In the world of art and cooking, the concept of “upcycling” is not a new one, but has gained traction. Imagine that you are an artist and discover that someone is getting rid of their “junk” (which is in the eye of the beholder) in their yard sale. You, as the artist, take the “junk” off their hands and transform what one person wanted to discard into a piece of art that is now highly sought after. I love to cook, and will oftentimes take leftover food from a previous meal and, in a personal episode of “Chopped,” use that leftover item and create a new and delicious meal from it, such as a duck fried rice dish that I created from a roast duck from a few nights ago.
This is an ironic way to start a blog post about Marketing Automation, but it relates to situations that we as Marketing Operations professionals commonly face, which is the question of “what do I do with this inherited (and possibly suboptimal) stack of marketing technology?
It is often a temptation to “just blow it up and start over.” Most of us would relish the opportunity to create our processes and our operations anew with a shiny, brand new instance of our chosen technology. Be honest. However, this decision may not be desirable or wise for your organization as what we would call “technical debt” contains hard won victories, customer engagement, historical data, and inferred or defined processes within it which can’t be (nor should be) discarded.
However, like art and food, we shouldn’t have to accept a suboptimal instance as it is. We should aim to upcycle it as well.
The resulting question that I’m certain is on your mind is: “How can I upcycle my instance?” This question can be more emotional for us depending on the level of technical debt that we have, or perceive, in our technology stacks.
Each of these use cases can be deployed in a number of technical contexts, but for this blog I am going to demonstrate examples in Adobe Marketo Engage, as I believe this platform provides unique and powerful tools for upcycling debt.
Upcycle Lead Scoring: Analyze your database for high conversion activities.
One of the areas that may be suboptimal (or non-existent) is your lead scoring. This may exist for a number of reasons, which I won’t speculate on. However, if you have been engaging prospects and customers for more than 6 months, you should have enough data present to analyze which behaviors correlate with key downstream sales activities.
First, choose a list of activities that you want to analyze. For example, one of the activities you want to analyze may be your webinar attendee data (Marketo Engage Smart List below), Create a similar report for each activity type you want to analyze.
Then, use a report that allows you to correlate your expected outcomes with the behaviors. Marketo Engage provides the People Performance report to analyze which activities are correlating with the desired downstream activity (such as opportunity creation). Each of the activities can be analyzed as a custom column in this report, where their correlation to the desired outcome can be evaluated. An example of the People Performance report setup is below.
Analyzing this data, through these reports or exporting and creating ETL-based analysis tables within your BI platform of choice (which could be Excel), to correlate outcomes can then be used to inform a new or updated lead scoring that can better enable your sales teams and translate to better results. We recommend that you take your reporting outcomes, and present a business case for proposed scoring changes to your marketing and sales leadership to gain buy-in for this effort.
Upcycle disconnected MarTech: Untangle the mess of “shiny toys” into your stack.
Depending on the level of governance you may have had (or wish you had) in the past around MarTech purchases, you may have a few (or many) marketing tools in your organization used for engaging customers that have yet to be integrated with your stack.
Conducting an audit of the tools being used by your marketing teams may uncover an opportunity to upcycle both them and your marketing automation engine to leverage these capabilities, without much extra work or technical effort. This is especially true if the vendor’s tool offers a REST API integration to your MAP platform, which most tools on the market make available for the major platforms on the market (Marketo Engage, Hubspot, Pardot, Eloqua). .
If I find one (or multiple) of these disconnected tools, how do I upcycle them? I will again use Marketo Engage as an example of how to execute. For other platforms, please consult with the vendor documentation for guidance on how to implement the solution.
First, coordinate with the team that owns the tool and understand their usage. This will allow you to understand the context for the big picture for which this tool fits into the marketing mix. Ideally, this conversation would have happened before the tool was purchased.
Second, read and understand the vendor’s documented steps for setting up a REST API integration with Marketo. In my experience, most vendors who are taking B2B marketing seriously will have this in place. Consider it a red flag if they don’t (although there are ways to create an integration via iPass tools if this doesn’t exist).
Third, follow the process steps to set up a custom REST API connection for the tool in Marketo Admin. This process is relatively straightforward.
Fourth, based on the vendor documentation, set up any Custom Objects and/or Custom Activities that are required by the vendor integration. An example of this instruction guide can be found here (via Vidyard, a leading video engagement vendor). Many best-in-class marketing technology vendors leverage custom activities and/or objects to push data because of the robustness of the data that can be provided to your operations.
Fifth, process map how engagements using this technology will fit into your engagement model. In this evaluation, you will find that one of two conditions will exist:
In this case, either modify your existing program templates for the program type and channel that the engagements represent and deploy those new program templates (along with documentation and training) to your organization’s Best Practice Program Template folder.
In this case, you will want to create a new program channel in Marketo Admin to track engagements through this marketing engagement technology. For example, for creating a channel to track consumption of recorded demo videos via a tool like Vidyard (note: Vidyard did not sponsor this post), the following channel setup may be used. In this example, “Visited” could correspond with filling out the demo gating form, “Started View” with clicking to watch the video, “Partial View” with viewing 25% of the video, “Complete View” with watching 75-100% of the video, and “Engaged” with the visitor taking an action that shows sales intent.
Once this channel setup has been established, then (based on your organization’s strategically defined workflow, use the REST API data updates and/or Custom Object/Activity triggers within the Smart Campaigns in a template program that follows the workflow you mapped out in the channel definition.
Upcycle Email Marketing: Engagement + Open time analysis
Are you in a “batch and blast” type of instance, and worried about the upcoming Google and Yahoo updates (and your reputation)? You may have a reason to be concerned. Many do. However, that doesn’t mean that you should abandon your email nurture, but instead you can analyze how your audience engages with your email nurture and use this data to craft a more intelligent and segmented outbound email approach.
Examples below will leverage Marketo Engage. If you aren’t using Marketo Engage as your Marketing Automation platform, please consult your vendor documentation regarding how to execute.
A few steps you can take include:
As you can see, there are many opportunities to upcycle your so-called “technical debt” into a reimagined operationally upgraded demand machine. Let’s in this year create inventions that will make all of us look back and marvel at the art and recipe from these transformations.