Marketing Strategy Archives - Act-On

The Big Shift: How the Economy, AI, and Privacy are Changing Everything We Know About Marketing

Act-On — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 23:51:01 +0000

Marketing leaders are facing an unprecedented time with unprecedented demands: Wring every drop of value from generative AI. Navigate ever-changing email privacy regulations. Deal with the loss of third-party cookies. And reassure your CEO and board that your tech stack and team deserve to ride out this wave of economic uncertainty.

So during this season of massive change, we sat down with marketing leaders who bring decades of experience and a refreshingly long lens to the current moment, including:

Wendy White, CMO at health and wellness SaaS platform Daxko, 30+ years in enterprise B2B marketing
Clark Newby, strategic marketing advisor, 30+ years in B2B SaaS marketing
Angelique Schena, Director of Marketing at Sentinel Group, 12+ years in financial services marketing
Jeff Day, SVP of Marketing right here at Act-On, 15+ years in SaaS marketing

We asked our experts to share their top priorities, challenges, and predictions about what’s happening right now in marketing. While these leaders come from different industries, company sizes, and backgrounds, a few common themes emerged.

So let’s dive in — here’s what’s top-of-mind for these marketing leaders, along with some sage advice for their peers.

Marketing — in this economy?

The current economic headwinds are the undeniable undercurrent driving marketing leaders’ decision-making in 2024. Organizations of all shapes and sizes are slashing headcounts and freezing budgets. This is primarily due to big-picture economic factors like inflation and high interest rates, which make borrowing and securing capital difficult.

For marketers across virtually all industries, but especially those working in SaaS, this cut-mode mentality has led to fewer in-market buyers.

Much of the technology sector experienced a relative boom in the first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the sudden shift to remote work drove increased investment in tech, but that time is over. “2023 was a massive wake-up call for everybody,” says Wendy. “If you work at any kind of PE or VC-backed firm, or a public firm, everybody’s feeling the same thing: boards are suddenly caring a lot more about efficiency metrics, revenue per employee, and spend metrics.”

As organizations tighten budgets and headcount, marketers tend to experience those downstream impacts as longer sales cycles and lower conversion rates.

Traditionally, sales reps can assign a higher percentage to the likelihood of a deal closing as they confirm the prospect has the budget, identify decision-makers, and move further along the buying journey. But in today’s buying market, those structures are being pressure-tested.

Clark describes prospects’ mindset as “‘FOFU mode’ — fear of ‘effing’ up.” Even if they see the value and know how they can use your product, they’re postponing making a decision due to this overriding economic uncertainty.

Sadly, macroeconomics are beyond our control. But when your prospects are moving more slowly throughout their buying journey, our marketing leaders advise their peers to prioritize full-funnel engagement.

“We care a lot about the quality and close rate of our different channels,” says Wendy. “We’re constantly looking at performance all the way through the funnel, not just what gets us volume at the front end.”

Clark believes that since prospects’ interest in purchasing is highly skewed by macroeconomics, the traditional marketing model of engaging buyers based on their level of interest — as determined by behaviors like clicks, downloads, and webinar attendance — needs to shift.

“When customer intent is tamped down overall, and is not as reliable in general, you need to think more broadly about what your funnel looks like end to end, where you think you are, and how you’re engaging with future prospects across your channels,” says Clark. “Your instruments may not properly pick up your prospects when they’re out of market. And by the time they’re in-market, your chance to communicate with them is largely over.”

Attribution in the age of privacy

The digital marketing community has been obsessing over increasing privacy regulations and the deprecation of third-party cookies — and our experts are no exception. But generally, they’re focused more on the silver linings of these changes than the end-of-the-world warnings.

Wendy and her team at Daxko had to navigate a complex landscape with multiple brands and email domains, but ultimately felt prepared when stricter email sender requirements at Google and Yahoo took effect in February. And these days, Wendy tracks their sender score and domain health score as routine metrics— which wasn’t a habit a year ago. “It’s just incremental awareness of making sure that the plumbing is working the way it should, so that your campaigns can be successful. Protecting your email domain health is super critical.”

Following best practices are the key to navigating these changes successfully, according to Jeff. “We don’t spam. We take pains to make sure our database is clean. If people opt out, we respect that. These new requirements have been a non-issue for us and for most of our Act-On customers as well. There’s a lot of people out there selling doom and gloom, but if you follow good practices, this isn’t an issue.”

In addition to dialing in on email deliverability best practices — like implementing authentication standards, optimizing for mobile, and promptly complying with unsubscribe requests — marketing leaders need to pay close attention to the reliability of common email metrics. Thanks to the proliferation of security-enhancing bots, which organizations use to open emails and check links for security purposes, our leaders report seeing artificially inflated open and click rates.

“Historically, Sentinel has put a lot of weight on our behavior scores to define an MQL and how we hand off leads to our sales development reps,” says Angelique. “But within the last few years, we’ve had more questions around that activity — like email crawlers who are opening and clicking every element of an email, and then the next thing you know, that person is an MQL. But when you dive into their activity, they’re really not.”

Both Jeff and Angelique are responding by shifting focus to downstream activities, like click outcomes and engagement rates on those pages — which happen to be far more informative about buyer intent.

“We’ve seen over the last couple of years that click rates and open rates have gone through the roof,” says Jeff. “Sometimes we get 90%+ open rates, which we know isn’t right. It’s pushed us to look at higher quality measures than these early indicator metrics. Marketers love their data, but we need to recognize what’s a real sign of actual interest and engagement.”

At Sentinel, Angelique and her team are using this shift as an opportunity to re-evaluate the weight of certain behaviors and put more stock in meaningful, hard-to-fake activities like webinar attendance.

This evolution reflects a deeper change in how Angelique evaluates her own success as a marketing leader. “For a long time, my personal goal was to generate a certain number of net-new MQLs. And I’m succeeding — but honestly, how many of these are converting? When we go deeper and really identify the ways that people are making their buying decisions — instead of only looking at email — you see things in a different way.”

For Clark, this kind of shift in perspective is welcome — and overdue. “It’s kind of ridiculous that we’re still doing everything the same way 15 years later. These changes are nudging us into a more effective, genuine, interactive, value-driven relationship with our prospects.”

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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AI needs to drive efficiency, not headlines

According to a study from PwC, 81% of CMOs say they expect to use GenAI to support new business models in their function in the next 12-18 months. Our marketing leaders are cautiously optimistic about the possibility of AI being adopted across the organization.

Jeff notes that while deep and meaningful adoption of AI tools are lagging behind the hype cycle, there’s untapped value available to leaders who can leverage them properly. “One of the trends we’ll see going through 2024 is that marketing teams are going to figure out how to make more use of AI, and get comfortable with it.”

Wendy agrees with Jeff’s prediction, and believes CMOs will be under increasing pressure to use AI in order to drive efficiency — in other words, to accomplish our aforementioned goal of doing more with less.

“I remember the year when ‘the cloud’ became the theme for the boards,” says Wendy. “This year’s theme for the boards is going to be AI and efficiency. They’re going to want to know, ‘Why aren’t you using AI to go faster or better? How are you driving high performance and high ROI work out of marketing?’ It’s just going to happen. If you’re not ready as a CMO, you’d better get ready.”

For example, Daxko uses AI tools to summarize release notes from integrated products or partners, share them in Slack, and notify relevant team members when there’s been an update. Previously, that was a manual task — but now, AI has taken it off somebody’s plate. And while the marketing team uses genAI tools to support content creation, they’re taking a lean approach with free or low-cost tools. “We’re doing some interesting work around using a plethora of tools versus a big heavy investment,” says Wendy. “You don’t need to buy an expensive tool in order to drive value.”

While our team here at Act-On uses generative AI tools to supplement research and ideation, Jeff has also found tremendous value by using AI in our own marketing analytics.

“Implementing AI into our analytics, including natural language processing, has changed everything for me as a VP,” says Jeff. “Now I can just ask questions like, ‘Show me the email performance for this campaign’. It’s super easy for me to go in, tweak the analysis, and gather insights — that I’d otherwise have to be spelunking around in our various software packages.”

Given the many possible applications of AI for the marketing org, Wendy is contemplating creating an AI Ops role to help organizational leaders figure out when and how to leverage AI tools, and stay on top of the quickly changing landscape.

Customer retention takes center stage

Customer retention often plays second fiddle to acquisition. But given the likelihood of fewer in-market leads and longer sales cycles, our leaders say customer retention has never been more important. And marketers are stepping up to the plate — marketing is now involved in the ownership of CX at ~84% of organizations.

“In terms of business planning and corporate strategy, retention continues to be extremely important,” says Clark, describing how venture capital and private equity groups are paying more attention to retention metrics. “Instead of focusing solely on annual recurring revenue (ARR), they’re looking at net revenue retention (NRR).”

At Sentinel, Angelique’s team has been actively restructured to increase their role in retention. Instead of reporting up through the sales org, the marketing team now directly reports to the CEO. “We still work very closely with sales,” Angelique says, “but this will help ensure we’re supporting our existing client base from a marketing standpoint the same way that we supported sales and getting new business. We want to make sure that our clients have a consistent experience across the board.”

Jeff describes how our team at Act-On focuses on retention by making sure our customers are getting the most value out of our product. “When we deliver on that, we’re confident that we will retain those customers.”

