You searched for search engine optimization - Act-On

How AI Is Changing Manufacturing Marketing

Nicki Howell — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:24:22 +0000

TL;DR: AI is helping manufacturing marketers handle long sales cycles and large buying committees by turning fragmented data into actionable insights. It improves marketing effectiveness through predictive analytics, personalized messaging for different stakeholders, and cross-channel optimization. AI also reduces manual work (like lead scoring and segmentation), connects disconnected data systems, and helps teams focus on strategies that drive ROI. Marketing automation platforms with AI (like Act-On) make it easier to identify buying signals, prioritize accounts, and engage prospects at the right time without overloading small marketing teams.

Introduction

As a marketer in the manufacturing industry, you likely have a long list of goals to hit this year, along with the added task of proving that every action you take and every marketing dollar you spend has an impact. And if you have a smaller team that is already stretched very thin, this challenge becomes even bigger.

The good news is that AI-driven marketing for manufacturing is giving the industry a much needed boost. Data that was once fragmented and hard to access is now being used to understand buyers in context, keep people engaged over long manufacturing sales cycles, and reach everyone involved in buying decisions. Understanding the potential of AI marketing for manufacturing as you move forward can help your team hit its goals and prove its impact.

Why AI Matters More Than Ever in Marketing for Manufacturing

Your buyers jump from channel to channel and follow sales cycles that are often long and drawn out. Research shows the average sales cycle in the manufacturing industry is about 130 days. In the meantime, your team works to meet buyers where they are and stay relevant as they move from interest to decision.

Latest manufacturing marketing trends point to extended cycles, while timing and relevance being more important than ever. A prospect might engage with your technical content early, go quiet for weeks, then re-emerge ready to go, with their ducks in a row and a budget approved. When you consider how long it takes to move from interest to decision, combined with the reality that buying committees are often large, tools like AI become important for maintaining buyer attention, especially when stakeholders are spread across many departments. One recent survey found that an average of 13 people are involved in B2B buying decisions.

AI powered marketing for manufacturing gives you the insights and tools to stay top of mind with multiple stakeholders across large committees and long buying cycles. And when your team is operating at full capacity, or let’s be honest, sometimes beyond capacity, having tools that lighten the load is incredibly valuable. Just as important, they help you show the impact of your efforts and prove ROI to leadership.

Four Ways AI is Transforming Manufacturing Marketing Today

Does your team have large goals and limited resources to accomplish them? AI marketing for manufacturing offers inspiration and hope for hitting those goals successfully without burning out your team. Here are the top ways we’re seeing AI transform the industry right now.

1. Predictive Analytics

You’re sitting on beautiful little nuggets of behavioral data, but in the past, turning those nuggets into ready-to-use insights wasn’t always easy. AI-driven marketing for manufacturing helps you analyze engagement patterns over time and home in on the signals that really matter in long manufacturing buying cycles.

For example, AI-powered marketing tools can flag an account that’s been quiet for weeks, then suddenly shows renewed engagement across multiple roles, like an engineering team revisiting technical documentation or a procurement contact opening ROI-related emails. Instead of treating each of these actions as isolated events, AI connects that data and serves up insights for marketing and sales. This type of intelligence allows teams to respond much faster.

2. Personalization at Scale for Complex Buying Groups

The days of “Hi {Name}” personalization are so far behind us that most prospects now consider it generic. Keeping attention requires messaging that fits who you’re talking to on the buying committee and where they are in their journey.

For example, an engineer reviewing technical specs and a procurement lead evaluating cost risk should each receive messaging personalized to their needs, challenges, and status in the buying process. AI tools help you customize content paths for specific roles within an account without building complicated, separate campaigns for every scenario. This makes hyper-personalization much easier when your team already has a full calendar and limited time for manual work.

3. AI-Driven Optimization Across Channels

Prospects aren’t always predictable. They jump from channel to channel, which makes it more important than ever to reach them where they’re engaging. AI-driven marketing for manufacturing helps by identifying signals and recognizing when it’s time for meaningful follow-up.

For example, AI can recognize when a prospect reads a technical email, visits a product page later that week, and then registers for a webinar, even when those actions happen across different channels.

Based on that activity, AI can automatically trigger a follow-up, such as a role-appropriate nurture sequence or a sales notification with content aligned to the prospect’s interests. This type of cross-channel optimization helps manufacturing marketers respond when interest is highest, without manually monitoring every touchpoint.

4. Improve Marketing ROI Through Better Decision-Making

Meeting the big goals you’ve set for the year likely involves a series of important decisions. And those decisions are only as strong as the data behind them. AI can improve marketing ROI in manufacturing by supporting better decision-making, uncovering patterns in what’s working and guiding where to invest more resources.

For example, AI can help you understand which combinations of content, channels, and roles consistently show up in won deals versus which efforts tend to stall. With that insight, you can reassess how you’re spending resources, shifting them toward the activities that clearly tie to ROI and your goals.

Common Marketing Challenges AI Helps Solve

Wondering how to use AI to optimize manufacturing marketing? The answers lie within your biggest challenges. Some of the largest we commonly see include:

Data overload. You likely have large amounts of behavioral data about your prospects, including website visits, content downloads, webinar attendance, and email engagement. On its own, that data can be overwhelming to analyze and interpret in context. AI helps you find patterns and understand meaningful buying signals that your team can quickly act on.
Manual processes. AI can also help you reduce manual processes around list building, lead scoring, and campaign adjustments. Instead of exporting engagement data or updating spreadsheets, AI can continuously group audiences based on behavior and adjust scores as interest rises and falls, funneling them into the most relevant nurture paths automatically. This is especially helpful in manufacturing, where buying activity can move at a painfully slow pace.
Disconnected systems. When your systems aren’t connected, it can create frustrating blind spots that impact many areas of the business. For example, when engagement data, account insights, and prospect data live in separate places, it’s difficult to understand what marketing influenced and when. AI helps align these signals across systems so marketing and sales can focus on the insights that matter most.

Sales teams can see which stakeholders are active and what topics they care about, while marketing can clearly see how engagement connects to opportunity movement.

AI Tools for Manufacturing Marketing

The right AI tools for manufacturing can help you continually refine how audiences are grouped and prioritized based on real-time engagement patterns. If an account, or specific roles within it, suddenly increases activity across emails, landing pages, and resource downloads, the system can flag it and help you respond.

You set the strategy, which might mean automatically adjusting a nurture path, updating lead scores, or passing a prospect on to sales. These are just a few examples of where AI fits into marketing automation and helps improve your manufacturing marketing ROI. Overall, it helps you focus your energy on strategy while automation handles the day-to-day adjustments that fine-tune campaigns and improve your manufacturing marketing ROI.

How Act-On Helps Marketers Put AI to Work

Act-On helps marketing teams get the most out of AI and prove important ROI to senior leadership leveraging purpose-built marketing automation for manufacturers that supports you with:

AI-powered insights. Instead of reacting to single data points, you can start to see patterns in how prospects and accounts interact with your marketing over time. That might include repeat visits to technical resources, cross-channel engagement, or other signals that show progressing intent.
Segmentation and targeting. You can group audiences based on behavioral engagement signals and create more relevant messages without requiring heavy manual effort or burning out your team. This approach helps you understand which actions drive engagement across the buying cycle, whether that includes engineers, operational leaders, or procurement teams.
Predictive optimization. You can use historical performance and engagement patterns to understand which campaigns and segments are most likely to contribute to movement along the buyer’s journey. This understanding helps you focus your efforts and show clear progression and impact to leadership.

With Act-On’s AI tools for manufacturing marketing, you can improve the impact of your marketing without putting additional strain on your existing team. You can also reduce manual work tied to tasks like segmentation and reporting while supporting more consistent impact across long sales cycles and complicated buying committees.

