While it’s a challenging time to be a marketer, the best are always looking for ways to adjust to this changing landscape and improve their programs, generate more leads, nurture contacts more effectively, drive revenue and boost loyalty. They’re constantly searching for new strategies and tactics that will help them improve their programs and gain an edge over the competition. And to that end, they’re always asking themselves questions about what they can to do to make their jobs easier, do their work faster and perform better.

But what are the right questions to ask, the ones that will help rather than hinder progress? Looking at the current marketplace, it’s clear that marketing departments must take their programs up a notch to meet both the expectations of prospects who expect responsive communications across a range of channels, and executives who demand increased efficiency with results that are tied to hard data. Within this context, there are five key questions Silverpop believes all marketers should be asking themselves:

• Are you as social as your prospects?
• Are you as strategic as you want to be?
• Can you automate the tactical?
• Do you wish you could do more with less?
• Can you prove your value?

By taking a step back and focusing on these questions (and better yet, doing a little soul searching to see how your organization currently measures up), you’ll be better positioned from a strategic standpoint, better prepared to tackle the daily challenges facing today’s online marketers, and ready to conquer a host of new opportunities that lead to more buzz, more conversions and more revenue.

And since Silverpop wants to make the path to success as easy as possible for marketers, we brought together five industry experts to help answer these questions and provide strategic insights into why these topics are particularly critical in today’s marketplace.

Question #1: Are you as social as your prospects?

Social media is a potent tool for companies looking to fine-tune the art of listening, which has become increasingly important in an era in which prospects are tired of generic messaging and overflowing inboxes. For savvy marketers who understand that they need to be where their prospects are, that place is increasingly on social networks.

From social media sites to mobile apps, smart phones to local check-ins, the emergence of new communication and marketing channels has made it critical that companies engage with prospects on their terms. And with social communities, blogs and online videos exploding in number and popularity in recent years—and with many of these types of content showing up in search engines—many B2B marketing leaders have been grappling with what this means in terms of the buying cycle, how they can use social to educate and nurture prospects, and how much time they should invest in social overall. To help marketers harness social media data and connect more socially with customers and prospects, companies such as Janrain are now offering social Web management platforms.

“B2B marketers are all about solving problems for their customers, so the big challenge is discovering who’s having the problem that you know how to solve right now,” says Jamie Beckland, digital and social media strategist at Janrain. “Social networks are hugely valuable in identifying who those people are. Status updates, questions on LinkedIn and forums focused on a particular industry subset can be deep resources for finding out about a marketer’s space—who has questions and where B2B marketers can position themselves as the expert advice giver, the person/brand that’s knowledgeable about the industry, and then lead them back to a solution that the B2B marketer is well positioned to solve.”

And with the rise of the Internet and social media, the buying cycle itself has changed, with the majority of buyers starting the decision-making process via online research and talking to other users. For many buyers, this research involves search engines that lead them to blogs, white papers and Webinars. They may then move on to seek out the opinions of others via social sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Often, it’s only at that point that they want to talk to vendors. How can marketers adjust?

“What you can do is engage in a way that’s appropriate for each social network and the discussions taking place there,” says Beckland. “For LinkedIn, for example, that might mean sharing industry content and best practices, acting as a resource. It might mean finding white papers and blogs that you’ve already created and are relevant to these conversations that are happening ‘in the wild’ and linking back to pieces of the puzzle that you have in other places. By doing so, you can move the user from a more general conversation in that social channel to a more specific conversation that you have more control of.”

