Guest Post by: Fiona Sexton
This week, I attended eConsultancy’s FUNNEL exhibition in London. FUNNEL is organized around the four disciplines of revenue marketing: attract, engage, nurture and convert.
Five hundred plus marketers streamed in and out of the presentations featuring practitioner sessions and short vendor chalk-talks covering the entire revenue funnel. Our fun element for the day was a draw on the hour every hour where we gave out £20 Starbuck gift cards to some lucky winners!
So fellow marketers, here are some gems I picked up from today’s tracks that I’d like to share with you:
- Attract
Delphine Remy-Boutang, Worldwide Digital Social Media Marketing Manager at IBM Software Group, talked about Attracting the Right Leads using Social Media. Delphine stressed the importance of putting in place the mandate to create a social strategy across your entire business. There needs to be a dedicated person governing social media policy and brand reputation, working with the responsible groups to make sure none of the policies or brand usage is being violated. Then depending on your strategy the entire marketing function (or in IBM’s case the entire organization) needs to be educated on what the shift (to social media) means to them and empowered to go out and participate in social media.
Today, almost 200,000 IBM employees have Facebook pages (nearly half of its global workforce), 25,000 have Twitter accounts and more than 17,000 maintain blogs. The strategy has worked by introducing an education program with physical training events, complemented by webcasts and demos on how to use various social platforms. In an effort to stay focused, Delphine ensures each social media campaign is well researched, has defined sales goals and supporting landing pages with creative content.
- Engage
Conor Dwyer, Senior Account Executive at Marketo presented The Secret Sauce to Sales and Marketing Alignment: Drive Revenue and Achieve Explosive Growth in the Engage track. This was a wonderfully insightful account of how Marketo uses it own marketing automation software to nurture, score and deliver greater numbers of qualified sales leads to drive predictable revenue and better marketing accountability. If you missed it don’t worry download the slides here or listen to is it here as a webcast.
- Nurture
Aaron Stead, VP of Sales at Infusionsoft talked about Creating the Customer Lifecycle: How to Convert More Leads and Boost Repeat Sales. He started out by explaining that content is the currency of the social web and should be at the heart of every campaign. His following practical advice made sense, so much of the time we marketers have our heads down focusing on the daily, weekly and even quarterly activities. We tend to focus on the tools and the tactics rather than overall strategy and this is the reason why we have holes in our funnel! We must take a step back to look at what the perfect customer lifecycle is or should be for each of our organizations, and what needs to happen at each stage. Very few of us are doing ALL of the necessary steps.
- Convert
Later in the day, Ian Harris, CEO of Search Laboratory, shared some great tips on search marketing in The Inbound Revolution. His advice was to learn to speak in the same language as your customers and prospects, and stay on topic! Search is not the place for a rebranding exercise or waxing lyrical! He also told us to watch out, search terms with high conversion rates do not always lead to sales. Oftentimes, search terms with much lower conversions can lead to a higher ratio of closed sales. The point is that everything must be measured from the outset.
Overall, I really liked the way it was a content-led event that combined ‘big picture’ vision with practical advice from front-line revenue marketers. Did you attend FUNNEL? What were your favorite takeaways?
Original Post: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2011/11/what%E2%80%99s-in-the-funnel-econsultancys-london-trade-show.html