“I think the big picture thing is to make sure you aren’t on that cut list,” says Clark. “Make sure you’re delivering value to your customers — and they know it. You need to understand what’s going with them now, where they’re headed, and be a great partner for them.”

Next-level personalization

Creating positive experiences to add value and retain customers goes hand-in-hand with personalization. And our marketing leaders agree that scaling audience segmentation and delivering tailored messaging is essential to achieving their goals.

“The biggest challenge across the years has been, ‘How do you rise above the noise?” says Jeff. “There is so much noise across so many systems — LinkedIn messages, email, ads, calls from BDRs. Lots of smart marketers and motivated companies are creating a lot of noise. Personalizing messages to title-level or industry will help make sure you’re engaging your target audience with messages that resonate.”

As Angelique and her team ramp up their involvement with client experience, they’re looking to more advanced personalization techniques as a way to improve their educational content. Often, they lean on internal roles in finance and HR to help develop real-time insights into what their buyer personas care most about at the current moment.

At Daxko, Wendy’s team is using AI to scale up their personalization efforts to the role or persona level. For example, they can feed a customer notification email through ChatGPT, prompt it to personalize the content for multiple personas, and ask it to segment a list of customers. “That’s a simple personalization that we probably wouldn’t have spent time on before, but we can do much faster now.”

As the possibilities of AI-powered personalization increase, Jeff advises marketing leaders to start planning their strategy now — including how to gather and share critical data. “What data are you going to need to accurately drive AI to understand your customer and the business context? If you’re not collecting that information, AI can’t do its job.”

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Be ready for what’s ahead

Clark has a final piece of advice for marketers navigating all of these challenges and opportunities: be ready when the market shifts.

“None of these challenges really change that much until the economic crystal ball clears up,” says Clark. “When’s the Fed going to move, or not? Will interest rates continue to fall? That’s what changes access to debt for growth companies and changes the signals that multinational companies read to crank things up. Those factors are what add up to an increased investment. And you can’t do much about that — so what you have to be is ready. Sniff out the opportunities and be ready when the tide turns.”

If your current approach to personalization, retention, or leveraging AI leaves you feeling unprepared, there’s still time to make fundamental — yet economical — changes to your tech stack. Learn more in our guide to switching your marketing automation provider.

Customer Acquisition: Face Economic Headwinds and Win

Act-On — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 22:46:04 +0000

Rising ROI expectations, increased inflation, and decreased consumer spending all add up to a CMO role that is quickly evolving.

“Surveys show CMOs are concerned about demonstrating ROI, with another significant challenge being the generation of leads,” says Jeff Day, SVP of Marketing at Act-On Software.

As CMOs create strategies to solve these challenges in the coming months, their role is also evolving. CMSWire surveyed 700+ marketers and found the future will require:

Increased cross-functional partnerships with sales
More pressure to improve customer experience
More robust data strategies

As leaders focus on these areas and build stronger customer acquisition, a few strategies can help increase success while navigating economic headwinds.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Cross-functional partnerships with sales and customer acquisition

Leaders are familiar with the age-old rift between sales and marketing. The disconnect becomes especially apparent when it comes to missing revenue targets. You might hear things like:

“Sales isn’t following up! We worked so hard to get those leads… .”

“Marketing keeps sending us all these terrible leads; we’re sick of wasting our time!”

However, this apparent challenge is actually a huge opportunity. And the key to capturing it is shifting from quantity to quality.

We recently talked with Kevin Butler, VP of Marketing & Strategy at Goose Digital.

He noted the need to consider MQLs in the context of your total addressable market (TAM). “When you look at your MQLs, does that number make sense with your TAM?” asks Kevin. “Your team might say, ‘We drove 4,000 leads this month.’ But what if there are only 200 companies in your target market? How is that possible?”

Part of this goes back to your lead-scoring system and talking with your sales team to ask questions like:

What’s a “good lead” for you?

Which leads are the easiest for you to make contact with and qualify?

For marketing, that might mean narrowing the focus to provide higher-quality leads, and sales might need to dive deeper and get specific about what makes a good lead.

Improving the customer experience and customer acquisition

Not surprisingly, survey respondents said another key factor that would shape a CMO’s role in the future is the customer experience. However, according to leaders, when considering experience improvements, they face two major challenges:

Lack of budget
Difficulty measuring ROI in marketing

Jeff explains that “cautiously optimistic buyers expect more value from their purchases in the current environment.” Building that value starts with nurturing prospects and continues long after the purchase.

As prospects and customers explore your website, open your emails, and engage on social media, they leave “digital breadcrumbs.” Collecting and knowing how to use this data is your team’s gateway to improving the customer experience.

For example, if you sell marketing automation, perhaps an existing customer attends a webinar about email deliverability and then downloads an eBook on the same topic. Tracking that behavior, your team can trigger campaigns to send that customer the most relevant resources to build pipeline and future cross-sells and upsells.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

You can also track behavioral data to identify prospects with a high sense of urgency. For example, a prospect who visits a product pricing page several times in a single day might receive a message asking if they’d like to connect with a salesperson. Allowing the prospect to self-identify their needs helps improve the experience.

Additionally, you’ll want to reconsider how you’re collecting first-party data. Marketers often ask for information such as name, email address, and phone number when gating content. However, according to Kevin, they rarely collect answers to questions like:

When are you looking to make a purchase?
What is your greatest need?

Gathering this information helps you build a stronger marketing pipeline that focuses on quality instead of quantity. It also helps you provide a better customer experience by identifying prospect interest and intent early.

More robust data strategies and customer acquisition

When asking marketing leaders about metric accountability, the survey found that:

59% reported that leadership expects “marketing to have quantifiable, measurable results for everything in the department.”
41% said that “leadership accepts that some of the goals may not have quantifiable results.”

Regardless of how your leadership team approaches results, marketing teams still face budget concerns, doing more with less, and demands around scaling.

As you work to overcome these challenges, marketing automation is a tool that helps you understand your audience’s needs, supports pipeline marketing, and provides sales with better leads.

The challenge is that many marketing teams use tools that don’t adequately support their needs.Gartner shows that only 33% of marketers fully use their martech stack, which means that many teams pay for capabilities they aren’t using (hardly a good thing when budgets are shrinking).

“Martech vendors, racing to build bigger and better features, ended up with so much “extra stuff” in their suites that getting even the most basic work done—let alone anything complicated—became difficult,” says Jeff. “The result is frustration and wasted time.”

This frustration is likely why 23% of marketers report they switched their marketing automation solution for a better alternative.

And at the end of the day, when you sit down with your CEO to discuss marketing strategies, they want to know:

How does this program, strategy, or campaign translate to dollars?

“When you can leverage data-driven strategies with tools like marketing automation, it’s easier to answer that question,” says Jeff. “But you want to use tools that have the capabilities you need, instead of paying for functionality you don’t want or need.”

If you’re concerned about the rising cost of operating your marketing automation along with increasing complexity, check out our free marketing automation assessment tool. It will guide you to calculate the business benefits of a more efficient solution to navigate the way forward.

5 Ways Marketing Leaders Help Sales Expand Pipeline

Act-On — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 17:29:29 +0000

Shrinking budgets, rising expectations, and a growing disconnect between CEOs and CMOs about the “most important” marketing metrics lead to more questions than answers about how to expand pipeline.

According to a recent report, the probability of CEOs and marketing leaders agreeing on top marketing metrics is like a flip of a coin (50/50).

But despite a growing disconnect, most can agree on one important priority: revenue growth. And achieving that is rooted in supporting pipeline expansion.

We tapped Jeff Day, SVP of Marketing at Act-On Software, and Kevin Butler, VP of Marketing & Strategy at Goose Digital, to share their favorite strategies marketing leaders can use to help sales build a pipeline in 2024. When considering the future, both are very optimistic about market changes, trends, and the opportunities they provide marketers who understand how to leverage them to create an advantage.

How marketing can help sales nurture prospects to create opportunities

Relevance to your audience’s needs, aligning it with your lead nurture efforts, and following up effectively are critical areas of focus when building a marketing pipeline, according to Jeff.

“If you know a prospect is coming to you from a Google ad on a specific topic, like lead scoring, follow up with lead-scoring content rather than hitting them up right away for a demo,” says Jeff.

Kevin, who leads Goose Digital’s strategy and marketing team, spends his days helping businesses figure out how to compete and win with their target audiences. He explains that it’s important to understand need and intent early.

Part of doing this well involves strategically leveraging first-party data about your audience. For example, marketers often ask for basic information, such as name, email address, and phone number, on forms, but rarely do they ask these two questions:

When are you looking to make a purchase?
What is your greatest need?

Capturing this data helps you understand a buyer’s intent and needs from the outset. He also explains that following up with previously lost prospects is a commonly overlooked strategy.

“When we lose a sale, we often close the book and move on, but that’s a huge missed opportunity,” he says. “For example, if you’re in an industry where one-year contracts are typical, circle back to that lost prospect before their next renewal date and ask how things are going.”

Building sales pipeline with a focus on quality over quantity

As you consider how to deliver the best leads to sales, one strategy is central to improving results:

Quality over quantity.

Oftentimes, metrics are based on the quantity of MQLs. But Jeff, who oversees Act-On’s marketing and BDR teams, explains that volume doesn’t matter if the quality isn’t great.

