As a company, Aprimo spent many years in a software category (marketing resource management) that most marketers knew little about. This category focused on the "back office" of marketing, helping the marketer manage their projects, their budget, and their marketing assets. However, most marketing organizations 10 years ago did this with spreadsheets and file systems (and many of them still do today! p.s. we still would like to talk to you!).
When you live in a category for a long time that does not have general awareness, you get addicted to outbound marketing. This is because you are constantly having to "reach out" to educate someone about what you do, why it is important, and why they should care.
Times have changed at Aprimo, and now we are serving many markets that have ready, willing buyers looking to solve the problems they have today with software we offer. However, it is interesting that our marketing was slow to change. We became addicted to outbound. Even though there are many marketers now looking to solve problems like email marketing, search engine marketing, campaign management, and more, we have built an engine that tries to "call everyone" asking if they want to solve the problem vs. putting up a sign saying "we solve this" and letting them find us.
Ok, a sign is a simplistic example. However, effective PPC campaigns are just not something we think first about. For instance, there were 700,000 people looking for "email marketing software" this month. However, we never seriously tried to win that search term. Instead, we will place millions into channels calling people about email marketing hoping they happen to be one of the 700,000 that already told us they were looking via search.
Times are changing at Aprimo and so is our marketing approach. In the coming months, we are going to be investing more and more on inbound channels. However, habits are hard to break and this change does not come easily. I imagine we are not the only company struggling to break such habits!
Maybe you already "got milk," but that's not all you need in life. Experts say we need a balanced diet of dairy, protein, grains, fruits and vegetables. You wouldn't try to survive on only one of these. You'd run into all kinds of problems if you only ate ground beef or blueberries. You know better, so you try to include every food group.I hope you also know better than to think you're set for life if you're using marketing software that addresses one, tiny area of your marketing organization. Yes, it may be improving your outbound marketing and lead distribution efforts, but what about your materials and inventory? You may have a microsite builder, but are you working on search engine optimization or PPC Advertising?
We do software, and if you do collateral we can help. If you and your team realize that much already, half the battle is behind you. Are you looking for collateral customization software? Collateral management software? Marketing collateral software? Marketing collateral management software? Digital asset management software? Brand content management software? (Phew.) No matter what you call it, we do it.
James Gilchrist, a Graphics Designer at Aprimo and one of my coworkers, may be talking about this functionality so check out his posts for more information.
As I cruise along at 24,000 feet on my way to the Gartner CRM event I can’t help but appreciate the complexity of air travel. Cram 130 people into a metal cylinder and fling them from Indianapolis to Phoenix. Repeat thousands and thousands of time around the world every day. How do they make this a successful and repeatable process? One key is automation.
For example, autopilot allows the intelligence of the airplane systems to automatically perform operations so the pilot doesn't have to. Autopilot lets systems and software take care of the ‘normal’ activities a pilot would go through to fly along at cruising altitude. I’m sure autopilot was complicated to program and test but the result of that effort is hugely beneficial.
Many companies have no autopilot equivalent for any facet of marketing. “Marketing needs to be high touch” or “Outbound Marketing is too complex to automate” they might say. My guess is that if we found a way to automate the intricacies of keeping a plane aloft at 30,000 feet we can probably automate some of the processes marketing is doing manually today.
One significant autopilot capability for Marketing is triggered dialogs. Triggered dialogs give marketing the ability to pre-define a series to steps to take for a given person that matches a certain criteria. Here are some real-world customer examples of utilizing triggered dialogs:
- Automatically respond to a website whitepaper request with the selected content.
- Automatically follow-up with a prospect two-weeks after a sales call.
- Automatically send reminders to attendees of an upcoming webinar.
- Automatically route leads against lead score thresholds to the appropriate team
The real power of triggered dialogs comes in the ability to chain steps together into a full customer communication workflow. Do this, then do this, then check this and if this...do this, or else do this. Marketing can pre-determine responses, time intervals, and actions but it’s the customer or the prospect then driving the process based on their actions, their timeline, and their data.
Triggered dialogs help marketing automate regular, recurring, standard processes which improves efficiency AND improves the customer experience. Now the system can respond as soon as a event is identified. These ‘dialogs’ can be simple one step automated responses or sophisticated lead nurturing campaigns that walk a prospect through dozens of steps over a period of months.
Just as a plane autopilot hasn't (yet?) replaced the human pilots, triggered dialogs don’t eliminate the need for marketers to truly understand and adjust to their prospect and customer interactions. But software, like the triggered dialog functionality of Aprimo Marketing Studio, can help marketers automate many of those interactions. Marketers can focus on the important campaign planning take-offs and landings and let the system automate the work at cruising altitude.
When I network with most marketing professionals these days, there is a lot of discussion about how to effectively populate the sales funnel. Conventional wisdom includes such initiatives as telemarketing, online advertising, cold calling, email blasts, webinars, tradeshows, etc. But, with all the messages that are hitting people today (over 2000 every day), we're all figuring out ways to "stop the clutter." So, how do we effectively get our messages out?
Look at supplementing your outbound marketing initiatives with inbound techniques, so that your potential customers come looking for you! Build organic search with key words, get your thought leaders out on the social media sites and get them talking about what they know best. Build an online reputation that draws in your prospects.
How do you and your company balance inbound and outbound initiatives? What's working, what isn't?
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