table of contents - optimizelypages.optimizely.com/rs/361-ger-922/images/the complete... ·...

Table of ContentsCHAPTER 1 The Optimization Opportunity 04

CHAPTER 2 Moving From a Pipeline to a 06 Customer Lifecycle

CHAPTER 3 How to Become More Efficient 12 at Each Stage of the Funnel

CHAPTER 4 Don’t Server Everyone at Once: 26 How to Target Marketing to Audiences

CHAPTER 5 Drive Marketing-Sales Alignment 28 with Account-Based Marketing

P2 | Table of Contents The Complete Guide to Optimizing Demand Generation in B2B Marketing

P3 | Introduction

IntroductionA high-growth B2B organization needs to constantly innovate in order to meet its targets. For the B2B marketer there will always be contradictions to balance throughout the customer lifecycle. Questions like:

• How do I allocate budget to drive theright type of visitors to my websitewithout sacrificing the lead volumeI need?

• How do I educate my visitors,presenting content and offers which isrelevant to them, but also bring theminto my marketing-sales funnel at theright time?

• How do I give my visitors an option toeducate and serve themselves, butreach out to help answer their questionsor prompt action at the right time?

• How do I increase my conversion rateswithout sacrificing valuable contactinformation my sales team needs?

• How do I meet increasingly ambitiousgoals with finite budget and resources?

Optimization is an essential strategy to make the most of every digital interaction in B2B marketing. It’s essential to focus on constantly improving your customer experiences through testing and personalization.

To do so, you’ll need to approach each stage of the B2B funnel with a keen eye for what helps educate visitors, addresses their concerns, and helps them to begin the journey of becoming a customer. Introducing changes and measuring their impact through methods like testing and personalization are the key to ensuring that every digital touchpoint with a visitor guides them towards becoming a customer as efficiently as possible.

Without optimizing, you’ll risk misallocating your marketing spend, driving leads into your marketing-sales pipeline that never convert to become customers, or acquiring customers that churn before you can break even on your customer acquisition costs (CAC).

The Complete Guide to Optimizing Demand Generation in B2B Marketing

CHAPTER 01

The Optimization Opportunity

Optimization is the strategy that will amplify your current campaigns across all channels. By testing, personalizing, and integrating the touchpoints of the buyer’s journey, you will:

• Get the most engagement fromevery interaction with a visitor

• Maximize the ROI of your marketingcampaigns

• Reducing risk of developing digitalcampaigns that don’t generate leads

• Ensure that you’re delivering a best-in-class experience to your prospectsand customers

As you manage the intricate balance of filling the marketing-sales funnel with an appropriate quantity of high quality of leads, there will always be tradeoffs. In this guide, we’ll discuss:

• How optimization will help grow andscale your marketing

• Tips for navigating quality vs. quantityof leads throughout the marketing-salesfunnel

• How to embed optimization within yourcustomer lifecycle to get ahead of yourcompetition

Optimization is a core function of a successful digital marketing program. Insights from testing and targeted, personalized experiences deliver more qualified leads and an overall more compelling customer experience. You need to be targeted, on-brand, and ready to engage with potential customers at every digital touchpoint.

— SARAH ORENDAIN, SENIOR DIRECTOR, CONNECTED EXPERIENCE, VERITAS

The Complete Guide to Optimizing Demand Generation in B2B MarketingP5 | The Optimization Opportunity

CHAPTER 02

Moving from a Pipeline to a Customer Lifecycle

The B2B Customer LifecycleWhere can website optimization and personalization influence B2B marketing and help drive business impact? Let’s take a look at a classic B2B customer lifecycle:

The Complete Guide to Optimizing Demand Generation in B2B MarketingP7 | Moving From a Pipeline to a Customer Lifecycle

AWARENESS EXPANSION AND ADVOCACY

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

AND RETENTION

INTEREST CONSIDERATION EVALUATION

Life

cycl

e St

age

Mar

ketin

g Ta

ctic

sO

ptim

izat

ion

Opp

ortu

nite

s

- PR Advertising- SEO- ContentMarketing

- Word of Mouth

- Webinars- Homepage- Product Demo- Product Pages- Tradeshows- Lead Nurture- Free Product Trial- Branded Events