Need Help Getting Started?

Interested in getting started with AI-driven marketing for manufacturing? You don’t have to completely overhaul your strategy or processes, and you can start slow by understanding latest trends and the best tools to help.

A marketing automation platform like Act-On is designed to help you meet your marketing goals by bringing together automation, analytics, and AI-driven insights in a way that supports the long sales cycles manufacturing marketers face.

Also, check out our Ultimate Guide to Manufacturing Marketing for best practices for generating high-quality leads, creating segmented experiences, and using AI in ways that help your team hit even your most aggressive goals this year.

Manufacturing Marketing Trends to Watch in 2026

Act-On — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:04:29 +0000

TL;DR: Even with tight budgets and long sales cycles, manufacturing marketers still have plenty of exciting opportunities in 2026 when they focus on the right trends. These include shifting from lead volume to revenue contribution, using marketing automation as an operational backbone, supporting buyer-led journeys, prioritizing first-party data, applying AI for insight, evolving ABM to support buying groups, and investing in credibility-building technical content that builds trust.

Introduction

For 2026, many marketers are keeping a close watch on manufacturing marketing trends while dealing with longer sales cycles, increased leadership demands, and shrinking budgets.

Recent manufacturing marketing statistics show that B2B manufacturing CMOs reported a drop in marketing budgets from 8.5% of total revenue in 2023 to 6.7% in 2024, and more recent research suggests the figure may be closer to 1%–3% of total revenue.

So if you feel squeezed to deliver more trackable results with fewer resources, you’re not alone. Many manufacturing marketers are facing the exact same challenge.

However, that doesn’t mean the year isn’t full of exciting new opportunities, many of which are tied to manufacturing marketing trends. And when you can connect your marketing strategies to these trends, you can capture momentum, and meeting leadership goals becomes much easier.

Seven Manufacturing Marketing Trends for 2026

As you plan your strategies for the months ahead, understanding emerging trends can give you a tailwind that helps push your team closer to success. Here are seven marketing trends for manufacturers to watch, and how to use them to give your team an edge this year.

1. Marketing Strategy Shifts From Lead Volume to Revenue Contribution

As budgets tighten, the microscope is also zooming closer on what you’re spending money on and why. As a result, the focus is shifting away from lead volume and toward revenue contribution.

For example, instead of optimizing for how many forms are completed, more teams are focused on engagement from the right accounts, influencing buying groups over long sales cycles, and showing clear impact on revenue and outcomes.

As you consider these marketing trends for manufacturers, tools such as marketing automation are helpful because they connect engagement data across all channels and tie it back to specific accounts, roles, and opportunities. So instead of treating every completed form the same way, teams can understand exactly which signals indicate buying intent and where multiple stakeholders are engaging. These insights along with a slew of manufacturing marketing metrics help marketers focus spending on programs that influence active deals and show their contribution to pipeline and revenue.

2. Marketing Automation Becomes a Core Operational Layer

Research shows that manufacturing CMOs are “optimizing the resources already at their disposal.” And while a resource like marketing automation for manufacturing can support single campaigns, teams focused on optimization are also shifting away from using it only for one-off efforts and toward using it as a core operational layer. But what does that actually look like?

It basically means connecting the data, engagement, and measurement across all channels so that each new interaction builds on the last.

For example, instead of launching a one-off email or gated asset and measuring it in isolation, teams can track how engineers, procurement stakeholders, and executives from the same account engage across emails, web pages, and webinars, and then allow sales to follow up accordingly. These signals roll up at the account level to trigger more relevant messaging and nurture paths, while giving marketing and sales a shared view of exactly what’s happening. All this happens through the core operational layer, which connects all of the different ways prospects interact across channels.

3. Buyer-Led Journeys Replace Linear Funnels

Wouldn’t it be nice if manufacturing buyers moved neatly from becoming “problem aware” to making a decision? However, the reality is that prospects now interact very differently, shifting toward more buyer-led journeys.

What’s more, manufacturing marketing statistics show that 57% of industrial buyers make a purchase decision before ever speaking directly with a manufacturing company. And if buyers aren’t moving along a straightforward path, we need to meet them exactly where they are, with what they need.

This is likely why more manufacturing marketers say they’re prioritizing customer journey experience optimization over channel-specific optimizations. Further research shows that those who maintain a “holistic channel strategy” are 43% more likely to exceed revenue goals than those with a siloed approach.

For example, an engineer may first engage with a technical white paper, while a procurement stakeholder may initially engage through pricing or compliance content on your website. A buyer-led approach uses engagement signals across channels and audiences to adapt messaging, surface relevant follow-up content, and nurture the right buyers with the right interactions over time. They also use digital marketing strategies for manufacturers to strengthen content and interactions.

4. First-Party Data Strategy Separates Leaders From Laggards

Third-party data is useful, but we’re seeing a manufacturing marketing trend toward using first-party data more strategically to lock in the results your leadership team is pushing you to achieve.

And the good news is that marketers already have access to a decent amount of first-party data. This includes your website data, content interactions, event data, and CRM systems. You can tap into this data to better understand prospects, segment audiences, and create more relevant messaging and interactions.

For example, you can use first-party engagement data to identify accounts that repeatedly consume content, attend webinars, and visit pricing pages, then follow up with personalized nurture sequences or direct sales connections at the right moment. These consistent, well-timed interactions create more opportunities and drive pipeline movement over time.

5. AI Shapes Marketing Direction — Not Just Execution

AI continues to be important for manufacturing marketers, but for far more than just generative AI use cases. We’re seeing a manufacturing marketing trend among marketers using AI to identify patterns, which helps them better understand how to use resources and shape strategy.

For example, teams might use AI-driven insights in marketing automation tools to surface early buying signals across multiple channels or identify exactly where engagement typically drops off in long sales cycles. With this data, teams can then adjust the content, timing, or channel mix to refocus resources on the programs most likely to impact pipeline and revenue.

6. ABM Evolves to Support Multi-Stakeholder Manufacturing Deals

Account-based marketing (ABM) is on the rise, and for good reason. Research shows that 76% of marketers report higher ROI with ABM than with any other marketing channel. This is especially important for manufacturing marketers working through long sales cycles, as it helps teams focus on high-value accounts and personalize messaging across many stakeholders.

For example, teams can group engagement by role, such as engineers, procurement stakeholders, and executives, and then personalize content and outreach based on each role’s challenges and priorities. Then, as different stakeholders engage with content, whether through email, web pages, or social, those signals help determine what to deliver next for more targeted follow-up.

7. Technical Content and Credibility Outperform Volume Publishing

Research shows that marketers are struggling to create content that converts. One survey revealed that 66% of manufacturing marketers report that creating content that prompts a desired action is hard. What’s more, even though teams are creating a wide range of content, from data sheets to interactive content and e-books, only a few key categories are producing the strongest results.

That same research found that when asked which types of content perform best, manufacturing marketers pointed to videos, case studies, customer stories, and white papers. As a result, it will be even more important to focus on high-quality technical content rather than sheer volume moving forward.

What These Trends Mean for Manufacturing Marketing Teams

As your team moves into 2026 and faces tighter budgets and sales cycles that continue to stretch out, success will depend less on activity and more on tying your efforts to revenue. And when you use a marketing automation platform to connect the results to what you’re doing, you can replicate what’s working, stay ahead of long sales cycles, and create the momentum you need to drive success in the new year.

Do you want to take advantage of this year’s manufacturing marketing trends and generate higher-quality leads? Check out our e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Manufacturing Marketing, which lays out a clear road map for using automation to connect with buyers throughout long sales cycles and reach them even during the darker phases of the buying journey.

