The Adaptive Marketer

Lead Nurturing Jumped The Shark – Why Automated Drip Campaigns Are For Drips

Posted on 27. Jun, 2010 by Robert Rose in Content Marketing, Online Marketing

Let me ask you a question.  If you had more money, would you be happier?   Not just a little bit more money – but alot more money.    Whenever I see pictures of Paul Allen’s boat, it’s really hard for me to answer “No.”   But, guess what, research has repeatedly shown that people with higher incomes are not “moment by moment” happier than any other demographic group.

This is what’s known as a cognitive bias – where we all believe something because well… it sounds true.

So, recently I’ve had two separate clients ask me about getting a Lead Nurturing software system.   I ask them why they want one.

The answer (I’m paraphrasing both) is that they’ve seen demos and “that part where they build an automated drip campaign – that runs automatically and delivers relevant content to users is really cool.”

Apparently, according to some of the software solution vendors:  “Analysts agree that every successful B2B marketer is doing it.”

Um, so okay… cognitive bias – meet blogger hyperbole:

Nobody *Really* Does Lead Nurturing

At least the way it was promised.

Look, you can read the workbooks from Marketo, and the white papers from Eloqua – and the wonderful thought leadership from Hubspot and all the great analysis from Forrester blah blah blah…. The idealized promise of B2B Lead Nurturing and marketing automation comes down to the same thing.  You take a well formulated content marketing strategy that presents your “thought leadership”.  You combine it with a marketing/sales content delivery workflow that supports that strategy against your buyer’s purchasing process journey.  And you use technology to automate the whole thing.

But in fact, show me any  B2B Lead Nurturing/Automation success or case study – and I’ll show you a story of great content marketing relationship building – not anything having to do with a formulated “drip” campaign.

In short, the gold standard of Lead Nurturing is basically delivering the right content to the right user at the right time – so that they continue to say ‘yes’ to deeper engagement (and ultimately sale).  But, of course, the trick is defining what “right” means in all those cases.  And guess what?

Nobody *really* does that.

Okay, hyperbole aside, I do understand that there are a few B2B marketers out there that have fully automated their marketing and put together sophisticated workflows of content.  They have segmented their audiences, put their content and buying stages into matrices, integrated their CMS Systems, automated the drip email campaigns against each conversion layer, tied it into Salesforce.com, trained their inside sales group with relevant call scripts for “keep in touch” campaigns and have specialized, automated workflow for moving non-responsive contacts back out of the marketing database.   Sounds cool doesn’t it?   Ever seen it work?

Yeah, me neither.  Eight out of ten marketers that I ask, use their lead nurturing software manually for one or more of these three things:

1. They send outbound email (maybe even on a regular basis) to their marketing lists.
2. They use it as a landing page, registration and authentication solution for access into their content centers. And they feed those leads into Salesforce.com or other sales force automation tool
3. They use it to do some form of lead scoring and track marketing tactic success for a click-to-close measurement (e.g. how many PPC leads ended up turning into opportunities, or customers).

And that’s it…..

Let me be clear…

For most that’s enough quite frankly.   But here’s the thing.  These reasons aren’t really why the solution was purchased.   Most of the time (just like my clients) – the sexy part of the product demo was that automated drip campaign based on cool business rules. Here are some actual quotes I’ve seen:

“Marketing automation puts you in control!” (yes, the irony was lost on them)

“Marketing Automation gives your sales people the ability to close 10% more deals.“ (really?  10%?  Not 8% or 12%)

“Lead Nurturing Automation Makes Your Marketing 15% More Effective” (this one was my favorite)

4 Out Of 5 Marketers That Chew Gum….

So, I asked veteran B2B marketers about setting up the aforementioned sophisticated workflow drip campaigns – most of them tell me the same thing.  “Yeah, we tried one or two, but it didn’t really work the way I thought it would”.

Why?

Mostly it’s because either:

1. marketing can’t really control the sales process.  In other words – it’s just too hard to make the sales guys  conform to a timed, scripted call campaign where they use the insight tracked from the lead nurturing software.  Because it’s Tuesday, they still just call and say “are you ready to buy now?”
2. implementing those automated content flows takes a lot of time and doesn’t allow us to be highly adaptive when we need to be….
3. we don’t have enough bandwidth to provide enough content to go more than two or three steps – therefore doing it manually works just fine

Does that mean that everything in Lead Nurturing is useless?

No, absolutely not.  And, as I said before, it also doesn’t mean that the companies that focus on these solutions aren’t tremendously valuable.   At various times, I’ve gotten tremendous value out of Marketo, Eloqua, Manticore, Hubspot and others.

And, I’ve blogged before at the Content Marketing Institute about the value of segmenting your content against buying stages.

But here’s the key – take all the time and effort you were going to spend worrying and implementing some sophisticated lead nurturing workflow program.  And, instead focus it on three areas:

1. An ass-kicking content marketing strategy.   Really go to the effort of understanding your buyer personas and putting together a point of view that addresses the needs of these personas.   Make this content as highly available and as easily attained as possible.
2. A measurement strategy that looks from the bottom up – rather than the top down.  Using your analytics tools, start understanding how that content is being used, and how it’s resonating with the customers – from initial click to close.  What part of the buying cycle are most of your users entering from?  Just KNOW this.  Don’t try and force every buyer down the same workflow funnel.
3. Creating a marketing/sales handoff that is flexible and allows people to use the content to have a meaningful conversation.  Instead of “rules” about when the next “keep-in-touch” campaign should happen – let’s teach the Sales People to understand the customers needs by what content they are engaging with.   In other words, let’s not keep in touch because it’s 90 days from first engagement.  Let’s keep in touch because we have something engaging to say.

In short, instead of force feeding content down our customer’s throats, in timed intervals that are pre-decided, let’s guide them to find their own way through our brand.

Spending time on our content and how we can actively take part in the conversation – ensures that the drip, drip drip of content doesn’t end up being water torture to the customer.

Photo Credit: John ‘K’

Tags: Drip Marketing, Eloqua, Hubspot, Marketing Automation, Marketo