The good news is

that for marketers who are looking to become more social, there are numerous tactics that they can employ, such as:

• Make your website more social: One of the easiest, most effective things to do is to figure out what levers you can pull on your site in order to encourage social activity. That could be as simple as having a comments section or a content aggregator that takes topics, hashtags and other information that’s coming from social channels across the Web and flowing it into pages on your own domain. That way, you’re showing social activity from around the Web that’s relevant to your audience.
• Offer social sign-in options: By allowing site visitors to register for online offers by signing in with their existing social network accounts, the process is simplified for registrants, increasing conversions. And marketers are able to connect contacts to their social profiles, providing them with valuable information about their site visitors. “Let’s say you offer a selection of four or five social networks where they can use their identity—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Salesforce, for example,” says Beckland. “As you start to aggregate that sign-in data, you can see where those people are actually coming from and which social identity they associate with your brand. That can help inform which channels you should start to build out as well as your content development strategy.”
• Use social lead gen to build your database: The key to success in today’s multichannel world is using each medium to help leverage the other. You’re already driving traffic to your Facebook page, so why not take the opportunity to gather registrations? And don’t forget about the power of Twitter. Make sure your followers are alerted to new white papers and upcoming Webinars, and then drive them back to your site to download, register and, most importantly, share important contact information with you.
• Make your content shareworthy and shareable: People like to share cool stuff that helps them solve their problems and do their job, so if you make an effort to include educational info in your messaging mix and make it easy for recipients to share with their networks, you’ll expand your reach exponentially. Make sure to prominently feature Share-to-Social links in your emails where applicable, as well as adding share call to actions into your white paper, how-to guide and ebook pdfs. Including Facebook “Like” or Twitter “Follow” buttons in every email, inserting share options into your landing page offers and incorporating share call to actions into Webinar and event reminder emails can expand your message reach. And plan your nurture campaigns around the idea of facilitating a social dialogue, encouraging sharing in multiple emails and enabling conversations around your content.
• Be sociable: In many cases, your contacts want to feel like you’ll help them learn, but they don’t want to be sold to. Keep this concept in mind when building your messages—recipients want the content to sound like it came from a real human being, not some kind of robot delivering corporate-speak. Consider entertaining your recipients with humor, adding customer comments and incorporating employee stories for a more personal touch.
• Target social sharers: Instead of just blasting your entire database with share call-to-actions, consider identifying your most active social sharers and using dynamic content to deliver shareworthy content specifically aimed at these social influencers.

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The endless possibilities can be overwhelming, so keep this basic mantra top of mind: With all the social activity that your contacts are engaging with, you want to create a bridge that leads them back to a social experience on your site or in your communications. Starting to build that connective tissue by empowering social activity on your site and in your messaging is an important first step—and one that’s usually pretty easy to get your hands around.

Question #2: Are you as strategic as you want to be?

Today’s buyers are seeking out information proactively, on their own and at their own pace. Substantive content matters, as does when and where buyers seek this content. Translation? Your buyers are smarter and more demanding than ever, and you need to stay a step ahead to be effective. That makes it essential to have a carefully planned strategy to meet their needs and deliver the information they want, when they want it.

Yet while the need may seem obvious, many marketing organizations, hampered by shrinking budgets and overwhelmed by the growing number of communication channels, are stuck in a repetitive rut of barely getting the next campaign out the door. This short-term, patchwork approach can lead to a “garbage in, garbage out” scenario in which poorly thought-out strategies and processes result in a lack of actionable data or quality leads, thereby decreasing ROI and necessitating the need for companies such as the Annuitas Group which helps marketers develop a process-based approach to lead management.

Jay Hidalgo, President of the Annuitas Group, likens marketers who don’t think about strategy to a football team that decides it doesn’t need to practice during the week. “You can’t go out there without a game plan, you have to take the time to prepare,” says Hidalgo. “No matter what the sport, most successful teams are the ones that spend a lot of time preparing, practicing and planning for that small three-hour window when they actually play the game. The same concept applies to marketing.”

When you’re ready to tackle strategic planning, timing will vary based on type and size of organization, but as a general framework, Hidalgo recommends an approach as follows:

• Annually: planning process with other parties (e.g. sales, executive team)
• Quarterly: strategy reviews looking at what worked and what didn’t
• Monthly: review of approach and fine-tuning as needed
• Weekly: get-together of marketing team to review tactical

Taking time out of an already busy schedule to think about strategy may seem counterintuitive, but it can actually save you time in the long run. “The typical marketer is saying I don’t have time to think about strategy—I’ve got to get A, B, C, D and E done from a campaign execution perspective,” says Hidalgo. “In reality, taking some time to strategically look at what needs to be accomplished would often allow that marketer to see that A, B and E need to be done, but C and D are a waste of time and don’t fit into the overall strategic approach. By not taking time to strategically plan, marketers are creating more work for themselves, and as a result getting less than desired results.”