- Lead Nurture- Free ProductTrial

- Branded Events

- Case Studies- Data Sheets- Analyst Reports- ROI Calculator

- CustomerOnboarding

- Product Implementation

- Product Education

- Product Upselland Cross-sell

- AdvocacyProgram

- Participation

- ContentConversionOptimization

- Targeted AdTesting andRetargeting

- EmailNewsletterOptimization

- Landing Page

- Web CTA’s- Webinar Signup- Demo CTA- Event SignupOptimization

- Case Study CTA’s- Sales EmailTesting

- Nurture EmailTesting

- Trial SignupTesting

- Event SignupOptimization

- ProgressiveProfiling

- CustomizedOffers

- Case StudyConversionOptimization

- In-ProductOnboarding

- Knowledge BaseSearch Optimization

- Customer NPSSurvey Optimization

- CommunityOptimization

- In-Product Upselland Cross-Sell

Prospect Client Advocate

For instance, take the start of the customer lifecycle, sometimes referred to as top of the marketing-sales funnel. Each acquisition method can be made more effective through testing and optimization, better responding to the motivations and needs of the unique individual who interacts with each touchpoint.

Advertising - A one-size-fits-all message is unlikely to be as effective as more targeted taglines and calls to action. Test different copy and CTA combinations along with different formats and placements on different advertising networks.

Content - On a company blog, test adding an email signup CTA to build a mailing list that you can follow up with for content offers or demo requests.

Landing Pages - On advertising landing pages, test the impact of symmetric messaging, which leverages the ad keyword in the copy on the landing page, to ensure the visitor has a consistent experience that meets their expectations.

Demo Pages - On the website, test the impact of a content offer against a demo call-to-action and determine which one generates more leads that are interested in speaking with your sales team.

With each idea you test and experience you personalize, you can improve your visitor’s experience, while delivering benefits for your business:

• Increase the ROI of a paid acquisitionprogram by increasing the conversionrate of visitors to leads

• Decrease CAC by decreasing CPL forpaid programs, or by increasing thepercentage of organic leads generatedthrough search traffic or content

• Evaluate which offers generate a betterquantity or quality of leads to hand offto sales

No two customer lifecycles are the same, and depending on your business, there may be more opportunities to test and personalize at different stages. If your website drives a huge amount of traffic that can be converted to leads, that’s great. But if you have a direct sales model, you may want to test other touchpoints – like in-person events and lead nurturing – to ensure your marketing programs are working effectively.

P8 | Moving From a Pipeline to a Customer Lifecycle

Source: Capterra

Average Pipeline Conversion Rates for B2B Sales

Validate Decisions that Impact Leads at Every StageOf course, you may not want to constantly increase conversion rates. With each action you take to increase the number of leads entering the marketing-sales funnel, there are tradeoffs to consider at the next stage.

When making decisions about how to increase conversions, you must consider the customer lifecycle holistically. A win at the first step of this process might cause problems later on.


http://blog.capterra.com/average-b2b-conversion-rate/

In a recent survey, 74% of business buyers told Forrester they conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline purchase. This buyer dynamic changes the role of B2B marketing in a fundamental way.

— LORI WIZDO, ANALYST, FORRESTER RESEARCH

Ask yourself questions like:

• If asking for less information on formsincreases my conversion rate, will mySales Ops team be able to enrich thelead with data from other sources, orscore the lead so my sales team haveenough information to effectively followup with the new leads?

• If visitors convert to leads as soon asthey visit my website, are they readyto evaluate my solution and become acustomer? If not, what is the best way tocontinue engaging and nurturing themover time?

• Am I showing visitors content which isrelevant to them, or am I deliberately

making information more difficult to find so they’ll engage with a salesperson?

At each stage of the funnel, consider how you’ll be able to translate leads into successful customers. While generating more leads may be the initial goal, think about the tradeoffs you may make in lead quality, or other characteristics of customer fit that determine how successful they’ll be once they are a paying customer. These are all considerations that can be navigated through testing, and informed decisions can be made based on data that you collect from your own visitors, leads, and customers.

