In my last post, I laid out the steps in the planning phase for building a relationship marketing program. In this post, I’ll break down the preparation phase of the program, which covers the integration steps you’ll need in order to launch your relationship marketing program. By the end of this series, you’ll have all of the steps necessary to build your own relationship marketing strategy.

Relationship Marketing Strategy Examples: 4 Steps to Prepare Your Program

There are four basic steps in the prep phase. These steps are as follows:

1. Develop a work plan
2. Build the program
3. Establish campaign benchmarks
4. Create feedback loops

In this post I’ll dive into the work plan, because it’s such a critical part of this phase and warrants its own article. Therefore we’ll cover steps 2-4 in detail in the next post. But as you read through, you’ll notice how the work plan feeds into these later stages, as well.

Step 1: Develop a Work Plan

At a minimum, your work plan should outline each step of the implementation process, by phase and outcome. The goal of the work plan is to ensure the work gets done quickly. It will help keep you and your team on track and provide you with a sense of what needs to be done in order to get to your end goal.

Since a relationship marketing program involves multiple channels, it gets complex quickly, and work plans keep you from getting bogged down. Each work plan will differ depending on the channel. For example, you may have several steps in an email drip marketing campaign and less steps in a social email outreach. However, you can keep the same format for all of your work plans, regardless of channel.

The following screenshots provide an example of a work plan for an email drip campaign.

a) Planning

Steps 1-4 in the planning phase of your channel work plan is essentially a carbon copy of the work you did in the planning phase at the program level. Having this information will focus the work you do within this channel.

b) Development & Performance Testing

This stage entails developing the creative — email, forms, images, PURLs, etc. — for the first email in your campaign. You will then load them into your marketing automation platform or email service provider and perform A/B and/or multivariant testing. Make sure to run your deliverability tests first to ensure your email renders correctly, is not flagged as SPAM, and that all the links are working.

Once you have that done, run an A/B test on subject lines (for open rates) on 5% of your contact list. You can also run an A/B test on content for click-through-rates, as long as you don’t get bogged down in trying to create the perfect email. You can always revise (and should revise) once the campaign is live.

The results of your A/B test will give you a benchmark to compare against once your drip campaign is deployed.

c) Prep

Now that you have your benchmarks, it’s time do develop the rest of your creative. You can also plug in the rest of your content into your flow diagram now that you’ve rounded out the subject line and email campaign, which can impact the content in your original flow.

The biggest action item here is to build the entire campaign logic and flow within your marketing automation tool or email service provider. This includes lead scoring, assignment, and creating your lists. I’ll cover more on lead scoring in a future blog post.

Run one last test to ensure compliance and that all links are working.

d) Execution

Ah, at last — time to flip the switch.

The timing of your launch is up to you. In this example, I’ve decided it’s best to run it between Monday-Thursday. The point is to time your launch according to historic data you may have on email open rate.

It is critical to also put a stake in the ground for your first follow up meeting to review the pipeline with Sales. Again, since you ran the A/B tests, you have something to benchmark your campaign performance against.

The goal of the one-week check-in is to also give you more insight as to where in the process your target buyer role is getting hung up. Try to look at each touchpoint in relation to the buyer journey you created to see how you can continue making tweaks to your campaign that actually move them forward to the next stage of the funnel.

Stay tuned for the next post in the series, when I’ll break down the steps necessary to build your relationship marketing program, establish campaign benchmarks, create feedback loops.

Executing a fully integrated relationship marketing program can be pretty complex. Even if you’re targeting just one buyer persona, when you add up the various touch points by channel (direct and indirect) and look at it across the entire buyer journey, it get’s pretty hairy and can trip up even the most experienced marketer when deploying.

If you’re interested in starting your first relationship marketing program or if you’re looking to revamp your current one, here’s some advice: start simple!

Over the next few weeks, I will lay out a step-by-step guide to building a multichannel relationship marketing program — encompassing email, social, and display — that will take no more than four weeks to plan and execute. For those of you who have your target buyer data ready, this program can be implemented and deployed in two weeks.

What is Relationship Marketing?

So before we dive in, let’s start by defining relationship marketing. By relationship marketing, I’m specifically referring to creating a series intelligent touch points, across different channels throughout the buyer’s journey. Each touch point correlates to a conversion event, with the goal of moving the buyer to the next stage in their journey and through the marketing and sales funnel.