73 Advertising Terms and Jargon Every Marketer Should Know

Act-On — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 20:10:58 +0000

Getting started with advertising can be downright overwhelming. The industry has its own special lingo and a library of acronyms, with new tactics and technologies emerging constantly. That’s why we created this glossary of advertising terms to help newcomers learn the lay of the digital land.

The following (relatively) jargon-free explanations of the most common advertising terms will help you navigate the world of online advertising.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a method used to determine which version of an ad or landing page performs better. A/B tests involve running two versions simultaneously while changing only one element at a time to pinpoint the key variable that drives audience response. Once a winner is identified, it becomes the next control and is compared with another version for further testing and optimization.

Above the Fold

Above the fold is a term originating in print advertising that refers to the top half of a newspaper where the most prominent headlines were placed. In a digital context, it describes the part of a web or landing page that’s visible without scrolling down. To maximize conversions, landing page best practices suggest placing your most important message and CTA above the fold. Keep in mind there’s no standard pixel size for the fold, as it depends on the user’s screen size and resolution.

Account-Based Advertising

Account-based advertising is a tactic used in account-based marketing. Account-based advertising displays ads exclusively to specific job titles at your target accounts. For instance, if you want to market a new food packaging product to General Mills, you can target individuals with titles such as Senior Product Manager, Senior Product Marketer, or VP of Product Marketing. This ensures that your ads are only visible to the relevant people at General Mills.

Ad Audience

Ad audience describes the overall number of individuals who have either already seen or could potentially see an ad during a specific time period.

Ad Click

Ad click describes the action a user takes when they interact with an ad by either clicking on it with their mouse, tapping it on a touchscreen, or pressing enter on their keyboard.

Ad Exchange

Ad exchange is an online marketplace that enables publishers and advertisers to buy and sell advertising inventory in real-time auctions. Unlike historical methods of buying ad inventory that involved price negotiations for ad placements on specific websites, ad exchanges enable instantaneous bidding for ad space available across the internet.

Ad ID (Advertising ID)

An Ad ID comprises a unique string of letters and numbers assigned to a mobile device by its operating system (like Android or iOS). Ad IDs allow advertisers to track and target mobile users with personalized ads based on their behavior and interests while allowing users to limit ad tracking and protect their privacy. Users can choose to reset or disable their advertising ID at any time.

Financial Services Advertising Regulations Marketers Need to Know

Stay compliant in 2026. Learn key financial services advertising regulations, including FINRA, SEC, and data privacy rules—plus tips to reduce risk at scale.

Learn More

Ad Impressions

Ad impressions are a performance metric used in advertising. Each time an ad has been served, regardless of whether the user has actually seen or interacted with the ad in any way, counts as one impression.

Ad Inventory

Ad inventory measures the total amount of advertising space or impressions a digital publisher has available to sell. For example, if The Gotham Times averages 1,000 visits to their homepage in any given week, and they have space for two display ads on their homepage, then their potential ad inventory is 2,000 impressions per week.

Ad Network

Ad networks connect advertisers to publishers, typically by aggregating ad inventory across multiple publishers and offering it to advertisers as a single point of contact.

Ad Serving

Ad serving means the delivery of a single ad from a web server to the end user’s device. Every time the ad is displayed on a browser or application, it has been “served” once.

Ad Targeting

Ad targeting describes the process of displaying ads to a specific group of people based on demographic, geographical, psychographic, behavioral, or other data. Advertisers “target” their ads based on who they want to reach and who they consider part of their audience or ideal customer profile.

Ad Units

Ad units describe the specific, standardized spaces on a website or app where ads can be placed. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade association promoting digital ad standards and practices, maintains a set of guidelines for sizing and formatting different types of ad units.

Addressable

In advertising, the addressable refers to the ability to target individual users or devices based on demographic or behavioral data with relevant and personalized ads. In other words, can the advertiser address a certain type of user or customer with an ad campaign?

^{Understanding digital advertising terms just makes things feel better somehow.}

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing. Advertisers pay promotional partners to drive a certain amount of traffic to their pages or other owned channels. The commission is usually based on the amount of clicks and/or leads delivered.

Attribution

Attribution in advertising describes the process of identifying which specific efforts led to a conversion. Marketers use different attribution models to assign value to different touch points and calculate ROI. Popular attribution methods include first touch, last touch, and multi-touch.

Banner Ad

A banner ad is one of the most common forms of digital advertising. These ad units can include static graphics, videos, and/or interactive rich media, to display long “banners” on web pages or in applications.

Bidding Strategy

In advertising, bidding strategy means the approach an ad buyer takes when deciding how much to pay for ad placements in an auction. Google search ad placements, among others, require a careful bidding strategy. For example, an advertiser could choose to bid a flat rate, bid based on the expected clickthrough rate, or use past performance data. A successful bidding strategy wins the ad placement while optimizing the return on investment for the buyer.

Blocklist

A blocklist is a list of websites where an advertiser does not want their ads to appear. Often, brands use blocklists to avoid association with controversial or inappropriate content. Blocklists can also include keywords or products to exclude from campaigns.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of website visitors that only look at one page before navigating away from a website is that site or page’s bounce rate. High bounce rates often indicate that visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for, or that the site or landing page has poor design or usability.

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness means the percentage of customers who recognize a particular brand or product by name. Increased brand awareness is a frequent goal and success metric for marketing campaigns, specifically “awareness campaigns.” Brands with high awareness are often more likely to be trusted by customers.

Call to Action

Call to action or CTA refers to the part of the ad or landing page that asks the user to do something. It calls them to act in a certain way. The CTA can be almost anything, but commonly used calls to action include Buy Now, Sign Up, Download, Get Started, and Read More.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is a law that imposes certain obligations around privacy and security on companies that collect personal information from California residents. The law grants California residents the right to know what personal information is being collected, the right to request its deletion, and the right to opt-out of the sale of their personal information.

Channel

In digital advertising, channels are specific platforms businesses use to reach their target audience. Digital ad channels include display ads, social media, email, and mobile in-app advertising.

Click-Through-Rate

The CTR or Click-through Rate measures how often people who are served an ad actually click on it. An ad’s CTR is calculated by dividing the number of clicks an ad received by the number of times it’s been served (i.e., clicks over impressions). For example, if an ad received 5 clicks and was shown 1000 times, the CTR is 0.5%. The higher the CTR on an ad, the better it’s performing.

Publishers use consent management platforms or CMPs to request, manage, store, and update users’ consent for data processing and privacy purposes. For users, CMPs usually include an easy interface to control how their data is collected, used, and shared. For publishers, CMPs enable compliance with privacy regulations and laws, and build trust with the audience.

Conversion

Any action that advertisers want their audience to take can be considered a conversion. The total number of conversions measures the success of a campaign or ad. Common examples of conversions include making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting a demo.

Conversion Pixel

Advertisers use conversion pixels, tiny 1×1 images invisible to users to embed code that triggers whenever a conversion takes place on a certain web page.

^{Make sure you have a full understanding of digital advertising terminology before trying your next campaign.}

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is an advertising metric equal to the percentage of users who convert. Conversion rates are calculated by dividing the number of conversions (such as purchases or form fills) by the number of views or visits, then converting to a percentage.

Conversion Rate Optimization

When advertisers work to improve the percentage of website visitors who convert, they are practicing conversion rate optimization. Tactics such as A/B testing, messaging adjustments, user testing, updating graphics, and trying new CTAs are all examples of conversion rate optimization.

Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking means monitoring how many conversions have occurred during any specific time period, and analyzing which ads converted most.

A cookie is a small script that advertisers use to track how visitors interact with a website and remember user behavior and preferences. (See also first-party cookies and third-party cookies.)