Taking time out of an already busy schedule to think about strategy may seem counterintuitive, but it can actually save you time in the long run. “The typical marketer is saying I don’t have time to think about strategy—I’ve got to get A, B, C, D and E done from a campaign execution perspective,” says Hidalgo. “In reality, taking some time to strategically look at what needs to be accomplished would often allow that marketer to see that A, B and E need to be done, but C and D are a waste of time and don’t fit into the overall strategic approach. By not taking time to strategically plan, marketers are creating more work for themselves, and as a result getting less than desired results.”

Of course, some marketers think they’re doing the right strategic things, but have erroneously focused on the wrong goals and metrics, such as zeroing in on click rates and total Web traffic rather than conversion rates and total number of qualified leads derived from Web downloads. The answer lies partly in deciding which strategic priorities and initiatives to pursue with an eye toward aligning your teams and initiatives toward overall goals and ROI.

Hidalgo suggests starting at the end, defining your ultimate objectives and your revenue goals. From there, you can work backwards, asking questions such as:

• To get “X” number of new customers, what does that mean in terms of how many qualified leads we need to generate?
• To achieve revenue objectives, how much will come from existing customers versus net new business?
• How many touches does it typically take to most effectively nurture leads from first contact to sales-qualified?

Once those and other questions are answered, then marketers can start looking at the methodologies that they can utilize strategically to obtain those objectives, as well as matching those methodologies with whatever resource, budget or personnel constraints they are faced with. This allows you to then to build out strategy. The bottom line? Unless you know the objective first, it’s very difficult to create that strategy.

Remember to involve sales in the annual planning process to improve marketing and sales alignment. This doesn’t just mean getting their approval; rather, it means developing a program that’s jointly creates by sales and marketing. When that plan is created together and then executed effectively, the result will likely be alignment—the result of both organizations marching to the same objective and marching to the same tune in terms of strategic approach.

Being strategic means listening to the buyer, understanding what the buyer wants and then providing what the buyer needs. “Ask questions, listen and then provide answers to those questions and solutions to the problem,” says Hidalgo. “That’s an approach I’ve seen work. Yet most don’t ascribe to that approach, primarily because it takes time and patience. Listening is hard work.”

Lastly, when it comes to developing and executing a strategy—particularly in the B2B world with its large-ticket purchases and longer buying cycles—it’s important to remember that’s there no “silver bullet” that can be applied and instantly guarantee massive revenue increases, whether it’s a proper process, strategy or technology. But although the reality is that true success takes time, if you make the effort to apply a strategy and build relationships with prospects and customers, you’ll see incremental success that will add up to big results over a longer period of time.

Question #3: Can you automate the tactical?

In the new age of marketing, companies must engage with contacts through highly relevant messaging that incorporates elements of social media and feels more human. But how can you reach more people with more targeted messages, more often and more quickly than ever? Ironically, to become more personal, marketers must become more automated.

Look at it this way: Every interaction that a brand has with its audience happens at the tactical level—an open, a click, a website visit, a retweet or a download. Those interactions represent prospects telling you about their interests, problems and needs, but it’s manually impossible for a human being to respond to each one in real time. Marketing automation enables you to leverage your thought leaders en masse, delivering their personalized voice to countless prospects in a one-to-one manner—a virtual guide providing a tour of your products, services and educational materials.

As buying cycles become longer and more complex, so has the need to find ways to automate manual tactical processes so you can focus more on developing strategy, processes and more complex campaigns. Whether it’s a basic business process or a behavior-driven triggered marketing campaign, automating the tactical has become top of mind for marketers aiming to lower costs, increase process efficiencies and drive revenue. To help fill this void, companies such as Whereoware have emerged to help marketers use automation to combine online behavior with customer data to deliver more relevant messages.