This is not a frying pan-over-the-head approach. By intelligent, I really mean an orchestrated series of events that specifically pertain to the buyer’s wants, needs, and preferences over the course of their decision cycle.

How to Build a Relationship Marketing Program in 4 Weeks

Now that we’re on the same page with the relationship marketing definition, each task will be grouped in the following order, with specific outcomes:

1. Planning: focusing on gathering necessary insight to make the most informed decisions about how to best structure your program
2. Preparation: providing clarity, scope, and essentially your blueprint to integrating your program with your marketing systems
3. Execution: ensuring all systems are ready and that you can monitor your campaign and respond quickly

I’ll break down the planning phase in this article and will cover the prep and execution phase in more detail in the next two posts.

Step 1: Planning Phase

1) Discovering Your Buyer’s Journey

In order to start the planning phase, you’ll first need to create a buyer journey. The only way you can accurately create a buyer journey is to FIRST have clarity on your target segment and buyer role. Once you have these two pieces of information, you an start your buyer journey.

The buyer journey provides a framework for you to really hone in on the most critical points within each stage to focus on. By critical points, I mean the touch points that result in the biggest gain for your effort. For example, your buyer might not respond at a particular step in their journey. The more you you know why, the better you can address this and the quicker you can get to a conversion.

If you’re not sure which points are most critical to evoking a positive response from your target buyer, you can gain insights with short surveys and questionnaires to current customers in order to validate which content you should use and through which channel to reach them. Armed with this information, you can start the other tasks in the planning phase.

2) Creating Specific Calls-to-Action

Marketers excel at this part of the planning phase and you can typically sail through this, especially now that you have some insight into which types of content and which channels your target buyer role prefers to be reached through. Here are some examples of calls-to-action, in no particular order:

3) Developing Your Content Inventory & Selecting High-Impact Channels

Unlike a full-blown content audit, you’ll have to reverse your content inventory by matching the calls to action with the specific content types you have. Again, we’re focusing mainly on calls-to-action that have the highest chance of leading to a conversion event. So instead of looking at all of the content you have for a particular buyer role, you should be looking for content to best exploit your main call-to-action.

You can also add your distribution marketing channel during the content inventory process. Here’s a simple example of how you can map the primary call-to-action and channel along the buyer journey using Excel.

4) Create a Flow Diagram by Channel

There are some incredibly inspiring campaign flow charts that I could use as wall art. However, for our purposes, we need a campaign flow diagram to be used as blueprint during the next stage. The problem with combining each channel into one diagram is that it takes too long and nobody else will understand it but you. To get around this, create a simple diagram with each touch point within a channel. The diagram will also illustrate the following key points:

1. Number of touch points: How many times will you push content to your target or expect them to pull it?
2. Campaign logic: If they don’t respond, what will happen next before you end the program?
3. Cadence: What will be the frequency at which you engage with them?
4. Content: Name the specific content you’re using (collateral, infographic, email).

Again, this will serve as your blueprint for the next phase: the integration process. Keep in mind that you once you complete a flow diagram for each channel, you can then combine them into one master diagram, which is easier than starting with a master first.

In the next article, we’ll walk through the preparation phase in detail which will get us ready executing our campaign. In the mean time, please reach out with any questions.

There’s certainly no shortage of metrics to access to measure your blog’s performance. Regardless of the analytics software you use, keeping track of what matters can get tricky. To make it easier, here are three blog metrics that can help you spot opportunities in key areas. The following will shed some light on where readers are coming from, which keywords they use, and what content they find most engaging.

1) Referral Traffic

Knowing which websites drive traffic to your site is important. But what’s really impactful is understanding how each of these referral sites stack up against one another in terms of a specific important activity — let’s say engagement, for example.

Looking at your referral traffic through the lens of engagement (number of page views and/or average time on site) are two filters you can apply to the referral traffic report that will provide you with this valuable information. Here’s how to set up custom goals with Google Analytics.

In the referral report above, you can see referral site, visits (segmented), and a custom goal named “Engaged Visits,” which is a combination of pageviews and average time on site.

This report can help you determine which channels you should be prioritizing and driving targeted content to, accordingly.

2) Keyword Analysis

The queries report in Google Analytics displays a list keywords that are driving traffic to your site. With some keyword analysis, you can also measure pages with the most unique views by search engine and/or keyword, all in relation to custom goals such as the engagement goal described above or a more specific conversion goal like newsletter subscribers.

