Marketing Automation & Drupal

Online Lead Generation

Presentation by Jim Caruso to the Atlanta Drupal User Group (ADUG)

The economic downturn forced marketing organizations to do a better job of communicating and quantifying their strategies, tasks, and success.

Out of this has come tools to generate leads better and also at a lower cost. These tools are marketing automation. Well-implemented Marketing Automation increases revenues and profitability while lowering costs (or at least cost per new customer).

Jim Caruso will cover why this is important to us.

The Video

Marketing Automation & Drupal: Presentation by Jim Caruso to the Atlanta Drupal User Group (ADUG) April, 11, 2013 from Jim Caruso on Vimeo.

 

The Slides:

Can we do it all in Drupal? What exactly is "it," Marketing Automation?

Jim will cover:

- What is Marketing Automation

- Components

-- Inbound Methodology

-- Incremental Improvements

-- Content Marketing

-- Content & Context

-- Buyer Persona

-- Social Reach

-- Calls-to-Action (CTA)

-- Forms

-- Landing Pages

-- Email Lead Nurturing

-- Advertising & PPC

-- SEO

-- Owned, Earned, & Paid Media

-- Response Time

-- Metrics & Measurement

-- The Sales & Marketing Lead Funnel

- Lead Generation on Drupal

- Available tools

-- Dashboards

-- Integrations

-- Research

-- Collaboration

- Real Marketing Automation

-- Resources

Transcript

Jim Caruso: Okay. I'm Jim Caruso. I work for MediaFirst. I've been on Drupal.org for six years and 24 weeks. Let's just check that. That's quite a while. Our site's on Drupal. We like Drupal. We build mostly in Drupal seven now but we're building in Drupal six. I am just going to fly because I have a lot of stuff to cover. Okay?

Jim Caruso: Marketing automation and Drupal. The first thing I want to talk about is just a little bit about us. We do a lot of different kinds of marketing, public relations, social media, web, and web sites and we're just very consistent. We've been doing it for a long time. We've been buying domain names and building web sites for people for 10 years. I'm a soccer player so that's why I have Lionel Messi there.

Jim Caruso: I like this slide, unfair advantage, advantages. I stole it from a VC deck that Guy Kawasaki gives out, the slide deck, for tech companies that are starting up, but he has a slide and the title of the slide is Unfair Advantages.

Jim Caruso: One of the things that makes us very different as a company is that we have people who used to actually be engineers, who used to sell IT solutions, so we not only have done some of the technology but we've actually had to talk to the person who had to buy it. That makes us a little different when we're working with a technology company trying to promote them. We are working with a lot of technology companies from web development shops to supply chain to different kinds of optimization software.

Jim Caruso: A little bit about us, we've been a Rackspace customer for more than 10 years. We are a hub spot partner, which is one of the backgrounds that I have in marketing automation, but I'm not going to be very specific of ad vendors. I'm using this tool called YOTTAA, Y-O-T-T-A-A. I have a few slides on performance, and we'll talk about that. But we are partnered with YOTTAA, and it's kind of CDN on steroids.

Jim Caruso: But if you have an issue with your site performance, and you are obsessive like me about response time, you might enjoy that. So we build in Drupal and can WordPress when the customer wants to. We've been both customers of, and vendors to Mail Chimp and their parent company for a long time since before they were Mail Chimp. So we do a lot of stuff including a lot of our core is writing, so a lot of marketing automation stuff happens around writing. So we'll give you some background. Obviously, everybody's getting all their information on Google. That's where inbound marketing, that's where marketing automation is about. Now that everything is changing, like if you read my intro that I wrote for today's speech, for a couple of years the economy was terrible. And marketing organizations were under a lot of pressure to justify their existence, to prove that they were doing things on task, to prove that they had a return on investment, to prove that they were feeding the sales funnel.

Jim Caruso: So marketing automation or inbound marketing is mostly about using the web, and the fact that people are now changing the way that they're getting information. So people get information from Google search. When they do a search, 25%, 75% of the time they click on the organic link. So part of it is having good content that ranks low on Google, and every page in your website ranks separately.

Jim Caruso: So your homepage may rank the best, and we always think about our homepage ranking the best. But Google thinks of every page separately. How does it rank? How useful is it to everybody who searches on Google?

Jim Caruso: So companies that blog and marketing automation is in part about creating lots of good content. So good content for a lot of companies starts with blogging. Hop Spot has a guideline, they suggest that you blog a couple of times a week. For a lot of companies that just seems a little out there, or difficult, or who's going to do it? Can you really get a contractor to write well about my business? That's the things that our clients struggle with, and that's why. Because we have this tech background, or we just have a new client that doing marketing automation, and supply chain logistics. We've been doing that for 10 years, so writing about supply chain logistics is easy, but all of us have our own challenges about writing.

Jim Caruso: Shockingly, people get customers from Facebook right? You don't think about getting customers from Facebook, but that's part of it. So new buyer, and it's really whether it's a B to B buyer or B to C buyer, but I stole this nice chart. So the main thing here is that people are doing things differently. Instead of going into the store to make the decision, of course, they're going online to make the decision, and I think you guys all understand that.

