Many digital marketers use nurture marketing to engage customers because it allows them to maintain multiple touch points throughout the lead lifecycle. <\/span><\/p>\n These touchpoints are crucial for demonstrating brand value, strengths, and solutions to problems that customers may not have even been aware of. In fact, <\/span>93% of B2B companies say content marketing generates <\/span>more<\/span><\/i> leads than traditional marketing strategies<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n In this blog post, we will focus on Marketo, however, the points covered are still applicable to all digital marketers looking to better understand the basics of nurture marketing.<\/span><\/p>\n Building a basic engagement program in Marketo is easy to do if you\u2019re familiar with the user interface. If you\u2019re not familiar, <\/span>Marketo\u2019s documentation<\/span><\/a> library provides end users with an extensive catalogue of easy-to-follow product guides. <\/span><\/p>\n However, the intent of that documentation is to give you the building blocks to get started. The actual management of your Engagement Program is up to you. So where do you begin?<\/span><\/p>\n Before creating or building out an Engagement Program, you need to first decide what you are trying to accomplish, and whether or not it can be measured. Your goals can be both quantitative and qualitative, so don\u2019t feel obligated to tie your goals only to numeric metrics. <\/span><\/p>\n Here are a few examples to help you get started:<\/span><\/p>\n Make sure that you and your team are clear from the beginning what those goals are, and how you plan to measure each goal. <\/span><\/p>\n Marketo has plenty of out-of-the-box reporting options to help you track and monitor the baseline metrics associated with your Engagement Program. <\/span>The Engagement Stream Performance Report<\/span><\/a> in combination with the <\/span>Landing Page Performance Report<\/span><\/a>\u00a0provides a broad overview of baseline metrics (Click Through Rate, Opens, Delivers, Clicks, etc\u2026) for each program within your content streams. <\/span><\/p>\n Marketo Smart Lists<\/span><\/a> are also a great resource to help you dive deeper into the metrics you won\u2019t find in Marketo\u2019s standardized reports. For example, you could set up smart lists to track weekly, monthly, or annual stream volumes. Or, you could use Smart Lists to track how many leads clicked on a specific CTA within a landing page or email, which can be extremely useful if you have multiple different links. Marketo also allows users to create subscriptions for all reports and smart lists, so you can deliver insights straight to an inbox.<\/span><\/p>\n Going beyond Marketo reports and smart lists, you should also be creating some form of custom reporting (outside of Marketo) to better track the metrics that align with your desired goals and outcomes. This could be something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet, or something more robust like a <\/span>Power BI<\/span><\/a> or <\/span>Tableau<\/span><\/a> dashboard. <\/span><\/p>\n Just make sure you\u2019re not spending all your time updating reports manually, and try to focus on the metrics that show you how well your Engagement Program stacks up against your pre-determined goals.<\/span><\/p>\n Equally as important as reporting, you should make sure you\u2019re setting up checks – using Marketo <\/span>smart lists<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>static lists<\/span><\/a> – to ensure that your Engagement Program is running smoothly. Especially if you\u2019re using complex back-end lead flow architecture. <\/span><\/p>\nMarketo Engagement Programs: Four Steps to Manage Them<\/h2>\n
#1 – Set Measurable Goals<\/h3>\n
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#2 – Report and Measure<\/h3>\n
#3 – Monitoring and Alerting<\/h3>\n