This report is especially informative because not only can it help illustrate high-value keywords, but it also lets you know if your SEO efforts are on track.

The keyword analysis report above highlights the article and keyword in relation to both engagement and transactional metrics. This report really puts my SEO efforts in perspective and allows me to get more creative with calls-to-actions on pages with high inbound search traffic.

3) Content Engagement

Reviewing content by highest volume of pageviews only tells one side of the story. In order to really know if your content marketing strategy is working, you need to review your blog articles in relation to a given set of goals. It may sound like a no-brainer but without some thought about specific goals, the analytics may not give you the level of measurement you need in order see the big picture.

This next report illustrates specific blog pages in relation to engagement metrics along with a particular conversion goal. Not only can I see pageviews, I can also tell which pages readers find engaging and how my CTAs are working. It also allows me to see if the article is bringing in the kind of qualified traffic I’m looking for.

The report above quickly tells me which content is driving traffic and if that traffic is doing what the content was created to accomplish.

These three blog metric reports will hopefully help you identify how your blog is performing against metrics that matter most to your organization. To get started with integrating these reports in Google Analytics, check out these downloadable customer reports.

Remember, you’ll still need to identify what your goals are and customize these reports in order to fit those goals. However, once you have that, you’ll be well on your way to tracking blog metrics that matter.

What other metrics and custom reports are you tracking to measure your blog’s performance?

“Everyone has something they need to hear. Tell them.”

-Homepage message on Hallmark.com 

Incorporating content personalization into your marketing campaigns is a lot like choosing a birthday card for someone.

That may sound overly simplistic, but while standing in front of the thousands of cards at the local Hallmark store last week, I realized just how similar the card selection process is to developing personalized content for email marketing campaigns.

The process most of us use for selecting the right card starts out with some basic information such what the occasion is, who the card is for, and what we hope to get out of it once it’s given. Marketers have fancy terms to describe these processes (i.e. distribution channels, target customer demographic & psychographic info, and key performance indicators).

Whatever the term, the point is that the more we know about the individual on a personal level, the better chance we’ll have of giving the recipient a memorable and positive experience– and as an organization, isn’t that also an important outcome of marketing?

Get Creative

Content personalization gives marketers a chance to go from a one-to-many message to a one-of-a-kind message. The difference will be a direct result of understanding customer unique experiences and preferences. By combining primary research with behavioral analysis (more fancy marketing terms), marketers can deliver messages that both resonate and move customers to the next level of engagement.

While it may seem somewhat complex and time consuming, you can save time by starting in a simple process like this:

1. Pick any stage in a target buyer’s journey
2. Identify the most important need your customer has at this stage
3. Validate Step 2 with current data (customer survey, website behavior, etc.)
4. Think about the content you are currently mapping to this stage
5. Ask yourself what needs to be modified and how in order for customer to feel like they are being talked to directly

If you’re already using a similar process with mixed results, let personal creativity be your guide. Just like birthday cards, we tend to remember those that were both creative and appealed to us on a personal level.

Manny customers expect a level of personalization from organizations. Look for innovative ways to bring more personalized messages directly to your customer with your content.

Test with Email

Email can be a great way to test messages and hone in on content personalization. With segmentation, you can further focus your list based on specific criteria in order to creatively develop personalized content.

Changing up content areas, visuals, and message tone are all ways to incorporate content personalization. It’s important to also ensure your test emails have a signature and an actual person the recipient can contact.

The results from your campaign testing can also then be shared across other channels in order to form a integrated marketing approach that encompasses content personalization.

Think about it: what were some of the most memorable birthday cards you received? There may just be a marketing lesson in them for you.

It’s easier than ever for customers and brands to interact with each other. Long gone are the days when brands relied on static media channels with broad, unidirectional messages with little means of attribution. Now, marketers are utilizing integrated marketing approaches to create true bidirectional interactions though rich, personalized user experiences across multiple channels which they can measure.

Organizations that make a concerted effort to coordinate multi-wave cross channel campaigns that create consistent brand experiences at each touchpoint have the advantage over those who continue to run their marketing programs in silos. It takes more than technology or additional headcount to run these multichannel campaigns successfully, however. In fact, after reviewing several successful integrated marketing programs, the following commonalities stood out:

• Target segment and buyer profiles are developed before executing multichannel campaigns
• Campaigns are created with a 360 view of the organization and are not solely demand-generation focused
• Analyzing customer behavior and preference trends is critical in order to optimize personalized messages

When combined, these three elements form the foundation for an integrated marketing approach. Once these elements are established, executing relationship marketing programs that span over the entire customer life-cycle become a lot easier.

