Tools to Improve Your ABM Performance article.
However, prospecting tools and account-based marketing can be useful for identifying new B2C MQLs, too.
While B2B SaaS companies will want to trigger key business decision-makers at their target companies, B2C providers can target individuals working at companies likely to have an interest in their software.
For example, a company like Headspace can use any prospecting tool to target stressed employees and promote its app as the perfect tool for reducing stress and anxiety. The company can also personalise their messages to reflect the nature of prospects’ industry, the size of their company or even their job title.
Likewise, you can use the technographics feature in a prospecting tool like Leadiro to find out which hardware, software and technology solutions companies are using to reveal the business challenges they face.
Naturally, B2B SaaS companies can use this to find companies using similar products to their own and position themselves as the better option but a more B2C-driven provider can also use these insights.
For example, a course provider like Future Learn can target staff with courses promising them to take the next leap in their career or training for the specific tools that will help them get a promotion within their existing company – or a job with one of their rivals.
The point is, account-based marketing is invaluable for B2B SaaS providers but it can also be a powerful strategy for software companies targeting users outside of the B2B niche – you just have to be a bit more creative with your prospecting tactics.
Make the most of SaaS data to maximise MQLsWhile SaaS marketing is a unique challenge it does have its advantages and the wealth of lead/user data you’re able to collect provides everything you need to qualify MQLs with accuracy – to a level most businesses could only dream of.
So make the most of this data and follow the steps we’ve outlined in this article to maximise MQLs and prioritise your marketing strategies to convert the highest-value prospects into paying customers.
The post How to Increase MQLs for SaaS Companies appeared first on Venture Harbour.
Agile Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
Agile marketing is one of the hottest trends in the industry but it’s also one of the most misunderstood and poorly implemented. Utilised properly, agile marketing allows you to respond to marketing trends quickly, identify new opportunities and capitalise on them before everyone else is doing the same thing.
Unfortunately, the term “agile marketing” itself has become a buzzword in the marketing industry, which results in a lot of misinformation and misconceptions.
In this guide, we run through everything you need to know about agile marketing, how to decide whether it’s for your business and how to implement it successfully.
What are we looking at in this guide?As this is the ultimate guide to agile marketing, we’re going to be delving into a fair amount of detail in this article. So let’s start by looking at the key points we’ll be covering to give you an idea of what’s ahead.
There are nine sections in this guide, each designed to give you a stronger understanding of what agile marketing really means for your business and how to implement it:
What is agile marketing?The 7 characteristics of agile marketingThe pros & cons of agile marketingAgile marketing misconceptionsHow to build and manage agile marketing teamsHow to manage agile marketing projectsHow to build your agile marketing tech stackAs there are so many misconceptions about agile marketing, it’s important that we start with the basics. First, we define agile marketing and look at its key characteristics before comparing the pros and cons you need to be aware of.
Then, we look at some of the most common misconceptions about agile marketing to get rid of any wrong ideas you may have picked up elsewhere.
Once we’ve got the basics covered, we can explain the key agile marketing concepts you need to know before we show you how to implement agile marketing across its three most important pillars: your agile team, project management and your agile tech stack.
Finally, we’ll ask whether agile marketing is right for your business and lay out the key considerations to help you answer this for yourself.
What is agile marketing?Agile marketing is tricky to define in a single sentence and this is partly why there are so many misconceptions about it. Part of this complexity is due to the fact that agile marketing isn’t a single principle in itself but rather a set of principles applied to marketing processes.
In this situation, I like to hand-pick some of the best definitions from trusted sources and explain why these explanations are valid.
“Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating. At scale, a high-functioning agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week.”
Agile marketing: A step-by-step guide; McKinsey
First up, we’ve got the above definition from McKinsey’s own guide to agile marketing. I like this definition because it correctly credits data and analytics as the key component and also states some of the key benefits: fast deployment, rapid iteration, running many campaigns simultaneously and testing new ideas every week.
Agile marketing is not a strategy; it’s an approach to marketing processes that informs and guides your strategies through data-driven insights and constant learning.
Next, we have an explanation from CoSchedule, which refers to the roots of agile marketing in software development:
“It’s a project management framework that borrows the principles of agile software development (which enables teams to hit ship dates under budget more consistently) and applies it to a marketing context. It achieves this by streamlining team structure, communication, processes, and workflows to maximize efficiency without sacrificing quality.”
How to Get Started With Agile Marketing and Do Your Best Work, CoSchedule
As CoSchedule explains, agile marketing takes concepts from agile software development and applies/adapts them to marketing processes.
The same article goes to say that “this results in doing better work more quickly with fewer missed deadlines,” adding that “it also allows teams to respond to changes in the market and adjust tactics according to what works much more rapidly than the typical annual ‘big campaign’ advertising model.”
It’s worth understanding this history because it helps define agile marketing correctly but also avoid some of the common misconceptions and how certain agile development principles have to be adapted for marketing purposes.
Jim Ewel was one of the earliest and most passionate advocates for agile marketing in the early 2000s. He defined his Agile Marketing Manifesto by adapting the key principles of agile development and previous suggestions from programmer and entrepreneur, Scott Brinker.
Here are the key principles Ewel sets out:
Individuals & interactions over processes and toolsResponding to change over following a planIntimate customer tribes over impersonal mass marketsTesting & data over opinions and conventionsNumerous small experiments over a few large betsEngagement & transparency over official posturingGetting out of the building over formal market researchTransparency & trust over official posturingContinuous improvement & engagement over big launch cyclesMeasurement & accountability over opinions and justificationsBroadly speaking, these are a good summary of the key principles in agile marketing but there are some specifics I’m not so keen on – such as the suggestion that agile marketing doesn’t or can’t follow a plan.
Regardless, Jim Ewel’s manifesto illustrates that agile marketing is a set of principles and it also raises the point that you have to decide what some of these principles mean for your business.
The 7 characteristics of agile marketingThe principles defined in Jim Ewel’s Agile Marketing Manifesto describe the key characteristics of agile marketing quite nicely but they are a little data by now and a few of them are a tad rigid for the modern definition of agile.
So let’s take a look at the nine key characteristics of agile marketing – most of which are closely related to Ewel’s manifesto with a few w tweaks and updates for agile marketing in 2021.
#1: AdaptabilityThe most prominent characteristic of agile marketing is adaptability where teams are able to respond to new opportunities, trends and disruptions. The aim is to identify opportunities and seize them ahead of your rivals, predict which trends are worth responding to and devise plans for disruptions that could otherwise damage your business.
At the campaign level, adaptability is an ongoing process of measurement and experiment to find what works, what doesn’t and test new ideas, often with hundreds or thousands of campaigns running at any one time.
#2: ResponsivenessClosely related to adaptability is the agile characteristic of responsiveness and this is defined by the speed and success of your responses to new developments.
