Salesforce Marketing Blog

Best Practices for Salesforce for Google AdWords – From Click to Customer

Search engine marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to generate leads which is why it is so popular with small and large business alike. Below are a few best practices to building a successful search engine marketing machine.

Select Keywords that Drive Traffic

When selecting keywords to drive prospects to your site make sure they:

Accurately reflect the products/services being offered
Match what your audience is looking for
Capture a large audience without being too general

When choosing your keywords, keep in mind that customers search differently in the different stages of the buying cycle. Early in the purchasing cycle they may be looking for feature comparison information vs. later in the cycle they may want pricing information. Be sure your keywords accommodate for all stages in the sales/buying cycle.

Don’t forget to add plurals and synonyms to your keyword list. These variations are seen as new keywords by the AdWords system and could potentially bring you more targeted traffic. Also, adding them as separate keywords also lets you track the performance of each keyword separately.

Not sure where to start? Check out the keyword tool on the AdWords site:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Write Compelling Ad Copy

One of the most important elements of writing effective ads is including your keywords in the ad title or somewhere in your ad text. Since keywords are bolded in ad text, incorporating them in your ads will make the ad stand out even more.

You don’t have much room in the ad copy so concise communication, appearance, and style are important in getting prospects to click. Be sure to have a clear call to action in the text. Simply saying “Click here” doesn’t give the prospect any indication as to what you are going to provide, where are “More Info” or “Free Demo” is much more descriptive and will have higher click rates.

Design Landing Pages that Convert

I’m always shocked at how many businesses out there are still driving paid search traffic directly to their homepage or to a generic product page. Designing specific pages for your search engine marketing campaigns is a must!

Keep your landing pages simple. Start with an eye-catching headline, and a very clear call to action. Be sure to embed a web form inside the landing page so prospects know exactly what their next step is.

Also, take the time to do some A/B testing on your landing pages, the results will surprise you! Changing things like font size, color, or placement of your brand on the page can increase conversion rates by a significant amount.

Track Google AdWords ROI with Salesforce

Now that we’ve gotten these lead inside Salesforce, don’t forget to track them through the sales cycle. With pre-built dashboards you can see how your different ad groups, ad headlines and keywords are performing. And as always, you can customize the dashboards to slice and dice the information however your organization desires.

For more search engine marketing resources check out “Secrets of Search Marketing Success” Webinar that is posted on the Salesforce for Google Adwords Blog.
http://blogs.salesforce.com/adwords/2007/10/secrets-of-se-1.html

Best Practices in Website Integration: Passing Hidden Values

For those of you who do not have your website forms integrated in to Salesforce.com check out Kraig’s previous post on how to enable Web-to-Lead (W2L). In addition to setting up W2L Kraig describes the process for passing a campaign ID in the background so you can track your leads by marketing campaign.

Passing hidden values can be applied to any standard or custom field on the lead record, not just the campaign and it’s fairly easy to do. Along side the rest of the hidden values you are passing simply add another line that looks like this:

Not sure what your field name is? Under customize, click in to leads, fields, and in to the specific field you want to pass.

Now just copy this field name in to the code, add the value you want to pass (make sure it matches your existing picklist values), generate the web code and send it over to your webmaster to post on your site!

Best Practices in Campaign Management: Tips & Tricks

Now that we’ve covered the basics of how campaign management works in Salesforce how do you get the most bang for your buck? Here are some suggestions to get you started:

Naming Conventions. A must-have for any organization running a lot of campaigns. The campaign name is what appears in search so you want it to be unique and easy to identify. Campaign names should be structured in a consistent manner so they are easy to decipher by people outside of marketing. For example: Program - Tactic - Audience - Quarter

Add custom fields to campaigns that align to key metrics. You may want to know how your programs perform by offer or by tactic (email, web promo, etc). Add these as custom fields to your campaign so you can report on them later. If these metrics are key to decision making in your organization be sure to make them required fields.