Jim Caruso: So marketing automation or inbound marketing is about transforming marketing. So you make stuff that people want, so you're making content that people want to see on the website. And content is a lot of things, it can be something you push out on Twitter, 140 characters in a tweet. It could be a blog post, it could be a press release, it could be a video. It's lots of different things. But you make things that people want, and you give things away.

Jim Caruso: So by being generous it means put content on your website that people enjoy, and can take advantage of in their decision process. So that's a lot of what marketing automation is about, it's creating content that helps people in their decision process, and being generous with it.

Jim Caruso: So what is generous? You let people have it for free, but maybe you ask them a favor like, give me your contact information. We're not going to sell your data, and we're not going to spam you, and you can cancel anytime, but let's exchange contact information and let's see if I can help you with your decision process, and hopefully, that works out for both of us. So I've spoken several years ago about SCO in the same forum, so I'm not really going to talk about SEO, but part of creating good content and tagging content like videos properly has to do with SEO. So tagging good content, making it available, making it searchable and indexable by a search engine is important. So keywords are important.

Jim Caruso: So obviously a lot of people think when they're building a website now, they're thinking to themselves, "I have visitors, and I want certain kinds of visitors to my website. What do I want them to do? And what can I get them to do on my website that makes sense? That helps them make a buying decision hopefully in favor of my company and its products and services over somebody else's." And investing, and there's a payoff from all this, but there's also cost to it. So there's the cost of blogging, the cost of marketing automation tools, or the cost of just implementing things. Even if you do it in free off the shelf Drupal and Google AdWords, or Google Analytics I'm sorry.

Jim Caruso: So HubSpot says to do something like this. Double your web traffic. Now I added this addition about double web traffic to specific pages that are tagged with buyer keywords. So when I talk about keywords, I'm talking about what keywords is the buyer entering their search inquiry to find what they want to buy? That's the keyword that really matters.

Jim Caruso: So can we double web leads? And then there are lots of tools, and I'll talk about a lot of tools at the end. One is a website grader. Now, the best ones are built into Google Analytics or in one of the very many dedicated SEO tools.. So obviously we've moved from lots of people having telephones that they don't want you to call right? I mean, I get all kinds of calls on my cell phone, and I'm on the national do not call list along with the other 99 million people.

Jim Caruso: So people don't want to be disturbed, they want to make the decision themselves, and they want to do the investigation themselves up to some point. So we used to cold call people, and try to find the decision maker, and there's still a lot of companies out there that are doing lead generation in that way trying to do appointment setting, or super appointment setting, or whatever.

Jim Caruso: So now we're trying to make it easy for people to find us, and give them the information that they want. So these are industry data from Hub Spot, but the idea is if I can get somebody to ... If I can give people information through my website that helps them make a buying decision and nurtures them through that buying decision process, maybe I can do it a lot less expensively than some other way.

Jim Caruso: I know that in our company we do a lot of PR, and we do a lot of marketing automation stuff, but we're very reluctant to go visit anybody if there are four other people competing for the business. It doesn't even matter if you're in Atlanta because we think you really haven't really gotten to the point where you've kind of decided and narrowed down who you really want to do business with.

Jim Caruso: So we try to kind of force you to do that, but we're trying to lower our cost per lead. So inbound marketing methodology. So what are the ideas? So you track people to your website, you convert them so you get them, you give them information, you collect that information through a form, you try to close the business, or close the loop on it, and you try to give them what they need to make a great decision, convince the other people around them, or get started effectively.

Jim Caruso: Is this thing on automatic? I hope not.

Jim Caruso: So I say marketing is everything. So marketing is everything that you do, tweeting, Facebook, LinkedIn, it's all marketing, and it almost all has to be somehow tied together. So there used to be a term, integrated marketing, and every marketing shop told you that you had to use an integrated marketing shop.

Jim Caruso: Well you don't necessarily have to, but the thing is, that if you're creating content in a blog, maybe your blog is similar to what you might be tweeting. So you have to think about all the different ways that you create content and try to help your customer make decisions.

Jim Caruso: So I'm on Twitter, I'm sure other people are on Twitter. 15% of buyers I think are on Twitter, and 85% don't care. But the way I use Twitter is I read all the time, and I read industry stuff, and I retweet it. So I'll bet if I retweet [inaudible] I'll bet other people in the Drupal community are going to like that, or listen to that and retweet it. But I do a lot of different stuff.

Jim Caruso: So we'll talk about a lot of things in marketing automation, kind of this overview which we're kind of going through now. What the components are, some of the tools, how to implement it, and how to measure it. So I like W Edwards Deming. He was a quality leader, manager, he was American, the US kind of ignored him, the Japanese thought he was really cool. They took him over there and all of a sudden they have these incredibly fantastic Japanese automobiles that are doing really well in the United States, and part of it was quality.

Jim Caruso: So he had kind of this cycle, and there are lots of different ways to call the four steps a cycle, but you plan what you're going to do, you go do it, you measure, and then you come back and you figure out what you can do iteratively to make it better.

Jim Caruso: So marketing automation is just ... It's kind of process improvements, incremental improvement just like you're fixing your manufacturing line, or just like you're doing anything. So that's kind of the way I look at it. I'm an engineer, that's probably why.

