Lead Scoring and Marketing Automation: the Buddha Funnel

Marketing automation lead scoring whiteboard session
Mac McConnell, partner and founder of BlueBird Strategies. Video by the Marketing Automation Software Guide.

Email marketing is increasingly becoming integrated in a cross-channel and event-driven marketing strategy. As readers of this blog will now, I’m a firm believer in customer-centric holistic marketing. OK, I know that’s a few expensive words in one sentence but that’s how I call it.

When you talk about cross-channel marketing, integration and email you’re really talking about marketing automation. And when you’re talking about marketing automation, you’re really talking about lead management in many cases.

One of the topics when it comes down to lead management is obviously lead nurturing (and boy, am I glad content is crucial in it, if not I would be out of a job). And when you talk about lead nurturing, you inevitably have to talk about lead scoring.

Defining the entry points of your funnel, attributing scores to them and your leads or prospects (yes, terminology still depends a lot on who you’re talking to) and lead scoring through the funnel is simply a must when you want to work in a customer-centric, data-driven and holistic way (oops, again expensive words).

Read more

Content, conversion and the integration of search, social and email marketing

Marketers need to have teasing and effective content on their web sites and blogs to attract visitors and customers. They need persuasive content in their emails. And, after all, that’s what search engine marketing is about as well: getting visitors to your website or to a specific landing page by offering consistent and relevant content. Blog marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing, content marketing, they all have one thing in common: they aim to attract, be found and persuade. But is it any different than in email marketing and what skills do we need?

We all know that content is crucial in SEO and that the words in a search engine ad are key to conversion. We also know that content is essential in the post-click process, email marketing and in social media.

Valuable and relevant content is what makes people click a link, take action, download something, further discover your site or blog and share information with others over social networks. The content that matters, however, is the content you need for your – prospective – customers and business goals.

Read more