Kevin suggests considering MQLs in the context of your total addressable market (TAM). “When you look at your MQLs, does that number make sense with your TAM?” asks Kevin. “Your team might say, ‘We drove 4,000 leads this month.’ But what if there are only 200 companies in your target market? How is that possible?”

With respect to MQLs, one additional consideration Kevin mentions is the importance of correlation of MQLs to qualified pipeline sales opportunities. “MQLs can be effective indicators of success, but ultimately markerters need to validate consistent conversion from MQLs into real opportunities your sales team can work with.”

Improving the quality of your leads goes back to your lead-scoring system. How do you set them up? And how do you pass only the highest-quality leads to your sales team and ensure BDR teams follow up in a personalized and more meaningful way?

Mastering this challenge is where you can gain traction for driving the best leads to your sales teams and expand pipeline.

How marketing and sales work together with account intelligence

Kevin explains that while it’s the salesperson’s job to close the deal, it’s marketing’s job to give them the “tools” to do so. “We’ve got to arm them with all the information we can so they can do what they are good at, and part of that is providing the right data.”

In other words, marketing needs to make it easy on sales. And doing that means the prospect comes with all the relevant background details, packaged and ready to use.

“A salesperson should be able to look in the system and say, “Okay, I see the background details; let’s schedule a discovery call,” says Jeff. “And what’s the discovery call about? Okay, I see it here; these are the ‘magic pillars’ I need to address.”

And by magic pillars, he means the areas most relevant to the prospect based on the content and previous interactions with your brand.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Scaling demand generation operations and pipeline marketing

Surprisingly, there are many teams still manually sending out marketing campaigns or creating single follow up sequences. But shrinking budgets and heavier demands on marketing teams require scalability.

“Don’t set up small things,” says Jeff. “Think about how to set up a trigger campaign based on a prospect viewing a certain piece of content, for example. Then, once they exit that sequence, they filter into an evergreen nurture sequence.”

The goal is to personalize based on intent and need and build stronger connections at scale. Marketing automation is a big part of that scalability, but it’s important that teams learn to use it and start asking important questions such as: How effective are my emails? Would changing the subject line, CTA, or something else result in better performance?

Run experiments. Pinpoint success. And then use tools like marketing automation to scale and expand that success.

Uncover trends that give your team a competitive advantage

Marketing leaders watch trends carefully, but the tricky part is figuring out how to leverage those trends to expand pipeline. Jeff and Kevin called out a few when asked which trends to watch this year.

Niche communities grow in importance. According to Kevin, buyers are “going dark” for longer periods of time before becoming known to brands. During these dark periods, they gather intelligence about solutions that address their challenges independently and spend more time in niche communities talking with peers with similar challenges and experiences. “If your target market is spending time in a community, being involved with it will be worth its weight in gold,” says Kevin.

Recognizing the broader capabilities of AI. Obviously, 2023 was a big year for AI, with ChatGPT hitting the scene. However, according to Jeff, we have to think about AI not only for generative content but also for its broader capabilities like predictive scoring and workflow automation. These help marketers get more value, move faster, and deploy campaigns quicker.

Google and Yahoo changes highlight the importance of quality over quantity. Quality over quantity will be important in nurturing campaigns with the most recent Yahoo and Google rules. Kevin suggests that marketing scrutinize their lists carefully. They need to understand who is opening emails and who isn’t and pay careful attention to disengaged prospects, because your emails to them could be labeled as spam. He adds, “Remember, it’s not about the size of your list. It’s about the quality and engagement of your list.”

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

The biggest question you need to answer this year…

Maybe you agree with your CEO on marketing metrics.

Maybe you don’t.

It’s a coin toss, right?

Either way, explains Kevin, when you sit down with your CEO, there is one question they want answered:

How does this turn into dollars?

It’s a fair question. And when you can leverage intelligence and data to support pipeline growth, it makes creating that connection and answering that question much easier.

Does your team need a proven strategy for effective lead-to-pipeline conversion? Steal your favorites! We share them all in this on-demand webinar.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Marketing Automation for B2B: Building Effective Strategies

Act-On — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 22:09:20 +0000

Marketing automation is a tool that promises to help streamline workflows, scale with ease, and get better results. But as with any tool, it’s only as good as the strategies behind it, right?

Yet creating better strategies requires better data, and this is where many marketers get stuck. According to our State of Marketing Automation report conducted in partnership with London Research, 49% of marketers cite being unable to measure ROI as a key barrier, and 36% note that a lack of internal knowledge is also a challenge.

Without this intelligence, knowing whether your strategies have foundational cracks is hard. That’s why we’ve pulled together our favorite B2B marketing automation strategies to set you on the path to success.

Marketing automation B2B: Focus on personalization

Customers are impatient, and their attention is now more fragmented than ever. With only seconds to capture their attention, missing the mark is far too easy. And that’s why you need a secret weapon: personalization.

The more personalized your content, the more likely prospects will engage and move further along the buyer’s journey.

Thankfully, marketing automation removes much of the work involved by allowing marketers to set up rules indicating which behaviors and characteristics qualify contacts to be automatically entered into a certain group.

It’s up to you, however, to work with your team to determine the best way to segment your audience (industry, product interests, stage in the sales funnel, pain points, size, etc.) and which content and tactics you need to engage them. Building your marketing automation strategy should involve identifying your target segments, mapping your content based on those groups, and creating targeted nurture campaigns to keep them moving through the customer journey. And, of course, you’ll want to measure those results (which we’ll discuss shortly).

Marketing automation for B2B: Account-based management and lead scoring

Buyer personas … have you created them yet? It’s common for B2C and B2B companies to create personas to more effectively target various audiences and capture their attention. However, because you’re a B2B marketer, the personas you create are very different from B2C personas. How?

B2B companies have complex buying processes (hello, long sales cycles!). Oftentimes, multiple buyer personas are involved in a single decision, which isn’t nearly as common with B2C companies.

Without the right tools, it’s hard to nurture various stakeholders within a business and even more difficult to measure where the group is as a whole when making a final decision. This challenge can lead to missed opportunities and negatively impact your organization’s ROI.

Fortunately, developing an account-based management and lead scoring system as part of your b2b marketing automation strategy can prepare your marketing and sales teams to strike while the iron is hot. This approach allows you to gain an aggregated view of how a company’s stakeholders interact with your marketing content and assign scores to each of their actions to determine whether they are ready to talk to sales.

Marketing automation strategies: Alignment of marketing and sales

Marketing and sales alignment … it’s gotten a lot of attention, right? And for good reason, considering that aligned companies experience 19% faster revenue growth and 15% greater profits compared to their nonaligned counterparts.

As you work to get aligned, connect with your sales team and consider asking the following questions.

What kinds of insights do your salespeople need in order to have more-targeted conversations that help close deals?
How will you score leads? And what makes a lead qualified to talk to sales?
How can your sales team leverage B2B marketing automation? What features are available to help them improve their outreach efforts?
What is the best process for handing off leads to sales? What are the next steps once that is done?

As sales and marketing become more aligned, your results and customer experiences will improve. And marketing automation is an important tool to support that alignment.

For example, Hitachi High-Tech Analytical Science wanted to automate lead creation and drive tighter sales and marketing alignment. “We wished to drive closer alignment with our sales, marketing, and service teams to provide a smoother, richer customer experience,” says Global Digital Marketing Communications Manager Kerry West. “We wanted a deeper integration to precisely target and nurture customers at all stages in the buying journey and improve our ROI.”

Using marketing automation, they automated 40% of all new marketing leads, dramatically cut down on manual tasks, and achieved significant gains for marketing and sales.

Define how you’ll measure B2B marketing success

You’ve heard it a million times: “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” And yes, most marketers know you need to measure results. But what are you measuring those results against?

A successful B2B marketing automation strategy should include KPIs that define what success looks like. With those KPIs in hand and a tool that helps you pull relevant data, you can easily show results to your key stakeholders.For example, Avery Dennison lowered software costs by 37% and tripled email open rates after enhancing its Act-On implementation. Achieving similar results starts with goals, defining KPIs, measuring them, and iterating to replicate and improve success.

Find marketing automation B2B partners that provide strategic and implementation support

B2B marketing automation has the potential to amplify your marketing success, but it’s about more than just the tools. How easy is it to use the marketing automation tool? Is it intuitive for your team? And does it have the right capabilities to measure results and scale performance? And even more important: will your partner provide strategic and implementation support?

With the right partner, you’ll have a competitive advantage because of their expertise and knowledge guiding you on the path to success. And when you’re ready to level up your marketing automation strategy, you can move on to more advanced strategies to further multiply results.

The Medium is the Message: Best Practices Guide to SMS Marketing

Act-On — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 22:14:27 +0000

SMS (Short Messaging Services) is a daily communication channel for nearly 65% of the global population. Though many people have now grown up with SMS technology at their fingertips, it is only recently evolving as a key part of marketing and communication strategies for both B2B and B2C businesses. Widespread use of text messaging, coupled with modern technologies like marketing automation makes SMS marketing a smart and effective way to connect with leads and customers throughout the buyer’s journey.