“From a lead-nurture standpoint, one of the most tactical operations B2B marketers face is engaging prospects whose business cards they receive at a trade show,” says Bill Haskitt, partner at Whereoware. “In many cases, marketers don’t follow up with these leads because they haven’t established any method for doing so. But by building out an automated campaign that reacts in real time to data on new leads, marketers can quickly engage prospective clients before the trail goes cold. A process is required for uploading batch data collected during each trade show. That data can then trigger an automated campaign that sends leads targeted email communications. Each lead will react differently to the messages sent, revealing interests and behaviors that guide future communications and, further down the line, provide actionable information for sales reps.”

For marketers interested in automating the tactical, the possibilities are endless. Haskitt recommends incorporating welcome campaigns and “super opt-in” lead-nurturing messages into your marketing mix as a starting point:

Welcome campaigns: Whether a prospect signed up for your newsletter, downloaded a white paper or signed up for a 60-day service trial, it’s essential to engage this contact while he or she is interested and highly engaged. Reach out immediately with a multipart welcome campaign that introduces new subscribers to all the benefits of your email program; highlights your website, social media pages and SMS offering if applicable; and provides links to helpful resources you offer. “How many times do people register on a website or fill out a lead-gen form, and then 30 days later they get the first email and forgot they ever did it?” says Haskitt. “A good welcome program immediately positions you as a trusted sender and establishes credibility that the content you’re going to send is something they’re going to want to open.”

“Super opt-in” lead-nurturing message: The more you know about your prospects, the more relevant messages you can send. Try setting up an automated email asking users what they want to hear about and how often they want to hear it. Whether you do so by directing the recipient to a landing page with a progressive Web form, sending a survey or directing them to your preference center, you’ll discover more about your contacts and increase future email engagement. And as an added bonus, you’ll send an important message to time-starved prospects: Not only are you going to send them good content, but you really care about their time, and you only want to send them the things they want to see— when and how they want to see them.

Question #4: Do you wish you could do more with less?

It’s a recurring challenge most marketing departments constantly wrestle with: Every day, they’re faced with deciding the most important things they can do with the limited time they have. And the question of whether to focus on A, B or C is often complicated by small staffs and time constraints. Faced with this dilemma, most marketers today wish they could do more with less, which is why some have turned to companies such as Find New Customers, which specializes in helping marketers combine technology, strategy and content to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

“I think a lot of doing more with less is harnessing all your major sources of unstructured data, getting some intelligence on it and being alerted when something happens that you need to take action on,” says Jeff Ogden, president of Find New Customers. “It’s about focusing on the high-level stuff—who you’re targeting and what their business problems are. You want to create content and message streams that move people through the buying process, and with so many things on the plate of a marketer, if you can take more off your plate by automating it, it can make a huge difference.”

One of the biggest appeals of doing more with less is the ability to scale your marketing efforts so that you can reach more people, leverage your content and nurture clients around the clock—literally, while you sleep.

Increasing efficiency means putting processes, people, programs and software in place that basically take activities that consume time and automate them. For example, with the right processes and technology in place, someone might fill out a registration form to download a white paper, and this behavior would be automatically scored and the prospect placed into a lead-nurturing program—without the marketer lifting a finger.

“By being able to do more with less, you give yourself more time to think and make more considered decisions about what you work on, what content you build or what events you hold,” says Ogden. “You might want to do a road show, for example, but you don’t have time to put it together. But maybe by automating things and giving yourself more ‘free’ time, you can start to think about doing this particular marketing event—and even have time to focus on doing it right.”

For example, General Growth Properties (GGP), the owner of 185 regional shopping centers in 43 states, was bogged down in the labor-intensive process of creating 185 monthly newsletters. Using relational tables and dynamic content, it was able to deliver personalized newsletter content based upon unique mall, promotion value and gender with a fraction of the effort, decreasing the number of newsletter templates by 90 percent and production hours by 60 percent. But perhaps the biggest benefit was being able to move from a reactionary production-oriented group to a more strategic organization.