Scaling with Integrated Marketing

Faced with having to do more with less, small businesses know the opportunity digital marketing offers, and are typically at the forefront of using web, social, email and display. As the company grows, it can become challenging to scale marketing programs efficiently while delivering more personalized offers across all of these available channels.

To help get around this common challenge, I have developed a list of tips for integrated marketing to help organizations big and small excel with integrated marketing.

10 Integrated Marketing Tips

1. Baseline how you are currently coordinating messaging within channels and across channels.
2. Map out your current process for implementing and deploying a relatively simple multichannel campaign against a specific buyer persona (if you don’t have buyer personas, you need one before proceeding).
3. Note any gaps with the process you’ve mapped out in Step 2.
4. Identify if gaps are related to process or technology. If the problems are process oriented, course-correct. If they relate to technology upgrade or/train.
5. Repeat Steps 1-4 above but for post-sales scenarios (e.g. customer support, face-to-face).
6. Evaluate your marketing automation tools and processes to ensure you can measure user behavior across each channel without leaving the system.
7. Place greater emphasis on measurement in order to track results and link them to individual efforts.
8. Communicate performance metrics throughout the organization to establish credibility and buy-in. Every employee needs to see themselves as a brand steward.
9. Modify your customer personas when you spot a trend with customer behavior.
10. Consider adopting a Scrum framework to keep the marketing team as agile and iterative as possible.

Integrated marketing can continue moving the needle when done right. In fact, according to IBM Applied Insights, organizations that engage customers effectively can experience a three-year revenue growth that is more than 40 percent higher than other companies.

While tip #10 may seem a bit odd at first, it’s this agile and iterative approach that can continuously help move the needle in the right direction. It can also help improve communication and transparency across each campaign, which can be tremendously useful when marketing organizations are distributed by vertical.

Lastly, these tips are mainly intended to help marketing organizations get clarity on how integrated marketing can work for them. For a deeper dive, we will be publishing a eBook in the next couple of months highlighting specific strategies on planning, executing and measuring relationship marketing programs in an integrated way.

To help, I’ve built out a list of five marketing news sites I feel feature some of the latest and greatest content around. The criteria for my picks is quite simple. I focused on the following:

1. Educational/inspiring: We want to know about trends, best practices, and innovation.
2. Global: North America only accounts for 11.4% of internet users. Nuff said.
3. All encompassing: Covering a wide range of topics; sales, technology, leadership, etc.

Top 5 Marketing News Sites

1) Advertising Age

What I like: Focus on global, digital, and strategy.

2) Mashable/Marketing

What I like: Breadth of inspirational and education articles on digital, especially social media.

3) NYT – Media & Advertising

What I like: Feature articles with top global marketing leaders in both B2C and B2B organizations.

4) Adweek 

What I like: Array of latest marketing news articles by type and topic under the Press section.

5) Search Engine Watch

What I like: From algorithm updates to in-depth how-to’s, this site is great for all things search.

Social media channels are another great source of gathering marketing news. Rather than list everyone you could follow, I decided to focus on specific online news publications dedicated to marketing news that also have a strong presence across Twitter, LinkedIn, Google + and Facebook, which can also be easily incorporated. You’ll also notice that you can follow any of the authors from each of these publications.

Getting Your Marketing News in One Place

Even though Google has decided to retire Google Reader, aggregating all of your marketing news can still be done through services like Feedly or Netvibes. For those who dare to venture outside of the browser, there are also plenty of installed-based applications like FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for Mac.

Whether or not you are utilizing marketing news to help fuel your content marketing strategy or just looking to keep your finger on the industry’s pulse, I hope this list of top five marketing news sites helps you find the most relevant and impactful marketing news available.

Which marketing news sites do you find most informative?

With the 2012 release of Google’s Penguin update, competitive link building strategies can quickly lead to being blacklisted from Google’s search results. It’s also no secret that building a network of reputable inbound links from sources with high page rank and authority is no easy task, but is critical to SEO. So, how then do marketers go about building links in the age of Penguin? Relationship marketing can help.

