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Sisters through Agriculture!!!! Love when I can share my passion with someone else and we can also enjoy life together! #sistersthruag #leadmd #maco #octurnitup #chesapeakelife #shorelife #pgprincess #ocprincess (at Ocean City, Maryland)

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Congratulations to the Winners of the Content Marketing Nation Contest

The contest is over! Our friends at LeadMD have put together a great blog post on The Content Marketing Nation contest. Here's a brief excerpt:

From March 11 to March 28, almost a thousand of you visited the Content Marketing Nation, casting in total more than 500 votes across 30 great posts. We want to congratulate the top 10 posts of the Content Marketing Nation because we think each post exemplifies why marketing automation is an important part of your sales & marketing toolkit.

Here are the top 10 posts from the Content Marketing Nation:

Content Marketing Tools: The Ultimate List posted by Michael Gerard.

Michael Gerard is CMO of Curata and their post on the ultimate list of content marketing tools highlights the importance of marketing automation in measuring and optimizing your content marketing.

Their infographic and descriptions gives users a comprehensive look at how to build a content marketing machine from scratch and which tools could work best for your team.

Click for the full post.

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ShareBloc and LeadMD Present The Content Marketing Nation Contest

This week, we announced a new contest to find the top marketing automation content. The person who posts the top voted content at the end of the contest gets a FREE ticket to Marketo’s The Marketing Nation Summit on April 7 to 9. We are launching this contest with some of the leading Marketo partners including our main sponsor, LeadMD and additional sponsors, Cloudwords, Heinz Marketing, Infer and RingLead.

Why marketing automation? Marketing automation is already a big business and according to (what we believe to be a conservative estimate from) Frost & Sullivan, it’s growing to become a $1.9 billion industry by 2020. Already, 5% of companies have started using marketing automation, which means there are 95% of C-suite executives that currently don’t see the ROI for marketing automation. We think we can help fix that problem by uncovering some great content that best exemplifies the value of marketing automation. Giving away a free ticket doesn’t hurt our users either. 

What should you post? It can be any form, like a blog post, eBook or a video. It can also be a post by Jon Miller or your original content. We encourage you to get your colleagues to support your entry. But to avoid gaming the system, representatives from ShareBloc and the other participating sponsors of the contest will have 10 votes per day instead of the three you have to help curate. We can’t win so we’ll only be looking for the best content out there. 

The contest ends on March 28 so get your posts and votes in. If you posted something amazing, be sure to get your colleagues to vote your post up. 

Our Sponsors and Partners

LeadMD is the main sponsor of the contest and one of the leading Marketo partners and marketing automation experts. Their clients include some of the world’s largest companies including Symantec, Ricoh and PayScale. LeadMD is participating because they understand that traditional marketing software didn’t leverage modern marketing assets like content marketing and emphasized the wrong KPIs. Marketing automation enables marketers like LeadMD to focus on developing great workflows so their clients can put the right content in front of the right buyer personas.

Heinz Marketing is a Seattle marketing agency focused on sales acceleration. We help our clients achieve sustained sales success by growing revenue from existing customers and cost effectively identifying and winning new customers. Heinz Marketing is participating because we’re big believers that revenue generation from new and existing customers is better with the buyer personas and workflows enabled by marketing automation. We work with clients every day whose marketing assets and leads are better leveraged with vendors like Marketo.

Infer delivers data-powered business applications that help companies win more customers. Its cloud-based solutions leverage proven data science to rapidly model the untapped data sitting in enterprises, along with hundreds of external signals from the web. Infer is participating because we collect internal and external signals to score your best leads. We can more effectively score leads if we’re collecting information about your customers all along the marketing and sales funnel. Marketing automation and CRM vendors like Marketo, Eloqua and Salesforce enable this data collection.

RingLead is the leading vendor for removing duplicate entries in your marketing automation and CRM platforms. RingLead has worked with over 2,000 companies, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, all across the globe. RingLead is participating because we all remember a world before marketing automation. Sales teams will struggle with unqualified leads with multiple duplicates sitting in different silo-ed spreadsheets. Marketing automation, powered by RingLead, removes these duplicates and gets you marketing and selling more effectively.

Cloudwords is the first cloud-based technology built to help companies automate, manage and analyze their content localization process. Cloudwords works with some of the largest brands in the world to help localize their content, including Groupon American Airlines and Marketo. Cloudwords is participating because marketing is a global opportunity and we need the right workflows to get the most out of your leads. With Cloudwords and marketing automation vendors like Marketo, we can help organizations better streamline their international customers, push global content to local sales teams and empower local stakeholders to manage their own leads.