Use this best practices guide to plan, build, improve and successfully implement your SMS marketing programs on an ongoing basis (or improve the efficiency and success of those you already run). Dive in for specific tips and more on:

Key Advantages of Using SMS for Marketing
Creating Your SMS Marketing Plan
Implementing Your SMS Marketing Plan

^{Ready to delight your customers with SMS marketing messages that excite and engage? Let’s go!}

Key Advantages of SMS Marketing

There is no doubt that SMS messaging is an attractive communication channel for businesses across industries, from manufacturing to banking to software. In any of these sectors, and so many others, it’s safe to bet that much of your customer base is using SMS already. With the right planning and the right tools, SMS can bring advantages for your marketing, sales and customer service programs, because of its benefits in immediacy, personalization, universality and user experience.

Immediacy

SMS alerts are immediate. Users are conditioned to respond to their devices right away when they hear that chime, or see that screen light up. If you have the right strategies, content and timing in place, this immediately can work in your favor for automated SMS marketing.

For example, say you provide B2B products and services. You can use SMS to alert customers and prospects of upcoming events, like a webinar starting in an hour. The reminder can allow your new lead enough time to get to her desk for your demo, reschedule the call, or seek a webinar recording, if she has to miss a live session. In each case, the notification creates options for the recipient, and builds connectivity with the brand.

Personalization

Used in connection with CRM and marketing automation, your text messages can make a big impact with personalization. One way to achieve this is to use customer data and geotargeting to deliver relevant messages that inspire immediate action. Personalized messages that use the recipient’s first name and reference a recent activity also are going to feel more personal, and therefore are more likely to be read and responded to. Ultimately, the personalization helps cement the bond between the brand and the SMS recipient.

Take this as a for instance: Retail businesses can use the known history of transactions and marketing engagement to segment buyers, and drive follow up purchases with a strategic suggestion or discount.

10 Best SMS Marketing Examples To Inspire Your Text Message Campaigns

Ubiquity

Nearly everyone on the planet with a mobile phone has SMS capability. That means using SMS can provide an advantage for building relationships at every stage of the buyer’s journey, wherever that buyer exists. This ubiquity allows businesses of all types to reach customers when internet connectivity is not available. A hospitality business might use SMS to remind customers how to get to a remote resort location, or alert the guest about an important change to their itinerary.

Intimacy

Ultimately, SMS offers an important channel for businesses that want to build better relationships with their customers and prospects. Used correctly, SMS marketing can be an important complement to other channels that are part of your overall strategy, and help you build engagement and grow your business. Any brand can use SMS as a direct relationship building channel. Try using SMS to offer exclusive pre-release access to a product, or deep discounts for loyal customers.

^{Finding customers at exactly the right moment is one of the primary advantages of using SMS marketing software.}

Creating Your SMS Marketing Plan

An effective SMS marketing plan has several important components, some of which you may already have in place, and some of which you may need to think about before moving too quickly and risking an SMS flop. It’s important to consider your plan ahead of time, so that you are prepared for all the possibilities, and therefore provide a great experience for the people you text. Remember, the subscriber controls the conversation, not the sender.

Here are few tips to get you started with your SMS marketing strategy:

Think about who would benefit most from your messages.
How can you provide an enhanced experience for that person / group?
Do you have the right tool to segment your messages and send at the right time?
What’s your approach to responding when someone texts back?
How are you going to make sure you stay compliant with regulations and guidelines around SMS marketing?

Think about approaching SMS marketing as one piece of your larger overall marketing strategy, and clearly identify when and where it will best enhance the experience of your leads and customers. The use of SMS should be prompted by your strategy, and not the other way around.

Getting Buy-in for Your SMS Marketing Plan

In order to get this SMS marketing idea off the ground, the first step is getting buy-in from your team. Building a proposal helps you get started, because it explains how SMS marketing can benefit your customers and business. Defining parameters like expected volume of messages and sending frequency, as well as success measures, will help you better define expectations.

Getting organizational buy-in is important for any project like this, because a new communications channel will always represent opportunity as well as some degree of risk. It’s essential to transparently describe possible options for how your SMS marketing program will be executed. Using this document or others that describe best practices can help you define your program’s parameters and obtain buy-in from your teams.

For some, talking about including SMS in your marketing programs may create a hostile backlash from customers and prospects, but SMS marketing is not necessarily a negative. When best practices are pursued, SMS can provide a unique opportunity to build brand affinity and lifetime customer relationships.

Today, many best practice parameters and compliance rules for SMS are well-defined, and partnering with your customers to set expectations and balance is a good path forward. After all, given the possibility of delivering improved brand experiences to customers through SMS, both you and your customers should want this to work perfectly. And you can do so.

Once your team is on-board, it’s time to start thinking more about what you want to accomplish with SMS marketing, and who you’ll contact. Defining the volume of SMS messages you intend to send at which frequency and on which topics will help you build a proposal that your team can succeed with.

SMS Traffic Types: Marketing vs. Useful Messaging

Defining Your SMS Marketing Plan

It’s important to note that SMS messaging is not email. Not only do recipients have to explicitly opt-in to receive SMS (unlike email), but each send has a cost associated with it, and your ability to send graphics or long form messaging does not convey to SMS. You should not expect to scale SMS as you can email. Instead, use it when and where it matters.

As noted above, SMS is a great channel for bonding with customers or sending notifications, but keep in mind it’s likely that your recipients will both open and react to your message within a few minutes of receipt. Where an email message may be included in hundreds of other daily messages that can be ignored, SMS messages are much more immediate.

Because you intend for those who volunteer to receive your messages to enjoy the experience, stepping into the channel with a solid communication plan is the best way to ensure success. For example, some businesses use SMS as the first outreach channel for opted-in buyers, or as a supplemental channel to reinforce email messaging or to add a sense of urgency or exclusivity.

Building your SMS Marketing List

No company can get into SMS marketing without a list of people to text. So, it makes sense that building a list is one of the first tasks to consider once you’ve built your program’s parameters. Getting the first opt-ins for SMS requires you to adapt form fields to include a mobile phone number, and an additional module for explicit SMS opt-ins, including SMS definitions, rules, opt- out availability, and expectations, with an opt-in checkbox.

One best practice for building your SMS list includes adding an SMS opt-in on your forms as a default. This allows you to start building an SMS opt-in list while building or considering how, exactly, to execute an SMS marketing program. While it warms customers and prospects to the possibility of SMS messaging from your organization. Doing so also allows you to build separate lists of opted-in and opted-out (or not yet opted-in) customer lists. Having both will allow for simpler control when you initiate your SMS program.

To entice customers and prospects to opt-in to SMS, consider including an opt-in message in your email and landing page footers and lead gen forms. Here are some ideas for building your SMS list:

Run exclusive promotions and campaigns that are open only through SMS, for example access to special content or an insiders-only deal.
Alert B2B customers of software or product renewals or of critical product changes.
Offer exclusive access to brand influencers and events.
Create a unique shopping experience with tailored suggestions as they browse your site or store.

Setting Expectations for SMS Marketing

Once someone opts into your list, it’s really helpful to set expectations around your SMS interactions with them. Consider sending a one-time welcome text to explain how your company uses SMS, remind what they’ve signed up for, or to deliver a promised incentive.

Here are some ideas of what else you can include with your welcome message to set clear expectations and retain your SMS marketing list.

How often you send messages
What they will be about
Specific benefits of receiving SMS from your company
Opt-out process
Whether or not you reply to texts
How to get more information or help

When you start sending SMS, you should be able to track how many credits you’re planning to use to do so, and once completed, how many remain. Your program’s reporting should also include a record of how many intended recipient numbers were not SMS eligible, to allow you to clean your lists and optimize your outreach.

Relevant SMS Fees

As we have all likely seen, “message and data rates may apply” when sending text messages. Accordingly, when you’re ready to launch your SMS initiative, it’s important to understand that there are costs involved when sending SMS messages. Most SMS marketing vendors have created a pre-purchase credits model that simplify individualized costs and adapt to international sending and sending multiple messages.

We therefore recommend purchasing SMS credits from your provider at a reasonable level to allow yourself to scale your program as you need it to throughout the year. At Act-On, for example, we enable customers to send SMS around the world through a tiered credit model that aligns to the local cost of sending SMS messages. This credit model makes it easier on marketers to plan and create messages, knowing how many credits they currently have and expect to use when sending an SMS message.

Must-Know SMS Marketing Regulations in the U.S.

Regulations for SMS Marketing

Successful implementation of your SMS marketing plan can only happen when following the appropriate regulations around SMS marketing. What’s the point of spending time and resources on planning and implementing great programs only to have them shut down as soon as you start sending?

While each global region and many nations have implemented some level of regulations around how, why, and how much SMS can be used to engage with recipients, there are also best practices that should govern how marketers use SMS. Ultimately, SMS messaging guidelines and relevant regulations are designed to ensure a positive experience for everyone.

Regulations on SMS messaging in the US require the following:

Express written consent to receive SMS marketing prior to receiving the first message
Predefining SMS messaging topics, messaging triggers, and frequency
Disclosure of any potential fees associated with any text messaging
Confirming enrollment and sharing data privacy, opt-out details and where to get help
No SMS before 8 am and after 9 pm in local times

Best practices suggest the following as well:

Sending a welcome message when recipients opt-in, including details on what they’ve signed up for, who you are, and how they got signed up
Providing clear examples of the type of content recipients should expect
Clearly informing recipients before changing messaging types and criteria
Sending SMS only within business hours, and not sending business content on weekends
Not sending blast messages with irrelevant content to a generic audience, with overgeneralized and inapplicable messages, no personalization or no actions to take

For more information on SMS marketing regulations, take a look at our complete and authoritative guide on the topic.