Responsiveness is a fine balance between collecting enough relevant data to inform key decisions and implementing changes quickly enough.
#3: TeamworkTeamwork is a fundamental characteristic of agile marketing teams with a heavy emphasis on digital collaboration to maximise efficiency and allow teams to work effectively across multiple locations.
Technology plays a key role in agile teamwork and a large portion of your tech stack will include software tools to help team members work better together.
#4: ProductivityA constant goal of agile marketing teams is to maximise productivity, enabling them to react faster, achieve goals sooner and waste less time on redundant tasks.
This is another where technology plays a key role and there are plenty of team productivity tools designed to help your team achieve more in a shorter time frame.
Automation is perhaps the most important technology of all when it comes to maximising productivity. However, you also need to adopt the right mindset to identify opportunities where tasks can or should be automated in order to increase efficiency or free up more time for creative tasks that can’t be handled by machines.
#5: ExperimentationAnother key principle in agile marketing is ongoing experimentation to test new ideas, verify hypotheses and bust misconceptions. Conversion optimisation and A/B testing are important parts of this but experimentation in agile marketing is much bigger than CRO.
You’re also experimenting with campaign ideas, testing different channels, trying out new tools and optimising your marketing processes to cut out inefficiencies and hit your targets faster.
#6: Data-drivenEverything is agile marketing is data-driven – everything. Key marketing decisions should always be informed, measured and verified by data, never opinion, assumption or gut feeling.
Yes, there’s room for creativity when it comes to campaign ideas, solutions and innovation but every idea is measured to determine its success or failure – and opportunities for improvement.
#7: Constant improvementOngoing, data-driven experimentation allows you to achieve a state of constant improvement where campaign performance and marketing processes continue to improve over time.
For example, your historical campaign experimentation data guides decisions for future campaign ideas by providing a blueprint for what works and what doesn’t, resulting in a higher success rate for new campaigns.
Likewise, refining your marketing processes by identifying deployment barriers helps you streamline the journey between creative concepts and live campaigns, allowing your team to deploy, track and optimise new campaigns within a shorter time frame.
The pros & cons of agile marketingAgile marketing gets a lot of positive press and it’s easy to get the impression that this is the new model for digital marketing that every business should adopt.
Like anything, though, there are pros and cons to agile marketing and it’s important to understand these before you try to overhaul your existing setup.
The pros of agile marketingLet’s start with the pros of agile marketing, most of which are well publicised by now:
Agile marketing is growth-oriented and, done properly, it will help you make the most of every chance to maximise growth.Agility means you’re able to respond to events – both good and bad – quickly.You can identify opportunities and seize them while your non-agile rivals are locked into fixed processes.You can also respond to market disruptions and survive difficult times by adapting.Agile marketing decisions are informed by data-driven insights rather than opinions, hunches or best practices.You learn from success and failures to inform smarter decisions in the future.Agile marketing will make you more productive and help you fix inefficiencies in your processes.Agile marketing enables you to hit short-term goals as well as the longer-term objectives of traditional marketing.Short-term flexibility makes it easier to align marketing with sales.Essentially, agile marketing is designed for modern companies that need to respond to market changes, new trends, customer demands and disruption quickly – all increasing priorities for brands in the digital, data-driven age.
This marketing principle evolved from agile software development and, for a while, it was most beneficial to the same software companies that needed equally agile marketing processes. Software and SaaS companies also tend to have access to all of the data required to make agile marketing work but, now, this level of data is available to businesses of all sizes, in every industry.
So agile marketing isn’t only for SaaS companies and startups anymore. Data access makes it possible for almost any business that can gain from the benefits listed above but it’s also important to understand the drawbacks.
The cons of agile marketingWith no shortage of positive talk about agile marketing, it’s probably more important to understand the negatives than the positives. For some businesses, agile marketing simply isn’t viable but, more commonly, understanding these negatives will help you build more effective agile marketing processes to mitigate or overcome them.
Agile marketing is misunderstood which leads to many companies implementing it incorrectly.Agile marketing requires top-to-bottom change which is difficult for some businesses to deal with.Long-term goals can suffer due to the emphasis on short-term targets in agile marketing.Fragmented output makes it harder to maintain quality and consistency across large or long-term tasks/projects.Talent acquisition can be tricky and you’re going to need a relatively large team (outsourcing is crucial for smaller teams).Agile sprints may lead to burnout so you have to plan breaks and recoveries strategically.Tech and data overload is a potential problem if you choose the wrong tools or have poor data processes in place.In truth, agile marketing can be tricky to implement for businesses that are used to doing things more traditionally – especially for larger, older companies that have invested a lot of time, money and personnel into those traditional processes and systems.
Likewise, very small businesses may not have the personnel, funds or data required to go truly agile – and the returns may not even be worth it.
However, for the growing majority of businesses that are determined to thrive through growth, agile marketing provides the flexible framework to capitalise on every growth opportunity – and you can overcome these potential drawbacks.
Agile marketing misconceptionsWith a firm grasp of the pros and cons of agile marketing, all that’s left now is to dispel some common misconceptions that can lead to false hopes, concerns or wrong ideas about how to implement it.
So here goes.
Misconception #1: Agile marketing is just the latest trendThere is some truth to this, in fairness, but agile marketing isn’t simply the latest disposable trend that’s going to be replaced by something new and shiny next year.
Agile marketing will continue to evolve but this concept is here to stay because the core principles behind it are necessary in today’s data-driven, fast-changing world.
What doesn’t help is the way a lot of marketers talk about agile marketing (or trends in general) like it’s some kind of holy gift handed down by the marketing gods that’s going to answer all of our prayers.
In reality, agile marketing is the adaptation of principles that drive modern software development and reshaped for marketing teams facing similar challenges. For some time, this mostly applied to software companies, SaaS brands and startups but the same challenges are now shared by almost any businesses looking to achieve rapid growth.
Misconception #2: Agile marketing is all about speedSpeed is a key concept in agile marketing but it’s never the main priority. It’s no good launching a new campaign in record time if it falls flat on its face because you cut a bunch of corners.
In agile marketing, speed is all about hitting your targets as soon as possible but you still have to actually hit them. Your aim is to find that balance of effectiveness where you’re completing objectives as quickly as possible and achieving rapid, continuous progress.
Every sprint is a dash to the finish line but, collectively, these sprints are part of a much bigger objective. Imagine the Olympics where the Sprints are the individual events and your team is the athletes who compete for medals while your company is the nation you represent and the overall medal tally is what matters most when the event is over.
Misconception #3: Agile marketing is all about changeGiven the adaptive, responsive nature of agile marketing, it’s easy to think that constant change is a key characteristic. To some extent, this may be true but, if change is the standout word when you describe the purpose of your agile marketing approach, you’re doing it wrong.