As I pointed out in my last blog post, marketers are looking to customer relationship marketing as a viable strategy for growing their lead pipeline while reducing cost per lead. In terms of linking building for SEO, the tactics, technology, and process of a customer relationship marketing program can also be leveraged across target influencers, who can help build targeted content and quality links.

5 Ways Customer Relationship Marketing Can Help SEO

1) Guest Blogging: Think Relationships, Not Links

5) Local Link Building

Just like your customer relationship marketing program focuses on engagement, your link building strategies should focus on building relationships in order to yield the quality links you might be missing out on. From guest blogging to social media outreach, the mechanics involved with a cross-channel, multi-touch relationship marketing program can also open up quality link building opportunities leading to higher rankings, more traffic, and increased brand awareness and lead acquisition.

Do you know of any additional resources or tactics to add to this list?

Is Relationship Marketing Worth It?

Relationship marketing may seem like a another marketing buzzword, but for many brands keeping customers happy and being in touch more often to add value has proven to be extremely effective at marketing positioning, brand loyalty, and increasing sales.

By now, we’re all in agreement that the one-to-many or batch-and-blast approach doesn’t work in a consumer driven environment where increasingly discerning, well-informed consumers choose to opt-in. The traditional metaphor of a marketing “funnel” can also fail to capture all the touch points and key buying factors resulting from the explosion of product choices and digital channels.

As marketers also look to lower cost per lead and cost per acquisition, the cost advantage associated with customer retention make relationship marketing worth taking seriously. However, it still appears that organizations are skittish about the impact relationship marketing could have on their bottom line. In fact, according to an recent survey by Econsultancy / Responsys, 24% of marketers indicate that retention and engagement will be a stronger focus for investment than acquisition in 2013, while 31% will continue to focus more on acquisition.

Instead of directing consumers through the funnel with transactional-only-based messages, organizations can combine elements of both relationship and transaction marketing strategies to build stronger customer relationships yielding an increase in both sales, engagement, and retention. So, if relationship marketing seems like a no-brainer, why are organizations still investing more in transaction-based marketing?

Measuring Relationship Marketing Engagement is a Challenge

The data suggests one likely reason: measuring engagement and retention seems to be too difficult compared to transaction-based marketing. There are many ways to measure retention, but while measuring retention metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV) might be relatively easy, many organizations don’t use it as part of their ROI analysis. If you’re interested in learning more about how to calculate CLV, there are some free CLV calculators to help. A quick and dirty CLV calculation looks something like this:

Estimated Average Lifetime Value = (Average Sale) x (Estimated Number of times customers reorder)

Remember the purpose of using CLV is to help predict the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer, but lasting impact is difficult to predict (which is why measuring short-term acquisition marketing initiatives that are more easily quantifiable is typically seen as the only true metrics to measure ROI). Yet, as we move to a more customer-centric approach and want to impact customer behavior to have a lasting impact on customer attrition rate over long periods of time, starting with a simple plan can help integrate relationship marketing metrics slowly into the fold.

Here is a simple 3-step approach:

1. Define one segment to start with
2. Consider the scope and content of the customer relationship
3. Create a genuine two-way relationship via the technology (marketing automation, etc.) you use to manage your market channels

Integrating Engagement & Transaction

I realize the steps above may seem overly simplistic, but it’s important to point out that the goal is not to be in complete control of moving a customer through a funnel. The first goal should really test your ability to respond to a target profile. By keeping customers engaged in the right channel at the right time, it will increase top of mind so that when they are ready to purchase — or their peers are ready — the primary transaction will be completed. The challenge lies in knowing how to align marketing programs with the most influential moments and channels.

One way to help make sense of engagement is to create simple customer scenarios that reflect different customers in the one segment you are starting with. Here is an example of a customer profile from a report from Forrester on engagement metrics illustrating a target profile who is to be considered a brand zealot with the potential to influence others:

For some brands, creating a specific relationship marketing program for such a brand zealot in the example above could contain transactional-like goals where the end goal is to draw users like “SARAH” closer to the company and energize their engagement with their peers across their digital networks.

As you can see, even though it’s a relationship marketing program, it still contains a transactional-like goal throughout a personalized user’s experience instead of a one-size-fits-all funnel. Creating examples like this can also go a long way toward successfully mapping content to channels and delivery — which in the end will help balance out which metrics to use and how to apply them to effectively measure your relationship marketing program.

Hopefully this helps answer what a relationship marketing program is, why it’s beneficial, and how you can start measuring engagement with transaction.

