Lead Nurturing ROI and Content Mapping

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Guest Post by: Maria Pergolino

This week Marketo released the final chapter of our Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing which focused on calculating the ROI of Lead Nurturing. This was my favorite chapter as it not only provided best practices and examples, but also included workspace for marketers to calculate the impact of lead nurturing at their organization.

 This was the perfect time for the release of this chapter, as Marketo had also just presented our webinar on lead nurturing. This webinar had over 1300 marketers register to learn about lead nurturing from Sergio Balegno, Sr. Analyst at MarketingSherpa Research Group and Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo and had a section dedicated completely to ROI.

A number of the questions Marketo received during the webinar had to do with the topic of content mapping. Content mapping is the process of matching your content (including white papers, brochures, webinars, podcasts, etc) to your buyer profile (buyer persona) and lead stage. This is not a difficult task for most marketers, but it takes time to compile data about your personas and requires conversations with sales to agree on lead stages. Marketo uses the following type of graph to map out our content to our buyer profiles and lead stages:  

(click to enlarge)

Content mapping is an important initial step in the lead nurturing process because the lead stages you define here will be used to calculate the ROI of your nurturing campaigns. For example, if your stages are lead, sales-ready lead, and opportunity, you will look at how a lead to sales-ready lead to opportunity conversion might evolve with and without lead nurturing. The difference between the two is the how lead nurturing impacts the conversion between stages. 

Next week I will post more answers to questions for the Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing webinar. In the meantime, here is the entire webinar and slides, which focused on Basic and Advanced Lead Nurturing and Calculating the ROI of Lead Nurturing, using actual case studies. 


Original Post: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2009/08/lead-nurturing-roi-and-content-mapping.html