Marketing in the 21st Century = Digital Body Language and Automation

July 22, 2008 | Posted by: Michele Perry

One of the key ingredients in our marketing recipe at Sourcefire is Eloqua, an online demand creation software application. With Eloqua, we are able to not only generate and manage leads but study each lead's digital body language. This gives us the insight into what they are doing online, what they are most interested in, when they are ready to buy, and, most importantly, when and how we should pursue them.

Eloqua offers a great deal of automation functionality reducing the time needed to complete inefficient manual activities. We have tapped into various areas where automation is available including lead scoring/rating programs, event promotion automated programs, and automated lead nurturing programs.

Need to better manage and prioritize your database for your Sales Team? Try implementing an automated Lead Scoring Program. Our automated Lead Scoring Program gives a lead a score based on both implicit and explicit criteria. Implicit criteria would be visiting our site, filling out a form, clicking through an email, searching for us on Google, etc. Explicit criteria include such things as a lead's title and profile type. The score is then put into a rating (A, B, C, D) for the Sales team to view for each of their assigned leads. This rating allows our Sales team to prioritize leads and spend their time more efficiently.

Do you host or participate in lots of events each year and find it challenging to effectively market to your contacts by getting them to attend the events and then follow-up with them promptly after? Consider using Eloqua's automated event programs. We host seminars throughout the year and have found Eloqua's event programs immensely helpful in automating when invitations, reminders, and follow-up emails are sent. Once the emails and program are set up, the program can be relied upon to deliver on time and with minimal effort. You don't miss a beat! You can increase attendance rates, increase follow-up activity, and get those prospects one step closer to buying your service/product (and sleep better at night because you just did all that).

Do you have inactive contacts in your database? We all do. At Sourcefire, our sales cycles tend to be long (on average, 6-9 months) so it is imperative that we keep moving leads along and do not lose them due to inactivity. We have always nurtured the existing leads in our database through mostly manual means but now we are implementing an automated lead nurturing program that will touch leads that have become inactive for six months or greater. The program sends the leads customized emails and moves them through the program until they perform an activity and let us know they are actively considering Sourcefire again. Then, their lead score increases and they are removed from the program and delivered to the Sales team to reengage.

Have you tapped into the search engine marketing craze? More and more consumers start their research online at a search engine. This trend that is expected to continue and increase over time so if you haven't tapped into it, you're missing out on capturing great leads! Our search engine marketing generates high quality leads which are tracked in Eloqua. We can tell what word a contact searched on, what pages they visited on our site and when (and can have automated email notification sent to Sales to let them know their contact is on our site), what forms they submitted and view all their responses, and much more. This tracking helps us best understand each contact's digital body language which, again, is crucial for us to be effective with our marketing and prospecting. It also helps us tweak and optimize our search engine marketing efforts.

Considering a marketing tool like Eloqua? We highly recommend Eloqua and would happy to discuss it with you.