Use the active flag on campaigns with purpose. There are 2 reasons why campaigns need to be active. The first reason, is so you can run the super secret “Campaign Call Down” report. The second reason is so your sales team can find the campaign name from the lookup on leads and contacts and manually add the campaign to the campaign history. If you have thousands of active campaigns, this look-up view for your sales reps gets pretty muddy and decreases the likely hood they will use it, so try and keep your active flags up to date. (Tip: In the Winter ‘08 release you will be able to run the campaign call down report on both active and inactive campaigns removing the necessity to have campaigns active for reporting purposes only)

Create a section on your campaigns for follow up. This is a great way to communicate to your sales reps or inside sales teams what the appropriate follow up is for each particular campaign. This section could contain key messages, any email templates that should be used for follow up, etc. This way an inside sales person can simply click in to the campaign, and easily identify what their next steps should be.

Standardize your member status values. Reporting across campaign membership can be difficult without consistency. Maintaining standard values will allow you to compare the performance of your programs against each other. Some example status values are:

For web promotions set the default value to “Responded”

For events and webinars set the default value to “Registered” with additional values for “Registered – attended” and “Cancelled”.

For email marketing set the default value to “Responded”

If you don’t have it already, install the “Campaign Membership” web link from AppExchange. This web-integration link on the campaign detail page pulls up the “Campaign Call Down report I referred to earlier and allows you to see all of the campaign members (both leads and contacts) in one report. If you don’t have this already, install the link off the AppExchange here: https://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?NavCode__c=&id=a0330000000j5OdAAI

Best Practices in Campaign Management: The Basics

What is campaign management? I think of it as managing a series of tactics and programs designed to achieve a specific business goal. This could be generating leads, pipeline, customer adoption, etc. Campaign managers usually leverage a campaign management system or tool that aids in the planning, execution, tracking and measurement of these programs.

Why use a campaign management tool? To get a holistic view of how your marketing initiatives are performing and maximize your marketing investments by replicating successful programs, tactics, and channels.

How does it work in Salesforce? That’s where the fun comes in….

Let’s start off by talking about the campaigns tab since this is the heart of our campaign management system in Salesforce. Campaigns allow marketers to track at a granular level how their marketing tactics are performing, from lead generation to pipeline creation. Some companies do this today using the lead source field or perhaps a custom field on the lead, but that can get messy and even unusable once your pick list gets too long. Campaigns are perfect for this level of detail.

Campaigns can be associated to leads and contacts in 3 ways.

Through your web-to-lead form. If you are generating leads on your website and using the Salesforce web-to-lead form you can easily pass the campaign ID as a hidden value through the form so every lead that is created from that form is tagged with your specific marketing campaign.
Manual association. You (or anyone with access) can manually associate leads, contacts to campaigns through the campaign history related list on the lead/contact record.
Mass association. You can add leads and contacts to campaign through the “Add to Campaign” button on reports or through a csv file upload using the “Manage Members” button on a campaign.

Campaigns can be associated to opportunities in 2 ways:

Lead Convert. When a lead gets converted to an opportunity, the campaign that was most recently associated to the lead will automatically pass over to the opportunity
Manual Association. You can manually associate any active campaigns to an opportunity using the look-up functionality next to the campaign source field on the opportunity.

Now anytime a lead, contact or opportunity is associated to a campaign, you can see that reflected in the statistic fields back on my campaign. These fields are updated in real time as leads are converting to opportunities and opportunities are closing so marketers always have the most up to date information on how my campaigns are performing.

You can see from the image above there is also the concept of a “response” reflected in the campaign statistic fields. For leads and contacts you can determine what the campaign member status of each record should be and if that status should be considered a response to the campaign based on your organizations business process. This is defined in the advanced set up are on campaigns and probably best explained through an example. If I am running an event, I would associate all of my leads and contacts to the campaign with a member status value of "Sent" with the responded checkbox set to null. At this point in my process I am using the campaign to identify my target audience and since individuals have not yet registering for the event I want to keep the responded field set to null.