How can marketers looking to do more less move in a more efficient direction? Again, there are many options, but Ogden highlights two keys steps involving building up your behavioral database and then using that data to deliver relevant messaging:

Harness the power of Web tracking: When prospects sign up for your newsletter, fill out a form or otherwise register on your site, Web tracking enables you to connect their email address to their future online behaviors. “One of the biggest things in marketing automation is simply hooking it to your website so that you have insights into who’s on your website, getting more information about those visitors and what content they’re interested in,” says Ogden. That means tracking everything from Web pages visited and white paper downloads to Foursquare check-ins and Twitter follows. Even better: Today’s Web tracking technology enables you to connect these new subscribers to actions they took on your site before opting in, increasing your chances of connecting more quickly by immediately putting them into an email track designed for their interests.

Set up emails and messaging streams triggered by behaviors: Sophisticated marketing automation platforms provide a way for marketers to harness the detailed data they’ve collected and use it to respond with timely, relevant, personalized content driven by these behaviors. Whether it’s sending a Webinar registrant down a messaging path with more offers aligned to that topic and non-registrants a survey or link to a progressive form asking additional questions, or including a content block in a message that dynamically populates based on the recipient’s past actions, behavior-driven messaging is a heady way to send content tailored to each individual in your database rather than generic “one-size-fits-most” messaging. “Once you’ve got the content and you’ve set up lead nurturing in a problem-to-solution story format, marketing automation can be the delivery mechanism based on behaviors and what pages contacts visited or what content they engaged with,” says Ogden. “Contacts can be put into a specific lead-nurturing campaign based on the problem they digitally told you they had.”

For marketers aiming to do more with less, it’s important to keep in mind that’s there more to the process than simply purchasing a marketing automation solution and turning it on. You have to think about strategy, create compelling content, and build out programs tailored to individual contacts’ preferences, behaviors and position in the buying cycle. Once that’s done, you can harness the power of marketing automation to do a lot more with less.

Question #5: Can you prove your value?

In the last few years, there’s been a gradual shift in the way businesses have evaluated marketing. Fuzzy marketing math is no longer enough. Marketers who previously judged their success on activities such as events hosted or press releases produced have had to adjust as new technological reporting capabilities converged with a greater emphasis on revenue.

This shift has been accompanied by an increased pressure on marketers to demonstrate their value and impact on the bottom line by offering a clearer view into the results of their efforts—from lead acquisition to account close and beyond. If you want to make the C-suite happy, you’d better be able to show them how marketing is making money—not just spending it.

But though this change in mindset presents challenges, it also brings potential benefits for savvy marketers. As marketers transition from thinking about activities for their own sake to measuring the impact of these activities on the full buyer’s journey, you can begin to more meaningfully articulate the impact of what you’re doing on a positive revenue or retention outcome. Helping marketers achieve this is part of the goal of companies such as SiriusDecisions, which provides research and advisory services aimed at maximizing top-line growth.

“Marketers at a lot of companies in years past have been given a free pass on having to quantify the impact of the work they do in terms of pipeline and revenue, but we’ve really passed the point where it’s acceptable for marketers to point to anecdotal evidence of success,” says Megan Heuer, service director at Sirius Decisions. “They really have to be able to tie their effort and dollar resources applied to some kind of positive revenue activity. That doesn’t mean everything you measure has to be about demand creation, but it does mean that everything you take on as a marketing organization has to relate in some way to key business objectives. We’re really encouraging marketers to think about whether every activity they undertake connects back to a goal that relates to what the business expects of marketing.”