Cost Per Acquisition

Your cost per acquisition is how much it costs in advertising dollars to acquire a single customer. Marketers calculate CPA by dividing the total amount spent on an advertising campaign by the number of new customers acquired through that campaign.

Cost Per Click

CPC advertising, or cost per click, charges advertisers for each time a user clicks on a placed ad. The CPC rate is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on a campaign by the number of clicks generated.

Cost Per Completed View

Cost per completed view (CPCV) is a pricing model for video advertising that charges an advertiser only when a viewer watches the whole ad.

Cost Per Lead

CPL or cost per lead advertising is a pricing model for ads that charges advertisers only for the clicks that result in a conversion. CPL is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on a campaign by the number of leads generated.

Cost Per Mille

Cost per mille (aka Cost per thousand) is a pricing model based on charging for every 1,000 ad impressions. CPM is used as a standard measure for buying display ads. Mille comes from Latin, and means “thousand.”

Cross-Device Targeting

Cross-device targeting allows advertisers to reach the same buyer with targeted ads across multiple devices, i.e., from tablet to desktop to smartphone.

Contextual Targeting

Contextual targeting means ads are displayed to users based on the content of the webpages they view. For example, an airline placing an ad on a travel article or a software company advertising on a startup community’s website.

Demand-Side Platform

A demand-side platform (or DSP) is a platform that allows advertisers to buy ad space across multiple ad exchanges, ad networks, and other sources through a single interface. DSPs use automation to target specific users and optimize campaigns based on user data.

Direct Response

Direct response (DR) in digital advertising refers to campaigns or ads specifically created to encourage audiences to take immediate action. The term is often used in B2B, where marketing works with leads for a long period of time through a transaction.

Display

Display advertising means graphic ads shown on web pages. These types of ads originated in the newspaper industry, and are decreasingly popular due to the prevalence of ad blocking technology and consumers’ tendency to ignore them.

^{This group of coworkers is absolutely winning the game based on their understanding of digital advertising terms.}

Expandable Banner

An expandable banner is a banner ad that increases in size when a user hovers over it.

First-Party Cookies

First-party cookies are cookies placed and owned by the same website a user intentionally visits. They can be used to store user preferences, log-in status, and other settings, in addition to their use in ad targeting and marketing.

First-Touch Attribution

First-touch describes an attribution model that gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the first marketing touchpoint in a user’s journey.

Frequency Capping

Frequency capping is the practice of setting a limit on the number of times an ad can be shown to a consumer within a specific timeframe (e.g., a week or month).

Geographic Targeting

Geographic targeting involves selecting an audience for a campaign based on geographic filters like zip codes, designated marketing areas (DMA), cities, states, and countries.

In 2018, the European Union adopted the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, a landmark privacy act that regulates how companies may collect and process customers’ personal data. Since it can apply to companies that aren’t based in the EU, its impact on advertising has been extensive. Among other things, it governs the use of web cookies and email marketing.

Identity Graph

An identity graph or ID Graph connects different signals associated with a single user or device across multiple platforms, including cookies, device IDs, social media accounts, and email addresses.

Financial Services Advertising Regulations Marketers Need to Know

Stay compliant in 2026. Learn key financial services advertising regulations, including FINRA, SEC, and data privacy rules—plus tips to reduce risk at scale.

Learn More

In-Stream Ads

In-stream ads are any video ads that play before, during, or after online streaming video content.

Interstitial Ads

Interstitial ads appear when a user navigates between two different web pages, usually displayed as a full-screen pop-up ad. For example, when a user navigates to a mobile website, that brand might offer an interstitial ad for their mobile app.

Keyword

A keyword is a specific word or phrase that advertisers in paid search or contextual ads use for targeting. Users who search a specific keyword will see ads before their organic search results that pertain to the specific keyword. In search advertising, advertisers bid against each other to get top position for coveted keyword placements.

Landing Page

A landing page is any standalone web page that users reach after clicking an ad. The goal of the landing page is to persuade the user to convert via the CTA, i.e., take the advertisers’ desired action.

Last Touch Attribution

The last-touch or last click attribution model gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the last touchpoint in a user’s journey.

Lead

A lead is simply a potential customer. In digital advertising, a lead is an individual who gives you their contact information. Examples include: signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form, or being served a tracking cookie.

Lookalike Audience

A lookalike audience describes a target audience that shares demographics, interests, behaviors, or other attributes with your existing customer base. Advertisers can target lookalike audiences on digital advertising platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Lookback Window

The lookback window is the specific timeframe advertisers set to attribute conversions or other reporting back to a campaign. The window can be expressed in hours, days, weeks, or months.

Mobile Advertiser ID

A mobile advertiser ID or MAID is a unique identifier assigned to a mobile device by its operating system (like Android or iOS). Advertisers use MAIDs to track and target mobile users with personalized ads. Users can choose to reset and clear their mobile advertising data at any time.

Multi-Channel or Multi-Touch Attribution

Multi-touch attribution is an attribution model that weighs each touchpoint along a buyer’s journey, across channels and devices. Often, these models assign various weights to certain actions within the buyer’s journey.

Native Advertising

Native advertising refers to a paid ad designed to appear indistinguishable from other content in the advertising channel. Advertisers try to match the form and user experience of content on the website or channel. Examples include a sponsored magazine article or a paid social media post. Native ads are intended to feel seamless and valuable, rather than sticking out as a blatant advertisement. However, in many cases, advertisers are required to include language within the native ad that specifies the content is for advertising purposes.

Overlay in Advertising

An overlay is a decreasingly utilized digital ad format that “floats” over a webpage, video, or app content.

Paid Search

Paid search is an ad format where ads appear within search engine results pages (SERPs) based on targeted keywords included in the search queries. These ads are designed to look similar to organic search results.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is an advertising pricing model. Advertisers pay vendors or publishers based on the number of clicks received on each ad. PPC is the most common model of paid search advertising, largely due to its widespread use by Google.

Personally Identifiable Information

In privacy terms, personally identifiable information or PII is a legal term describing any personal data that can be used to distinguish the real-world identity of an online user. PII can include names, addresses, ID numbers, phone numbers, and birthdates, among other data.

Pop-Up Ad

A pop-up ad is any ad that opens in a new browser window. Pop-up ads are typically viewed as annoying and a poor user experience. More widespread in the early days of digital advertising, today many browsers block pop-ups by default.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is a method of buying ad space that uses automation and AI. It allows marketers to target an audience, set a budget, place real-time bids, and purchase advertising from a publisher. It uses data to make decisions about which ads to buy in real-time. The goal is to improve the efficiency of the ad buying process and the effectiveness of the ads themselves.

Reach

Reach is the total number of people who see your ad.

Real-Time Bidding

Real-time bidding (or RTB) is an ad sales method that involves purchasing ad impressions in real-time auctions through programmatic platforms. RTB takes place in milliseconds, on an impression-by-impression basis, with the goal of increasing ad buying efficiency and using real-time data to decide which ad to show to which user.

Retargeting

Retargeting, sometimes remarketing, is the process of serving ads to people who have previously interacted with your content but not made a purchase.

Rich Media Advertising

Rich media advertising incorporates interactive features such as video, audio, or interactive quizzes and games. The goal is to improve engagement and provide an immersive experience, all in hopes of getting users to click.

Third-Party Cookies

Third-party cookies are set up on a website or other channel that track back to a different owner than the owner of the website hosting the cookie. For instance, when you are logged into a social networking site and visit another website, the social networking site may be placing third-party cookies on the site. Often used for advertising purposes, third-party cookies are being increasingly restricted by government regulations and tech platforms to protect user privacy.

View-Through Rate

View-through rate is an attribution metric used to measure the number of times a user who later converts views an ad without clicking. View-throughs are a way to track the effectiveness of an ad that may have influenced a customer’s decision, even if they didn’t directly interact with it. View-through windows typically define the number of days after viewing an ad that the viewer took action attributed to the ad.