When individuals do register for the event, I would update the member status to "Registered", with the responded checkbox marked. All records with a member status value with the responded checkbox marked are reflected in the responded statistic field. Now, I can tell my conversion rate and for future programs better project how many invites it will take to achieve a my desired registration number.

Best Practices in Lead Management: Step 3

Keep Those Leads Working!

Just because a sales person has determined a lead isn’t qualified at the time it’s generated, doesn’t mean our job in marketing is done. Building a house list or internal database of names can be a gold mine for future opportunities, but mining those lists can be time consuming. I recently came across a great way to keep up communications to internal lists using intelligent workflow.

I mentioned in my first post about lead management that it was important to have a ”pass back” mechanism from sales to marketing so marketing knows when they should continue cultivating a lead. I prefer the method of using a lead status value of "archived" to indicate the leads is back in marketing’s hands. Once a lead has been "archived" I want to send them a marketing communication based on the reason why it was archived. In this case I have a dependent picklist created so anytime a lead is archived, the sales rep identifies why the lead wasn’t ready and this is the criteria I can use to send my next email to them.

Lead_status_dependant_picklist_3

Now, I’ve created some rules that say "If the lead is archived for reason A send Marketing communication 1. If the lead is archived for reason B send marketing communication 2. etc". I can even schedule the email, so it occurs a week after our sales team has archived the lead. All of this is done by using intelligent workflow and referencing an email template. Just click on setup ->customize -> workflow and approvals and follow the wizard through the process.

Learn more about Salesforce's powerful lead management features, and how Salesforce CRM Software as a Service can keep your sales organization working to grow your sales.

Best Practices in Lead Management: Step 2

Automate it!

Now that we have a process in place, how can we automate as much as possible inside the application? Here are 4 easy tools that can help.

Web-to-Lead
Are you generating leads on your website? Salesforce web-to-lead forms allow you to post all of your inbound web leads directly in to Salesforce. We’ll dive deeper in to web-to-lead in the web integration section but for those of you new to the concept check out Kraig’s previous post here to get you started: http://blogs.salesforce.com/marketing/2007/03/capturing_leads.html

Assignment Rules
Your lead gen machine is in full gear but where are all of the leads going? Assignment rules can help you get the right leads to the right people, and keep those Mickey Mouse leads far away from your sales teams. Located in the admin set up, these rules let you assign leads to users or queues based on any criteria you may be capturing on the lead or related objects. For example, all leads in the eastern US should go to one rep, and leads in the western US to another.

Auto-Response Rules
Your sales team is busy and might not be able to follow up on every lead in ample time, so let marketing handle the first point of communication. Auto-response rules can be based on any criteria that you are capturing or pre-populating on the lead record and can leverage text and html templates.

Lead Scoring
Pre-score your leads so only the most qualified are getting passed over to sales. You can create some basic lead scoring formulas using custom formula fields.

In this example, we’ll leverage the lead source field and provide a higher score for leads generated through our “contact us form” than through “advertising”. Simply add a custom field to leads called “lead score” and use the following formula: Case(LeadSource, “Contact Us Form”,2,”Advertising”,1,0). Now I can leverage assignment rules and send all of my 0 and 1 leads to a queue for marketing to cultivate and send my 2 leads on to the sales organization.

These are some out of the box ways you can start to optimize and automate your lead management process but don’t stop here – get creative! With all the developments to the platform in the past years, including custom formula fields, workflows, validation rules, roll up summary fields, etc. there are a lot of options for you to create a process inside Salesforce that is aligned to your business process.

Salesforce includes a number of powerful features to help you manage and optimize your lead flow - Sales Leads Tools ensure that leads are optimally routed while automatically recording all touches with prospects and customers. The Lead Management functionality within Salesforce Marketing, our Marketing Automation SaaS product, ensures that marketing and sales are always in tandem when it comes to growing your sales. Salesforce.com - the world's favorite CRM Software as a Service.