Jim Caruso: So what do I like about marketing automation? So there are two things that I like, and I tell this to both customers as well as partners. Marketing automation gives you a list of things that you need to do if you buy into the fact that blog content targeted to the audience helps draw visitors that are buyers using buyer keywords, and things that are important in the industry, then it gives you the step-by-step, the different step that you need to do to implement marketing automation.

Jim Caruso: So that's the first thing is it gives you these tasks to do. So somebody has to do them, so if you're ambitious you can do it, and if you're staffed and you can get buy-in, you guys can do it yourself. And if not, maybe there's a market for a services firm like ours that helps people do marketing automation.

Jim Caruso: And then the tracking methods. So I was doing business with an SEO firm, and they were tracking five keywords. Well, HubSpot lets me track a thousand keywords. I kind of like that, I don't know what it is. So SEO firms are going to target and really work on a few keywords that are important, and having an SEO firm is important, and having people who are targeting the app is important.

Jim Caruso: But marketing automation and the automated tools may let you do a lot more. So why Drupal? Powerful out of the box, we all know that. Flexible, we can add all kinds of modules, and I like it because even if you're kind of a site builder and not a developer, don't tell anybody. Don't tell anybody I'm really a site builder and not a developer, but the point is there are so many modules in Drupal. You can create incredible functionality out of the box.

Jim Caruso: So marketing automation. So content, we've talked about what's on the website. Blogs, press releases, other kinds of content like if you were on a forum. So how do you offer information to people that might be useful? You do it through a called action.

Jim Caruso: So here's what's called the top of the sales funnel calls-to-action, which is, would you like 10 tips on doing marketing automation better? Have it for free, just give me your email address and go off with it and think about it. And then what's really interesting, and I'll give you the list of all the marketing automation vendors. But if you get on ... I'm on the list for several, [Arcetto] and Par Dot, and Hub Spot. But they keep sending you information that tried to get you to think about marketing automation and how to do it better, and they're trying to nurture you as a prospective buyer into what things do you have to think about, and what steps can you take, and are you ready for a demo? Which is the bottom of the sales funnel kind of call-to-action?

Jim Caruso: So you have top of the sales funnel calls to action, this is just to get people in the ecosystem, and you have bottom of the sales funnel calls to action, and actually middle too, that get people to make a final decision. So a lot of stuff is driven by forms. How much information do I have to give you? Do I have to give you 20 fields worth of information to get my 10 tip sheet? Or do I need to give you my name and my email address, and maybe my phone number if I feel like it, and maybe now.

Jim Caruso: So what do you need? If you're trying to sell somebody, how much do you need? And there are some great charts, and I couldn't find it with the chart today, but the more fields you put on a form, the less the form is going to get filled out right? That's the way it is.

Jim Caruso: So landing pages. So the form is usually on a landing page, the landing page needs to set the person's expectations. So if I expect to see the 10 tips sheet, the landing page that I get to after I press the call-to-action button needs to talk about the 10 tip sheet.

Jim Caruso: Once I have this person, and they've gotten their 10 tip sheet, and now I can take that email address and I can put it into a lead nurturing campaign. So there are these nurturing campaigns, which are also called drip campaigns, which are periodic kind of reinforcement like, you got the 10 tip sheet last time, here's a video. You got the video last time, here is an evaluation sheet of, how do you evaluate products and services like ours?

Jim Caruso: Things that step-by-step get people closer to the buying decision. So you're tracking buyers, and we've talked about this. We'll talk about buyer personas a little bit more, but who's going to buy it? Is it for us? CEOs sometimes buy, VPs, and Directors of Marketing sometimes buy, and sometimes somebody in a marketing department, someplace is tasked with finding somebody who can do supply chain and logistics PR. And we pop up, so there are different buyer personas. So how do I satisfy each buyer persona?

Jim Caruso: So if you read my website, you'll see stuff about for the CEO. So what does the CEO want? The CEO wants to build his company up, do better, prove that they're doing a good job, make sure that the news gets out, and sometimes they're interested in selling the company, some kind of exit. So if you're a venture capital investor, or really any kind of private investor in a private company, you might want to sell out someday. So one of the things that we do is we help that CEO with that objective if that's one of their objectives.

Jim Caruso: And then different objectives if you're just a VP of Marketing, and you want to get things done and you don't want to have to worry about it. So buyer keywords, what's going to be in the search query? We've talked about this.

Jim Caruso: I wanted to use these terms because these are just hot terms out there. Owned media, earned media, paid media. So owned media is whatever you're doing, whatever you have complete control of. Your website, your Twitter stream, your Facebook page, your LinkedIn page, whatever you own and control, you can give people information through those channels. You can post a press release or a blog post to a LinkedIn group that you belong to that's industry-specific, and may help you generate leads.

Jim Caruso: So you own that channel. Earned media, press coverage, things when people like you on Facebook or Google Plus or retweet what you're saying, and paid advertising that we know about. There are also some other paid ways to syndicate your content, so if you do blog posts, there are ways to push that content out more generally nationally or internationally and get people to see it and read it and come back to you.

Jim Caruso: And then there are other kinds of advertising, Facebook and LinkedIn ads, which are getting more sophisticated and more granular so you can get closer and closer to the kind of person you might want to sell to.