^{Since our phones are so important to our lives, they offer a great chance to win over customers and prospects with SMS marketing.}

Implementing Your SMS Marketing Plan

Once you’ve defined the outreach strategy, it’s time to start executing your program. Whatever your plans for SMS marketing, there are a few first steps to ensure your program succeeds.

As a reminder, your SMS marketing plan should include:

Which audience segment to target
The position of the message in your communications workflow
Length of text and whether you’ll include a link
Personal and compelling messaging
Desired outcome and calls to action
Plan for responding

Start Small with SMS Marketing Messages

Make sure your messages are getting through with an incremental outreach program. There are some delicacies to doing SMS right, as we’ve discussed, and it’s advisable to do some initial testing before going full force into SMS marketing.

When you’re first getting started, you may want to limit the scope of your SMS topics and frequency. Try targeting opt-ins for a particular use case, like an event or a loyalty program. With that in mind, you can strategically place your opt-in forms where those particular buyers will see them, and where your incentives to opt-in speak to them. Be very clear about what they’re signing up for, and stick to that only.

With a smaller handful of opted-in customers, you can send relevant messaging with a measurable outcome. Something like a loyal customer discount or coupon, or a live event invite to meet the speakers, where you can assess a direct correlation between the messaging you sent and the outcomes. In both of these cases, you’re also building a deeper relationship with your recipients.

It’s also important to not try to do too much with your first SMS messages. Keep it simple, keep it under 160 characters so it doesn’t potentially spill into two messages. Keep it in a single time zone so you don’t risk pinging people when they aren’t expecting it. Include a shortened URL to an exclusive landing page with some kind of benefit, so you can track clicks. Track responses, and see how people are taking it.

You can include personalization in your earliest sends, addressing the messages to individual recipients. You can schedule it to be sent at a certain time – 11:30 am with a coupon for a lunchbox – testing the features and functionality of your marketing automation SMS sending solution.

Ultimately, you want to build positive relationships with your recipients, and you want to prove the viability of your program. Those first SMS adventures should be designed to demonstrate success and reach a milestone you’ve set to determine whether or not it worked. If it didn’t come out quite as expected, you will not have gone down the SMS path so far that you can’t back up and try it again. Give yourself the ability to test and win or test and fail, and explore the opportunity to iterate, improve, and hit your targets.

Your business is unlike any other, and your customers and buyers are going to have unique relationships with your brand. If you can successfully use SMS to bridge gaps, to build brand attachment and loyalty, and better engage your advocates and loyalists, that’s a great success.

Must-Know Regulations for SMS Marketing in EMEA

Timing your SMS Marketing Messages

Once you’ve got your team’s buy-in and defined what and how you want to use SMS to build customer engagement, and after you have acquired the credits you need to get started, there are a few additional operational elements to define.

Regulatory requirements dictate no SMS marketing messaging is permitted in off work-day hours. You’re not allowed to and should not want to message people in the middle of the night or during dinner. Your best practices should define sending hours and your SMS delivery system should stop you from sending in off-hours.

For the most part, country codes and area codes can help define the time zones of your recipients, and automated marketing solutions can help with ensuring your SMS timing is scheduled appropriately.

In some cases, you may put into place SMS messaging based on an activity your recipient completes, like making a purchase at a point-of-sale in a physical store, or making an online order in the middle of the night, or registering for an event that triggers a receipt or confirmation SMS message. If your system sends an automatic confirmation, let your customer know to expect that text message in response to their purchase or reservation.

At Act-On, we send confirmation SMS messages to opted-in customers and prospects who register for our webinars one hour before they start. While our webinars are typically in the morning to allow for American and European registrants to attend, we can suppress the SMS message for any registrants that are in Asia or Australia, for example. And we can include links to access the recordings when they are available.

Responsiveness of your SMS Marketing Messages

While your SMS marketing program may be mostly outbound, there are occasions when you’ll want to do more than track opt-outs. It’s important to think about responsiveness when

building out your SMS marketing program, because users will have expectations, depending on the messaging you send, and how effectively you’ve set expectations.

Can your SMS marketing tool react beyond responding to ‘reply STOP to opt-out’ and removing the user from youst list? In some cases, your automated marketing solution can identify key terms – beyond STOP or Opt-Out – to generate the next component of an SMS conversation. If a brand texts about a furniture sale to opted-in customers, and the recipient responds with an “I need help with my product,” that message could generate an automatic response with customer support contact information.

Bi-directional SMS based on recipient responses has the potential to further enrich that customer’s experience with the brand. And unlike where an actual individual may actively respond to the messages, an automated solution for SMS can scale and adapt as the engagement grows.

Defining Metrics for your SMS Marketing

Marketing metrics help prioritize decisions, drive optimization of cross-channel programs, and allow marketers to build on successful efforts. And the same is true with SMS marketing programs, even where they are used for limited audiences.

Keep in mind that your intention with an SMS marketing program is to reinforce and enrich a known buyer’s relationship with your brand. Therefore, some of the measures that matter will be more qualitative, and may not show immediate results. For example, unlike email, open rates are not tracked with SMS. But you can track recipient responses (how many TACO responses did you get?), recipient click through rates where you include a URL, or numbers of customers that stick with your SMS marketing program over the long term.

SMS connects with an already highly engaged audience seeking benefit and value from your brand. Accordingly, recognizing when a known customer purchases more from you after your SMS message was sent can be an indicator of its effectiveness. Using SMS delivered coupons, or seeing an uptick in webinar attendance after SMS reminders are sent can be indicators of a program that’s working.

Marketing Automation and SMS

It is only possible to implement your SMS marketing plan at scale through automated SMS sending solutions. Automated solutions enable businesses to send SMS to opted-in recipients at the right time – whether triggered by a recipient’s recent activities, or a calendar event, or a purchase history – with the right message, delivering a personalized experience. Because automated systems send based on lists and tracking systems, they greatly reduce the likelihood of sending SMS to non-opted-in recipients, or exceeding the promised volume of messages within a prescribed period of time.

Integrating SMS into marketing automation platforms also enables better control over when recipients receive messages in a communications sequence and workflow, how messages can reiterate or reinforce critical messages also shared via email (or at an event, or through a website), and the degree of adaptation in those messages based on response data, replies, and other SMS-specific behaviors. In an automated solution, marketers can set trigger points for immediate follow up SMS messages, including thank you notes for purchases, resort check-ins, delivery schedules, and many other immediately meaningful notifications.

The fact that you can trigger, time, and send the entire flow of information to the right person at the right time is marketing automation. While it could all be managed by an individual waiting to register visitor activity and then sending a series of one-to-one personalized messages, that’s not scalable, the quality of the experience and lack of errors or missteps is defined by the marketing automation solution into which the outreach elements and messages are built.

Scalable Marketing Strategies for Small Teams

Act-On — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 23:20:10 +0000

Marketers are creative, constantly looking for new ways to reach their target market and get results. But we’d argue that small marketing teams like yours must be even more creative … because you don’t have a huge internal team to back you up.

Yep, you’re doing more with less. But expectations for results don’t really reflect that, do they?

Nope.

But hey, every challenge also has a solution, right? One of the best solutions for small teams is leveraging tools specifically designed to scale marketing. We’ve compiled our favorite hacks for scaling marketing so you can get results without driving your internal team to burnout.

Scaling Marketing to Drive Engagement

Superfans. Everybody wants them, right? An audience that opens your emails, comments on your blogs, downloads your eBooks — or whatever. But to reach that level of engagement, you need a solid game plan. And furthermore, you need the internal resources to implement it. So, where do you start?

We recommend focusing on a scalable marketing strateg for efficient, effective, and sustainable growth.

Identify Simple MarTech Solutions to Key Challenges

Growing businesses need the right marketing technology to continue expanding at scale. For most organizations, this includes a customer relationship management (CRM) system or business intelligence (BI) tool as the foundation of their sales efforts.

But to execute strong inbound and outbound marketing campaigns, you need to integrate these sales tools with a marketing automation platform, which is the functional layer of successful companies.

Marketing automation makes it much easier to manage, measure, customize, and optimize the customer experience across multiple online channels (e.g., email, web, social, events) and through all stages of the sales funnel. When you move from a cobbled-together set of disparate tools to one cohesive platform, you make marketing more effective and set the stage for anticipated, sustained, and scalable business growth.

According to Kevin Butler (VP of strategy at Goose Digital, one of the fastest-growing marketing agencies in Canada), “The system of record is the CRM platform. The system of execution is the marketing automation platform. So when these two solutions are integrated and working well together, you’re off to the races.”

In addition to CRM systems and marketing automation platforms, there are literally thousands of solutions you can integrate into your MarTech stack. These plug-ins help you plan, manage, and execute webinars, track and transfer data, import and export behavioral data, and even coordinate additional outbound campaigns. (At Act-On, we offer hundreds of simple and seamless MarTech integrations through Zapier.)

Develop Repeatable Marketing Workflows

The key to scaling marketing is efficiency. By meeting increased demand with the same or fewer resources, your business becomes more profitable and can identify new areas for potential growth and diversification. But efficiencies don’t just appear overnight of their own accord.

