Marketing Automation and Drupal

A strong lead management process requires B2B marketing professionals to respond to each prospect within the buying process. However, as your business grows, understanding and responding relevantly to a buyer’s interest is almost impossible to do manually. To ensure that your marketing efforts are targeting customers and prospects with the right messages at the right time, a marketing automation software is key.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation software brings together content assets such as landing pages, emails, web events, etc. and delivers them to prospects at a time when it is most relevant to them in their buying cycle.

Knowing the “right time” is key to effectively engaging prospects with your brand. Conducting an analysis of your target audience and capturing demographic information, along with their interactions with your brand through your website and social platforms, allows you to qualify a lead and deliver to your sales team. Most marketing automation platforms integrate seamlessly with popular CRMs, so your sales staff can most likely continue to use their existing tools.

Marketing automation and Drupal?

I’m skipping ahead in the process and assuming you’ve already determined that you need a marketing automation software. The question now is “how effectively will this software integrate into a Drupal website?”

Drupal is definitely one of the better marketing platforms, and with a simple install of custom modules, the most popular marketing automation platforms can quickly be integrated with your Drupal Site.

Below are just a few examples of custom Drupal modules that have been created for marketing automation platforms:

• Marketo Munchkin Module – (created by Mediacurrent‘s Damien McKenna) The Marketo Munchkin is a very simple module to output the Marketo Munchkin tracking code obtained from http://www.marketo.com/.
• Eloqua Module – This module allows you to build webforms that directly parallel forms in eloqua, and can thereby be posted into eloqua.
• Pardot Module – This module adds Pardot web analytics directly onto your Drupal site. It supports general visitor tracking, path-based individual campaign tracking, and path-based lead scoring.
• Built In Module to Replace 3rd Parties – This module serves as a locally hosted replacement for 3rd party services like Pardot, Marketo or Eloqua, allowing you to track individual user paths through your site and assign rules for marketing automation in the form of drip campaigns triggered from user interaction.

Conclusion

Personally, I recommend every Marketing and Sales Director investigate marketing automation software. To truly grasp the value provided by marketing automation, a level of understanding is needed, which only develops from in-depth personal experience with the technology, or a thorough investigation of its core features and functions. In either case, plan to spend a significant amount of time learning the ins and outs of the solution features. However, I strongly believe that companies that implement a marketing automation system to support their marketing and sales efforts are better equipped to manage lead flow and process leads more efficiently.ketin

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Interview with Josh Clark: Mobile Design and Strategy

Today consumers regularly, if not exclusively, access online content on their mobile device. What does that mean for businesses? Where does mobile fit into your digital interface?

Yesterday I had the chance to chat with Josh Clark, Keynote Speaker for the Atlanta Drupal Business Summit and Drupalcamp Atlanta. Josh specializes in mobile design, strategy, and user experience.

In this interview, Josh previews his talks for both events and answers questions about mobile strategy and design such as:

• What are the biggest hurdles companies face when “going mobile”?
• What new mobile standards and technologies will Drupal need to embrace to stay relevant?
• What are the next phases of responsive design?

Marketers Ruin Everything.

Let me start with what annoys me about online video: commercials.

I went to Youtube recently to watch a commercial that someone in the office was talking about. Before the commercial came on, I had to watch another 30 second commercial. Watching a commercial in order to watch a commercial = one annoyed viewer.

But, I must get over it. With the rise in popularity of online video, companies everywhere are trying to “go viral” with their best sales pitches. Which means, other marketing companies will be placing their ads to catch your attention.

I tend to agree with Gary Vaynerchuck in that “Marketers ruin everything!” He said that, among many other outstanding things about social media and marketing, in his recent keynote address at the Digital Summit in Atlanta this week. #dsum11

It’s true though right? Great marketing gets your attention. From there, other marketers mimic the efforts. Which leads to more and more efforts that are similar (call it trends if you will). Eventually, the “market” is saturated with similar tactics and then the consumer chooses to ignore it. Let’s take a moment of silence for Banner Ads, Sponsored Search Results, and Direct Mail.

MATRIX is not immune to this thinking. We know that online video is popular, and we want a piece of it. However, rather than sitting around brainstorming the best way we can “go viral”, we’re evaluating the content that we currently have, and brainstorming ways we can simplify and put it on video.

Now, we’ve created video “case studies” for our Business Intelligence group, fun videos showcasing things about our corporate culture, and highlighting our true heart-felt importance of community service.

Have they gone viral? Hardly.  Do we want them to? Sure why not! Let’s make Kwesi Oseitutu the next Old Spice man!

The point is, MATRIX isn’t trying to spam, nor is our goal to win a Webby. We are trying to provide our customers another insight into our business and corporate culture.

Our most recent “video venture” is taking our technical jobs and putting them on video.  It’s not polished. It’s not over-produced. But it’s real. Real information about the opportunity, the work environment, and the skills needed to land the job.

In the end, we’ll keep testing out different forms of video that work for our business. Scratch the ones that fail, then saturate the streaming web with those that work.

Camera Quality Battle

I have been wanting a side-by-side photo comparison of the best camera phones on the market. Today, I gathered a few colleagues and took pictures using their EVO, iPhone 4G, and Incredible. Which picture do you think is best?

iPhone 4G

EVO

Incredible

Top Words Declared for 2009

The Global Language Monitor just released the most popular words of 2009, and the #1 word is [drum roll please] Twitter. It beat out Obama and H1n1 as the most frequently used word in print, digital media, internet, and blogosphere.

Think you can guess what the top “phrase” of 2009 was? Click here to read the full article by Richard Lea.

The other competitors of GLM’s top words of 2009 were:

1. Twitter
2. Obama
3. H1N1
4. Stimulus
5. Vampire
6. 2.0
7. Deficit
8. Hadron
9. Healthcare
10. Transparency
11. Outrage
12. Bonus
13. Unemployed
14. Foreclosure
15. Cartel

Six Social Media Trends for 2010

Over the past year or two we have seen a huge explosion of social media applications for both personal and professional use. Now that we have established that social media is not going away, we as marketers can concentrate on how we can leverage the latest trends.

So what are the upcoming trends of social media? David Armano recently wrote a post on the “Six Social Media Trends for 2010” that I wanted to share with you.

Take a look at the article here, and please share your thoughts with me.