Walled Garden

In advertising, walled garden describes a platform that collects and controls user data and keeps it hidden from third parties. Examples of walled gardens in advertising include Facebook, Amazon, and Google. For advertisers, walled gardens offer the ability to target users based on the platform’s proprietary data. However, they provide limited visibility into the results of specific ads and campaigns.

Use This List of Advertising Terms to Improve Your Campaigns

Hopefully this glossary of digital advertising terms cuts through the jargon and provides useful definitions of common concepts to help you plan, build, and execute your demand generation campaigns.

Curious how you can drive more engagement from your prospects and customers using marketing automation? Check out our ebook for a step-by-step guide.

SEO Basics for Better Rankings

Act-On — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 16:02:41 +0000

Easy wins. Everybody wants them, right? Especially when it’s your job to attract more organic traffic through search engines and you’re working to improve search engine optimization (SEO). The challenge is that algorithms are a moving goalpost – and hey, let’s not sugarcoat it: SEO is hard. These SEO basics are essential knowledge on your path to better rankings, increased visibility in search results and more traffic.

Just when you think you have it all figured out, the algorithm does an inconvenient reshuffle. Google comes out with the latest Google algorithm update.

And yet, even with this difficulty, you can still target some easier areas of SEO. We’ve highlighted basic SEO tips to help get on the right side of Google and other search engines.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a strategy focused on attracting more visitors to your website. More traffic helps you support your audience on their buyers’ journeys, whether that’s providing blog content, downloading an eBook, signing up for your email list, scheduling a product demo, or taking some other action.

Search Engine Optimization might include keyword optimizing your content, building more links to your website pages, and handling more technical areas (like making sure your website doesn’t load at a snail’s pace). Make sense? Excellent.

Let’s dive into the other SEO basics you can get started with today!

Pay close attention to your Meta Titles

When you search for things online, the first thing you’ll see in the results are meta titles. Mastering this element is not only basic SEO, it’s an essential component of mastering SEO for beginners. In the example below, the page meta title is “Act-On: Marketing Automation Software”

The meta title is usually the first thing people see when searching for things online. It’s important for search visibility but also for capturing attention in search results. When a user searches for a keyword, you want to show up in the search engine results and do so with a title that’s so enticing they can’t help but click it.

^{SEO tip: Make sure your page meta title will show up in a compelling way on the search engine results pages (SERPs).}

Here are a few things to remember when it comes to meta titles:

Give each page a unique meta title to avoid multiple pages competing for the same keywords.
Use your most important keyword in the title, and try to use it early, but do so naturally.
Make sure you do a good job describing what the page is about, so the reader feels like “Yes, this is exactly what I’m looking for.”
Ensure your meta title is the right length to avoid it getting cut off. Aim for less then 60 characters. Use a character length checker when needed.

And while we’re on the topic of how you appear in search results, we can’t talk about meta titles without discussing meta descriptions (those little blurbs that appear under your meta title). And that’s our second tip for improving your rankings.

Write engaging Meta Descriptions

If you do a great job writing the meta title, readers will likely skim your meta description and then, hopefully, click your link. That’s why a strong meta title and meta description are essential for your basic SEO knowledge.

We love this meta description example from the Content Marketing Institute:

Meta Title: Don’t Make SEO the Reason for Your Content Marketing

Meta Description: SEO isn’t the best grounding for a new content marketing program. Here’s what you should think about instead.

Consider using curiosity in your meta description, and of course, remember to include your most important keyword in your meta title and meta description to improve SEO performance. Try to keep the length of your meta descriptions to 155 characters or less to avoid them getting cut off.

^{SEO tip: Think of your meta descriptions as ads, and use the same techniques to entice readers to click.}

Avoid keyword stuffing

It’s tempting to stuff pages full of keywords. After all, if one keyword is good, then a bunch must be great, right? Not necessarily.

What is keyword stuffing? It’s the overuse and misuse of keywords in your content. Before Google cracked down, many marketers crammed far too many keywords into their pages, used them unnaturally, and sometimes just flat-out listed them (separating them with a simple comma). Sometimes they even used tricky tactics, like putting keywords in the same color as the background to hide them! And that didn’t go over well with Google.

According to Google, keyword stuffing is when you load a page with keywords in order to manipulate a website’s rankings. Instead, Google wants you to provide useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context. So, yes, pick great keywords but prioritize quality and quantity.

Link to high-traffic web pages

Do you have rock star web pages? You know, the ones pulling in far more traffic than the rest? We’ll let you in on a little secret. This blog on effective email subject lines is one of our top performers. But here’s the point: You want to squeeze these pages for all they’re worth. Here’s how:

Understand which pages bring you the most traffic. We love using Google Analytics to find this data.
Link from your top performing pages to your brand-new content.

When you do this, it helps more people find your new content and is a positive signal to Google for new content rankings.

And one more thing you should know as part of your SEO basics crash course. If you’re feeling lost about the performance of your existing pages, you can use tools like our SEO audit tool. It generates real-time reports that detail each page’s SEO performance, along with recommendations on how to improve it.

Create pillar pages

If you aren’t using pillar pages, consider them in your B2B SEO strategy. Pillar pages make it easier for search engines to crawl your content while signaling that you’re an expert in your niche. Here are a few tips for getting started with pillar pages:

Define a general topic. For example, we’d look for a topic related to marketing automation since that’s what we do at Act-On.
Plug a topic-related keyword into a research tool. We use SEMrush, but other options exist, such as Moz, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, and Google Keyword Planner. If we type “marketing automation” into a keyword tool, we can find related keywords and begin grouping them.
Create “content clusters.” Staying with the marketing automation example, we may notice keyword groupings around marketing automation, email marketing automation, and lead nurturing. As a result, we could create the following pillar pages: marketing automation best practices guide, email marketing automation strategies for success, and lead nurturing and conversion with marketing automation.
Create related optimized content for each pillar page. Create a pillar page (it’s kind of like a big, long landing page), and then link out to other related pages in the content cluster.

As you evaluate potential keywords, don’t forget to look for lower funnel keywords. For example, “how to set up a marketing automation demo” or “how to buy a marketing automation tool” are phrases that signal the searcher is close to purchase, resulting in higher-quality website traffic.

SEO FAQ: Your Most Common Search Engine Optimization Questions Answered

Use ALT tags for images

ALT tags let you add a text description to every page image. They’re an often-overlooked part of SEO basics, but an easy way to optimize your pages. Additionally, they’re important for content accessibility, as they tell users who are visually impaired details about your images via screen reading tools.

Most content management systems make it very easy to add ALT tags. Sprinkle your keywords in as you write them, but as always, write ALT tags for human readers, not for search engines.

ALT tags are also important for social sharing. A few social platforms, like Pinterest, will use the ALT tag copy as the default description. So make sure your ALT tags make sense in case they are displayed to readers on social media.

Use keywords in the file names

Using keywords as file names is simple and may support better rankings. It helps readers understand what’s in the document – and what’s good for the readers is also good for SEO.

Just don’t go wild and use multiple keywords in your file names. Ideally, use one keyword, and at the most, two. Here are a couple of examples:

Good filename: crm-study-ebook.pdf

Bad, keyword-stuffed filename: CRMManagement_BuyCRM_CRMServices_Ebook

Do this well, and you’ll give search engines a little more info about what your content is about, and every little bit helps. You should also use all lower letters and separate the words using dashes.

Social media might not be an official SEO ranking factor, yet it appears to have an impact, so you should include it in your understanding of SEO basics.

SEMrush recently noted that Google appears to use online brand mentions to influence what terms you rank for.

