‘Always-On’ Audience Collection

Create Audience Insights & Drive Consumers Closer To Conversion

Another value of zero-party data is the campaign-specific audience insights a brand can gather. By using real-time consumer feedback from your advertisements, marketers can segment viewers into intent-based audiences to amplify their messaging to those who are likely to buy, while also addressing concerns or perceptions of those unlikely to buy in future messaging.

Creating these campaign-specific, zero-party audiences can also help drive consumers closer to conversion.

Better Questions Lead To Better Advertising

The post Creating Winning Campaigns With Zero-Party Data: Tips & Best Practices For Agencies appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Through the no-code integration, HubSpot customers can use TikTok to help centralize prospects into a single source of truth by:

• Integrating TikTok for Business accounts with HubSpot;
• Deploying lead-generating ads on TikTok and automatically syncing leads to HubSpot’s Smart CRM in real-time;
• Engaging leads using HubSpot’s Marketing Hub to create personalized campaigns across channels — such as email, paid ads and SMS;
• Prospecting smarter, organizing qualified leads and closing deals via the new Sales Hub; and
• Leveraging HubSpot’s AI-powered reporting to better understand results and double-down on top performing campaigns.

“We’re always looking for ways to help our customers grow better, and it’s undeniable that TikTok is a massive opportunity for businesses,” said Karen Ng, SVP of Product at HubSpot, in a statement. “With this integration, we’re pairing the discoverability of TikTok with the power of HubSpot’s customer platform to help more businesses turn tuned-in audiences into high-value customers.” 

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According to the company, key features of the new collaboration include:

• A user-friendly interface that requires no coding skills;
• Real-time lead transfer capabilities; and
• Instant access to leads in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

“TikTok enables brands to reach and engage with new audiences and communities they otherwise would not have been connected with before,” said Lorry Destainville, Head of Product Partners for TikTok, in a statement. “Powered by the new way people discover and connect with businesses, we are excited to partner with Salesforce to help advertisers capture the engaging TikTok community and turn them into leads.”

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The newly released capabilities include:

• Automatically identifying frequently asked questions on calls to inform SEO, keyword strategy and marketing messaging;
• Capturing personal details and preferences of callers automatically, such as their birthday or an upcoming life event; and
• Leveraging AI to generate thoughtful, concise text and email messages after a call has ended.

“Our new releases extract simple, practical yet incredibly valuable, information to give CallRail customers another layer of business understanding without significant investment in time, talent or other costly resources — it’s all AI-powered,” said Sean McCrohan, VP of Technology and Leader of CallRail Labs, in a statement. “Our conversational AI pulls and aggregates the previously undiscoverable customer insights from calls that allows businesses to increase impact to both top-line growth and bottom-line cost savings. We appreciate our curious customers that join us in testing and innovation.”

The post CallRail Labs Introduces 3 AI-Powered Solutions appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Hot Contacts relies on RollWorks’s ability to deanonymize prospects that have met a company’s sales-readiness threshold, which is based on fit, ad clicks and website engagement. The solution then sends contact-level information pulled from Salesforce or HubSpot — such as name, title, event type, URL visited, ads clicked and the date of last engagement — to help sales teams tailor their outreach.

“For far too long, an entire subsection of leads in the B2B space was being completely overlooked because of the inability to track them, but now with Hot Contacts, we have put an end to the archaic ways of generating leads,” said Jodi Cerretani, VP of Revenue Marketing at RollWorks, in a statement. “Instead of only looking at form-completions, we are now expanding on the behaviors of individuals to their web use and ad engagement, creating an entirely new category of sales-ready leads. It’s a one-of-a-kind solution that no one else is providing to these organizations and we’re thrilled to deliver it to our customers.”

The post RollWorks Launches New Category Of Sales-Ready Leads, ‘Hot Contacts’ appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

As part of the Lead Lifecycle Management release, the Tray platform now offers:

• More than 80 unique templates and ready-to-use workflows for lead capture;
• Pre-built connectors to integrate and automate RevOps processes across marketing, sales and RevOps tools; and
• Streaming log data to triage and resolve process bottlenecks.

“Monolithic platforms and outdated approaches to lead lifecycle management no longer meet the needs of modern marketing organizations and often lead to a disjointed buyer experience,” said Rich Waldron, CEO and Co-founder of Tray.io, in a statement. “Sales Ops, Marketing Ops and RevOps teams often spend extensive time manually stitching together apps or rely on ineffective, out-of-the-box integrations typically found in marketing automation platforms to engage with their prospects. Combining low-code automation with best-in-class martech further maximizes the efficiency of the RevOps tech stack and ultimately enhances the customer journey.”

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The Challenge

Megan Verkamp, LHP’s Director of Content Strategy, explained that “historically, we’ve dealt mostly with internal combustion companies for traditional gas vehicles, but as we transitioned into more autonomous and electronic vehicle (EV) startups and mid-level companies, we needed effective ways to reach them.”