This shift in thinking means looking beyond the marketing department. Do you understand what drives management, what their needs are, and which business goals and objectives they value most highly? Look for opportunities to address corporate objectives—e.g. retaining customers—and think how you can use your channels to achieve these objectives and better align your goals with those of sales and the C-suite. Are you investing in the future, or simply looking at the latest campaign? If your objective is the former, that means looking beyond process metrics such as email opens, white paper downloads and Webinar attendees and also measuring conversions, revenue and marketingqualified/sales-qualified leads. By thinking beyond marketing and looking at the world from the standpoint of the CEO and CFO, you’ll take a valuable step toward providing value and proving your investment.

As you’re taking a deeper dive into revenue reporting, it’s important to remember that while marketers would like to be able to attribute revenue back to a specific activity, the reality of a complex B2B buying process makes that a nearly impossible task. What you can do, however, is understand which activities tend to be part of the path to a positive revenue outcome so you can encourage people to follow that path.

Some marketers fall into a reporting trap in which they attempt to either assign random weightings to activities based on instinct or attribute a close back to the first or last touch that was involved. Either one of those approaches is going to lead to some flawed assumptions about the best use of your marketing dollars and resources. Instead, seek a more complete picture of how your marketing efforts are performing by looking at first touches (how the prospect came to know about your brand, as well as the reason they decided to fill out your form) and “influence” (all the things you did during the buying cycle that convinced someone to purchase from you).

“What I think marketers need to look at is the big picture of the buyer’s journey and all the places where marketing has a positive role to play based on actual outcomes,” says Heuer. “When you win, what do different types of buyers do along that path, and how can you best map what you offer to them to the things that they need to buy from you? And when things don’t go your way, how do you know how it went off the rails, so you can either stop doing it or do something to fix it? To me that’s the more holistic view of marketing’s complete contribution versus just attempting to have a simplistic view of ROI that doesn’t reflect the reality of a complicated, multiperson, multi-touch long-term buying process.”

For marketers looking to more effectively prove their value, Heuer suggests the following tactics as a starting point:

Understand how marketing objectives fits into the big picture: Seek to decipher how marketing can better align itself with sales and overall corporate goals. With input from sales and the C-suite, think about how marketing can best contribute given your company’s position in the market—what you’re selling, who you’re selling to and where you stand in relation to the competition. Determine marketing’s ideal role in the organization, what contributions are reasonable to expect from marketing, and how you’ll measure your success.

Have a system in place that enables you to measure marketing initiatives across the board: By employing technology and strategy that captures all aspects of your marketing campaigns, you’ll have the confidence of knowing you can accurately showcase how your lead sources and offers are capturing prospects’ attention throughout the whole lead-management process, from capturing leads and nurturing them through the funnel to ultimately influencing revenue. “It’s important that you have a system—and data that’s delivered from that system—to show what you need to know about all the ways marketing is contributing and be able to trace what’s happening along a buyer’s journey, so that you can go back and claim victory in the places where you want to say you made a difference,” says Heuer. “The key is that this isn’t going to be effective without technology—it’s just too complicated to track, and there’s just too much data collection involved. You can’t get to best-in-class marketing without the appropriate integrated technology in place and a data management strategy that lets you collect accurate information about what you’re doing.”

In your quest to measure and maximize ROI, remember that it’s also important that a small percentage of marketing’s budget be dedicated to research and development— investment in marketing initiatives that are so new that it’s too early to have strong metrics around ROI. This will enable you to pursue innovative marketing tactics while still maintaining a strong foundation grounded in revenue.

Conclusion

Have you gotten so bogged down in the everyday grind that your marketing could use a jolt of inspiration and innovation? Make sure you’re periodically asking questions about your marketing programs that enable you to fine-tune your campaigns and improve your results. By thinking carefully about strategy and how you can improve productivity and efficiency, you’ll be well-positioned to implement multichannel marketing programs that ensure you’re where your customers and prospects are engaged and deliver relevant content triggered by their behaviors and preferences. And you’ll boost the odds that you’re focusing on the right things, investing in your future by zeroing in on the areas that can most contribute to your organization’s overall objectives and ensuring that marketing is making a strong, tangible impact on reaching these goals.