As you share content on social media and your audience shares it, traffic to your site improves – and you might even score some backlinks. The number of backlinks, and the quality of those links, also impact SEO performance (more on that shortly).

So, consider adding social sharing buttons to your content. Share your content via social media. And encourage others to share it, whether it’s your employees, subject-matter experts who you interview, or business partners who work in the same space.

Build links very carefully

Nobody likes a bad reputation. And shady link-building practices risk earning a bad rap with search engines.

Smart marketers are cautious about link-building. Google appears to frown on most “link-building tactics.” So avoid any experts who want to submit your site to 500 directory listings or want to “spin” one of your articles and submit it to a bunch of article directories.

Here are some safe ways to build links:

Create a piece of amazing and high-value content.
Do unique research and publish it as a report.
Publish unique, insightful articles on high-authority sites.
Create the type of traditional business listings expected on sites such as Yelp, your local chamber of commerce, and trade organizations.

And remember, when in doubt, don’t do it.

SEO FAQ: Your Most Common Search Engine Optimization Questions Answered

Format your content so it’s easy to read

Lastly, if you remember any of these SEO basics, remember to make your content friendly for human readers. Because when humans love your content, so will search engines. Here are a few tips for making your content easy to read:

Write short paragraphs.
Punctuate those short paragraphs with a one-sentence paragraph every so often.
Use subheaders.
Use bullet points. See a string of commas in a sentence? That’s often an opportunity for a bullet list.
Add images every 350 words or so.
Add quotes and call-outs.

And while there’s no such thing as “easy SEO,” you can use some of these easier tactics to get on the path to improved rankings. Sure, you’ll still need to stay on top of the latest and greatest algorithm shuffles. It’s the nature of SEO, right? But when you write content that is truly valuable to your audience, the impacts are timeless. As a result, the content will continue supporting improved traffic, generate more leads, and get the results you need.

Want to go beyond SEO Basics?

Yeah, we get it; there’s so much to know! We’ve compiled the most common SEO questions and provided our expert answers.

What is Growth Marketing?

Act-On — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 23:09:10 +0000

Growth marketing has been around for awhile now. Wondering “What is growth marketing?” Don’t panic. Like many buzzwords, the core concepts are more important than the name itself.

The truth? You’re probably already doing some version of it. So congratulations, growth marketer.

So let’s take a look at the definition of growth marketing, and where the term came from. We’ll also provide some examples of how to use a growth marketing mindset to expand business and enhance the customer journey.

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing focuses on quickly making data-based strategy changes and iterating on those changes just as quickly. Growth marketing leaders and teams identify potential areas for organizational growth and attack those opportunities with razor-sharp focus. More specifically, growth marketing goes beyond the old-school “attract and capture” model of lead generation. Instead, growth marketers focus on how to build better relationships with customers.

Did our growth marketing definition sound to you like a definition for all marketing in 2023? You get a gold star! Growth marketing has stormed the castle over the last few years and become the dominant marketing strategy. This makes sense in an era of decreased resources and a “more for less” mentality.

Entrepreneur and marketer Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacking” in 2010. As Ellis described it, growth hacking involves data-driven experimentation, agility, and scale. The term became incredibly influential in marketing over the ensuing decade, inspiring the birth of growth marketing. Today, growth marketing is so common that many sophisticated marketing organizations have an entire department devoted to the approach.

What specifically do growth marketing professionals do? We’ve got you covered in the next section.

What Does a Growth Marketing Manager Do?

In a nutshell, growth marketing managers take deliberate steps toward expanding their company’s customer base and overall revenue through more creative measures than typically associated with traditional marketing. They view the customer lifecycle as an hourglass rather than a funnel. Not only are they concerned with developing creative awareness and lead gen campaigns, but they’re also razor-focused on extending the value of their offerings for their existing customers. By driving more active engagement, they better understand their customers, which empowers them to tell more compelling stories to all of their target audiences.

Here are just a few things successful growth marketing managers do on a daily basis to help expand their business:

Work cross-functionally to develop an understanding of each department and learn how they can contribute to the growth of the company
Develop plans to experiment, test, and optimize targeted and personalized digital experiences across every stage of the customer lifecycle
Oversee content marketing initiatives meant to drive traffic to numerous digital properties through search engine optimization, backlinking initiatives, and public relations efforts
Gather, analyze, and interpret critical data to identify growth opportunities and improve awareness, conversions, sales, and revenue
Experiment with innovative marketing techniques and deliver progress reports to key stakeholders

That’s a lot to ask of any single marketer. It’s best for marketing teams to employ a universal growth marketing approach.

5 Growth Marketing Strategies to Consider

Check out these growth marketing strategies that most growth marketers stand by.

1. Organic lead generation is preferable to paid lead generation

By focusing on where SEO is trending and delivering exciting messaging, companies can drive major leads and sell far more of their products and services without having to drain their budget through paid advertising strategies. And skilled marketers who do invest in paid advertising do so to complement their existing content marketing efforts and support a holistic marketing plan.

2. Customer retention is just as important as customer acquisition

This isn’t to say that bringing on new customers shouldn’t be a priority, but the best way to grow your company is through your existing business. Keeping your clients and consumers engaged with your offerings leads to better usage and more interest in other products and services. So make sure that you know your customers, understand their needs and expectations, and deliver on your promises.

3. Persuasion is a better approach than overt salesmanship

It feels awkward even having to include this on the list, but many marketers still think they can bend customers to their will. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Modern consumers are in complete control of their buying journeys, so it’s important that you treat them with the respect they deserve. Don’t lecture, educate. Don’t preach, empathize. Don’t brag, listen. Informing your audience will drive trust in your offerings and endear prospects and customers to your brand.

4. Instinct is a slippery slope; trust the data instead

Historically, marketers have had to make estimated guesses about their target audiences and their program performance, which isn’t ideal. After all, determining the ROI of roadside billboards and radio ads is pretty difficult. These days, though, we have a literal world of data at our disposal. Don’t ignore it! Use this information to develop accurate personas, anticipate your customers’ next steps, and improve program performance in real-time.

5. A company is more than the sum of its products

Every business relies on the quality of their offerings as the foundation of their revenue. But a product can’t sell itself, so you need to go beyond the tangible offering to build a larger narrative that delights your audience and elevates your brand to new heights. While staying within brand and style guidelines is important, don’t be afraid to express a creative, disruptive, or even subversive message. Again, know your audience and use that knowledge to anticipate and exceed their expectations.

Growth Marketing vs Performance Marketing

Growth marketing focuses on long-term customer engagement and retention by optimizing the entire customer lifecycle, using tactics like A/B testing, personalization, and content marketing to drive sustainable growth. In contrast, performance marketing prioritizes immediate, measurable results such as clicks, leads, and conversions through paid campaigns like PPC, social media ads, and affiliate marketing. While growth marketing emphasizes lifetime value (LTV) and customer loyalty, performance marketing focuses on short-term ROI and cost-efficiency. Combining both approaches can create a balanced strategy for achieving both immediate and long-term business goals.

What About Compound Growth Marketing?

Compound growth marketing refers to a strategy that builds on incremental gains over time by leveraging compounding effects across the customer lifecycle. Instead of seeking short-term spikes in growth, this approach focuses on optimizing small, consistent improvements in areas such as acquisition, retention, engagement, and referrals.

Key elements include data-driven experimentation, enhancing customer experiences, and creating scalable marketing systems like email nurturing, content marketing, and referral programs. Each improvement feeds into the next, generating a self-sustaining cycle of growth. Over time, these compounded efforts can significantly accelerate a brand’s growth trajectory, maximizing long-term ROI.

Is B2B Growth Marketing the Same?