You and your team have to build them through smarter strategies and helpful technology. Done properly, you can develop repeatable marketing workflows that help with acquisition, nurturing, qualification, and sales.

Lead Acquisition

Attract and acquire new leads by managing all inbound and outbound marketing programs from a single platform. With marketing automation, you can improve SEO to drive high-intent traffic, build and optimize landing pages and web forms to generate conversions, and manage all your social media campaigns to increase awareness and share of voice in your industry.

For example, Goose Digital leveraged marketing automation to capture all the data intelligence required to execute its lead strategy and grow results.

“What I love most about Act-On is the flexibility of the platform. Creating segments and building out the automation with conditional logic is easy and intuitive,” says Butler.

Lead Nurturing

Once you’ve acquired the lead, it’s time to guide them through the funnel along a fun and educational experience. By developing accurate, actionable lead and customer scoring programs based on demographics, “firmographics,” and behaviors, you can better understand each contact’s position in the buying journey. Then, you can put segmentation on auto-pilot, serve each person up relevant messaging and content, and watch your results improve.

Do you want to see how this plays out in real life with marketing automation examples? Here’s one to consider. Avery Dennison leveraged automated programs to strengthen their lead nurturing, saving countless hours and tripling email open rates. The company’s biggest problem now, according to James Moat, director of global digital corporate communications, is putting enough staff in place to follow up with the increased leads!

Lead Qualification and Sales Enablement

With a good scoring system in place, marketers can automate the lead qualification process to both improve existing nurturing and provide your sales team with transparent and comprehensive insights into contact-specific journeys.

Act-On allows you to build custom dashboards (here’s a great example from our partner The Marketing Guys) to integrate granular and aggregate data into single views. Doing so allows you to track engagement, opportunities, and ROI — from initial campaigns to annual recurring revenue. The Marketing Guys, for example, have generated 25% in annual revenue growth.

Scale Smarter, Not Harder

The best part about scaling marketing is that there’s always room for improvement. Sure, your campaigns are automated, but you can regularly tweak these programs to drive more engagement and revenue. This is critical because, as you continue to grow, your objectives will evolve. Marketing automation allows you to scale in proportion to that growth.

The magic elixir here is testing. Be sure to run your automated marketing campaigns long enough that you’ll have ample datasets to work with. A/B test everything, from email subject lines to paid search headlines and then closely monitor the results. The clear insights into performance afforded to you by marketing automation will help you understand what’s working, what isn’t, and how and where you can improve.

Most importantly, don’t adjust your efforts simply for the sake of doing so. When you have reliable data, there’s no need to react haphazardly. Every single action should improve efficiency and efficacy, so make sure your entire team is on the same page and that you meet regularly to adjust your short-term plan of attack and long-term goals and objectives.

Act-On: Helping Marketing Teams Scale

Regardless of the size, shape, or makeup of your marketing team, Act-On’s marketing automation platform can help you execute all the tasks above for scalable, sustainable business growth. Our solution helps all marketers improve every aspect of the customer life cycle, including demand generation, lead nurturing, data management, customer loyalty programs, and even sales enablement.

Want to learn more about how marketing automation helps with scaling marketing? Check out our on-demand webinar as Act-On’s SVP of marketing, Jeff Day, and solutions consultant, Mike Felix, run through how to fine-tune your marketing automation platform for pure performance and build the pipeline you need to drive your business.

What is Growth Marketing?

Act-On — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 23:09:10 +0000

Growth marketing has been around for awhile now. Wondering “What is growth marketing?” Don’t panic. Like many buzzwords, the core concepts are more important than the name itself.

The truth? You’re probably already doing some version of it. So congratulations, growth marketer.

So let’s take a look at the definition of growth marketing, and where the term came from. We’ll also provide some examples of how to use a growth marketing mindset to expand business and enhance the customer journey.

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing focuses on quickly making data-based strategy changes and iterating on those changes just as quickly. Growth marketing leaders and teams identify potential areas for organizational growth and attack those opportunities with razor-sharp focus. More specifically, growth marketing goes beyond the old-school “attract and capture” model of lead generation. Instead, growth marketers focus on how to build better relationships with customers.

Did our growth marketing definition sound to you like a definition for all marketing in 2023? You get a gold star! Growth marketing has stormed the castle over the last few years and become the dominant marketing strategy. This makes sense in an era of decreased resources and a “more for less” mentality.

Entrepreneur and marketer Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacking” in 2010. As Ellis described it, growth hacking involves data-driven experimentation, agility, and scale. The term became incredibly influential in marketing over the ensuing decade, inspiring the birth of growth marketing. Today, growth marketing is so common that many sophisticated marketing organizations have an entire department devoted to the approach.

What specifically do growth marketing professionals do? We’ve got you covered in the next section.

What Does a Growth Marketing Manager Do?

In a nutshell, growth marketing managers take deliberate steps toward expanding their company’s customer base and overall revenue through more creative measures than typically associated with traditional marketing. They view the customer lifecycle as an hourglass rather than a funnel. Not only are they concerned with developing creative awareness and lead gen campaigns, but they’re also razor-focused on extending the value of their offerings for their existing customers. By driving more active engagement, they better understand their customers, which empowers them to tell more compelling stories to all of their target audiences.

Here are just a few things successful growth marketing managers do on a daily basis to help expand their business:

Work cross-functionally to develop an understanding of each department and learn how they can contribute to the growth of the company
Develop plans to experiment, test, and optimize targeted and personalized digital experiences across every stage of the customer lifecycle
Oversee content marketing initiatives meant to drive traffic to numerous digital properties through search engine optimization, backlinking initiatives, and public relations efforts
Gather, analyze, and interpret critical data to identify growth opportunities and improve awareness, conversions, sales, and revenue
Experiment with innovative marketing techniques and deliver progress reports to key stakeholders

That’s a lot to ask of any single marketer. It’s best for marketing teams to employ a universal growth marketing approach.

5 Growth Marketing Strategies to Consider

Check out these growth marketing strategies that most growth marketers stand by.

1. Organic lead generation is preferable to paid lead generation

By focusing on where SEO is trending and delivering exciting messaging, companies can drive major leads and sell far more of their products and services without having to drain their budget through paid advertising strategies. And skilled marketers who do invest in paid advertising do so to complement their existing content marketing efforts and support a holistic marketing plan.

2. Customer retention is just as important as customer acquisition

This isn’t to say that bringing on new customers shouldn’t be a priority, but the best way to grow your company is through your existing business. Keeping your clients and consumers engaged with your offerings leads to better usage and more interest in other products and services. So make sure that you know your customers, understand their needs and expectations, and deliver on your promises.

3. Persuasion is a better approach than overt salesmanship

It feels awkward even having to include this on the list, but many marketers still think they can bend customers to their will. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Modern consumers are in complete control of their buying journeys, so it’s important that you treat them with the respect they deserve. Don’t lecture, educate. Don’t preach, empathize. Don’t brag, listen. Informing your audience will drive trust in your offerings and endear prospects and customers to your brand.

4. Instinct is a slippery slope; trust the data instead

Historically, marketers have had to make estimated guesses about their target audiences and their program performance, which isn’t ideal. After all, determining the ROI of roadside billboards and radio ads is pretty difficult. These days, though, we have a literal world of data at our disposal. Don’t ignore it! Use this information to develop accurate personas, anticipate your customers’ next steps, and improve program performance in real-time.

5. A company is more than the sum of its products

Every business relies on the quality of their offerings as the foundation of their revenue. But a product can’t sell itself, so you need to go beyond the tangible offering to build a larger narrative that delights your audience and elevates your brand to new heights. While staying within brand and style guidelines is important, don’t be afraid to express a creative, disruptive, or even subversive message. Again, know your audience and use that knowledge to anticipate and exceed their expectations.

Growth Marketing vs Performance Marketing

Growth marketing focuses on long-term customer engagement and retention by optimizing the entire customer lifecycle, using tactics like A/B testing, personalization, and content marketing to drive sustainable growth. In contrast, performance marketing prioritizes immediate, measurable results such as clicks, leads, and conversions through paid campaigns like PPC, social media ads, and affiliate marketing. While growth marketing emphasizes lifetime value (LTV) and customer loyalty, performance marketing focuses on short-term ROI and cost-efficiency. Combining both approaches can create a balanced strategy for achieving both immediate and long-term business goals.

What About Compound Growth Marketing?

Compound growth marketing refers to a strategy that builds on incremental gains over time by leveraging compounding effects across the customer lifecycle. Instead of seeking short-term spikes in growth, this approach focuses on optimizing small, consistent improvements in areas such as acquisition, retention, engagement, and referrals.

Key elements include data-driven experimentation, enhancing customer experiences, and creating scalable marketing systems like email nurturing, content marketing, and referral programs. Each improvement feeds into the next, generating a self-sustaining cycle of growth. Over time, these compounded efforts can significantly accelerate a brand’s growth trajectory, maximizing long-term ROI.

Is B2B Growth Marketing the Same?

B2B growth marketing is a strategic approach tailored to driving sustainable growth for business-to-business organizations by optimizing every stage of the customer lifecycle. It focuses on building long-term relationships, improving lead quality, and enhancing customer retention through a mix of data-driven experimentation and targeted strategies.