Change is a common by-product of agile marketing but these changes are part of the drive towards continuous improvement – and this means changing what doesn’t work and continuing to do what does.
In theory, as your marketing processes mature and your data insights become more reliable, the amount of change taking place within your agile marketing system should gradually decrease with your historical data guiding key decisions.
Change is never the objective but agile marketing should equip you with the tools and processes to change what and when it’s required.
Misconception #4: Agile marketing doesn’t support long-term strategiesThis is perhaps the most frustrating misconception about agile marketing but it’s also one of the most common problems companies run into. If you’re not disciplined, agile marketing can take your attention away from long-term objectives but it’s our responsibility, as marketers, to be able to work towards long and short-term goals.
Take SEO as an example, which is widely regarded as a long-term marketing strategy – and for good reason.
You target keywords and gradually build a search presence that’s designed to last but there are also short-term goals you can work on, too. Taking the agile marketing approach will help you identify new keyword opportunities, as they emerge, identify changes in consumer trends and even predict market shifts before they happen.
Why not run SEO and content marketing campaigns to publish a bunch of content for topics and keywords projected to increase in popularity over the next 12 months and build your presence before everyone else is fighting for the same spots?
This doesn’t mean you ditch your long-term SEO goals for top-level keywords.
You maintain your long-term strategies and integrate agile approaches to help you achieve short-term objectives to create a more comprehensive search strategy – and the same is true for agile marketing in general.
Misconception #5: Agile marketing sacrifices consistencyAgain, this is a gander if you focus all of your efforts into short-term goals but nobody is forcing you to do this. Consistency is a challenge for businesses, regardless of whether they take the agile marketing approach, and you have to put processes in place to maintain the same level of quality, voice, brand image, etc.
For example, if a consistent tone is important in your content marketing strategy, you have to create style guides, hire editors and use software tools to automate repetitive functions – none of which is unique to agile marketing.
Likewise, if you want customers to receive consistent quality via support channels, you have to invest in training, documentation, infrastructure and the tools necessary to deliver the same level of service to every customer.
Yes, consistency can be a challenge with agile marketing but this is true for any kind of business process carried out at scale.
How to build & manage your agile marketing teamAgile marketing is a team effort and it doesn’t matter how good your agile processes are, in theory, unless you’ve got the right personnel on board. In this section, we look at how you can build an agile marketing team that meets your business’ needs.
Structuring your agile marketing teamThere’s no single agile marketing team structure that works for every business and you’ll find all kinds of templates suggesting different variations.
Agile marketing: A step-by-step guide, McKinseyFor example, the War-Room Team suggested by McKinsey (above) aims to illustrate a team structure comprised of a Core War-Room Team, which includes a top tier of team leaders and a second tier of professionals for specific marketing activities, which can be in-house or outsourced as needed.
There’s also an Extended War-Room Team of departments/individuals that are outside of the core agile marketing team but still integral to helping it achieve its objectives.
Your own agile marketing team might look very different to this but there are some key concepts to learn from here:
Creating a tiered system for your agile marketing teamBuilding a core team of in-house / permanent talentOutsourcing activities to agencies or freelancersBy implementing a tiered system, you can assign roles and accountability more easily. With agile teams adapting so regularly, it’s important that everyone understands their responsibilities and who has the authority to give them new ones.
Build your core teamMuch like the McKinsey article suggests, you’re going to want to build a core team of quality talent – contracted employees who work in-house or, at least, on a permanent basis, even if they’re working from home.
As a rough guide, your core team should include team members that are any of the following:
Top-level marketing talentIndividuals you would struggle to replaceFull-time team membersThis should include your top-level team members: the decision makers, strategists and team managers. These are full-time positions where you want to recruit and retain top talent rather than constantly switching personnel.
Your core team may also include professionals for specific marketing roles, such as technical SEOs, landing page designers and content marketers – if they play a key role in your marketing strategies.
Here at Venture Harbour, our core team has two levels with our marketing leaders in the top tier. In the second tier, we have our key marketing talent – everything from campaign managers and CRO experts to data scientists and analysts.
These are the team members that you always want on your side, no matter what else might change.
Expand your team with talent from outsideWith your core team set up, the key to building a truly agile team is to bring talent in from the outside. This can include agencies, freelancers and part-time staff that are important but not indispensable to your team.
The benefit of outsourcing is that you can add talent on-demand and expand or contract your team as necessary.
Let’s say you launch a new campaign with an ambitious customer acquisition target for the next year – one that’s going to require a significantly larger team. Instead of investing large sums in expanding your in-house team, you can strategically choose which talent to bring in from outside on a temporary basis without any long-term risk.
You can also experiment with new strategies and bring in new team members for the trial period.
For example, let’s say your data suggests that creating regular video content will generate more traffic and leads per month. Instead of building a new video marketing team, you can hire freelancers to help you put this theory to the test before you start pumping money into it.
You can always build this video marketing team in the future, if that’s the way to go, but outside talent provides the flexibility you need in the meantime.
How to manage agile marketing projectsMuch like building an agile marketing team, there’s no single way you have to approach managing agile marketing projects but there are tried and tested frameworks you can use to get started and adapt to meet your needs.
The two most common frameworks used by agile marketing teams are called Scrum and Kanban.
Agile frameworks: Scrum vs KanbanScrum and Kanban are the two most common agile methodologies that have carried over from development into marketing. They both aim to make large projects more manageable by breaking them down into smaller chunks and setting constant, achievable goals to keep your team motivated and hitting targets.
However, the day-to-day workings of these two frameworks are significantly different.
Using the scrum framework for agile marketingThe Scrum framework was originally designed to address some of the unique challenges inherent in software development, such as:
Teams losing sight of the long-term goals while they’re working on new features, updates or bugs.Developers getting bogged down in code-level details.The needs of the company changing before long-term goals are even achieved.The complexity and time frames of software development can make it difficult for engineers and teams to keep sight of the long-term goals.
Likewise, when you’re knee-deep in code, it’s easy to get lost in details when rolling a feature or product out for the sake of progress over perfection makes more business sense.
Furthermore, the constant cycle of software updates and re-releases means that, sooner or later, the company’s goals are going to change, while teams are half-way through working on unmet objectives that are no longer relevant.
These same problems exist for modern marketing teams that are constantly working to short and long-term goals, which can change at any moment.
The Scrum framework aims to address these issues by encouraging your teams to regularly check-in to discuss the progress of short-term goals, ensure these actions are still contributing to your long-term goals and confirm that these long-term objectives are still the direction the business wants to take.
This allows marketing teams to adapt to the business’ needs as soon as new opportunities arise or market disruptions call for a change of course. In other words, it ensures that marketing efforts are always working towards the primary goals of the business.
