Marketing operations tech stack audit: A proven checklist for operations teams Marketing tech stacks often expand fast, leading to sprawl. The result is low tool usage. Gartner estimates that only 49% of marketing technology tools are actively used by teams. A marketing operations tech stack audit brings structure back to teams with bloated software. During the audit, teams identify opportunities to cut redundant software, resolve data issues, and improve ROI. Ironically, teams may also surface the need for new tech to manage large volumes of data. HubSpot’s Data Hub is designed to help, combining data across each company’s tech stacks. This post explores when marketing operations tech stack audits are necessary. Marketers will also learn how to run tech stack audits and where AI fits into the process. Table of Contents What is a marketing operations tech stack audit? What You Should Audit in Your Marketing Operations Technology Stack How to Run a Marketing Operations Tech Stack Audit Where AI Fits in Your Marketing Operations Tech Stack Audit Frequently Asked Questions About Marketing Operations Tech Stack Audits What is a marketing operations tech stack audit? A marketing operations tech stack audit is a structured review of all marketing, sales, and service tools. The audit identifies tools that do the same job. During the tech stack audit, teams also map what data is collected by each tool and if data is accurate. At the end of the audit, the team should...

Everything You Need to Know About Behavioral Segmentation Do you ever ask yourself why you act the way you do? Like why you venture out during a snowstorm to get an iced coffee?  For marketers, behavioral insights are not only interesting but key for understanding their audience, going beyond demographic and geographic data. In order to understand your audience's behaviors, marketers can implement behavioral segmentation, an analysis that groups prospects and customers into different segments based on how they behave.  Behavioral segmentation is a part of behavioral marketing, a set of methods to collect and analyze consumer behavior data to segment and target audiences with laser-like precision. In this post, we will go over: What is behavioral segmentation Why marketers need behavioral segmentation Four types of behavioral segmentation Behavioral segmentation examples With behavioral segmentation, marketers can gain a more comprehensive understanding of their audience’s motivations and needs, resulting in better tailoring of products and services to their customers. Behavioral segmentation is interesting because it intersects with psychology — when we think about how someone behaves and why, we naturally think about their psychological motivations.  However, behavioral segmentation is distinct from psychographic segmentation.  Psychographic segmentation is rooted in lifestyles, interests, values, and even personality traits. Behavioral segmentation is about how a customer interacts with a brand and their products or services.  For example, marketers can segment people based on website behaviors like clicks, page views, social shares, and media plays.  ...

Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Operations in One Place One of my favorite movies is "School of Rock," which also happens to be one of 2003's best films. In the movie, Jack Black poses as a substitute teacher at a private school, and, after noticing the students are musically talented, he turns the 10-year-olds into a fully-fledged rock band. When assigning roles to the students, he approaches the class president and deems her band manager because she had the organizational skills needed to help the band run smoothly. "Summer," he says, "You're in charge of the whole thing." When I think about marketing operations, I think of this quote — without a team, businesses that depend on technology would have a less-than-seamless experience carrying out their duties. In this post, you’ll learn more about marketing operations and why these teams are essential to a business. The people involved in marketing operations build a foundation that reinforces and supports marketing efforts. It makes it easier to achieve goals by implementing systems to ensure marketers are best equipped to succeed at their jobs. Why is marketing operations important? 93% of B2B marketers say the marketing operation’s function is important or critical to delivering digital transformation. After all, without marketing operations, it would be tough for marketing teams to complete essential activities effectively because they enable other marketing departments to bring cohesion to campaigns and processes. For example, as technology is necessary to carry...

What Is Content Operations? A Straight-Forward Guide In a 1996 essay, Bill Gates wrote, “Content is king,” and what was true then is still true now. Content is necessary to the success of a business. If the content is the king, we could say its operations are the queen — or at least a knight. Imagine a startup that wants to create a blog post. It’s a timely post that needs to be up before the end of Q1. Because the startup is new, it hasn’t established concrete operations for blog content. So, the post sits in a Google document with no plan for who uploads the content or what blog platform will host the information. The business has a content writer, but operations don’t typically end there. Blog posts aren’t the only content option there are. You can incorporate over a dozen different content types, including email, videos, social media posts, podcasts, infographics, and other visual content to increase brand awareness. Without content operations, though, this content likely has no plan for production, publication, or distribution. And what good is a blog post if no one reads it? If the goal is to post content daily, then you’ll need to identify who is performing the work? What methods are they using? What systems are necessary to get the job done? One department is the solution to these questions — content operations. Content operations focus on three elements: People: who is performing a task and...

Predictive Lead Scoring: What It Is and Why It's Important If your marketing team and the systems you have in place to attract leads are working properly, you’re likely seeing anywhere from 10s to 1,000s of new leads each week. If you’ve got a robust sales team, they may be able to contact every single lead within a few hours. However, if you’re like most companies, your sales team has to prioritize in order to reach out to the “best” prospects quickly, while saving the “less likely” prospects for last. This doesn’t mean that they can’t be converted, there’s just a lower chance of securing those prospects as customers. Time spent courting the wrong prospect is not only an exercise in futility, but it takes time away from your salespeople and prevents them from closing sales and making your company money. How then, do you make the job easier (and more lucrative) for your salespeople? Predictive Lead Scoring can take the guesswork out of following up on leads. Let’s take a look at what it is and how it could help your business grow. What is predictive lead scoring? Before we define predictive lead scoring, it’s important to understand traditional lead scoring and its limitations. Businesses have struggled with prioritizing lead follow-up for decades. In many cases, salespeople are left to their own devices, using their best judgment to decide who gets contacted first. Marketers and salespeople use data such as demographic info (age, marital status, industry, role),...