Best Practices in Lead Management: Step 1

Define Your Process

When I think about best practices in lead management, the first thing that comes to mind is process. A well documented process that everyone in your organization clearly understands and abides by is the key to success for any company trying to streamline lead management. Since this is usually the point of hand off between marketing and sales, it’s important that both teams are involved in defining the process, what the feedback mechanism is, and what the measure of success is.

Some basic questions to get you started in defining your process:

What is a lead?
I know this may seem like a silly question, but it’s a great first place to start. Will everything that enters your CRM system be considered a lead and passed over to sales? In some instances this may be the right way to go, especially if your sales team has the bandwidth and their compensation structure incites them to follow up on marketing leads. But keep in mind, sending over all of your marketing generated leads could overwhelm your sales organization and if a large number of these leads don’t pan out, it could leave a bad impression and keep sales from following up on future leads.

How many times will sales try to reach a marketing lead?
This could vary depending on the type of lead. For example, whitepaper leads may only warrant 1 touch from sales but if a lead engages in a product demo, we might require 3 touches. Whatever you decide, the # of required touch points should be documented and if it varies by type of lead be sure you are capturing each type on the lead record.

How will sales “pass back” a lead to marketing?
Just because a lead isn’t ready for prime time when its generated doesn’t mean it is lost forever. Once your sales team has determined a lead isn’t qualified what is the process for passing it back? An easy way to do this is create a custom lead status value of "marketing" or "archived" that indicates marketing can continue to cultivate the lead until it is ready again for sales.

What is a qualified lead?
This is typically the key metric marketers use to determine the success of a program and where future budget dollars should be allocated so its important to be consistent across your organization as to when a lead is qualified and how. This could be as simple as creating an opportunity in Salesforce once a first meeting has been booked or when budget has been identified.

I can’t stress enough the importance of documenting your process once it has been defined. It will help you identify any gaps in your process and it’s a great tool to get your entire company on the same page. Check out an example posted earlier on successforce here:
http://blogs.salesforce.com/processes/2006/07/sales_process_m.html

Learn more about how Salesforce can optimize the flow of Sales Leads, or view the Lead Management functionality within Salesforce Marketing, our Marketing Automation SaaS product. Salesforce.com - the world's favorite CRM Software as a Service.

Salesforce Marketing Best Practice Series

Being new to the Salesforce Marketing product team, I've had to get up to speed on what the Salesforce Marketing product is all about. As a long time customer and internal user of the marketing product I’m familiar with all of the features but I have to admit, even I’ve been guilty of propagating the concept that Salesforce Marketing = the campaigns tab. Well....no more! I’m here to tell you (in great detail) about all the cool stuff Salesforce has to offer to marketers and how you can leverage it in your organization.

This is the first installment in a series of blog posts in which we’ll walk you through the basics of Salesforce Marketing from lead management to email marketing and everything in between.

Bookmark this page and we’ll continue to update the topics below with links to the posts. If there are other topics or areas you would like us to cover, feel free to send an email over to awildt(at)salesforce(dot)com.

Salesforce Marketing Best Practice Series

Lead Management
Step 1: Define your Process
Step 2: Automate It!
Step 3: Keep Working Those Leads!
Campaign Management
The Basics
Tips & Tricks
Website Integration
Passing Hidden Values
Salesforce for Google Adwords
From Click to Customer
Email Marketing
Collateral & Brand Management
Marketing Analytics
AppExchange Apps for Marketing

How to Measure Campaign Influence

Thanks to everyone who came to Dreamforce! If you missed it, keep an eye out on successforce.com for the recorded sessions - they should be posted soon.

In the last session of the Marketing track, “How Salesforce uses Salesforce Marketing”, many of you were asking about how to measure the influence of marketing campaigns on opportunities. Using Custom Report Types (CRTs) we can start get a better handle on this metric.

Note: You will need to have the "Manage Custom Report Types" permission set on your profile in order to create and publish CRTs.

To create a new Custom Report Type go to Setup -> Build –>Custom Report Types

First thing you want to do is pick the primary object you want to report from (in this case it will be the
Opportunity), name your report and identify what folder you want it to show up in.