Jim Caruso: So another kind of persona is that venture capital investor in a private company, they want to see a large market, a nice little management team, an effective value proposition, and an ability to execute. So when I work with companies, that's one of the things that we try to do when we promote them and publicize them is that they have those kinds of cornerstones.

Jim Caruso: So we work mostly with private companies and we're trying to promote them both in the press and on their website, and those are the kinds of things that kind of run through ... Are messages that run through the back of the story that we're telling about their company.

Jim Caruso: So this really isn't about storytelling, but there's all kinds of hot marketing info about telling a great story about your company now. So that's the kind of story that we try to weave in the background.

Jim Caruso: So metrics, what really matters? So there are all kinds of marketing metrics, and then there are metrics that matter to the executives of a company. What are the revenues? How much [inaudible] make? What kind of deals? Are we closing deals? And are we closing at a good rate? And are they closing them profitably? And all kinds of things. And those flow back into the sales funnel. Are we getting enough qualified leads? Well, sales think about leads really differently from how marketing does. So what's a qualified lead to a salesperson, and what's a qualified lead to a marketing person?

Jim Caruso: So one of the things that have happened in the last few years, and actually was happening before is that people thought marketing did a really bad job generating leads, or that marketing leads were crap. So the question is, are marketing leads a good quality or are they not good? So now, when you have a marketing automation system and you can see which pages somebody has gone to, what things they've downloaded, you have a really good idea about whether they have a genuine interest.

Jim Caruso: And if you know their IP address, and they subscribe with their company email address, all of a sudden now you have a good profile, and maybe a better-qualified lead.

Jim Caruso: But you have to start with all leads, and somewhere you have to start with traffic. So all of us have some kind of traffic. Do we have the traffic that we want? Or do we have traffic that represents buyers? One of the things that happened to us early on was we were advertising, and everybody who was looking for a job, there are people who want to advertise for that, but that wasn't what we wanted. We wanted buyers to come to our website and we were getting job seekers to our website. Nothing wrong with that, it's just we were spending money and we weren't trying to do that.

Jim Caruso: So marketing tools. This is fun. So there are different ways to profile what's going on on somebody's website, your competitor's website, your partner's website. What kind of cool tools are people using? So there are two things, there's one that I'm using. I'm actually using Ghostery. Ghostery is a plugin, I'm running it on Chrome, so when I go to somebody's website a little window pops up and it tells me all the scripts they're running so I know all the services that they're running just by going to their website.

Jim Caruso: So that helps me if I'm trying to evaluate my customer or a potential client, or I'm trying to look at a competitor. What is a competitor doing? Is a competitor running Hub Spot or Par Dot or are they running some white label marketing automation system? So I really like Ghostery.

Jim Caruso: And then there are these other tools and people know about them. You can do these crawlers that'll go look for different kinds of websites and identify all the Drupal sites in the world for example. So Built With is one of those, and I know of another one, and I just couldn't figure it out today.

Jim Caruso: So dashboard. So dashboards, this is something that I'm beginning to play with, but are also really cool and I have a few examples. So I have a whole list, so I really won't go into it, but it's a way to create basically a TV screen that you put up in your office of how many email subscribers do you have, what's your traffic today? What is your response time look at your website? Lots of things, so you could keep it on your desktop, or you could put it up on a TV and make it available for people to see, what kind of growth are you getting? How many leads are here today?

Jim Caruso: And you can connect Salesforce.com to these dashboards, or you can connect your marketing automation system for lots of different tools. So I really like dashboards. I found a lot of the dashboards as a result of using this integration tool called Zapier. So Zapier lets me take a lead that comes in through Hub Spot, and add it to my Mail Chimp email list, and things like that. It allows me to do things like if I got a new lead that came in through Salesforce or through Hub Spot, it allows me to send an SMS message which is a text message to my phone through Twilio.

Jim Caruso: So it lets me take completely different services and mash them together and create results, and I basically do it with all auth. If you know all auth, it's like signing in with Facebook, or signing in with Twitter, all you're doing is authorizing it to look at Google Analytics, or Twilio, or whatever, Salesforce. So I kind of like Zapier and I'm using it more and more.

Jim Caruso: So those are marketing tools, so collaboration tools, we're using a couple. We're using Base Camp for basic website changes and calls-to-action and stuff like that. We're beginning to use this UK based product for content called Gather Content. So there are a gazillion collaboration tools out there. The list was really too big because I've been looking at them for a long time.

Jim Caruso: SCO, there are lots of SCO tools. I just threw a bunch of them down here. If you want me to get you a better list, I can get you a better list. So traffic rank is if you have a bigger site and you want to see where you stand nationally, you can actually run the scripts from these companies and pay them, and they'll tell you something about what's going on.

Jim Caruso: I object every time somebody wants me to pay them to give me information about my company, that's just me.

Jim Caruso: There are a bunch of really cool file sharing, everybody kind of knows about Google Drive and Dropbox, but now there are a bunch of tools, Voxel, and Cloud HQ, and some others that allow you to take some file that got posted someplace like Base Camp, and loads it down to your Dropbox. Things like that.

Jim Caruso: So there are some other ways to mash up and do marketing automation that way. There are some really cool quote tools, there's some cool digital signature signing tools for contracts and stuff that I'm looking at right now. So here's the dashboard, I use this really because it looks cool on the screen right? So I just started using this. It happens to have some things, this is to do items, and it's me and my client, and different people, and how many to-dos are there? And how many are completed? And stuff like that.