If you’re already running relationship marketing program, how did you start?

Tips to writing a business case for marketing automation

Nobody really enjoys writing a business case. While the process in and of itself can be monotonous, there are ways of making it easier and more effective. Unlike other marketing investments like email service providers for batch and blast campaigns, a well-tuned marketing automation solution will be the result of alignment across functional stakeholders, users and decision makers.

If you’re beginning the process of evaluating a marketing automation tool and have been tapped to answer “why marketing automation?”,  try avoiding generic business case templates found online or templates created solely by marketing automation vendors. While both of these can save you a bit of time, the business case should really speak to your organization’s goals, objectives and expected outcomes.

Start Simple

Most organizations look to marketing automation to do at least one of the following:

• Enable more effective digital marketing campaigns across the entire buying cycle
• Empower sales with higher volumes of qualified leads
• Efficiently manage prospect/customer relationships, data and marketing content

Define how marketing automation will help and then organize your research by how effectively a marketing automation solution could be in meeting those goals. The more specific the goals, the easier finding the right solution will be.

Set Clear Expectations

Since your business case supports a specific business need, it’s imperative to set clear expectations for how the system will be selected, deployed, managed, and measured. This sounds like a no-brainer but it’s an imperative step because marketing automation tool will shift the way you current run your marketing programs. So, defining how things will change will avoid any potential pushback and increase the likelihood that stakeholders and users will be prepared when those changes occur.

The most common areas a marketing automation will impact are:

• Technology stack: Email service provider, CRM, CMS, Web analytics
• Campaign planning & process: Channels, content, lead capture & scoring, timing and rhythm
• Resources: Expertise, roles, dependencies
• Communication: Sales and marketing alignment, tracking and measurement, executive reports

Build Use Cases

As a marketer, you know how effective story telling is. Citing specific examples of how the marketing automation system will be used within a current campaign can really help to highlight its value and return on investment.

Again, start simple and then get more sophisticated. A before and after campaign snapshot can be one effective way of making your point. Examples should include prospect behavior and quality of a lead, which should get sales excited and on-board. More sophisticated use cases could include reengaging campaigns with behavior-based email triggers that are timed to meet optimal open and click-through rates a cross-channel multi-wave campaign that includes A/B testing.

Explain ROI

Some organizations do not track cost per acquisition and some do. Both organization types could use the same marketing automation platform successfully. Regardless of how you measure marketing effectiveness, as marketing channels increase (channel fragmentation), you’ll need to clearly spot which channels are worth your time and which aren’t. Starting with basic ROI calculations using data in your CRM, can help round out what you’ll get for your investment.

It’s been said that most companies who deploy a marketing automation solution see improved metrics in the following areas:

• Email open rates
• Click-throughs
• Database size
• Web traffic
• Reduction in bounce rates
• Average conversion rates of contacts to leads

By looking at the current data points in these specific areas, you can also begin to explain ROI in these most basic marketing metrics.

Next Steps

There are many ways marketing automation can help execute marketing strategies which involve engaging with customers often. By understanding your business goals first, it will then be easier to frame your business case to help answer why marketing automation is worth the investment.

Creating use cases around those goals will also help you describe the ways in which you will start using a marketing automation solution, the changes it will have, and help forthcoming direct vendor demos.

In my next post, I’ll cover how to begin the vendor selection process.

Have you written a business case for marketing automation? What tips can you share?

By now we have all heard about the puff piece of the kids whose dad told them if they got 1 million Likes on their Facebook photo they could have a puppy. Within seven hours or so, they had 1 million likes and their dad kept his promise.

While I don’t particularly care about the controversy that quickly ensued regarding the dad’s level of responsibility by asking for attention on Facebook (the kids and dog are all doing fine), through the lens of a b2b marketer, 1 million Likes in less than a typical business day is something worth noting.

Turns out that dad is a digital-media scholar at Northeastern University, and while he didn’t actually create the Facebook page, “Twogirlsandapuppy,” there are a few key aspects of their story that make for great social media marketing tips.

1) Start with a goal

How many of us are operating without a specific, metric-driven goal? It sounds simple, but make it a point to really define what you’re trying to do and the expected behavior around it. Getting a million unique visitors is cool but is it really success? There’s a ton of metrics that define social engagement, for instance, but they’re completely useless if they don’t appropriately align with your end goal.

Finding metrics that validate whether you’re successful will be easier when you first have a goal in mind.