Next you will create the relationship between objects. In this case we want to report from the Opportunity to Contact Roles to the Campaign History.

Once you have saved the report you can go in and edit which fields show up in the report by clicking the “Edit Layout” button highlighted below.

At this point, we are finished creating the reporting structure for campaign influence, however I do want to point out one of the most powerful components of CRTs which is hidden on the edit layout page under the link “Add fields related via lookup”.

This link allows you to extend your report even further by adding in fields from objects that are related by a lookup to any of the primary objects you are reporting from. For example, I could get to information on the account record from the lookup to the opportunity, or I could get to user data from the lookup to the campaign record. This hidden gem can come in handy, so keep it in mind for other reports you may be trying to run.

Now, back to our influence report…I’ve saved the report type down and can get to it through our regular reporting wizard.

Just like any other report, you can structure it in any way you like. I prefer to create a summary report grouping the results by campaign. This way I can see how much opportunity has been touched by campaign, regardless of what the campaign source is on the opportunity.

Once you’ve tested out your report, don’t forget to go back in and deploy it to all of your users so anyone with access to your report folder gets the benefit of this new report!

Added 10/03:
Thanks to Tom Tobin who packaged up this CRT and put it on the AppExchange here:
https://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000004IOTRAA4

Salesforce Marketing at Dreamforce!

It’s been awhile since we’ve posted here but we’ve been busy this summer building tons of great new features and content to share with you at Dreamforce! We’re excited to announce that Salesforce Marketing will have 2 tracks at Dreamforce this year which will be held Sept 16-18 in San Francisco.

The first track, Marketing I: Building the Funnel is geared towards users who are either new to Salesforce or new to certain aspects of the marketing product. We will be covering the entire range of marketing topics including lead management, search engine marketing, campaign management, email marketing, analytics and more.

The second track, Marketing II: Advanced Strategies will be focused on just that – advanced strategies! If you’ve been using Salesforce Marketing for awhile now you might be looking to take it up a notch and that’s exactly what this track is designed for. We’ll be discussing best practices in lead scoring, integrated website tracking, search engine marketing techniques and extending beyond Salesforce reporting just to name a few. This is a track even you seasoned veterans won’t want to miss!

For more details on Dreamforce check out the conference website at www.dreamforce.com.

Hope to see you there!

Marketing in the Google Era, Part 2

We're pleased to post the materials from our recent webinar Marketing in the Google Era, Part 2. In this presentation, we discussed many of the 21st century techniques that the salesforce.com marketing organization uses to deliver results. Below you will find the details from the presentation, delivered by Sean Whiteley (one of the founders of our Google AdWords tracking technology) and Andrea Wildt (our campaign management and marketing operations guru).

Acrobat_1 Marketing in the Google Era, Part 2: Webinar Slides (Adobe PDF, 5.5MB)
Abobe_breeze_icon Marketing in the Google Era, Part 2: Webinar Recording (Adobe Flash, Streaming)

Marketers Turn to Web2.0

James Connolly published a good article in B-to-B magazine this week titled Techs Turn to Web2.0. The article the covers new-era web technologies that have changed the game for marketers, and folds nicely into the content that we've recently been delivering in our Marketing in the Google Era webinar series.

For marketers... Web 2.0 may present the first real opportunity for them to listen to their customers, according to experts who say marketers have tended to be insulated from their customers by sales and engineering groups.

The topics in the article of particular relevance include corporate blogging and community development. Although the content is geared to technology marketers, the concepts are generally applicable across a wide variety of industries.

Batting Averages and Clickthrough Rates

John Gartner is obviously a fan of the book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, as am I. Moneyball is a book by Michael M. Lewis released in 2003 about the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane, and his team's approach to running the organization. One of the central tenants of Moneyball, is that in the game of baseball, real statistical analysis has shown that on base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and that avoiding an out is more important than getting a hit. In his article, Do Your Metrics Measure Up, John analogizes a batting average in baseball, to a clickthrough ratio for marketers. This begs the question, which metrics are most important to your marketing organization?