Jim Caruso: So I just like this because I thought it was a pretty decent representation of what's going on on this particular client project. So this is just the website changes, so installing calls-to-action, and changing landing pages, and doing other things like that. So that's this part. So the content stuff for this client like blogging is in a different project. So I kind of like this.

Jim Caruso: Ducks Board, I just cut out a piece of it, so I have like response time on the bottom, and Facebook likes, and I have Twitter followers someplace else. So the number of Twitter followers was big, so I just put that there.

Jim Caruso: Okay, so here's a list of all these dashboards that I was talking about a minute ago. So the ones that I'm playing with right now are Ducks Board, Gecko Board informally, and Leftronic, and maybe Zeppelin. But those are all the ones that I found, and I just thought it would be kind of cool to do this. I just posted this to the blog, so if you want to take a look.

Jim Caruso: So I always say, think like a media company, or that you are a media company. You are your own media company, and it doesn't matter whether you're an individual, or you're a company, you are your own media company, kind of have to take ownership of your brand, and you have to figure out how you want to promote yourself, and how you're going to get Google when people search you, whatever. I just think it's a good way to look at things. Now the question is, what happened to my computer? That's very interesting. Doesn't want to go to the next slide.

Jim Caruso: So we've talked about Google being our business card, so all these components of marketing ... Can you guys still see this okay now that I've messed it up here?

Jim Caruso: So I think we can all kind of buy into the fact that the more content you have on your website, the more traffic you get, so that's what this story is on this screen. The more content you have, the more leads you get. As you get a lot more traffic, your site ranks higher. If you look at different Drupal-based sites, industry sites, different companies in the Drupal space you'll see that this is true for those companies.

Jim Caruso: So the components create that great offer, put it on the website, nurture the leads, promote the offer, that's kind of what this workflow is. Measure the impact. So what kind of offers? Ebooks, white papers, webinars, demos, tip sheets. We talked through some of these.

Jim Caruso: So we talked through what a landing page was, some text that describes what it is, an image, and a form. That form's actually pretty long. So here's a nurturing example. On the first day, on day 10, we offer somebody a lead generation ebook, and on day 20, how targeting email can increase leads. Day 40 we send them something else. Would you like to receive a demo?

Jim Caruso: So this list is going down from the top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel. So you can promote offers, you can promote them through social media and other things, lots of metrics. So measurements, this is one of the great things about marketing automation systems, is that they have ways to measure what's going on. How many people hit the call-to-action? How many people filled out the form? How many people went to the landing page? And then things you can track in Google Analytics too like if somebody fills out the form and hits submit, redirect them to a thank you page. You can do tracking of success metrics using Google Analytics, you don't have to have a marketing automation tool, but you have to know how to set it up.

Jim Caruso: This is just ... I don't know if you can see these very well, but this is just a couple more forms, more landing pages offering to give different things away. This is a library of resources to try to delight people to come to your website.

Jim Caruso: So this is an example from Marketo, I kind of like this. People come to your website, they get kind of interested, and then nothing happens, and this is what they call the leaky sales to funnel. So you get lots of leads, they're not qualified enough for sales, so sales don't want to see them, and marketing didn't have a way to deal with these in the past. So when you think about doing email lead nurturing, now all of a sudden you have a way to plug that leaky funnel and do something with the leads that are coming in through marketing.

Jim Caruso: This is an example of my content distribution. This was me tweeting about the Atlanta Drupal Business Summit. So different ways to push content out there and get people to come back to your site, or get people to come to the event. There are lots of different metrics, ways to measure. I'm sorry, tools to measure what your success is online in Twitter, and on other social media.

Jim Caruso: I always go back to incremental improvements, so back to the quality storing. Incremental improvement, this is a real chart I've taken the axes off obviously, but this is a real chart of website visitors, organic sourcing of traffic.

Jim Caruso: This is an example of our landing page image, good text, 10 tip sheet. Big surprise, and a form they fill out.

Jim Caruso: Going back to incremental improvements. So if you have an Aquia subscription, they'll tell you how's your website doing even if you're not hosting on Aquia. So I'm not hosting on Aquia, but with my Aquia subscription, this is telling me how am I doing ... So it says, performance C. And I wasn't very happy about having a C, you can imagine, obsessive response time guy like me.

Jim Caruso: So security is not shown here, but my site's reasonably secure. SCO, A plus, best practices. Okay, so great. So what did I do? I went out and I did something about performance. In this case, this is the example of YOTTAA, and what I love about this slide is the, "You are beating all your competitors worldwide." So it's looking at my site performance, and I stuck competitors in here, and I happen to love that. I can't help it. So this is response time.

Jim Caruso: This is a real project that we're doing for somebody. So what's going on in here? In the middle, we have a bunch of landing pages. So people got to those landing pages from a bunch of blog posts. I'm going to step over here for a sec. So we have a bunch of blog posts, and we have images that are going on the blog posts, and we have offers, which is these PDFs that people can download, and there's this call-to-action, so there's a button on a blog post or in a column on the blog and it sends people to a landing page.