The Complete Guide to Optimizing Demand Generation in B2B MarketingP10 | Moving From a Pipeline to a Customer Lifecycle

build – testing can also help quantify the value of a new experience or a change to an old one. For instance, before scheduling an engineer to remove the passwords from our account creation form, Optimizely tested whether removing these fields would have a positive impact on conversions—it did.

Finally, the transformative power of testing is that there is never a status quo with your demand gen. There are always new ideas to try, disagreements to be settled, best practices to upend, and impactful new experiences for you and your team to go out and create. By experimenting and constantly optimizing, you get to combine the best of the expertise from across your team, constantly trying ideas in pursuit of that next winning variation – regardless of who came up with the idea.

I’m such a huge, passionate believer in optimization and testing. It is the antithesis of the HiPPO, top-driven command, because great ideas can come from anywhere. Anyone on the team in any function can have those ideas. Testing and optimization allow you to validate those.

— BILL MACITIS, CMO, SLACK

Learning from Every Experiment, Successful or NotTests that don’t increase conversions or another key metric provide valuable learning opportunities. That new CTA button copy didn’t increase conversions? Good thing we learned that before we rolled it out across the entire website. The new form design is passing through junk leads? Good thing we tested it so we could determine the number of leads we’re giving up in order to focus on a smaller amount of higher quality for sales.

In determining how to allocate your resources – which projects to prioritize, and what experiences to design and


CHAPTER 03

How to Become More Efficient at Each Stage of the Funnel

Delivering optimized, personalized experiences at each interaction can help generate new leads, nurture them through the funnel, and convert them to customers with high LTV, all for a low CAC. Learn how to look at each interaction in the marketing-sales funnel as an opportunity to test, learn, and personalize for key audiences.

In this chapter, we’ll address how to optimize the following marketing touchpoints and campaigns for greater engagement and conversion, including tips and best practices from industry experts:

P13 | How to Become More Efficient at Each Stage of the Funnel

Content Forms

Landing Pages Webpages


ContentAn essential component of building a trusted brand and generating top-of-funnel awareness is great content. But if your content only read by anonymous visitors, what good is that to your business? Right now, not much.

Finding opportunities to convert your content readers into leads creates a number of opportunities for testing. Do you blog readers want to subscribe to a newsletter, or get a more detailed piece of gated content? Or would they prefer to see a demo? Get early access to a meetup you’re hosting in their city? There are plenty of opportunities to optimize content for engagement and conversions. Once you’ve developed a list of subscribers to your content or a batch of content leads, you can begin to nurture them based on their interests, industry, or location, educating them until they have matured to the stage where they’re ready to evaluate a new technology solution.

Content marketing is an audience-building and education strategy that can pay tremendous dividends for your demand generation strategy.

Optimize your investment by ensuring you:

• Always have a CTA present on freecontent - blogs, SEO articles, helpcenter content, etc.

• “Upsell” your audience by drawingreaders to landing pages with a gatedcontent offer, demo, free trial, or anothervalue add

• Recommend content for further readingand engagement

• Target content offers based on whatthe audience is reading


Generating Leads from Educational Content

Optimizely has a glossary (called the ‘Optipedia’) that houses pages of content defining SEO-friendly keywords related to our business. The glossary brings in tens of thousands of pageviews a month, and each page has an embedded form at the bottom to collect leads who are interested in putting their newfound knowledge into practice by creating an account. The only problem? The CTA is at the very bottom of each article, and often isn’t even seen by the visitor, let alone clicked on or engaged with.

To seize the opportunity to generate new leads from this high-performing content, we tested two changes:

• A different offer – for a gated content downloadinstead of creating an Optimizely account

• A different CTA design – one that appears as thereader scrolls instead of all the way at the bottomof the page


CASE STUDY:

The variation (right) content displayed a CTA upon visitor scrolling through 50% of the article.

Original (left) content CTA was displayed at the bottom of the page.


Future Testing Opportunities

But that’s just the start – what if we change the CTA text? Test a different content offer? Experiment with dynamic CTAs on the Optimizely blog, or in other areas on the website?

This winning result is just an opportunity for more iteration, and we’ll continue to experiment with ways to generate more leads from our content and nurture them throughout the sales process.