Key tactics include personalized account-based marketing (ABM), content marketing designed for decision-makers, multi-channel campaigns (email, LinkedIn, webinars), and leveraging tools like CRM platforms to track and nurture leads. B2B growth marketing emphasizes understanding the buyer’s journey, creating value-driven interactions, and employing scalable strategies such as referrals or upselling to compound growth over time.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

How to Improve Your Marketing Campaign in 6 Steps

Act-On — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 23:28:00 +0000

Improving marketing campaigns to generate more leads has always been important. But you don’t want just any leads. You want the leads with the best chance of successfully making the journey from awareness to purchase. (It’s a bonus if they make that journey fast, but we’ll get to longer sales cycles shortly. Hold tight).

Marketers today have more tools than ever to improve marketing campaigns. And yet, tools only work as well as the strategies behind them. So we’ve brainstormed our favorite marketing campaign strategies to help you get better results.

Focus on first-party data

The most crucial way to improve your marketing campaign is to know your target market. It’s the first rule for all good marketing. And yet, you can’t just know “Tech Tim,” “Marketer Molly,” or the other personas you design. You also need to know the audience members as individuals. That requires first-party data.

First-party data is the information you collect about your target audience based on their interactions with your brand’s marketing channels. It’s valuable data about their behaviors, preferences, and needs that help you personalize marketing and create more engaging experiences.

You can collect data via many different touchpoints, such as your website, CRM, social media, webinar platform, and more. A marketing automation tool helps leverage this data to create more personalized and meaningful interactions.

Create content for every stage of the customer journey

Don’t leave your audience hanging. You want to create content at every stage of the customer’s journey — top, middle, and bottom — with the right message at the right time.

Here’s why: 61% of B2B buyers consume three to seven pieces of content before engaging with a salesperson. If you’re stumped about what type of content to deliver at each stage, here are a few suggestions on how to improve your marketing campaign strategy:

Early stage: At this stage, prospects realize they have a problem, and they want to learn more about how to solve it. Examples of great content at this stage include infographics, blog content, and quizzes.
Middle stage: The buyer has a sense of how to solve their problem, and now they’re comparing different solutions. Examples of potential resources to create include eBooks, whitepapers, and case studies.
End stage: The buyer is finally ready to purchase, and you want to win them over with content such as testimonials, videos showcasing credibility, and product demos.

Also, as you’re planning what type of content to deliver, consider automating tasks. After all, you can’t be everywhere at once, and marketing automation tools can help eliminate manual drudgery and scale marketing efforts.

Put relationship-building on autopilot

Speaking of drudgery, marketing teams are increasingly challenged with doing more with less and yet still have big goals. Some face staff cutbacks and budget cuts, and even if you aren’t, many teams are still overwhelmed.

Automating campaign nurturing allows you to put relationship-building on autopilot. It eliminates many manual tasks, allowing you to develop a campaign, choose the appropriate target segment, and decide who receives what content and when.

For example, Tower Federal Credit Union lacked the ability to effectively and efficiently nurture current and prospective members. Using Act-On, they delivered members the right message at the right time, increasing open rates on follow-up emails by 300%.

Use AI to improve your marketing campaign

Delivering the right content at the right time is key. But it’s also helpful to streamline your content creation to free up staff time. Emerging tools, such as Act-On’s AI Create, leverage generative AI to create content faster.

^{Getting help from AI to improve your marketing campaign isn’t as exciting in real life as the movies, but it can still take your marketing strategies to the next level.}

AI Create uses a single prompt to generate new email content in seconds. Additionally, you can use it to create subject lines, eliminating the dreaded writer’s block that often slows teams down.

“We have been using Act-On’s AI Create feature for the past month, and I find it easily puts an end to writer’s block,” said the director of development at an enterprise transportation company. “I now have at my fingertips refreshed versions of stale and outdated emails. Act-On AI Create also saves time developing text for new email campaigns, forms, and landing pages. I recommend making this tool a part of others’ marketing strategies.”

Multiply efforts with advocacy

You can create as much content as you want, but unless you have a fantastic plan for distribution, it can accumulate cobwebs sitting unread. A marketing campaign strategy that helps is advocacy.

Here are a few places to start:

Your existing customers: Did you write a great case study? If so, you can ask the customer to share it, spreading awareness and attracting more top-of-the-funnel interest.
Your employees: We recently talked to our internal demand generation guru, Kelsey Yen, about promotion strategies. One of her favorite tricks is asking account managers and other customer-facing staff to promote content, such as webinars, directly in their email signature lines (check out more great promo tips in point #5).
Your partners: You might have co-marketing partners, and if so, they can be a great resource for promoting content that aligns with your common goals. When you create relevant campaigns, ask them to share. And, of course, do the same for them!

Also, stay on the lookout for more advocates as you create new marketing campaigns. Even your internal SMEs can be great advocates, helping you spread the word while sharing their insights and expertise.

Combat lengthening sales cycles

Longer sales cycles were happening before the pandemic, but the pandemic only increased that challenge. But that doesn’t mean you must sit back and watch them continue getting longer. Instead, you can leverage a marketing campaign strategy designed to deal with a growing number of decision-makers (one of the top drivers of longer sales cycles).

Account-based marketing helps you focus on targeted, high-value accounts. ABM campaigns involve precise targeting to deliver more tailored content across many decision-makers in the same organization. As a result, you can improve your marketing campaign by being more coordinated in your efforts and support shorter sales cycles.

Final thoughts: Retool, rethink, and pivot

The market is full of new tools. And, of course, a new tool in itself isn’t necessarily the answer to how to improve your marketing campaign. It’s about the potential impact of that tool and how well it solves your problem. But when you combine the right tools with the right marketing campaign strategies, you can push through the roadblocks wedged between you and your goals — and do so at scale.

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10 Best SMS Marketing Examples To Inspire Your Text Message Campaigns

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 22:11:32 +0000

Are you using SMS marketing yet? If not, you’re missing out on an opportunity to reach your customers directly. Take it from these top brands in our collection of best SMS marketing examples. (Just be sure you’re following all the laws and regulations in your region before getting started).

^{SMS marketing can get your message in front of your customers more effectively than most other channels. Photo by Pradamas Gifarry on Unsplash.}

With an average open rate of 98% compared to roughly 20% for emails, the best marketing text messages have the potential to make a big impact on your marketing ROI. If you’re on board with the idea of SMS marketing, but need a little inspiration, check out these 10 examples of great SMS marketing. From software to clothing to the stock exchange, SMS marketing can be an important channel to add to your greater marketing strategy in any industry.

Text4Baby

This one might be our absolute best SMS marketing example. It shows the power of content to build positive brand perception. Text4Baby provides updates and resources for families expecting a child. A few times a week, the service sends links to content, pregnancy milestones, and advice on staying healthy.

Sponsored by a coalition of mobile service providers, Text4Baby is a classic content marketing play. The focus is on providing something useful to the customer for its own sake, not on a transaction. However, the sign-up process and the Text4Baby website make clear that the service receives sponsorship from major mobile networks (T-Mobile, AT&T, Virgin, etc.). As a result, the unrelated service extends its brand halo to the customer’s cell phone provider. Brilliant!

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Urban Outfitters

^{Integrate a chatbot with your SMS marketing and watch the sales flow in!}

Clothing retailer Urban Outfitters uses SMS messaging to connect customers with the UO ChatBot. Through a series of message options, it’s possible to check the status of an order, find out more about their returns and exchange policies, and connect with a customer service agent for more complex inquiries.

JUDY

^{Some of the best SMS marketing examples integrate chatbots into the experience for real-time customer help.}

JUDY supplies a range of emergency products, from ready-to-go survival kits to portable power stations, first aid essentials, and more. Sign up for their SMS alerts, and they’ll send you promotional and personalized SMS messages. Their chatbot will also reply to messages asking about disaster preparation, what to include in an emergency kit, and how to prepare if you and your family find yourselves in a real-time emergency.

Microsoft

Microsoft 365 allows users to sign up for text alerts for lists and list alerts. It’s a great example of a use case for SMS in customer marketing, because Microsoft is using hyper-personalized SMS to help embed their product. Using the immediacy of SMS, Microsoft 365 is improving adoption, and providing a supportive, helpful push toward achievement, whether it’s a business, family, or student using their products.

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CVS Pharmacy

You’ll notice we don’t have an image for this one. And there’s good reason for that: CVS Pharmacy uses text messages to update customers on important personal medical information. So any example we picked would end up looking like a heavily redacted government document by the time we scrubbed it.

CVS customers can refill prescriptions, view resources on the medications they take (including videos), and communicate with their pharmacist…all simply by replying to automated SMS messages. Now that’s what we call a great customer experience!

Eagle Investors Stock Alert

^{Have timely alerts to provide for customers? SMS marketing is the perfect channel for that!}

Keeping up to date with the stock market can make trading more profitable, but it’s not always easy to follow those significant changes. With Eagle Investors real-time stock alerts, traders can stay in control of investments and options. The investment firm builds brand affinity by offering the chance to join a global community of traders who share their knowledge.

Jenna Kutcher

^{SMS marketing is a great way to solicit user-generated responses from your most engaged customers.}

Marketing entrepreneur and beloved host of the Goal Digger podcast, Jenna Kutcher, has an SMS marketing program that nurtures her community with weekly inspirational messages, questions, and links to courses, podcast episodes, and more.