The Scrum framework revolves around four team events:
Sprint Runs: Short, manageable projects with specific goals, usually running for no longer than 2-3 weeks.Daily Scrum (also known as Daily Standup): Short, daily meetings to check in on progress and ensure everything’s moving in the right direction.Sprint Review: Team meetings where the result/goal of the sprint run is discussed and reviewed.Sprint Retrospective: The final Sprint meeting where the Sprint itself and the working processes are analysed.As you can see, the key word that keeps popping up here is “Sprint” which refers to the short project cycles agile marketing teams work on when using the Scrum framework.
Sprint Runs in agile marketingSprints are power sessions that typically last anywhere between one and six weeks on a project, experiment or task with a defined goal. For example, you could be running a feedback campaign for a new feature on your software product or testing four variations of a landing page for a new product release.
You can break down larger projects into sprints, too. For example, if your design and paid advertising teams are tasked with creating 15 new landing pages for a batch of campaigns, you could split this into five two-week sprints to complete three landing pages, from start to finish.
The important thing is that each Sprint has a clearly defined goal that’s both achievable and measurable.
When the Sprint comes to an end, you’re going to run a Sprint Review where you discuss the result of the Sprint – in other words, the goal that has been achieved (or not) and the quality of this result.
So, if your goal was to create 15 landing pages, the Sprint Review would focus on analysing the quality of these landing pages and discuss whether the objective was too ambitious or not ambitious enough.
The final meeting at the end of a Sprint is the Sprint Retrospective and this is where you analyse the working processes of your Sprint to address any issues that may have gotten in the way of progress – inefficiencies, delays, lack of tools or personnel, etc.
This allows you to improve your agile marketing processes to ensure you have the tools and systems in place to hit your targets.
Daily Scrums in agile marketingOtherwise known as standup meetings, Daily Scrums (named after the rugby term) are short, daily meetings where agile marketing teams gather to discuss the progress of the current sprint.
Ideally, these meetings should be no longer than 15 minutes long, depending on the size of your team, and each member should explain the following three things:
What they did yesterday to contribute towards the sprint objective.What they plan to do today to contribute to the sprint objective.Any barriers standing in their or the team’s way of achieving this objective.Typically, these meetings run at the start of the day to help team members get their head in the game and motivate each other to hit targets while also giving team managers the chance to monitor progress and address challenges.
Using the Kanban framework for agile marketingWhile the Scrum framework is clearly defined and adaptable, the Kanban principle is less structured in terms of team structure and project management.
One benefit of this is that Kanban is adaptable to any marketing team, regardless of size or setup. However, this means you have to define your own structures and processes from scratch – this isn’t necessarily a downside but something you need to be aware of.
More importantly, the Kanban framework prioritises different objectives.
The key objectives of Kanban:
Visualise the workflow: Using Kanban boards to visually manage projects.Limit work in progress: Complete tasks faster, improve efficiency and reduce the percentage of work “in-progress”.Manage flow: Kanban prioritises a continuous flow of work rather than structured bursts.Increased responsibility: Kanban encourages everyone to adopt a leadership role over their own tasks, increasing responsibility, accountability and credit for successes.Improve collaboration: Kanban is collaborative where improving processes for teamwork constantly aims to increase efficiency.Constant improvement: Analyse workflows to find opportunities where processes can be improved and barriers removed.Reduced multitasking: Increase productivity by focusing on individual tasks and actively taking steps to reduce multitasking and interruptions.,While Scrum focuses on Sprints of set time-frames, Kanban is less concerned about rigid turnarounds. This doesn’t mean deadlines aren’t important in the Kanban principle but they are perhaps more flexible. For example, strictly speaking, new work should never be added to a Sprint that’s already in progress whereas new work can be added to Kanban tasks, even if this means pushing back the deadline – as long as this is deemed the best overall action to take.
So you can already see how Kanban is more flexible than the traditional Scrum and, technically speaking, this also makes it the more agile of the two frameworks.
Scrum or Kanban: Which is better for agile marketing?Both the Scrum and Kanban frameworks are proven agile marketing methodologies so it’s not a case of one being better than the other. It all comes down to what your goals are with agile marketing and what kind of setup you’ve got to work with.
Generally speaking, larger teams with clearly defined marketing roles and external departments to think about often find it easier to implement the Scrum framework because it requires clearly defined roles and it sets regular, time-sensitive deadlines/goals that are more in-line with traditional business setups.
If you or your team are regularly reporting to senior management, the Scrum framework makes it easier to demonstrate progress through consistently structured reports that are easily analysed.
You’ll also find the Scrum framework is naturally geared towards assigning roles and tasks to specific departments and individuals, which can be easier to work with if you’ve already got this team structure in place.
The Kanban framework can be adapted for these team structures, too, but you have to define where these lines are. This requires some extra work and discipline whereas the Scrum framework already comes with this structure in place.
The downside is that the Scrum methodology can be too restrictive for smaller or more agile teams. It’s no coincidence that the Kanban framework is popular with startups and newer SaaS companies that are agile by nature and need working processes that allow them to fully exploit their agility.
So where a company like IBM is more likely to opt for Scrums, newer or smaller software companies are generally better off starting with Kanban.
This doesn’t mean Scrum is always better for larger teams and Kanban for smaller teams, though. More than anything, Scrum is easier to implement and manage for larger businesses and the same thing applies to Kanban and smaller companies – but convenience isn’t a very good marketing objective.
So think about which is more important to you: Do you want to constantly hit targets and produce work faster (Scrum) or improve your production process over time and maximise agility (Kanban).
Implementing both principlesIt’s important to understand the differences between the Scrum and Kanban but you don’t have to choose one over the other. Plenty of agile marketing teams implement both frameworks into their agile processes – for example, adopting the Scrum framework for project management and using Kanban within their Sprints.
While the Scrum framework comes with defined roles and time frames, you can adapt these in any way you want. Maybe Sprints of 2-3 weeks aren’t always long enough and you decide to run some Sprint for up to 6 weeks. That’s absolutely fine and Kanban happens to implement very nicely into longer Sprints.
So take the time to get familiar with both of these frameworks but don’t let anybody tell you that you’ve got to use one or the other.
How to build your agile marketing tech stackAgile marketing relies on data and automation to inform rapid decisions and cut out unnecessary tasks that prevent you from responding and completing goals quickly enough.
This is why it’s so important that you have the right tech stack in place to manage agile marketing at scale.
What do you need from an agile martech stack?Agile marketing is all about hitting targets, responding to change and constant improvement. So your software priorities mainly revolve around project management, analytics, automation and collaboration.