The Complete Guide to Optimizing Demand Generation in B2B MarketingThe Complete Guide to Optimizing Demand Generation in B2B MarketingP16 | How to Become More Efficient at Each Stage of the Funnel

Landing PagesSearch ‘landing page best practices’ and you’ll find thousands of examples and best practices for a successful landing page. You’ll find recommendations like:

• How to craft a clear, compelling headline

• Placing the form and CTA above the fold

• Reducing the number of form fields

• Creating a descriptive CTA

• Adding disclaimer text about whathappens to the information a visitorsubmits in a form

• Adding social proof (logos, quotes, etc.)to assuage visitor’s concerns about thecompany’s credibility

Although a landing page that follows all of the recommendations about would certainly not be a bad landing page, the only way to find the ‘best’ landing page for your campaign is to test and personalize it. You could try each of the best practices listed above to find out whether the changes have any impact on conversions.

There are always opportunities to improve your landing page performance. If you pay for AdWords, display, or remarketing campaigns to acquire visitors at the top

of the funnel, you absolutely need to be testing to ensure that your marketing budget is being spent effectively.

A simple principle that you should test on your landing pages is symmetric messaging. It’s a simple but effective idea: if you show the same message in subsequent steps of a digital visitor’s journey, they will be more engaged and likely to convert. It’s also, at a very fundamental level, more personalized than a generic landing page experience.

Leveraging an AdWords integration, you can show the same message in an ad and on the landing page using just one landing page, without creating a different landing page for each keyword.

This test idea stems from the principle of matching user intent with expectation. Entering a search in Google is a clear display of user intent. The hypothesis is that a symmetric experience from the ad to landing page—one that clearly matches that search intent—will make people more likely to take the desired action on the page.


http://unbounce.com/ppc/ignoring-user-intent-costs-you-money-in-adwords/

Increase Landing Page Effectiveness with Symmetric Messaging

Secret Escapes is a flash-sale luxury travel company that offers discounted deals on four and five-star hotels around the world. The business is growing quickly with 300% YoY growth, expanding to markets in Germany and the U.S. with a base of 10 million+ members on their iOS/Android apps and website.

The company had high click-through rates on their search marketing campaign ads and directed all of this traffic to a single Pay Per Click landing page. They saw an opportunity to convert more paid traffic on this page.

Secret Escapes ran a symmetric messaging test for their “spa” AdWords group first. Product Manager Tom Evans tested two different personalized pages against the original landing page. The first variation personalized the subheading on the landing page form, while the second personalized both the headline and subheading in the same form.


CASE STUDY:


Both variations succeeded in increasing landing page conversion. The subhead-only variation increased conversions 26%, while the headline and subhead variation increased conversions 32%.

How would a double-digit improvement in conversion rate impact the number of leads you’re able to collect from your paid advertising strategy?

The Complete Guide to Optimizing Demand Generation in B2B MarketingP19 | How to Become More Efficient at Each Stage of the Funnel

Forms Forms are the cornerstone of an effective demand gen program. Balancing aesthetics and functionality is essential—both in terms of what a visitor can see, but also in terms of what they can’t. This is a rich, high-impact area for optimization in your marketing funnel.

In this Marketo experiment, removing 4 form fields increased the conversion rate 34% and subsequently decreased the CPL (cost per lead) over $10.

Data Enrichment and Validation

Your marketing is only as good as your data. But to increase conversions, you might be toying with the idea of knocking a couple fields off your lead capture forms. This is a tried and true strategy

for increasing conversions. Fewer form fields are an easier task for a website visitor to complete, and logically lend themselves to a higher conversion rate of visitor to lead.


SHORT (5 Fields)Conversion: 13.4% CPL: $31.24

MEDIUM (7 Fields)Conversion: 12% CPL: $34.94

LONG (9 Fields) Conversion: 10% CPL: $41.90


http://blog.marketo.com/2008/02/two-practical-l.html

The downside to this conversion-increasing strategy is the tradeoff of handing leads with less information to your sales team. This optimization challenge requires creativity and testing to find the right balance for your marketing-sales organization.