Divi

^{SMS marketing can keep customers updated on the status of popular products.}

Divi is a health and wellness company from Instagram influencer Dani Austin. The beauty brand uses SMS marketing to launch new hair care products. Subscribers to their SMS alerts have the opportunity to purchase products on a pre-release basis, a tactic that proved so popular that their new Scalp Serum sold out in record time.

Act-On

^{We’re not afraid to make our own SMS marketing example on one of our lists, because the results speak for themselves!}

One of our favorite examples is our own implementation of SMS marketing to improve webinar registrations and attendance, because it’s working. In fact, the attendance rate for our webinars grew by 80% after we implemented day-before and day-of reminders via SMS. Engagement also increased, because it’s personalized and convenient to learn about marketing and sales topics of all kinds. B2B SMS marketing can clearly be an important addition to your marketing efforts.

USA Today, The Short List

Sometimes the news cycle can feel a little overwhelming, so with The Short List*, USA Today editor Ashley Shaffer sends out an SMS with the day’s most popular stories, condensed into a super-speedy format. If recipients want more, they can click through to the USA Today website, and get the full roundup of the day’s most popular news.

^{This SMS marketing example from USA Today shows some of the required steps to signing someone up for text advertising.}

We consider this one of the best marketing text messages we’ve seen because of how well it communicates the voice of the brand in such a short space. USA Today first became famous for its pithy, to-the-point style for readers on the move. This SMS example captures it perfectly.

Create Value and Expand Your Reach with SMS Marketing

Using SMS marketing as a direct way to stay in touch with your customers is an excellent option to future-proof your strategies. With changes to email privacy protection, and ever-changing social media algorithms, it’s more important than ever before to find a way to connect. SMS marketing offers a direct line to the devices we all have in our pockets and purses every day. It’s definitely a great option to increase engagement with your brand and its offerings, as long as you do it correctly. We hope these 10 examples provide some inspiration.

_{*This newsletter is no longer available. But we still like the example. Have you noticed that this method of receiving updates has only become more popular from media brands since we first published this blog in 2021?}

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How to Create a Buyer Persona that Increases Marketing ROI

Act-On — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 22:09:49 +0000

Marketing personas are fiction. But all good fiction is based on slices of reality, and when you pull relevant research to bring your personas to life, the potential results are significant.

Fifty-six percent of companies report higher-quality leads due to using personas, and 36% say they contributed to shorter sales cycles. And if that wasn’t enough to show the power of personas, consider that 96% of companies that exceed their lead-generation and revenue goals use … you guessed it, personas.

^{If only it were so easy…creating buyer’s persona or customer persona for marketing takes more than grabbing one off the shelf.}

You might wonder where to start if you haven’t created personas yet or want to create better ones. Here’s a brief definition of a buyer’s persona, a step-by-step guide for creating personas, and tips for aligning them with the buyer’s journey to amplify your impact.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer’s persona is similar to your ideal customer profiles but zoomed in on a particular individual at the company. It helps you understand a person’s exact needs, preferences and behaviors. The purpose of a persona is to gather insights and motivations about the decision-making process of your different customer types so you can use them to create customized marketing strategies and get better results.
Developing good buyer personas makes creating content that resonates with your audience much easier and helps drive your customers to action. It also supports making that content consistent across various teams in the organization.

Creating a persona (step by step)

Creating buyer personas can seem overwhelming. After all, you likely have many target audiences, and the thought of creating personas for them all can feel overwhelming. The good news is that you don’t have to.

Persona customers typically fall into the following categories.

Decision maker. This is the person who owns the budget approval.
Influencer. This is the person who recommends the solution.
User. This is the person who actually uses the product or service.

Select the most relevant three to five personas to target and then use the following steps to create a profile for each.

Conduct customer persona research

The research phase is about learning more about specific groups of buyers so you can do a better job of helping them. Details you’ll collect can include demographics, challenges, and more. A few places to gather this information are:

Survey your existing customers and prospects (pro tip: Consider enticing them with something to improve response rates, such as a drawing or gift card).
Interview your sales team. Learn more about the exact words your persona customers use to describe their problems, why they switched from a competitor solution and the most attractive benefits of your solution.
Review internal databases. Gather data to confirm who is purchasing your solution and why.
Tap into outside research, including audience analysis reports, industry surveys and more.

With this information in hand, you’re ready for the next step, which is drafting the persona profile.

Create a persona profile

Ready to create your first buyer persona profile? Great! Here are some sections to consider including:

Background: Describe the person’s job title, career path and any relevant personal details.
Demographics: Include factors such as age, income and location of the persona. Identifiers.
Challenges and frustrations: What are the person’s largest challenges, and what roadblocks do they face when working to overcome them?
Information consumption habits: What publications, blogs, and other resources does your persona consume? What is their “information diet”?
How you can help: Include how your product or service can help them reach their goals.

Want an example? Here’s a sample persona for a B2B marketing automation solution.

Name: Marketer Molly
Age: 36
Location: San Francisco, California
Position: Marketing director at ABC company
Background: Molly has an MBA and reached the marketing director level after climbing the ranks from marketing specialist at her company.

Challenges: Molly’s team is overwhelmed. They seem never to have enough time to finish the work, and she worries about staff burnout. She wants to support her team in improving efficiency so they don’t feel stressed out.

Frustrations: Molly knows budget cuts are coming. She doesn’t want the existing problem to worsen, putting more pressure on staff to produce results with fewer resources.

How we can solve frustrations: A marketing automation platform can help support Molly’s team by scaling their resources to get more done in less time, reducing burnout and frustration while improving results.

https://act-on.com/learn/e-books-guides/building-buyer-personas/

Iterate and refine

Once you create your buyer’s personas, remember it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it task. You’ll want to revisit them periodically, validate the information and iterate as needed.

Creating a buyer persona matrix

You might wonder, “Who at your company will buyer personas most benefit?” Buyer personas support marketing, product, sales and support teams. That’s why once you create your buyer persona types, it helps to pull them into a matrix, which makes the data more readable, concise and easy to reference.
Here’s a sample persona matrix that describes buyer personas for a marketing automation solution:

	“Maxine”	“Sam”	“Danielle”
Title	Marketing Manager	Sales Director	Content Manager
Role	Buyer	Influencer	User
Background	5 years of experience 28 years old	8 years of experience 32 years old	7 years of experience 30 years old
Challenges	Managing multiple marketing channels, manual processes and limited resources	Struggles with aligning marketing with sales and effectively managing and prioritizing leads	Efficiently managing content creation and distribution, and measuring content performance across multiple channels
Concerns	Demonstrating marketing ROI and generating qualified leads for the sales team	Needs seamless integration of marketing automation with CRM to optimize the sales process	Concerned about personalizing content, optimizing ROI and improving audience engagement
Needs	Streamlined campaign management, automated lead generation and robust performance tracking	Marketing automation software that offers lead scoring, tracking capabilities and visibility into marketing-driven revenue	Requires a solution that makes it easy to scale content personalization and in-depth analytics to track content
Goals	Improve marketing effectiveness, increase lead quality, and drive measurable business results	Improve conversion rates and drive revenue growth	Increase engagement and drive content-driven conversions

Of course, you can go into more detail. Some persona matrixes take up multiple pages or slides. But often the simpler, the better. You want to present the information in a way that makes it easy to see the differences between the challenges and needs. And you want your personas to be memorable, not so detailed they’re impossible to recall.

Map the buyer’s journey

Creating buyer personas is the first step. The second step is mapping those personas to the buyer’s journey. This helps provide a framework for creating the right content at the right time.

The steps below illustrate the journey of a marketer with a problem: She needs to generate more leads. Once that problem is identified, she begins to consider changing her marketing automation platform. By stage 3, she’s got a short list of features she wants, and she’s considering which vendors she will talk to. So far, her journey has been entirely online. Her opinions have been formed by the content she found when she searched for a solution.

Objective	Research	Consideration	Evaluation	Decision
Buyer needs to generate more sales-ready leads	Buyer starts researching options for a different marketing automation platform	Buyer narrows down list to identify potential vendors for a solution	Buyer identifies and prioritizes her criteria for choosing one platform and vendor over the rest	Buyer decides on a vendor and makes a purchase

Build a content plan

Using the buyer’s map, you can assign relevant content for each stage of each persona customer’s journey. If we look at the example above, we see the following:

Objective: We’d work to attract those buyers with social media and advertising; we’d make sure our web copy answered the question “How do I generate more sales-ready leads?” so when the buyers searched, our page would be returned.

Research: We’d salt our landing pages with attractive early-stage content that the buyers would find so attractive that they would fill out a form with their contact information in order to get it, and (best-case scenario) they’d opt in to receive our emails. Now we nurture them with content that helps move them through the funnel.

Consideration: We begin to offer content that differentiates us from other vendors, such as online demos that show simple, common scenarios.

Evaluation: We make sure they get information about pricing, spec sheets, and other pieces that help them compare systems and make a final decision. This content may come from the salesperson or come during the course of a meeting or demo.

Decision: We move into training materials and usability support materials, then into loyalty and advocacy content.

There is a stage for every piece of content, and vice versa. With just a little planning, you can be ready to meet that persona customer or prospect wherever they are with something that speaks to them and their needs.

Do you need a little more help building your buyer personas? If so, check out our “Building Buyer Personas in 3 Steps” eBook, which we created to guide you from being confused to being done.