B2B growth marketing is a strategic approach tailored to driving sustainable growth for business-to-business organizations by optimizing every stage of the customer lifecycle. It focuses on building long-term relationships, improving lead quality, and enhancing customer retention through a mix of data-driven experimentation and targeted strategies.

Key tactics include personalized account-based marketing (ABM), content marketing designed for decision-makers, multi-channel campaigns (email, LinkedIn, webinars), and leveraging tools like CRM platforms to track and nurture leads. B2B growth marketing emphasizes understanding the buyer’s journey, creating value-driven interactions, and employing scalable strategies such as referrals or upselling to compound growth over time.

Financial Services Advertising Regulations Marketers Need to Know

Stay compliant in 2026. Learn key financial services advertising regulations, including FINRA, SEC, and data privacy rules—plus tips to reduce risk at scale.

Learn More

What Are the Best Marketing Conferences?

Act-On — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:13:24 +0000

Looking to meet and mingle with the leaders in your marketing field? Or pack in a year’s worth of learning into one weekend? Check out our picks for the best marketing conferences. From the art of storytelling to the science of data analytics, these events are endless sources of creativity, innovation, and strategic insights. Get your lanyards ready as we go through the best marketing conferences on the scene.

HubSpot INBOUND

HubSpot INBOUND isn’t your average marketing conference; it’s a full-blown immersion into the world of marketing, sales, and customer success. Held annually in September, INBOUND is one of the best marketing conferences because it calls together the world’s inbound marketers to share their expertise. Programming includes keynote speakers and breakout sessions that explore everything from content creation to lead nurturing.

As popular as the event is, the popularity comes with a price. Just like the product it spun off from, the cost can be a bit steep, especially for smaller businesses managing tighter budgets. And, with so many attendees vying for networking time and seat space, you might have trouble making it to all the events and panels you’d like.

Content Marketing World

Billed as “the largest content marketing event on the planet,” Content Marketing World is the pinnacle event for content marketers. Taking the stage every September, this conference brings a cavalcade of ideas, tactics, and strategies designed to reignite your content marketing efforts. Whether you’re a seasoned wordsmith or just dipping your toes into the sea of content creation, you’ll find sessions and workshops that cater to your needs.

This is one of the best marketing events due to the lineup of speakers. It reads like a who’s who of the content marketing scene, with practical and hands-on workshops to dig into. But beware the paradox of choice—so many sessions, so little time! Navigating the offerings can be a challenge, but if you manage to find your niche, you’ll leave armed with actionable insights. Just make sure to save a few brain cells for the inevitable decision fatigue.

Adobe Summit

Adobe Summit makes our list of best marketing conferences even though it isn’t strictly a conference. It’s more a huge promotion channel for Adobe’s suite of design and marketing products. If that appeals to you, the event showcases the latest trends, technologies, and tactics for using Adobe’s products. Held in March, this annual gathering offers a kaleidoscope of insights across the digital marketing spectrum. From keynotes about pushing the boundaries of creativity to immersive labs that let you get your hands dirty with Adobe’s tools, this conference is a playground for marketing and design nerds.

But again, you get what you pay for. The price tag might have you clutching your corporate credit card to your chest, just like many of Adobe’s products. The design and creativity angle also might not be ideal if that’s not your marketing lane.

Financial Services Advertising Regulations Marketers Need to Know

Stay compliant in 2026. Learn key financial services advertising regulations, including FINRA, SEC, and data privacy rules—plus tips to reduce risk at scale.

Learn More

SXSW (South by Southwest)

Music, film, tech, and marketing, together at last? That’s SXSW. No one asked for it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not here to stay. Taking over Austin, Texas every March, this event is a smorgasbord of creativity and innovation, making it a must-attend for marketers who want to tap into the pulse of cultural trends. We think it’s one of the best marketing conferences for that reason, even if it’s not strictly a marketing event.

But beware that you don’t get a case of “eyes bigger than stomach.” This festival is like a buffet where you’ll want to sample everything, and the sheer volume of sessions and events can be a tad overwhelming. Plus, the marketing track shares the spotlight with other domains, so you’ll need to sift through to find what you’re looking for.

MarketingProfs B2B Forum

Looking for something a little more cozy? This gathering of B2B marketing enthusiasts brings leaders of the field together to exchange ideas, tactics, and maybe a few laughs. That’s the essence of MarketingProfs B2B Forum, a more intimate event held every October. If you’re knee-deep in the world of B2B, this conference offers a spotlight on strategies tailored just for you.

The vibe is warm and welcoming, fostering an environment where connections flourish. However, if you’re looking for a more diverse range of marketing topics, this might not be the best marketing conference for you. If B2B is your bread and butter, this forum is your platform to shine.

Tweets, posts, and likes, oh my! This event, orchestrated by Social Media Examiner, is like a master class in all things social media. Held annually, it’s a pilgrimage for marketers who want to stay at the forefront of this ever-evolving landscape. Prepare to dive deep into the realm of hashtags, algorithms, and engagement metrics.

From insightful sessions with top-notch social media gurus to networking opportunities that can turn virtual followers into IRL friends, this conference is a feast for the social-savvy. Just be aware that the social media bubble can sometimes overshadow other aspects of marketing, so if you’re looking for a broader menu, you might need to look elsewhere

MozCon

Hosted by the makers of one of the best SEO tools, MozCon is your best chance to meet the luminaries of search engine marketing in person. Held annually, this is a deep dive into the intricacies of search engine optimization and digital marketing tactics. In such a fast-changing realm as SEO, this can be a great way to catch up on the most recent trends and changes. But keep in mind this is a niche conference. Come here if you want to focus on toning your SEO muscles, not for a more well-rounded experience.

AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O

Unravel the enigma of programmatic advertising at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O. This conference is where the wizards of ad tech come together to discuss programmatic marketing. Held annually, it’s a deep dive into the world of data, algorithms, and targeting.

Expect to immerse yourself in discussions about ad exchanges, real-time bidding, and the ever-elusive click-through rate optimization. The conference is a treasure trove of insights for those who thrive in the data-driven realm. However, be prepared for a slightly tech-heavy focus, which might go over your head if data isn’t your primary focus.

The Market Research Event (TMRE)

Delve into the world of consumer insights and market research at The Market Research Event (TMRE). Held annually, this conference is your source for methodologies, trends, and case studies that can elevate your understanding of your target audience.

Get ready to unlock the secrets behind surveys, focus groups, and data analytics. The conference offers a platform to rub shoulders with market research experts and glean insights from their successes and challenges. Just bear in mind that the scope is primarily centered around research, which could be a bit of a niche topic for some.

MarTech Conference

We had to include this martech focused event in our list of best marketing conferences. Navigate the intersection of marketing and technology at this event. Held annually, it’s a voyage through marketing automation, AI, data analytics, and beyond. Meet your favorite vendors, and discover new products to help automate and integrate your marketing functions.

That’s it! So mark your calendars, pack your notepads, and get ready to embark on a journey of marketing discovery like never before.

Financial Services Advertising Regulations Marketers Need to Know

Stay compliant in 2026. Learn key financial services advertising regulations, including FINRA, SEC, and data privacy rules—plus tips to reduce risk at scale.

Learn More

Demand Generation Strategy: 7 Tactics That Work

Act-On — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 16:23:52 +0000

Introduction

Demand generation, aka demand gen, isn’t only about generating a ton of leads. Nope. It’s also about the quality of those leads — because it’s totally possible to generate huge lead volumes and still come up empty-handed. Why?

When there’s a mismatch between lead quantity and lead quality, it hampers your sales efforts, leaving your sales team spinning their wheels, working bad leads.

At the same time, recent demand generation trends show that marketers face increased pressure from executives to tie marketing efforts to revenue. And that’s where a solid demand generation strategy comes into play.