Here are some of the key things you need from your agile marketing tech stack:
Task management: A system for managing your backlog, prioritising tasks, assigning them, updating statuses and marking them off when completed.Team management: An intuitive way to manage your agile marketing team collectively, as well as individual team members.Project management: A platform for managing projects from start to finish.Agile planning: A range of potential tools for planning new campaigns, managing goals, calculating outcomes and prioritising campaign ideas.Campaign approval: A system for getting campaigns approved and signed off as quickly as possible to cut out unnecessary deployment delays.Campaign measurement: Analytics tools for measuring the performance of campaigns vs your goals.Marketing automation: Custom automation to take the manual workload out of campaigns, freeing up time for tasks that have the greatest impact.Customer relationship management (CRM): A platform for storing and updating customer data as they progress along the buying process.Marketing & sales alignment: Tools that integrate your marketing and sales teams (and strategies) for a seamless transition between the two.Collaboration: Tools to help your team members work together with the greatest efficiency.Asset management: A platform for managing all of your digital assets while giving access to everyone who needs it.Documentation management: Tools to create and manage documentation for your marketing team to follow.That gives you a good idea of what you’re going to need from your agile marketing tech stack so, now, let’s look at some of the best tools to get you started.
TrueNorth: The all-in-one agile marketing platformTrueNorth is the all-in-one agile marketing platform that helps you plan, strategise and deploy campaigns faster while also providing tools to predict and measure the performance of campaigns.
Unlike most marketing software tools, TrueNorth’s priority is to take the guesswork out of marketing decisions so you can grow with confidence.
Key features:
Agile management: Manage your entire agile marketing efforts from one place – no more switching between apps and documents or getting lost in fragmented data.Marketing simulation: Simulate campaigns before deployment to predict outcomes, compare results, prioritise campaigns and set budgets more effectively.Campaign approval: Get campaigns approved faster to reduce deployment delays, allowing your team to run campaigns at the most effective time and start gaining traction right away.Paybooks: Align your team on what works with playbooks; A source of truth of what works in your marketing – from audience personas, to best performing channels and campaigns.Agile reporting: TrueNorth provides a built-in reporting system designed specifically for agile marketing that allows you to demonstrate ROI, measure campaign performance, set and allocate budgets more effectively and compare real-world results against your simulations.Test & learn: Capture meaningful insights from every campaign and learn valuable lessons for every marketing activity, which you can apply to future campaigns to constantly refine your agile processes.TrueNorth takes the complexity out of agile marketing management without holding back on features. Too many software tools get in the way with poor usability, bloated feature lists, restrictive pricing and poorly-implemented tools – all of which ends up adding to your workload instead of reducing it.
With TureNorth, you can see how much effort has been put into designing every tool to help you take meaningful actions with every click. This is a platform that doesn’t demand your time or put unnecessary hurdles in your way – a problem many agile marketing tools suffer from.
ActiveCampaign: Powerful automation across marketing & salesActiveCampaign is a comprehensive CRM, email marketing and marketing automation platform that cuts out the manual workload across marketing and sales, helping to align both seamlessly.
Key features:
Customer relationship management (CRM): ActiveCampaign’s built-in CRM puts all of your customer data in one place where you can update, manage and use it to target highly-relevant campaigns.Marketing automation: Automate your campaigns using pre-made templates or create your own workflows using the drag-and-drop automation builder to bring your own ideas to life.Email marketing: Nurture leads into paying customers and maximise customer lifetime value with automated email marketing campaigns.Lead management: Track leads across the customer journey, qualify and score leads, target them with relevant campaigns at every key stage of the buying process to maximise purchases.Multichannel marketing: Run campaigns across every channel, capture leads and bring them through to your owned channels (website, email, etc.).Conversations: Communicate with leads and customers via live chat, email and Facebook Messenger.That doesn’t even cover a fraction of the features available on ActiveCampaign, which is one of the most comprehensive marketing systems available – and the only one that offers enterprise quality at scalable prices almost any business can afford.
More importantly, when it comes to marketing automation, it’s difficult to find another platform as good at this (let alone better) and we’ve spent the last 5+ years trying to.
Zapier: App linking & small task automationWhile ActiveCampaign is the king of marketing automation, smaller everyday tasks can still drag down the productivity of your team – things like manually uploading email attachments to a Google Drive folder or copying and pasting data from one app to another.
Zapier cuts out these inefficiencies by linking thousands of your favourite apps together, allowing them to exchange data and automate basic tasks.
So, for example, you can set up automatic Slack notifications for every time a new email lands in Gmail matching your chosen keywords. Or you can automatically create new Google Calendar events every time a new card is created in Trello – the possibilities are (almost) endless.
Slack: The agile communication toolSlack was built by agile developers for agile developers and its success has turned into one of the biggest SaaS success stories ever. The platform’s genius lies in its simplicity and dedication to excellent UX but this isn’t the basic messaging app it looks like when you first start using it.
Key features:
Instant messaging: Live communication between every team member for seamless collaboration.Statuses: Users can set availability statuses to focus on individual tasks as needed.File sharing: Drag-and-drop file sharing for PDFs, images, videos and other common files types.Voice & video calls: Voice and video calls directly from within Slack.Screen sharing: Allows team members to show their work to others in real-time for stronger collaboration.Slack apps: Unlock a wealth of new features and integrations with Slack app.There are powerful features lurking under Slack’s simplistic exterior and, arguably, it’s most impressive is the library of Slack apps developed by third-party software providers.
These apps open up a wealth of features and integrations beyond the core Slack offering and we’ve discussed our pick of the 30 Best Slack Apps, Integrations & Bots to Try before.
For example, the SignOff app integrates Slack with TrueNorth to help agile marketing teams get campaign ideas approved from within Slack, further cutting down on potential delays and closing the gap between ideas and results.
This is one of the most important processes for agile marketing teams to optimise and remove inefficiencies. With Slack and the SignOff app, you remove even more switching between apps, potential delays with message delivery and manually chasing up approval requests.
TrelloWith Kanban being such a crucial principle in agile marketing, it wouldn’t be right to end this article without a mention for at least one of the project management tools built around the Kanban design.
Key features:
Project management: Trello is a simple, easy-to-use project management app for collaborative teams.To-do lists: Create to-do lists, add due dates, assign them to people and manage tasks as they’re completed.Trello boards: Dashboards where you can create and manage lists of cards containing tasks and to-do lists.Work with anyone: Invite anyone from around the world to help you make things happen.Instant messaging: Talk to team members in real-time to discuss tasks.Trello regularly features in our rankings for best productivity apps and for good reason. If you’re looking for a simple Kanban project management tool, this is as good a place as any to start.
In truth, there are plenty of Kanban tools on the market these days and many of them offer more features than Trello but it all comes down to whether you need these extra features or simply want the Trello boards to manage team projects.
Make agile work for your businessAgile marketing is a modern concept for today’s growth-driven businesses but it’s not always easy to shift from tradition to agile frameworks – especially for older, established companies.
Newer, smaller companies tend to be more agile by nature but there’s a difference between being agile-inclined and being truly agile, which means responding with speed, accuracy and effectiveness.
Simply changing your mind a lot and optimisation for the sake of optimisation is not agile marketing – or, at least, it’s not effective agile marketing.