The Internet has fundamentally changed the way we all live an work. This has never been more true for marketers. As marketing dollars and advertising spend has shifted from Madison Avenue to Amphitheatre Parkway, marketers can measure almost every aspect of the performance of their marketing programs in real-time. One of the potential effects of this, aside from Google's repeated quarterly revenue home runs, is a potentially overwhelming amount of statistical information associated with your various marketing programs. If you get lost in a sea of stats, and lose track of what is important, it is very easy to miss your targets, which in the b2b world is likely along the lines of pipeline, revenue, and profitability.

John's article certainly shares our mindset. While clickthrough rates, quality scores, and conversion rates are key metrics to track closely, if you live in the b2b world, be careful not to get so bogged down in the myriad of metrics that you lose sight of your original goals:

Driving new leads, pipeline, revenue, and profitability for your organization.

Optimizing for Web Replay with Adobe/Breeze

We recently posted a replay of our Marketing in the Google Era webinar to this blog. We've now re-recorded the content in Adobe/Breeze/Flash format for rapid consumption and improved audio quality.

Abobe_breeze_icon Marketing in the Google Era: Webinar Recording (Abobe/Breeze)

A Note to Marketers:
The Adobe/Breeze format is great for easy consumption and replay of web presentations. The format loads quickly, works well in all major browsers, and allows the user to navigate easily between different sections of the presentation. Another example, Google uses the Adobe/Breeze format their interactive training website.

Our initial replay of this webinar was posted in Windows Media format, which has real and tangible drawbacks for distributing webinar-style content on the web:

The Windows Media format assumes that the viewer has installed the Windows Media Player
Windows Media forces a viewer to wait for the presentation to start playing. buffering...buffering...buffering.
Once playing, a viewer might want to navigate to another spot in the presentation, but the standard Windows Media format does not provide a table of contents. So perhaps the user clicks, and then again, buffering...buffering...buffering.

The real question is, how long before a visitor gets frustrated? On the web its about lowering barriers to adoption, and if your content is not easy to consume, it will not be consumed.

Associating Web Leads to a Campaign

We recently decsribed the process of setting up web-to-lead forms on your website. In addition, it is also quite simple to auto-associate inbound leads to a Campaign. Every Campaign record in Salesforce has a unique ID, which can be found by looking at the Camapign detail record:

Once you have the Campaign ID, simply insert an additional "hidden" field in your web-to-lead form that passes the campaign ID along with the form submission.

Republish your enhanced form to your website and Salesforce will take care of the rest! Every new lead submission from this form will be automatically associated to your Campaign.

Additionally, we recommend creating unique landing pages for every marketing program. This will allow you to optimize conversion rate by custom tailoring a landing pages to the offer(s) you present in your targeted email, advertising, events, or other. Every landing page can contain unique Campaign ID field and auto-associate new leads to the appropriate Campaign.

You can learn more about Salesforce's lead management features, and how Salesforce CRM Software as a Service can keep your sales lead processes optimized for sales growth.

Capturing Leads from Your Website

Companies often contact us with basic questions about website name/lead capture forms. To our surprise, many Salesforce customers are unaware of the standard web-to-lead functionality that comes out-of-the-box with every salesforce account.

There are a few simple steps to get started with website lead capture:

(1) Enable Web-to-Lead functionality
Enabling web-to-lead is a simple step that should take only a few sceonds. Log into Salesforce and navigate to the setup area for web-to-lead (Setup > Customize > Leads > Web-to-Lead). From here click on the hyperlink to enable web-to-lead for your organization. You will be required to assign a default user as the lead creator for new inbound leads.

(2) Create a Web-to-Lead form
Salesforce does not host web pages for customers, but we do our best to make the process of creating a web-to-lead form as simple as possible. From the web-to-lead setup area, you can get started by selecting the hyperlink labeled Generate the HTML. You will be asked to select the Lead fields that you want to capture on your website, and specify a return URL. The return URL is a web page where you direct visitors after they have filled out your web-to-lead form. This is often a "thank you" page, a "download whitepaper" page, or something similar.