Jim Caruso: And again, the landing page has a form, and so we built multiple landing pages in different segments. And then for each segment, we built eight different emails that go out over time. And this is actually a very early example. This is actually what we talked about months ago.

Jim Caruso: So we have five different segments, so these are five different email campaigns going out to five different segments kind of in parallel going off in different days. So I just thought that was a good example.

Jim Caruso: So lots of different value of lead nurturing that comes out here in this Marketo chart. More sales, more opportunities, better decisions, better win ratio. And then anytime you talk about email, you kind of have to talk about whether you have permission to email people. So you can send out a big email blast, follow the canned spam guidelines, which I think means you ... Anybody can correct me, but I think you have to have your address and wait to unsubscribe basically. And it's the legal minimum, and it's fine. But guess what? If you keep sending this stuff out, especially in large numbers, your internet service provider is probably going to come back and slap you on the wrist. If you're using an email service provider, so Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, all these other ones. They may just cancel your account. And it happens all the time.

Jim Caruso: So what can you do? You can do single opt-in, which is people come to your site, they say I want to subscribe, okay. So now they've opted in, that's good. That's pretty good. Or you can double opt-in, which is they come to your site they go, "Hmm, I think I want to subscribe." Go in and subscribe, and then it sends them an email that says, "You said you wanted to subscribe. Are you sure?" So now the email service provider knows that they got that email, knows that they said they wanted to subscribe, and now things are ... Now they're really happy.

Speaker 2: It also permits other people putting other people's emails in to-

Jim Caruso: There you go.

Speaker 2: That happens a lot.

Jim Caruso: Okay, I'm lucky. I have [inaudible 00:37:01]. Okay, so back to nurturing for a minute. This is kind of a nice slide because it says, at different points in the buying cycle, how do I get them interested? How do I teach them so that they can learn more about it? How do I get them the information that they need to really evaluate the solution? Do I get a chance to give them a proposal? Do they want a fast quote? Do they want a free demo? Okay, so how do I get them to purchase?

Jim Caruso: I'm going to put this ... This will be obvious, but I'll put the slides up tomorrow. So Hop Spot's come up with this idea that's kind of cool, to create marketing that people love. So that's kind of the whole idea being inbound marketing is, how do I make my website someplace that my customer, my prospect really wants to come to and is useful to them in a real way? And what I'm providing the content, can I provide it in the right context? Can I provide it at the right time? Provide it in the right format? The right device? Can I give them a video if they want a video? Can I give them a slide download if they want to see it on slide share or someplace? Can I give them what they want?

Jim Caruso: So one of the things that's fairly new is something called transactional email. So I kind of put this in because this is more about transactional email, but it's content, and context. So if I come to their website and I ask for something and you send me an email right away, I kind of expect to hear from you. So the open rate's going to be higher. So if I've initiated it, then when you send me an email I'm going to expect it, I'm going to be more receptive. So that's part of these things about triggered or transactional emails is that they're triggered by something that happens. That could be you ordered something, could be you downloaded something, could be you signed up, could be something. But the open rate is higher, the success rate if you want to say that in terms of delivering email is higher. So that's that.

Jim Caruso: So buyer persona, I said I would say something about this. So semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer. So I find this interesting because I really came out of the sales side. So on the sales side, every customer is kind of different, but there are buyer types. I might've gotten cut out of my bio, but some of you guys might've done the Meyers-Briggs that gives you like this ... I'm an ENTP if you know what that is.

Speaker 2: ESTJ.

Jim Caruso: ESTJ.

Speaker 3: INTJ.

Jim Caruso: INTJ, there we go. So it gives you like a personality type, so people ... And the funniest thing was when my wife and I first got married. My family is like Italians, and Irish, and we argued about everything and we all loved each other. And her family was like Scottish, and they like, couldn't disagree, and it was just like night and day. I don't know if that ... If you buy that-

Speaker 3: Well [inaudible 00:40:09].

Jim Caruso: Yeah, I think it had a lot more to do with her mother in their family than anything, but the point is, there are really very different communication styles that people have based on their personality. So what's a buyer persona? I mentioned this before, is it a venture capital person or an investor in the company? Or is it a CEO buyer? Or is it a VP buyer? Is it a marketing person who's an evaluator or a recommender?

Jim Caruso: So I threw this in. These next two slides come from Hub Spot. So what's the role? What's the company like? What's the goal of the organization? What is the biggest challenge? That's actually a question when you first go to Hub Spot, that was one of the questions that they were asking me as a prospective buyer of Hub Spot. What is your biggest challenge?

Jim Caruso: How do they get information? So they're talking on this thing about watering holes. So how do people get information? Do you get it from a blog? Do they get it from Facebook? Do you get it from LinkedIn? Do you get it from an email? How can I provide you with the right information in the right way? And how do you like to shop? Do you want a video? Do you want to email? Whatever.

Jim Caruso: So here is a persona, Marketing Mary. I don't really buy into all this stuff, but this idea of that VP or Director of Marketing, Marketing Manager maybe, how big is the company? For us, we sell mostly to private companies, things like that. So that's the idea. And there are several companies in town that do this kind of analysis, and it's kind of presented-

Jim Caruso: He'll be presenting next [inaudible 00:41:47]. He could, but that's exactly right. You want to have content that's tailored to that persona. What is that buyer's interest? Because it's different.