So follow the steps we’ve outlined in this article, set clear goals for your agile marketing processes and implement systems designed to meet the needs of your team/business.
The post Agile Marketing: The Ultimate Guide appeared first on Venture Harbour.
January 13, 2021
We’re No Longer Focusing on Leadformly
It’s with mixed emotions that we’re ending work on Leadformly today.
As many of you know, Leadformly was our first foray into SaaS. What began as an experiment with interactive forms, turned into a tool used by over 10,000 small businesses in 150+ countries over the years.
When we created LeadFormly back in 2016, there weren’t many good form builders (unlike today) and upgrading to a LeadForm gave many businesses a genuine way to 2-3X their leads. Since then, forms have got better and alternate solutions like chatbots mean that Leadformly no longer gives businesses the competitive advantage it once did.
Leadformly has been invaluable, generous and at times humbling in the lessons its served us. We learnt the importance of good architecture (the hard way), how not to name a venture (we almost called it Qualiflower), as well as countless ways to improve how we build and release products.
Perhaps the biggest lesson, though, is knowing when to stop. In hindsight, we should have done it a long time ago. Leadformly is a great product, but it’s not the product that’ll achieve our vision. Nothing is more important than focusing on the right things and, while uncomfortable, improving focus often requires subtracting the things that distract us from our goals.
What’s next?First off, LeadFormly is not going away. We’ll be continuing to support existing customers. If you’re a customer your account, LeadForms, and leads will remain safe and accessible in Leadformly indefinitely. We’re just not taking on any new customers.
As we move into 2021 we’ll be doubling down on TrueNorth, an agile marketing platform that helps marketing teams move fast & stay aligned by simulating a path towards their goal and working in short iteractive cycles to learn and grow at a faster rate.
TrueNorth is our most ambitious and promising venture. It’s aligned with our vision, our strengths, and the needs of modern marketing teams.
While Leadformly played its part in making Venture Harbour one of the fastest-growing UK tech companies, it’s time for us to refocus on the challenge ahead and what will achieve our 2030 vision.
Final wordsWhat got you here, won’t get you there.
Marshall Goldsmith
This announcement has been bitter sweet to write.
The next chapter for Venture Harbour is an incredibly exciting one and I believe that our most innovative, successful ventures are yet to be built.
At the same time, this is the end of an era for myself and many people who came together to work on Leadformly. I’m immensely grateful for all of the moments and relationships made possible by Leadformly.
With that, I’ll say a huge thank you to Ryosei, Ben, Rajinder, Dhananjay, Kristine, Martina, Jay, Swapnil, Coenraad and the entire team at Venture Harbour and Alphalogic. And of course to all of our amazing and supportive customers over the years – I hope we see you again in another venture!
Onwards,
Marcus
The post We’re No Longer Focusing on Leadformly appeared first on Venture Harbour.
December 15, 2020
Marketing Management: A Tiny MBA in 20 Minutes
“No sales, no company.”
That aphorism, from billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, highlights how vital marketing is to a company’s success.
And if you’re tasked with managing your company’s marketing efforts, that makes you indispensable — as long as you get results.
This guide will help you do just that as we cover everything you need to excel at marketing management and prove how indispensable you truly are.
Overview of Marketing ManagementAnatomy of a Successful Marketing Management Team6 Skills Required of Effective Marketing ManagersHow to Develop Your Marketing StrategyHow to Develop Your Marketing PlanHow to Allocate Your Marketing BudgetHow to Measure & Track Marketing Performance
Let’s start at the top.
Overview of Marketing Management
Marketing management is the process of planning, overseeing, and directing brand awareness and growth activities for a company.
That’s an intentionally vague definition because a lot of activities fall under the Marketing Management umbrella regardless of your company’s size and maturity.
Most Marketing Managers are tasked with the following responsibilities:
Develop your marketing strategyDevelop your multi-channel marketing planExecute your planned marketing campaignsMeasure campaign resultsOptimise campaign performance
If you’re a solo entrepreneur or work for a small company, you may handle everything above by yourself.
If you work for a larger company, you may manage (or be part of) a marketing team that works together to achieve your company’s business goals.
Let’s start with the composition of a successful marketing team.
Anatomy of a Successful Marketing Team
Successful marketing teams come in all shapes and sizes. What matters most is that the team’s structure is designed with their business objectives and workflow in mind.
However, there are a few best practices to consider if you’re building your marketing team from scratch. At a high level, there are seven different tiers with a variety of specific positions within each:
Decision-makers: Top-level roles with sign-off power.Strategists: Big-picture thinkers who create key strategies for decision-maker approval.Managers: Responsible for the day-to-day operations and performance of business units.Campaigners: Oversee the execution and performance of individual campaigns.Specialists: Technical experts with a narrow focus, such as design or copywriting.Analysts: Data linguists who track performance and find new opportunities.The super-subs: Freelancers and contractors who cover the gaps of your in-house team.
SourceMarketing Management requires overseeing all of these tiers, which doesn’t necessarily mean having managerial authority over every tier. Many Marketing Managers sit in the managers tier, and they probably aren’t bossing CFOs around.
Instead, they’re communicating up and down the hierarchy of tiers, which requires cross-functional expertise.
Plus, these six skills.
6 Skills Required for Effective Marketing Management
Marketing Management’s wide range of responsibilities requires an equally wide range of skills and competencies:
LeadershipCreativityAdaptabilityTechnical competencyPerformance analysisCommunication
Let’s explore each.
1. Leadership
Management of all types — not just marketing — requires strong leadership skills:
Strategic thinkingOrganisationGoal settingPersonnel managementTeam building and motivationGuidance and mentoringDelegation
You need the ability to understand both C-Level strategy and campaign-level tactics, often switching between the two at a moment’s notice, while managing a multi-faceted team responsible for executing multi-channel campaigns in a complex and competitive business landscape.
Leadership skills aren’t optional.
2. Creativity
Marketing requires creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. Your marketing leadership role doesn’t make you responsible for coming up with every creative idea (unless you’re the only marketing resource your company has), but having some creativity helps.
3. Agility
Today’s business environment is more dynamic and fast-paced than ever. That’s especially true for marketers, who are tasked with capturing their audience’s attention via countless crowded channels — and new channels seem to pop up every week.
To cut through the noise and rise above the chaos, marketing teams are turning to Agile Marketing, a work management methodology that emphasises visibility, collaboration, adaptability, and continuous improvement.
Agile Marketing replaces the traditional months-long planning process (think Gantt charts) with a series of 1-3 week Sprints — short periods of highly-focused, results-driven work that gives teams the ability to reprioritise regularly.
Unsurprisingly, Agile Marketing requires agile marketers.
What are the benefits of switching to Agile?
CMG Partners surveyed CMOs, senior marketing executives, and Agile experts from over 40 companies, and 87% reported that Agile made their teams more productive.