To start building awareness in the EV space, LHP adopted a simple approach to ABM — some paid social, email and display — but the company quickly realized it needed something more robust. In its first stab at ABM, the marketing team relied on a combination of paid social and retargeting through the company website with mixed results and uneven ROI.

The Solution

To gain more visibility into ABM activities — and build more predictable revenue plays — LHP partnered with RollWorks in 2021 with three core strategies in mind:

• Target and advance accounts in EV space;
• Reach $1BN+ companies in EV space; and
• General retargeting.

The first step for LHP was connecting RollWorks with its CRM, HubSpot.

“The data has been incredibly useful, from intent topics to who’s playing on our website or engaging with our ads,” explained Verkamp. “We track leads coming from RollWorks weekly. From there, dashboards in HubSpot show us who came in, and we’re able to pass that along to SDRs to follow up.”

In keeping with their goals, the LHP team primarily focuses on how many leads move down the funnel in a given month or quarter, which is a significant shift for LHP.

“If we didn’t have the integration, we’d just be tracking vanity metrics like click-through rates, impressions and clicks,” said Verkamp. “Because marketing was never seen as a lead generator until a few years ago, we must show the return for any investment we make. Being able to do that from the connection between RollWorks and HubSpot is fantastic.”

To encourage better alignment with sales, the marketing team also instituted monthly meetings to share metrics and trends.

The Results

Since choosing RollWorks as its ABM partner, LHP has increased leads, brand awareness and lead quality tenfold.

“Since introducing RollWorks over the past 16-18 months, we’ve seen an incremental jump in the quality of leads we’re reaching, as well as the value of those leads,” explained Verkamp. “This year alone we’re already seeing 3X the value of leads year on year.”

In 2022, the company saw so much ROI with RollWorks that the marketing team decreased Google-direct spend and cut back significantly on LinkedIn and Facebook advertising.

“We were doing the same thing on LinkedIn but spending 3X as much and not seeing nearly the same results,” added Verkamp. “RollWorks is getting visibility to customers we otherwise wouldn’t for a relatively low cost.”

The new investment strategy is working. With three recently closed $1M deals under its belt, the marketing team can confidently attribute these wins to the brand awareness and retargeting plays that RollWorks enables.

“Partnering with RollWorks has been incredible for our pipeline,” Verkamp explained. “It would never be on that list to cut the budget. We’re putting more into RollWorks because it benefits the business.”

The post How LHP Grew Average Lead Value By 3X appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Not so long ago, one-way automated email blasts were the only way to entice leads to jump the gap into sales-ready status. But with virtually no way to engage every lead 1:1 at scale and speed, marketing automation platforms (MAPs) alone don’t do the trick anymore. Today’s audiences need a more hands-on approach to catch their attention and move them down the funnel quickly.

Enter the “conversation qualified” approach to help close the gap through direct two-way dialogue, led by conversational AI.

When Yesterday’s Marketing Automation Only Goes So Far

For years, marketers have relied on lead scoring to evaluate when a lead is sales ready as a marketing qualified lead (MQL). We carefully watch engagement and tinker with points — a form fill here, a webinar there — to measure when we can slap that MQL label on and pass the lead to sales.

I don’t mean this as a knock on MQLs. I remember when the metric emerged with MAPs two decades ago (you know, when flip phones were the hottest thing). It was a big deal, a real step-change in lead qualification. Before that change, we might expect a 1%-2% conversion rate, but by systematically scoring and driving sales readiness, conversion rates can grow 3X to 5X.

That being said, just like flip phones, marketing automation tools of the time only go so far and don’t meet current customers’ expectations. The digital generation today demands a highly personalized, white-glove experience, where you know them, respond quickly and can interact in two-way exchanges.

After all, an MQL who’s downloaded a lot of content and attended a webinar might not be ready to jump straight into a sales call — they need some back-and-forth to warm them up first. But previous tools aren’t designed to meet this demand at scale, which leaves a huge opportunity for businesses to set themselves apart.

Instead, everyone’s using the same standard automation, like one-way email nurturing sequences. That status quo limits companies to 1:many communications where they’re talking at a lead rather than with them — a far cry from a true conversation and certainly not the type of brand experience that buyers expect. There are huge business implications when the full funnel experience disappoints because companies are unable to directly interact with leads and deliver memorable, personalized interactions at scale.

High in the funnel, marketers relegate themselves to sending generic communication that neither builds rapport to move people forward nor provides a clear indication of who’s already sales ready. Overburdened sales teams then spend too much time sifting through an inconsistent list, while truly sales-ready leads get missed and the not-quite-there-yet group never gets ushered along successfully. You end up with a long journey from the MQL stage to the deal, during which extra resources are spent on the wrong leads, actual in-market leads are neglected and you miss out on revenue opportunities.