To ensure that you can generate leads that are data-rich while still optimizing for conversions, consider these data enrichment strategies:

• Only accepting a business emailaddress

• Requiring company, and using thatinformation to pass along other leadinformation without requiring the userto fill it out

• Enabling progressive profiling forexisting leads to continually enrichtheir data profile

• Leverage a data enrichment tool

• Moving password fields off the formand setting passwords over emailinstead

Data Enrichment for Forms

Here are a few data enrichment tools we recommend:

• Demandbase

• StrikeIron

• Clearbit

These tools can help to add lead information to a lead record behind the scenes, which helps to increase the conversion rate on your forms, while also providing more accurate data based on company or email information from a lead.


Progressive ProfilingMost landing pages and forms look exactly the same to every visitor. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

By presenting the same forms to prospects you already have in your CRM, you’re wasting an opportunity to learn more about them as they continue to engage with you through content, events, and other campaigns you might be running.

Progressive profiling is the process of hiding fields from forms when that

information already exists about a visitor in your CRM, and adding new forms or questions when they go to complete an action on your website. Try asking about their industry, title, role, and other information that could be useful during their nurturing and sales process.

The benefits of progressive profiling:

• Higher conversion rate from formsthat are requiring

• A better experience for visitors, whodon’t need to fill out redundant formseach time they visit

• More complete lead information forsales to leverage in their conversations

Marketing automation platforms (Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, Pardot, ActOn, and others) typically have a progressive profiling feature, so there’s a chance that you could start doing progressive profiling without much technical overhead.


Does progressive profiling really work? Take a look at the leads collected from two of our 2016 Optimizely campaigns before and after progressive profiling was implemented on May 18th


CASE STUDY:

Optimize Signup Points to Increase Lead Volume and Drive Sales Pipeline

AdRoll is a leading ad retargeting and prospecting platform with over 25,000 global customers. Their Growth team tests constantly to drive user acquisition and increased revenue for the business.

Their account creation form is a key conversion moment that they’re always striving to further optimize. In a recent experiment, they made a change that confirmed a valuable lesson: sometimes, when a visitor is ready to test out your product, less is more.

The original form (left) included marketing messaging about the value of creating an AdRoll account.

The test variation (right) removed the messaging and included only a headline, centering the form.


The change resulted in a 13% improvement in accounts created, or a seven-figure impact on revenue from the new leads they were able to generate with this optimized form.


At AdRoll, we depend on testing to drive customer growth—we’ll test just about anything. Optimization is a key lever in our strategy and ensures that we grow the footprint of our business as quickly as possible.

– PETER CLARK, DIRECTOR OF GROWTH, ADROLL


WebpagesWhether your visitor lands on the homepage, a key product page, or registers for an event, your web experiences need to be as engaging as possible in order to ensure visitors are well-informed and convert.

There are plenty of factors in your current website experience that might be preventing visitors from engaging and converting. Testing can help to determine what elements of your visual design or copywriting are prohibiting engagement, as well as which elements could be added to encourage conversions.

Developing unique experiences for target audiences could also boost engagement and conversions even further. When you add in the complexity of the different audiences that you have visiting your website, the possibilities for personalizing your web experiences become even more varied and interesting.

Here are a few examples of both tests and personalized campaigns you could be running to generate leads advance them through the customer lifecycle:

Website Test Ideas Personalization Ideas

• Embedding a form vs. a button CTA that leads to a formon a separate webpage

• Adding a CTA button to the hero of a homepage or landingpage, in addition to a final CTA once the visitor reachesthe bottom of the page

• Adding (or removing) an explanatory video

• Different homepage headline for new vs. returningweb visitors

• Tailored product use cases by industry

• Varied content recommendations by industry

• Custom CTAs for prospective vs. current customers


CHAPTER 04

Don’t Serve Everyone at Once: How to Target Marketing to Audiences

Visitors from Key Industries - Speak your prospect andcustomers’ language - veryinfrequently do customers careto compare their experience topeers in other industries. Tailorsocial proof (logos, customerquotes), content, and use casesbased on the industry a visitor’scompany is in.

Customers - Once they’ve started a subscription or signed a contract, it’s time to show your customer the royal treatment: invite them to a local user group, show them the latest product features, or direct them to helpful resources and training—all from your website.

Churned Customers of Customers Lost in a Competitive Deal Did a visitor try your product and churn? Did they choose a competitor’s solution over yours? Leverage your knowledge of their history in either case to offer a compelling message to win these qualified prospects back.