Source4. Technical competency
Managers don’t need to have technical proficiency in every marketing task (unless you’re handling everything yourself), but there are a few technical skills you should have:
SEO, SEM, UX, and responsive designUnderstanding of the specific channels your business uses, such as Facebook or PPCEmail marketing, sequences, copywriting, and segmentationFluency with your business’s marketing management tools
Marketing strategies and campaigns vary greatly from industry to industry, and even between companies within a single industry, so the specific tools you’ll need vary as well.
Most companies prioritise email marketing because it has one of the highest ROIs of any marketing channel (3800%). If your company focuses on email marketing, there are a few email marketing tools you may need to use.
Beyond email marketing, you need proficiency with other tools to help streamline planning and reporting, lead generation, conversion optimisation, search marketing, and social media marketing. Like above, there are tons of different tools out there, but here’s a roundup of 30 free marketing tools.
5. Performance analysis
The best marketing teams continuously test new ideas and optimise winning ones to squeeze every ounce of benefit out of their highest-performing campaigns.
This cycle of execute, measure, prioritise, optimise integrates seamlessly with the Agile Marketing methodology. It also requires marketers to track, analyse, and prioritise all of their campaigns, which gets complicated in a hurry.
TrueNorth makes this process easy, giving you one less thing to worry about.
SourceTrueNorth’s greatest benefit is its simple interface, which lets you simulate, plan, and track all of your company’s marketing activity in one place.
[image error]With TrueNorth, you can report your marketing team’s efforts with meaningful metrics that C-Level executives want to see. That means more credibility and higher marketing budgets.
6. Communication
Communication could have been lumped with leadership, as it’s a critical component of managing a high-performing team, so why is it called out separately?
Communication extends up the food chain too.
A core part of Marketing Management is communicating strategic direction, performance, and marketing ROI to C-Level executives.
What marketing needs to get better at is having it ingrained that it’s about profitable growth…not growth ‘at any cost.’
You absolutely must be able to tie your team’s marketing efforts to identified business objectives and communicate that value in clear terms.
This is where tools like TrueNorth shine.
How to Develop Your Marketing Strategy
Your marketing plan guides your team’s actions, and your marketing strategy guides your marketing plan.
That begs the obvious question: What is a marketing strategy?
A marketing strategy is not a list of the various campaigns you want to test. That’s your marketing plan (more on this a section below).
A marketing strategy is one level up and provides big picture direction. Typically, it includes the following four elements:
Business objectives: What does success look like? More sales or revenue?True North success metrics: How do you measure that success? Incremental sales or revenue? Possibly incremental leads for businesses focused on growth marketing ?Segmented target audience: Who is your target customer? Is there more than one?Channels to reach that audience: Where is your target customer?
The order of those four elements matters.
Your objectives (what success looks like) drive your metrics (how you measure that success).Your audience (target customers) drives your channels (where those customers are).
Nothing in this strategy explains how you’ll market to your target audience or what you’ll say. That’s your marketing plan.
Identifying Your Target Market
Identifying your target audience begins with identifying your target market. While market and audience sound similar, there’s a distinction between the two:
Target Market: The broad group of potential customers your brand and products appeal to.Target Audience: A subset of your broad target market to which you can market a particular product or idea.
If your company sells all-natural pet supplements, your target market is pet owners while your target audiences are dog owners, cat owners, and senior pet owners (among others).
Beginning with your target market gives you a big picture look at all of your potential customers, which has several significant advantages:
Understand the size of your company’s potential customer poolUnderstand your competitors, position within the market, and market shareGives you a starting point when segmenting your target market into narrower target audiencesAllows you to compare the potential of each target audience to maximise the likelihood of investing in high-ROI marketing campaigns
How do you identify your target market? It begins with two introspective questions:
What is your brand?What are your products?
You can’t market a product and brand you don’t understand, so who are you and what are you selling?
SourceOur guide to the Art & Science of Finding Your Target Audience dives deeper into identifying your target market and is worth a read.
Identifying & Segmenting Your Target Audience
Your target audience is a subset of your target market. It’s the people you’re trying to market a specific product/message to because they’re specifically interested in that product/message (even if they don’t know it yet), and you can have more than one target audience.
In most cases, further refining your target audience results in better conversion rates and campaign ROIs because you’re serving a more focused and personalised message that resonates more closely with your audience’s wants and needs.
Marketing segmentation is the process of refining your target market into narrower target audiences who share the same customer profile (or persona) and are likely to react favourably to your focused marketing campaign.
There are five ways to segment your target audience based on the various traits, behaviours, and characteristics your target customers have:
Demographic: Quantifiable, population-level characteristics (age, sex, income)Geographic: Physical location (country, city, urban vs rural)Psychographic: Personality traits, likes, and dislikes (introvert vs extrovert, values, activities)Behavioural: Actions and interactions associated with your brand or other brands (impulsiveness, funnel status, brand loyalty)Contextual: Instantaneous situation that modifies the other four segments (recent major life event, happy vs sad, shopping at home vs work)
Consider a PPC search campaign for the brand mentioned above that sells all-natural pet supplements. We can segment our target market into narrower target audiences with increasing specificity:
Very Broad: Animal loversStill Broad: Animal ownersGetting There: Dog ownersFocused: Senior dog ownersHyper-Focused: Senior dog owners segmented by breed
In theory, we should see higher conversion rates as we move from Very Broad (animal lovers) to Hyper-Focused (senior dog owners segmented by breed).
Quick timeout: We’re still in the strategy phase and haven’t gotten to developing your marketing plan or budget (that’s the next section). Right now, you should be thinking about your broad target market and the various audiences you can segment them into. You shouldn’t be thinking at the campaign level just yet.
However, this is an excellent time to ask (and answer) an important question:
If hyper-focused segments generate better campaign-level returns, why doesn’t everyone get as hyper-focused as possible?
Cost.
As you continue to narrow your audience further and further, there are increased marketing costs:
Creating separate email sequences or ad copyCreating separate landing pagesTracking each campaign’s performanceOptimising each campaign
Somewhere between Very Broad and Hyper-Hyper-Focused exists a Goldilocks zone with the greatest marketing ROI — where your cumulative campaign returns are worth the increased cost and complexity.
Figuring out where this Goldilocks zone is requires a lot of organisation, testing, analysis, and performance measurement. This is where marketing management tools like TrueNorth becomes invaluable, letting you compare the performance of your many campaigns in a single, convenient dashboard.
Identifying Your Core Channels
Your marketing channels are the media used to communicate with your target audience. Once you know your audience, you need to figure out where they are.
The channels you use are specific to your brand and industry, but here are some of the most common marketing channels:
EmailSocial mediaPPCContent marketingPodcastsTraditional offline marketing (print ads, billboards, direct mailers)
Do you know which channels drive the highest marketing returns for your company? You may or may not depending on your company’s phase of marketing maturity.