Marketing Qualified Lead: Everything You Need to Know About MQLs By aligning team members and different teams, your business's employees are able to work together to create delightful experiences that make prospects want to convert and stay loyal to your brand. One example of a process in which this type of collaboration only improves your ability to convert prospects into loyal customers is lead qualification. Think about it this way: If your marketing team can align with sales on what makes for a high-quality lead at your company, then marketing can identify and handoff these leads to reps after a lead's initial interaction(s) with your brand. Then, once sales has these contacts from marketing, reps can also qualify them and nurture them accordingly. This leads to time being well-spent across the org and ensures sales reps aren't wasting their time trying to identify leads that marketing has already engaged and vetted. These leads that marketing engages, vets, and passes along to sales are called marketing qualified leads (MQLs). MQL In this post, we'll talk about what an MQL is, why identifying MQLs is worthwhile, and MQL criteria you can establish on your team. How does the qualification process for an MQL work? At a high level, a lead becomes an MQL, then a SQL, working their way down the funnel until they (hopefully) become a customer. As mentioned, if a lead becomes an MQL, they've been vetted by the marketing team. In other words, the marketing team...

6 Steps to Build a Single Customer View & Improve Customer Experience Ever see those cool 360-degree cameras on red carpets at award shows? Someone famous will stand in the middle and several cameras positioned all around will simultaneously capture pictures of the star, creating a spectacular image that gives you a 360 view of the person. Now, imagine if you could do that with your target audience? Capture them from all angles as they interact with your brand. With a single customer view, you can. The issue is, many businesses struggle to know where to start. At the end of this article, you’ll understand what a single customer view is and how to create one for your brand. A single customer view combines data from a consumer’s behavior on web and email, social media activity, demographics, interactions with customer service, and purchase history. Let’s go through an example of an interaction between a consumer and a brand. A consumer, let’s call her Jazmyn, discovers a brand on Instagram. Jazmyn visits the brand’s website through Instagram and downloads a free offer. Said brand adds Jazmyn to an email list and she starts receiving nurturing emails. After months of no interactions, Jazmyn rediscovers the brand and makes a purchase. A month after that, she calls customer service regarding an issue with her product. In just a few months, Jazmyn has interacted with at least three departments within the company: marketing, sales, and customer service. In many businesses, every department tracks...

Lead Source: What Is It and Why It's Valuable To Your Team The more you know about your buyer personas, leads, and customers, the easier it is to effectively target them. This entails identifying the channels and platforms in which they spend their time and understanding their needs and challenges. It also means knowing how your leads find your business — how and by which method they come across your company. This is known as a lead source. Lead Source In this blog post, we’ll review the definition of a lead source, why lead sources are so important, common types, and best practices for managing and tracking them. Why do lead sources matter? By understanding and identifying lead sources, you’re able to gain context around why and how your audience members find you. As a result, you can improve the customer experience and buyer’s journey with targeted content, communications, interactions, and more. This allows you to determine which lead sources are most valuable to your business so you can hone in on them as well as measure your success over time in attracting and converting leads. Additionally, knowing which lead sources bring in the most qualified leads helps you focus your resources where they matter most and where you’ll get the greatest ROI. Identifying and understanding your lead sources is also a major part of lead management, the process in which you manage — or nurture — your leads until they decide to convert. These are all...

What Is Last Click Attribution and How to Use It For your team’s marketing efforts to be effective, you need to know which marketing channels and touchpoints are resonating with your audience most — you must understand which channels and touchpoints are so successful at whatever it is they do that they make leads want to convert. Last click attribution can help you with this — it assists in identifying which marketing touchpoint prompted a conversion in the final part of the buyer's journey. Last Click Attribution Model In this blog post, we’ll cover all things last click attribution including how it’s defined, what makes it unique, how your marketing team can use it, and more. Pros and Cons of Last Click Attribution Last click attribution is helpful if you want to know which of your marketing channels and touchpoints have the most influence in the final stage of the buyer’s journey. While this is helpful information, it doesn’t account for the numerous other channels and touchpoints that impacted a customer from the very start of the buyer’s journey. This is important to note since there are a variety of touchpoints, across numerous channels, that impact a lead throughout the buyer's journey — which is why most marketers today refrain from only using last click attribution. Rather, they'll use multi-touch attribution or include last-click as part of their other marketing attribution efforts. For instance, say a lead received an email from your email campaign, clicked through to...

Multi-Touch Attribution and Models: A Complete Guide Today's buyer's journey includes a number of interactions across various touchpoints and channels. There's rarely a conversion of sale that occurs based off a single interaction. Rather, conversions and sales often stem from a mix of interactions via a variety of sources such as blog articles, social media posts, webinars, in-person events, conversations with reps, content on your website, email marketing campaigns, and more. All of these touchpoints play a role in getting your customers to convert. Attribution allows you to give credit for conversions to those marketing touchpoints and channels throughout the buyer’s journey. Multi-touch attribution takes this a step further. Multi-Touch Attribution In this blog post, we’ll cover the definition of multi-touch attribution, what makes it unique from other types of attribution, and multi-touch attribution models. Let’s get started. What is multi-touch attribution? Multi-touch attribution, which may also be referred to as fractional attribution, is how you determine the value of each touchpoint throughout the customer journey that results in a conversion. In other words, it's when credit for a conversion is given to every touchpoint that a customer experienced throughout the buyer's journey. Why is multi-touch attribution important? The reason multi-touch attribution is so important is that it allows you to pinpoint all of the channels that contribute to a conversion and which of those channels have the most impact on a conversion. It gives you a clear picture of how your channels and touchpoints influence every conversion....