Your audience is incredibly varied and diverse. You might already be addressing the needs of your different audiences by producing content for them based on sales stage (lead nurturing), or by creating events specifically for customers (user groups and customer marketing), or programs for advocates (advocate marketing).

But have you considered how your website could be adapting to give members of key audiences a more relevant and effective experience?

With personalization, you can move from a one-size-fits-all website to a more relevant, engaging experience that responds to cues from your visitor’s behavior, as well as demographic data you likely are already collecting. By testing the impact of more targeted experiences, you can quantify the value in clicks, leads, and revenue. Once the changes are validated, deliver them on an ongoing basis as part of a personalized approach to demand gen.

For organizations looking to adopt an account-based approach (also known as ABM, or account-based marketing), developing a list of target accounts often surfaces other considerations around both testing and personalization. Having

a list of accounts with specific attributes that help define them (revenue, industry, etc.) can lend towards even more targeted advertising, optimization, marketing campaigns and sales tactics.

Search Traffic - Visitors coming from search tend to be very focused and have a high tendency to convert. Consider surfacing introductory content that helps educate the visitor before surfacing CTAs that would pull them into the sales funnel.

Paid Ad Traffic - Visitors who have clicked on a search term or introductory offer could see a relevant subsequent content offer or CTA the next time they visit your website.

Prospects who have Attended an Event - Attending an event is a significant commitment. What could your visitor do next? See a demo of your product? Participate in an advisory session or evaluation with your sales team? Stop surfacing introductory offers to these more engaged prospects.

The Complete Guide to Optimizing Demand Generation in B2B MarketingP27 | Target Marketing

CHAPTER 05

Drive Marketing-Sales Alignment with Account-Based Marketing

Account-Based Marketing is a strategy used by B2B marketers to identify and target the accounts they value most, opening strategic sales opportunities and supporting them through the buyer’s journey. ABM solutions typically include account-based data and technology to help companies attract, engage, convert and then measure progress against customers and prospects (source: Demandbase).

At a high level, ABM involves:

Establishing a succinct list of target accounts, which marketing and sales define together

Developing insights and generating contacts specific to those accounts

Creating account-specific messages and content and delivering them through account-specific interactions and campaigns

The benefits of ABM include:

• 26% increase in deal size (accordingto Demandbase)

• 75% increase in deal close rate(according to Demandbase)

• 84% of marketers reported that ABMtactics had a higher ROI than othermarketing programs (according to ITSMA)

According to SiriusDecisions, 92% of B2B companies recognize the value in ABM. But getting started can feel like a monumental step. Personalizing and testing your web experiences for target accounts is an excellent way to execute account-specific campaigns and measure the impact of your ABM efforts from the start of the marketing-sales funnel.

The Complete Guide to Optimizing Demand Generation in B2B MarketingP29 | Account-Based Marketing

Here are a few use cases for website testing and personalization within an ABM strategy:

Validate your messages and content with your

target audience

Deliver content dynamically across all your web properties

Surface the right call-to-action

Testing ensures that your messages, positioning, and tailored content resonate with your prospects and customers. Make changes and iterate, test new hypotheses, and avoid creating a sub par “one-size-fits-all” message. Ensure that your messaging creates the right expectations before the hand raise and that leads have good velocity through the marketing-sales funnel.

Make sure that you’re delivering messages and content in real time to prospects, based on signals that you’re already capturing in your CRM, Marketing Automation platform, lead enrichment tools and other data sources.

Be smart about how you spend your resources. Only surface contact sales CTAs to members of target account lists, while funneling other visitors to more scalable engagement opportunities, like a recorded product demo, free trial, or self-serve pricing.

The Complete Guide to Optimizing Demand Generation in B2B MarketingP30 | Account-Based Marketing

P31 | Conclusion

Conclusion

Acquiring new customers, generating demand—however you describe the process of acquiring new customers and growing them over time, it’s essential to keep optimization at the core of your demand gen strategy to continue delivering growth for your business.

From building content to developing a sophisticated performance marketing strategy or offering a compelling free trial, a demand generation marketer can leverage testing and personalization to successfully ensure that all campaigns and initiatives are operating to their fullest potential in order to maximize growth and revenue for the business.

http://www.optimizely.com/get-started

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