SourceContinuous campaign performance tracking and optimisation are crucial to make sure you’re making the most of your marketing spend.
Our guide to the Ultimate Marketing Plan gives detailed, actionable steps for companies in all three phases.
How to Develop Your Marketing Plan
Your marketing plan is the set of specific tactics you’ll use to execute your marketing strategy. It should include the usual planning elements — SWOT analysis, tactics, and KPIs — but it should be flexible and able to adapt as we gain information on campaign performance.
It all comes back to Agile.
The S.T.A.R marketing system is an alternative to the traditionally rigid marketing plan to allow for constant tuning. As the acronym implies, it has four parts:
Strategy: Calibrate your marketing plan’s goal, audience, budget and channelsTriage: Create and prioritise a list of campaign ideas and optimisationsAction: Refine, approve, and launch agreed campaignsReport: Report back on campaigns that have ended
SourceWe’ve talked about your marketing strategy, and we’ll get to metrics in the next section, so let’s focus this section on Triage and Action.
Triage, in the marketing world, is the process of developing and prioritising a list of campaign ideas and optimisations. If you’re new to campaign brainstorming, start with ten ideas and use a prioritisation framework to compare and rank them.
SourceAction is the tactical work of refining, approving, and launching your prioritised campaigns. Each campaign should begin with a brief, which includes the following key elements:
Campaign summary (name, channels, overview)Expected results (as a range, e.g. 50-75 leads)Expected budgetTimeframe (start and end date)Prioritisation score
Campaign briefs are invaluable when communicating your vision to internal stakeholders and they help keep your campaign’s efforts focused.
How to Allocate Your Marketing Budget
Your marketing budget is the total money allocated to growth and promotion-related efforts over a defined period, such as one month, one quarter, or one year.
Your marketing budget is tied closely to your marketing plan, so now we have a “chicken or the egg” situation.
If your plan can inform your budget, and your budget can inform your plan, which comes first?
The answer depends on your specific company, their budgeting process, and the company’s attitudes and culture towards marketing. In general, there are two types of marketing budgets:
Benchmark Budgets: Assign marketing spend based on a bottom-line number, like per cent of company revenue. They come before the marketing plan, and the allocated resources are used to figure out which marketing tactics to prioritise.Zero-Based Budgets: Assign marketing spend based on the estimated costs required to execute your marketing plan and achieve your business objectives. They come after the marketing plan, and the allocated resources are estimated based on the identified marketing tactics.
Zero-based budgets are significantly better because they’re goal-oriented. You know if you allocate $20,000 to marketing each month, you’ll hit your identified objectives.
That sounds great, but it requires two critical pieces of information:
1. Your company’s business objectives
2. The ROI of your marketing activities
Many companies don’t know either their business objectives or the ROI of their marketing activities (sometimes both) and simply allocate money to a poorly-defined row in their spreadsheet labelled “Marketing.”
If you’ve developed your marketing strategy, you already know your business objectives.
To understand your marketing ROI, you need to set up performance tracking.
How to Measuring & Track Marketing Performance
We’ve spent a lot of time talking about performance optimisation, but we haven’t talked about how you do that.
It all starts with marketing metrics, which are the statistics used to evaluate campaign performance. There are tons of different metrics to measure and track — we identified 51 critical marketing metrics — which we can categorise broadly into two major groups:
Channel Metrics: The platforms or media you’re measuringPerformance Metrics: The results or outcomes you’re achieving
SourceIf there’s just one thing you remember from this section on marketing metrics, make sure it’s this:
Make sure you track campaign performance metrics that tie to your company’s identified business objectives and communicate campaign performance, value, and ROI to executive leadership.
Put another way, track the results of your marketing efforts using the metrics your company cares about.
If your company cares about generating more revenue, measure and report the incremental revenue attributed to your campaign.If your company cares about lead generation, measure and report the number of marketing qualified leads (MQL) and sales qualified leads (SQL) your campaign generated.If your company cares about customer retention, measure and report the number of repeat customers your campaign drove.
That seems obvious, but too many marketers fail to connect campaign performance to business outcomes, instead reporting vanity metrics like social media impressions or email clicks or website visitors.
Yes, those metrics correlate with revenue, leads, and repeat customers, but how is your CFO supposed to reach when you tell them your email marketing campaign sent 50,000 emails and generated 5,000 clicks to your landing page?
What’s the value of those 5,000 clicks to the business?
You need to have a holistic understanding of each campaign by focusing on your funnel. If you’re trying to generate product sales with an email marketing campaign, you’ll need to measure the following raw count metrics:
Sent emailsDelivered emailsOpened emailsEmail clickthroughsProduct purchasesEmail unsubscribes
SourceThose raw count metrics are vanity metrics (except for product purchases). You need to convert them to conversion rate metrics:
Bounce rate: Number of sent emails which failed to deliverOpen rate: Number of delivered emails which were openedClickthrough rate (CTR): Number of delivered emails which resulted in a link clickClick-to-open rate (CTOR): Number of opened emails which results in a link clickCampaign conversion rate: Number of delivered emails which resulted in a saleLanding page conversion rate: Number of link clicks which resulted in a saleUnsubscribe rate: Number of delivered emails which resulted in an unsubscribe
We’re getting closer. These conversion rate metrics are great for comparing campaign performance to identify, prioritise, and optimise high-performing campaigns. Still, we can do better for our decision-making executives by factoring in campaign costs and revenues:
Return on investment ( ROI ): Net revenue generated from campaign spendCustomer acquisition cost (CAC): Cost to generate one new customer measured by (Campaign Spend) / (Number of New Customers)Customer lifetime value (CLTV): Amount of value the average customer generates for your business, generally reported as net revenue after expenses (not including marketing)CLTV-to-CAC ratio: Relationship between the campaign-driven value of one customer and the cost to acquire that customer (this absolutely must be positive)
These are the metrics your executives care about. If you’re trying to transition your company away from benchmark budgeting to zero-based budgeting, these metrics are how you do it.
Conclusion
Marketing Management is multi-faceted and complex, encompassing everything from C-Level strategy development to ground-level tactical execution. It requires you to be a skilled leader and communicator with both cross-functional familiarity and tactical, subject matter expertise.
Put bluntly, a lot is asked (and expected) of today’s marketing managers.
Marketers who balance the job’s many demands attribute their success to two factors:
Well-developed processes and workflowsPowerful marketing tools that seamlessly integrate with and streamline those workflows
Tools like TrueNorth, a marketing management system that helps marketing teams create adaptable plans, attribute value, and prioritise campaigns, are critical for marketers who want to rise above the chaos and become invaluable to their company’s success.
If you’re interested in joining our beta, you can join here. As a Venture Harbour reader, you’ll be jumped to the front of the beta queue.
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