(3) Cut and Paste the HTML
Salesforce will generate a working HTML page that contains the web-to-lead form you generated. It's not very beautiful, but it works! From here, you can copy and paste the HTML and load it onto your site, or send it over to your web designer to apply your corporate stylesheet. Here is a sample web-to-lead appearance after applying a corporate stylesheet:

(4) Get Smart with Landing Pages
A landing page is simply a web-to-lead page that is highly tailored to a specific offer. As a best practice, instead of driving users from programs to your homepage, we recommend that you create for every marketing program you run. In addition, you can include Salesforce Campaign IDs in your web-to-lead forms and automatically associate inbound leads with email, search, telemarketing, or other programs.

Marketing in the Google Era, Part 1

Thank you for the overwhelming attendance and feedback from yesterdays Marketing in the Google Era webinar. Here you will find the details from yesterdays presentation.

Acrobat_1 Marketing in the Google Era: Webinar Slides (Adobe PDF, 5.5MB)
Abobe_breeze_icon Marketing in the Google Era: Webinar Recording (Abobe Breeze Presenter, Streaming)

Also, many of you have asked us for the 7 techniques reviewed in the webinar, the bookmark set and blogroll that was listed at the end of the presentation.

Bookmark Set: http://del.icio.us/kswensrud
Blogroll: http://www.bloglines.com/public/kswensrud

Spread the word: Delicious_1 Bookmark in del.icio.us Digg_image Digg it!

Measure Marketing Effectiveness with Pipe-to-Spend Ratios

It’s a basic question most marketers ask themselves and I'm sure many struggle with the right answer…How should we be measuring the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns?

In addition to direct ROI, we also look at a pipe-to-spend ratio for each campaign we run. This allows us to see for every marketing dollar we spend how many dollars of pipeline are we generating in return. Using a basic calculated field, all of our marketing managers can easily see how their campaigns stack up against the rest.

You can set this up as a calculated field directly on the campaign object, or just build it in to one of your standard performance reports. In this example, I have it built in to the report. Start off with a campaign report, and select a summary report type. When you get to the second step “select campaigns to total” scroll to the bottom and insert a new custom formula field. The formula should be the total value of your opportunities divided by the actual cost of these programs.

The result is a report like the one below that benchmarks all of your campaigns against each other.

Now your marketing managers can see which of their programs are effective (in real time!) and management can make educated decisions based on hard data rather than gut feel.

Microsoft Redesigns the iPod

You may have seen this video on YouTube in the last 18 months. Word on the street is that this was produced by Microsoft's marketing team to showcase things gone awry with their own product packaging. More than anything, the clip demonstrates the beauty of Apple's simple design.

There are numerous product marketing examples where simplicity wins, and complexity loses. And yes, here at salesforce.com, we are sometimes guilty of over-complicating things...think something about a salesforce product, website, message, or brand is confusing? Comment now and share your thoughts.

Spread the word: Delicious_1 Bookmark in del.icio.us Digg_image Digg this article

Traditional Media Drives Web traffic

In the Era of Trackable media, one red hot advertising trend is using traditional forms of media to drive new web traffic. From TV spots, to magazine ads, to newspaper columns, to direct mailers, to freeway billboards, marketers are trying to push consumers from traditional media onto the Internet.

If you dont normally think about this kind of stuff, try being conscious of it for the next 24 hours. You will notice that a clear shift that is upon us.

On the Internet, marketers can design a more targeted, relevant, interactive, and longer lasting experience (the famous example: Burger King's subservient chicken). Most importantly, marketers can measure every detail of a website visit. Every impression, every click, and every clickstream is logged, recorded and replayed. Free services such as Google analytics will tell you who is on your site, when they arrived, where they came from, what they clicked on, how long they stayed, and hundreds of other metrics that allow a marketer to dissect patterns and measure interest and behavior.

