I am a data junkie so my favorite presentations today were the ones presenting the hard facts in numbers. Here are my top 6 takeaways from my 2 favorite presentations on Day 1 of the Marketo User Summit:
Lori Wizdo, Analyst from Forrester spoke about “The Lead-to-Revenue Management Zeitgeist” and she shared some recent Forrester research. Some noteworthy conclusions:
1. Customer intelligence is a top spending category
B2B marketers spend 11% of budget on customer intelligence solutions. This is about the same amount as they spend on lead generation. Very cool!
2. Customer lifetime value is a key metric for marketing to track
Key metrics tracked by B2B marketing executives include: revenue related metrics (71%), brand awareness (43%), customer satisfaction (43%) and customer lifetime value (24%). Personally I believe customer lifetime value should be on top of the list: revenues is a lagging indicator, whereas customer satisfaction and customer lifetime value are leading indicators of customer and company profitability.
3. Leading organizations use blogs and customer communities
Forrester also analyzed some of the marketing practices used by the highest performing companies. Most striking to me was that leading companies use customer communities and blogs much more frequently than lagging companies: 70% of leading companies blog (versus 49% of lagging) and 70% of leading companies have a customer community (versus 36% of lagging companies).
Jon Miller, VP Marketing and co-founder of Marketo shared details about Marketo’s internal marketing performance:
4. Inbound marketing rules
We all know this by now but it’s still good to see in numbers: between 65% (small deals) and 32% (big deals) of opportunities came from inbound marketing efforts. While the difference is big, even for the big deals this is the single biggest lead category.
5. Slideshare presentations work in a visual age
Of all the content marketing campaigns that Marketo runs, the most successful ones are visual campaigns. In particular a single slideshare presentation can drive 136,000 views as compared to just 11,000 (or so) for the associated white paper. Think in pictures when you are designing content!
6. Don’t gate your top-of-funnel content
The age old question: which content to put behind a form versus which content to make freely available. Marketo makes ALL thought leadership content freely available so it can be shared across the web. Only content aimed at making a purchase decision: buying guides, analyst reports comparing vendors and RFP tools are gated by a form. In Marketo’s book these are hot prospects that sales should always talk to so these pieces have a form.
Tomorrow I am going to shake things up with a presentation about customer marketing: while as a marketer I like all this talk about leads, the truth is that for many subscription-based businesses 80% of revenues comes from existing customers. I’ve been asking people all day who in their company is focused on marketing to those existing customers to drive retention and customer lifetime value and I have been encountering a lot of blank stares. We are going to change that tomorrow. Be there! 11:20 AM with our customer Jeff Wiss from Zendesk who will presenting some very cool campaigns all marketers should implement!