The Way Ahead: Conversation Qualified

Conversation qualified is a new funnel approach to close the conversation gap and optimize customer experience and revenue generation across the buyer journey. It’s driven by conversational AI that automates humanlike, two-way conversations at scale for 100% lead coverage. These conversations, driven and managed by autonomous AI assistants, not only build meaningful, positive customer relationships but also encourage prospects to raise their hand when they’re ready to speak with sales so there are no missed opportunities.

You can identify conversation qualified leads (CQLs), i.e., your hand raisers who have indicated they are ready to buy and provide not-yet-ready leads with a better, more effective experience to progress them further in the relationship with conversational AI.

Through machine learning and natural language processing, the AI assistants automatically understand incoming messages, decide on the next best action and promptly respond accordingly. They can hold conversations with leads at the top of the funnel and see who is ready to be fast-tracked to a CQL while delivering a memorable experience to every contact.

We’ve seen companies leveraging a conversation qualified approach triple their conversion rates because they can accurately identify and drive sales readiness across the funnel — raising the bar from yesterday’s marketing automation. The AI-led approach generates direct pipeline, conversion and revenue breakthroughs to benefit all revenue teams.

For marketing, AI assistants can nurture higher in the funnel than previously possible to create a memorable brand experience and surface the “hand raisers” — the highest, sales-ready opportunities — at a faster rate.

On the sales side, a conversation qualified approach scales outbound lead prospecting, finds the best leads and augments teams with digital co-workers so salespeople can focus on the priority inbound leads.

Finally, the conversation qualified approach helps customer success teams reach out to every customer to motivate engagement, retention, product adoption and expansion through personalized back-and-forth dialogue.

Conversational AI marks a significant leap forward for scaling and automating conversations without compromising experience. With this new conversation qualified approach, your marketing, sales and customer success teams can close the conversation gap with authentic, two-way exchanges that promise better buyer experiences, lead qualification, conversions and revenue.

David Greenberg is the CMO of Conversica. He has more than 20 years of experience as a marketing and GTM leader with deep expertise in building high-growth organizations that disrupt the “old way” of doing things. He is deeply passionate about leveraging technologies to create significant step-changes in the business. Prior to joining Conversica, Greenberg was the CMO at Act-On Software, where he was responsible for the overall strategy and execution of the Marketing and Product functions. Prior to this role, Greenberg has held numerous senior executive positions across groundbreaking organizations such as Jive Software, Airship and Liveops.

The post Solving The Conversation Gap: A New Funnel-Building Approach appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Agent3 initiated this acquisition on the belief that B2B organizations are disillusioned with the demand generation process and focus more on delivering volume rather than value. By joining forces, the two companies plan to take a more data-driven and insight-led approach to generate demand. 

“Increasingly, our customers have been turning to us to apply our account-based methodology to lead generation, as opposed to traditional methods that all too often are biased towards quantity as the only measure of value,” said Clive Armitage, CEO of Agent3, in a statement. “This account-centric, personalized approach delivers needle-shifting results for our clients but bringing oneninefive into the fold enables us to do so at scale. Today is another huge step in the development of Agent3. With this announcement, I’m confident that our overall proposition for our customers just got even stronger.”  

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The “Marketing Automation Platforms Insights” report provides insights into MAP implementation in 2021, focusing on how B2B marketers are using the solutions to enhance their daily departmental operations and scale their marketing strategies for new channels. The research also explores the most common implementations of MAPs, and organizations’ increased focus on learning how the platforms work and factor into their marketing initiatives.

“At Demand Spring, we see the huge value in utilizing MAPs, but we wanted to know if other organizations see similar value and are using these MAPs effectively,” said Derek Boshkov, Director of Marketing Technology at Demand Spring, in a statement. “This report outlines the feedback and results we gathered from marketing professionals across a variety of industries, and provides insights on the most desired MAP features, usage challenges, and the metrics that are viewed by marketers as the most important.”

One standout stat from the report is that more than 50% of respondents reported less than 9% of their employees understand how their MAPs are implemented. Additionally, 47% report being unable to attribute their ROI to individual MAPs, presenting organizations with an opportunity to bridge the gap between their MAPs and individual processes.

As a result, organizations are increasing their focus on MAP expertise within their individual teams, educating their employees on how to use their MAPs for greater departmental efficiency. Sixty-eight percent of respondents who focused on operationalizing their MAP usage for individual departments reported a positive impact, with employees learning how to better operationalize their MAPs for enhanced customer experience (CX), personalization and lead nurturing strategies.

Additional takeaways from the report include:

• Email marketing strategies remain the number one reason organizations implement MAPs implementation (79%);
• 52% of marketers are implementing MAPs to enhance their customer experience (CX) strategies;
• After using MAPs for two to three months, 56% saw an increase in conversion rates; and
• 52% prioritize implementing MAPs that can integrate into other solutions within their organization’s tech stack to enhance their marketing efforts.

For more insights into MAP implementation, check out the full report.

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