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Moneyball for Marketers: Marketing Automation’s Time in the Big Leagues

We recently posted an article about Marketing Automation on Social Media Today. Here’s a brief excerpt: 

Appearing first in a book before being adapted into an Oscar-winning film, the term Moneyball was coined by author Michael Lewis to describe the player performance methodology used by a small-market baseball team like the Oakland A’s to compete with financial heavyweights like the New York Yankees. The A’s General Manager, Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt in the film), measured players using new, data-centric metrics that flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Before Moneyball, baseball scouts relied on popular but flawed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like RBIs (Runs Batted In) and how a player looked (aka “gut instincts”) to judge his effectiveness. But technological advances and a better understanding of statistical correlations employed by Moneyball practitioners like Beane made these old scouting reports obsolete and uncovered hidden gems amongst the player rosters. So what does this have to do with Marketing Automation?

See the full article here.

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Interview with Justin Gray, LeadMD CEO and Marketing Automation Expert

As part of ShareBloc’s ramp-up towards Marketo’s major The Marketing Nation Summit conference in April, we wanted to reach out to some experts in the field. We recently traded emails and sat down via Google Hangouts with Justin Gray, CEO & founder of LeadMD, a preferred service partner for Marketo and one of the country’s leading marketing automation consultancies. We asked Justin for his thoughts on the state of marketing automation, the role of metrics in driving your marketing and sales team and some of the best practices he’s seen across his suite of clients. Here were our takeaways from his responses; we edited the content for prose, not substance. 

How do you see Marketing Automation fitting in the sales & marketing funnel?

“Most client CEOs and CFOs want to know what are the results of the marketing spend, even if it’s just marketer’s time.”

Marketing automation is the tool that tracks and guides leads from the top to bottom of the funnel and “allows marketers to measure consumption, score activity, tie those metrics to the revenue funnel and see how is sales absorbing these leads.” Ultimately, marketing automation enables marketers to tie their work to revenue, which is the end goal.

What is the most common mistake you’ve seen from clients adopting marketing automation?

“Marketing automation is an ongoing process; not a single campaign.”

Marketing organizations from two-person startups to large organizations need to plan their transition to marketing automation technology and processes correctly. Some organizations don’t correctly account for “legacy process” before a marketing automation system is in place. Others have never used marketing automation before so there’s a bit of a learning curve to not just implement the technology, but also to train marketers and sales to use the system. This is why many of LeadMD’s clients are on retainer after the first engagement. Even with a process in place, marketing is cyclical and it’s important to recognize that you will not get results right away.

Where do you see the role of Sales in Marketing Automation?

“CRM is still the backbone of the organization but marketing automation is the head.”

We are seeing a bit “Death of a Salesman” in digital sales & marketing. That’s because the best salespeople today are also really good marketers. Terms like “solution selling” and “sales enablement” are relevant because good salespeople leverage marketing assets and utilize buyer personas. One major impact on sales is the end of demos. Potential customers can view demos without a salesperson. Rather, good salespeople walk leads through a solution and “make the lead an active participant.”

What are some areas that Marketers and Marketing Automation are still not getting right?

"Behavior and alignment to buyer persona are the only true indicators of lead qualification." 

Marketers should look to new metrics and the questions they answer:

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) conversion rate: “Does your marketing team know how to generate quality leads?”

MQL to Opportunity: “Does you sales team know how to ask for money?”

MQL to Revenue: “Is your sales team weak at closing?”

Most marketers still rely on vanity metrics, with “net new names” by far the largest culprit. Typically, sales will give marketing a large quota, even though the “sales team can never process all these leads.” This stems from a legacy without marketing automation, where leads are not well defined and buyer personas don’t exist. But in recent years, marketers have learned that buying lists of contact information simply does not yield significant results. 

To align marketing and sales, both parties must define what a MQL is. “Don’t set MQLs based on industry, revenue or demographic data, for example.” Rather, a lead should be “dictated by the buyer, not the organization.” Organizations that tend to create too many stages in the sales & marketing funnel can be “overly prescriptive.” Buyers behave as they normally would so even if they don’t click on that button or respond to an email to move them off that stage, if they are ready to buy, the process should recognize the buyer’s willingness to move down the funnel. Marketing automation can pick up these signals the way traditional processes cannot.

What is the one thing your clients are excited about in 2014?

“Content creation is still not part of marketing automation.”

Many of LeadMD clients are excited about content marketing but have outstanding questions. For example:

How do we crowd-source content?

How do we involve thought leaders?

How do we create high value content that breaks through the noise?

More LeadMD clients are getting engaged on content but inbound is still not being tied-in with marketing automation, and thus not being measured for effectiveness. Calendaring, content planning and other features need to be more deeply ingrained in marketing automation. 

For more information on Justin Gray and LeadMD, go to their website, their blog or follow them on Twitter.

LeadMD has a great resource on content and marketing automation. Click on the graphic below to download.