Simply put, what happens on the Web is trackable.

Think back a few weeks to the Super Bowl, the most significant day of the year in television advertising. Countless numbers of TV spots were used by marketers to drive viewers from TV to the web.

Naturally, it makes sense for companies like GoDaddy.com to drive web traffic, their site is a domain selling storefront, so new web traffic = new customers. (OK, GoDaddy may not be the best example, they have a history of using half-naked cheerleaders and tangling with TV censorship in an effort to drive web traffic.)

Take another example, this year Doritos ran a Crash the Superbowl program, creating an interactive microsite that allowed consumers to design a superbowl ad by uploading video. The final super bowl ads were picked out of the thousands of submissions:

And guess what consumers wanted to do after they watched the winning ads? They went to work on Monday and spent half the day on the Doritos website watching the ads that missed the cut.

USA today reports that in 2006, only one company, Blockbuster, noticably asked viewers to come to its website. This year, nearly all super bowl ads were designed to engage web behavior, both before and after the commercial aired on TV. The idea is simple, hook the visitor on TV and drive them onto the web where the consumer can have a longer lasting and interactive experience.

Even in cases such as the controversial Snickers ad/website, the content itself backfired, but the desire to drive web traffic was clear.

People are living significant portions of their life online, both at work and at home. As the web encroaches on traditional media, marketers need to rethink the bridge between online and traditional programs, and how they plan to enhance offline campaigns with online content.

The Era of Trackable Media

Imagine this scenario: Manufacturing wants to build a new facility that’s designed to increase capacity and decrease defects. In order to execute the project, they need $10M from management. Management (of course) asks manufacturing for an ROI model for the project.

Manufacturing’s response: We don’t have an ROI model, but we can promise you’ll like the way it’ll look.

Hard to believe? Well, it happens just about every day across corporate America, but not in manufacturing. It happens in marketing. Every day, marketers spend millions on advertising investments with uncertain (and worse, largely unmeasured) return.

They don’t do this by choice. They do it because advertising was forced by circumstance to develop the now time honored habit of investing serious dollars in untrackable media. Print ads with no response component. Big TV spend. David Ogilvy popularized John Wanamaker’s astute observation that:

Mr. Wanamaker, Mr. Ogilvy, meet the largest trackable advertising system ever invented, the Web. Now you can know. And not only can you know what worked, you can know which investments drove the highest response rates and which others drove the highest quality return. You can tune your advertising investments to your business needs.

The era of trackable media is here...Major ad budgets are shifting online, and Google's acquisition of YouTube starts to make sense.

The Web is a Marketing Platform

The Web is a marketers paradise. A community of connected individuals talking, reading, publishing, collaborating, syndicating, discovering, and sharing information around the world and around the clock. A community where every individual participates by contritbuting content, tags, links, descriptions, comments, bookmarks, and opinions.

So when we came across this video on You Tube last week, we figured there was no better way to kick off the new Salesforce Marketing blog:

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

The video is itself informative, describing the changes that are at the very heart of the web and the internet marketing revolution. Even more interesting is the manner in which this information is disseminated. The format is video, published for free on You Tube. Over the course of 10 days, the community has viewed the video 806,077 times, posted 2749 comments, and republished the video or the link on countless other websites and blogs (such as this one) that resyndicate the content via RSS.

To take it a step further, search engines crawl the web and index its content and links. As of the date of this post, the video ranks #4 out of 164,000,000 search results for the term "web 2.0 video" ...and it all happened in a matter of days

It really makes you think. If your prospects and your customers are online, how are you reaching them? How are you disseminating your message and interacting with your community?

The Salesforce Marketing blog is designed to help marketers answer this question and discover new ways to take advantage of the web as a marketing platform. Stay tuned.

- The Salesforce Marketing Team

Spread the word: Delicious_1 Bookmark in del.icio.us Digg_image Digg this article Find Related | Technorati Profile