2) Focus on your target market

Rather than chasing broad traffic trends, companies with high market clarity will also discover the most effective marketing channels to run their marketing efforts through. Getting to know one market segment at a time intimately will yield far greater returns than having a one dimensional understanding across a greater number or markets. Such is the case with social media.

Organizations can cultivate loyalty for their brand more effectively with a solid understanding of their buyer and user personas. By doing so, they won’t burn hours with a spitball approach. Instead, content and delivery will meet the communication expectations of their targets, forming the foundation for successful relationship building while increasing their demand pipeline.

3) Understand viral loops

While many startups have been all over viral loops for years, digital marketing strategies including social media should encompass the most efficient means of distribution and scale. At a tactical level, if your social campaign is all about getting new visitors, consider the number of steps visitors have between entering your site and inviting the next set of new visitors. That can be a critical factor to your campaign’s viral growth. Make the process of sharing easy, even if you’re not building a social media widget. This is also a great element to test as part of you campaign optimization.

Regarding the office pet, it would take well over 1,000 shares before I could even begin to lobby for one. Perhaps the photo of the cute puppy will help.

Pressured not just to deliver a high volume of leads, but high-quality leads that will convert into sales pipeline opportunities, B2B marketing leaders are increasingly turning to marketing automation platforms to help manage and improve their customer acquisition efforts, according to Techaisle, a global SMB & Channels ICT Market Research and Industry Analyst organization.

Marketing automation software is not enough

However, it’s also clear that many organizations are struggling to get the most out of their marketing automation implementation and are making it a top priority to do so.

The implementation of these applications alone does not make for an optimized sales funnel. It takes an in-depth analysis of your target buyer’s behaviors, your content strategy, and lead qualification process to get these systems to really work for you.

Considering the trend towards lengthening sales cycles and the growing number of individuals involved in the buying process, that means developing a formal, repeatable lead generation process is really the only way to get the most of your marketing automation software.

Automation sucks. Personalization rules

Regardless of the marketing automation tool you currently have or are thinking of using, successfully building automated, trigger campaigns (lead nurturing, etc.) without your prospects feeling like it’s a formal, repeatable process can be tricky.

No one wants to feel like they are part of mechanically-driven marketing drip campaign. If you’re going to get the most of a marketing automation tool, every touch point should convey personalized content that aligns to the customer’s stage in the decision cycle, taking into consideration their preferred delivery channel.

Check out these great articles on developing a buyer persona framework and building a content factory for ways to get started.

It gets better

Since the topic of marketing automation is both vast and deep, I’ll be writing a series of articles covering everything from vendor selection and database migration to campaign creation and lead gen optimization. My goal is to help you:

• Develop a business case
• Clearly identify funnel stages and definitions
• Establish and optimize lead scoring and management with Sales (Yes, they need to be a part of it)
• Develop and optimize lead nurturing campaigns

Remember, the output of this work will vary from organization to organization and there is not one clear-cut universal model that can be applied across all. That said, I can help you avoid some of the most common pitfalls (having made them myself) and plan to recruit some of the brightest minds to help guide you on the subject. At the end of this series, you should be well on your way to getting your B2B marketing automation to work for you.

What marketing automation topics/pain points are you interested in reading about most?

This year’s marketing predictions aside, one marketing trend that is sure to continue is the expectation that marketing will play a greater role in contributing to revenue generation.

Marketing leaders are increasingly being asked to measure beyond traffic and lead generation and to better optimize processes that directly impact sales growth.

This demand for more marketing accountability will inevitably lead to changes across how your marketing strategy is planned, executed, and measured against. Regardless of whether you’re tweaking your current operations or building them for the first time, there are a few key aspects to delivering a high-performing, more transparent, and accountable marketing organization that I intend to cover each week in my blog.

My goal is to provide insightful information you can actually use at both strategic and tactical levels. I’ll cover a wide range of topics focused on:

• Building and optimizing inbound marketing
• Relationship marketing
• Direct marketing campaigns and strategies

No related topic is off the table and there’s certainly no shortage of opportunities to deep dive into any of these topics, so please reach out via comments, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Lastly, being a member of the OpenView Labs team gives me the unique ability to build, test, optimize, and deploy marketing strategies and tactics at different levels for some of the most promising expansion-stage companies in their respective industries. It’s also a great opportunity to share ways on how you too can boost your marketing ROI.