Jim Caruso: The VP of Marketing, unless they have a lot of stock, doesn't care when it sells. They're probably happy with their job, they don't want the company to sell. But somewhere the CEO, especially of a venture-backed company, in bad economic times you have companies that got down venture rounds and are trying to recover themselves, and ultimately sell out or get bought. Exactly.

Jim Caruso: So I think I said somewhere I was going to say about Paper Click. So this is my whole slide on Paper Click. But in the center box is the organic results. This is on the Google search result page right? So the center box is the search results that come out of Google, and then they put two or three paid ads here, and a number of paid ads down the side depending on how popular the subject is, what you're really competing them for, and whether people are paying to have ads shown.

Jim Caruso: But most of the traffic goes to those organic search results. But some traffic doesn't. Some traffic goes to the paid search. So part of your strategy in going back to marketing is everything, right? So you can have an organic search only strategy, or you can go after this extra 25% and try to figure out how you can cost-effectively do it and pay for keywords that are the ones that buyers care about.

Jim Caruso: So here's a long list of marketing automation vendors. I didn't really want to talk about marketing automation vendors because there are lots of them. They probably all do similar things, lightning's going to strike me now I'm almost sure for even saying that. So some are probably easier to use, there are certainly price differences.

Jim Caruso: I left off somebody at the bottom of the list. Unbounce, so Unbounce is a very easy landing page generation tool. A lot of the stuff you can do with a form. You can do a form on WordPress. Lots of people use Gravity Forms, WuFoo Forms, Contact Form 7  or others, there are a bunch of different form providers.

Jim Caruso: So there are complete package solution ways to do marketing automation, which is what most of these are. Silver Pop for example, is very hands on. They do a lot of the marketing for people, they're here in Atlanta. Par Dot's here in Atlanta. There's another one here in Atlanta, is it-

Speaker 2: Sales Fusion.

Jim Caruso: Sales Fusion. Thank you. Which somehow missed ... Here's it here. Okay. So lots of things, now this is a Hub Spot slide, but I used it because it says several things. The contact database. So once that lead comes in, and it gives you the email address, it becomes a contact. It's not like a CRM contact where you may know a lot about it, and you might've been to meet them, it's just somebody who came in, you can sync it with your Salesforce, and you can create a lead if you think that it's qualified.

Jim Caruso: But most of these systems have some kind of crude contacts database, not a full CRM but sometimes. They have some way to do workflow, which is a way to manage the email lead nurturing. Landing pages, forms, spark forms, they get filled out. If you've ever been there and you filled out a form, it gets filled out. Smart calls-to-action, so maybe calls-to-action based on geography, based on whether you've ever been to the site before, based on the next step that you might take in the sales process.

Jim Caruso: Social contacts, so you can search by hashtag or keyword and you can have social interactions here. We use Hoot Suite, and there are lots of tools to do that. Email marketing, so some of the email marketing tools are built into marketing automation systems like Hub Spot, and then there are stand-alone marketing automation tools, Constant Contact, Mail Chimp. My mind's drawing a blank right now, but lots of them.

Jim Caruso: So those tend to have a lot more functionality, and the other thing that's kind of cool I think about Mail Chimp is that they have integrations. So they're integrating with Fresh Books for billing, or they're integrated with ... You can integrate it with Salesforce if you want. You can use Zapier, and you can tie it together with Hub Spot.

Jim Caruso: But they have their own ... Actually Unbounced called it their marketing conversion ecosystem. So there are these providers in the space that are kind of point providers, landing page providers, or email service providers that have partnered so that you can use different solutions, and you can piece together a fairly complete solution for marketing automation.

Jim Caruso: This HubSpot slide says something about the Salesforce.com connector, and then analytics. So I like the analytics, so you can look at traffic by source. So I can look at traffic by organic source, by paper click source, by social media source. And one of my clients just built a website, and it's not mobile friendly. They didn't talk to us until they wanted us to take it over, so they had somebody else build the website, and now we have to take it over. I just know ... They just signed the agreement, not mobile friendly. I don't know what you guys think, but that just drives me crazy. I put these in here because I think this is just a useful list. So all the marketing automation vendors do a good job selling marketing automation right? So if you want to see how they sell to you, that may give you some insight on how you might sell to your customers and implement marketing automation.

Jim Caruso: I told somebody that I was a Hub Spot partner one time and they said, "Yeah, I haven't heard from Hub Spot in four hours." And the reason is, is because they really are trying to provide you some kind of useful information every time you turn your head, and they're trying to make it lovable.

Jim Caruso: Okay, so Brian Clarke is the guy who's kind of an affiliate marketer. He sells WordPress themes, he's got some eCommerce stuff that he sells. He goes by Copy Blogger, I think is his name. So Copy Blogger. But if you're going to look into blogging and you're going to look at how people are blogging, and how they're consistent about blogging, and what kind of ecosystem they have around blogging, these are like individuals that are blogging. But a lot of them like Chris [Broggin] and Gary [Benerchuck 00:48:46], they're big in social media, they're big in blogging, and they've created companies that are doing consulting to big Fortune 500 companies.

Jim Caruso: Are you guys familiar with these people at all? So Broggin was at the Hub Spot Inbound Conference a couple of years ago and I saw him. Gary Benerchuck, he's just completely out there, and if you're easily offended by bad language, you don't-

Speaker 3: Is he the one that started-

Jim Caruso: Yeah, Wine Library TV. And he's very interesting, and I'm going to tell you this example. But it's bad because I did not do this today. So I went to his presentation maybe three or four years ago at South by Southwest in Austin, which is where marketing geeks hang out, and social media people. And I'm going up, and I'm actually with Ben Finkley from [Falachi 00:49:44]. We're both walking up to the session because Ben lives in Austin. So we're walking up, and Gary Benerchuck is at the door thanking everybody personally for coming to the presentation.

Jim Caruso: So you walk in, there are like 5000 people in this presentation. So obviously he's either been there a long time or ... It was pretty impressive because it's that kind of connection he's trying to make. He's trying to make it very personal.

Jim Caruso: Okay, marketing automation with Drupal. So how do you do it if you don't have the tools or can afford the tools or don't want to use the tools? We have a prospect that has Salesforce.com, and their company is already spending a lot of money on Salesforce.com and they don't have any money for anything else right? So what can you do? You can use Google Analytics, obviously with Drupal it has great content, and taxonomy, and related content, and all kinds of cool things you can implement.

Jim Caruso: It has a very friendly search, I like Solar, I like Fast Vid Search, performance tuned servers. I'm running some stuff at Pantheon right now, so Pantheon caching, CDN, Aquia hosting, or some of the stuff that I'm doing because I'm obsessed.

Jim Caruso: Drupal forms, validation modules, so that's one piece. That's how you collect data and collect it on your website. You can collect data and have it go directly to your CRMS, so there's like form modules for Salesforce, it's just really a script, just put the script on the page.

Jim Caruso: Email, there are modules for Mail Chimp, and [Mandril 00:51:26]. So more and more people are turning up servers in the cloud, right? So I'm turning up an optimized server that does Drupal performance. Am I also going to put up an email server to manage my email? Probably not. So what are people doing? There's a number of transactional email systems so that you can build email into your server, and not actually have to manage an email server. So Mandril is the offering for Mail Chimp, Send Grid, Mail Jet, Mail Gun. There's a gazillion of them out there. Not a gazillion, but there's a lot, and they're fairly new. They're all startups, but they're going after mostly the developer community that is building an app, and don't want to manage their own mail servers, but want a way to communicate with people.

Jim Caruso: And now what I think is kind of cool, is that there are some tools that are getting built on top of that. So some of the marketing tools that you would see from an email service provider, templates. The ability for a marketing person to actually do it. Because transactional systems are code, you want to go grab some Python or PHP, or there's ... What is it? Trilio just came out with the Note JS stuff. So ways to integrate into what you're doing, now there are more of these transactional systems that are more friendly to marketers so marketers can go in and create transactional emails.

Jim Caruso: So one company that I ran into, and I kind of forget the name. They put a script on your site, they know when the person signed up to your site, like if you're launching a new website, the next Twitter or Four Square. So it tracks when somebody comes to your site and signs up, and then it can send them transactional emails periodically. It knows where or not they've come back to the site. "Hey, you signed up last week. You haven't been back to the site, here are some things you can do on the site." Those kinds of transactional emails.

Jim Caruso: So there's actually modules, Drupal modules for Mandril and Mail Chimp, and Mail Chimp is actually funding, which is one of the ... In addition to liking the Mail Chimp people, I think that that's kind of cool that they're actually funding Drupal developers to develop modules that use their products on Drupal.

Jim Caruso: So obviously all the things that you can do on Drupal, a great experience is there. And then there are lots of different tracking alternatives and different landing page alternatives that you have on Drupal if it's plain vanilla. So ...

About Jim Caruso, CEO, MediaFirst

http://MediaFirst.net

Marketing strategist and CEO at MediaFirst, a PR firm, and marketing agency providing inbound marketing, social media, public relations, and web development for lead generation.

Guy from Earth. Technology evangelist. Creator of opportunities and deal-maker. Writer, engineer, speaker, and enabler of teams. Early adopter. Dangerously technical. Interested in Semantic Web, social media, blogging, CMS/blog engines, quality, and everything tech. Enjoy speedy, standards-compliant Web sites. A proponent of the Open Web, transparency, and liberty. ENTP. Advocate for good. Play soccer, rugby, and lacrosse.

MediaFirst is a top agency for technology marketing, PR, social media, and websites. The firm's blog was one of the 20 top blogs on social media as recognized by Social Media Examiner in 2012. You can find him in the trenches of the web, technology, and social networking in Atlanta or at conferences, such as Inbound, DrupalCon, or South by Southwest (SXSW).

Jim maintains alignment of business activities with strategic intent for his clients. Internally, his concerns are the strategy, lead gen, process, execution, and quality. He has business experience across industries like telecom, computing, new media, and the Web that offers a deep understanding of client markets and better positioning of technology products and services. As a speaker, Jim engaged audiences from technical and executive roundtables to more than 1000 conference attendees across the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific.

Tags: Marketing Automation, Drupal, Presentation, Jim Caruso, Atlanta Drupal User Group, ADUG, Inbound Marketing, Hubspot, MailChimp, Marketo