TL;DR: Effective demand generation focuses on attracting high-quality leads, not just volume. Key tactics include SEO optimization, gated content, website personalization, social engagement, account-based marketing, lead scoring, and marketing automation to drive awareness, nurture prospects, and improve conversion rates.

What is demand generation?

Demand generation is a strategy that creates interest or awareness about your products or services. It includes a variety of efforts, such as content marketing, social media, and more. The goal is to attract prospects, drive awareness, and convert leads.

Successful demand generation strategies are measured by:

The quality of your leads.
What you’re able to convert to revenue.
The ability to prove your contribution to your company’s bottom line.

Demand generation tactics combined with the right tools can be powerful because it can help you generate pipeline. This in turn helps shorten the sales cycle and produce more revenue, which is directly attributed to specific actions. But, of course, it starts with figuring out how to best reach and help your target audience.

Demand Generation vs Lead Generation

Demand generation is focused on creating awareness and interest in your products and services. Lead generation is focused on collecting information from potential customers who have shown interest. In other words, demand gen lays the foundation for generating interest, and lead generation focuses on converting that interest to potential leads.

The two work hand in hand, which is why you need solid demand generation strategy to get the best results.

7 Demand Generation Strategies & Tactics

Getting a prospect to take action. That’s what you want, right? Yeah, us too. But that won’t happen unless you can walk with them along their journey from awareness to consideration to finally making that purchase.

But first, you must be found. And then, you need to know exactly where your customer is every step of the way, so you can give them what they need. Easy, right?

Maybe, when you know exactly what to do. Here are seven strategies to help you get there.

1. Optimize your website for SEO

When a prospect has a pain point, they search for a solution. And when they do this, you want them to find you. Of course, that’s what SEO and picking the right keywords are all about — getting found. Today, improving your SEO is one of the most essential demand generation tactics. But if you’re a marketer, you probably know that already, right?

However, when using SEO for your website, it’s also critical to consider the search intent of keywords. A person searching “best email marketing platform” will bring you far more targeted traffic than a person searching “best email.”

So make sure your website is full of the right keywords, free of HTTP error codes, and structured in a way that helps you stay on the good side of search engines.

2. Gate your best content

It takes moments for a visitor to close their browser. But before they do, you want to earn the chance to engage with them again. A great way to do this is by creating high-value gated content.

Are you already doing it? Great. But it’s still worth taking a fresh look at two areas.

Relevance. Is the gated content still relevant to your target audience? Does it still speak to their most important pain points? Is there something that would work better?
Personalization. Once a prospect hands you their email, do you have a personalized nurturing sequence to keep them engaged?

For example, as part of our demand generation strategy, we created an in-depth eBook about how B2B marketers can attract more high-quality leads. We include our favorite insider tips and offer the download in related blogs to help our audience improve their results.

^{Demand generation tip: We gate content to continue providing our audience with resources and value in the future.}

3. Use website personalization

Personalized experiences. Customers don’t just want them … they demand them. And if you don’t deliver, it’s hard to create that connection that keeps people engaged and coming back for more. A demand generation tactic that helps you get there faster is website personalization.

And yes, it’s true: Website personalization has been around for years, but previously it was complicated, expensive, and out of reach for many B2B marketers (especially if you worked for a smaller company). That’s all changed though.

Website personalization provides intelligent content recommendations to engage various audience segments. It uses AI and machine learning to deliver a customized journey that helps prospects move through the sales cycle faster.

4. Engage in the right places

Are you serving customers in the B2B space? If so, you want to hang out in the same places they are to boost your lead gen efforts. A great starting point is LinkedIn, since over 90% of B2B content marketers report LinkedIn as an effective distribution channel.

Here at Act-On, we know our target audience (B2B marketers) spends a decent amount of time on LinkedIn, so we often use it to promote content that will help them with their challenges (like this recent post we did to promote a Demand Gen webinar).

A social media tool such as Act-On’s Social Media Automation can also help you reach your customers by scheduling posts in advance, monitoring mentions, and helping you respond. You can even create advocacy boards to motivate staff to help spread the word about what you’re doing.

And remember, the most successful demand generation tactics are less about promoting and more about giving your audience the information they need to make smart choices.

5. Leverage account-based marketing

Gridlock. That’s what it feels like with an increasing number of decision-makers in the buying process, which slows down sales cycles. According to Gartner, the typical buying group for a B2B solution involves six to 10 decision-makers. A solution that helps you manage this growing challenge is account-based marketing (ABM).

ABM can help improve the odds of winning over multiple stakeholders. It complements demand generation by targeting high-value accounts to help optimize resources and personalize engagement.

For example, a salesperson can personalize messages and marketing to accounts, based on the combined needs and pain points of all stakeholders. ABM also helps nurture connections and supports upselling, to create even more potential opportunities.

6. Use lead scoring

The purpose of lead gen is to attract new leads but also to make sure those leads are high quality. Lead scoring is a great way to do that.

Lead scoring evaluates a prospect’s past behavior — viewing web pages that signal purchase intent, interest in a product demo, and other actions. It uses this data to determine whether the lead is ready for the sales team. And if so, they can take action faster. To get the best results, learn how to build a lead scoring model.

7. Utilize marketing automation in your demand generation strategy

As you select the best demand-generation strategies, marketing automation can help support your efforts. The right tool can help you attract and nurture prospects throughout every stage in the funnel, from awareness to purchase.

As a result, you can shorten the sales cycle and more effectively link your efforts to specific results. Plus, as marketing teams struggle to do more with less, leveraging marketing automation helps you scale demand generation strategy while easing the burden on your staff.

Do you need help attracting more prospects? If so, we can help! Download our eBook and we’ll give our favorite tips for attracting new high-quality leads.

Summary

A strong demand generation strategy goes beyond generating leads—it prioritizes attracting qualified prospects that convert. By optimizing your website for SEO, gating high-value content, personalizing experiences, engaging on the right platforms, leveraging account-based marketing, implementing lead scoring, and using marketing automation, you can guide prospects through the sales funnel efficiently. These tactics help shorten sales cycles, improve ROI, and ensure marketing efforts are aligned with revenue goals. Platforms like Act-On simplify these strategies, enabling marketers to scale campaigns and deliver personalized experiences across every stage of the buyer journey.

SEO FAQ: 31 Common SEO Questions [Answered]

Act-On — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 22:14:57 +0000

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, has become one of the most important elements of a modern marketing strategy. But as search engines continually update their algorithms, and AI moves quickly to the forefront of new developments in search, it’s normal for even the most seasoned marketers to have questions.

We put together this SEO FAQ to help answer the most frequent questions we hear from customers about search engine marketing. Whether you’re an SEO whiz or still learning the ropes, use this as a quick reference to answer those burning SEO questions.

What does SEO stand for?

SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. It refers to the manipulation of online content and website code in ways that align with the expectations and behavior of search engines and online searchers alike.

SEO is often described as “organic search” because it supports businesses and brands’ ability to rank naturally within search engines based on their relevance and authority, as it pertains to the online user’s search intentions, and on the level of visitor engagement, without payment of any kind.

What is SEM?

SEM stands for search engine marketing. Generally, it refers to the paid side of search engine marketing. SEM primarily involves gaining website traffic by placing advertising on search engines. It’s often referred to as paid search. This often takes the form of text ads that look much like organic search results.

What is PPC?

PPC is short for pay per click. It’s a payment method for paid search advertising and other types of online ads. Pay per click ads are one way to pursue SEM, or search engine marketing. It’s common to use PPC and SEM in conjunction with SEO, especially to drive traffic from keywords that would be too difficult (or expensive) to rank for organically.

What is the difference between on-page SEO and technical SEO?

On-page SEO refers, unsurprisingly, to the content you put on your webpages. On-page SEO includes techniques like keyword strategy and optimization, readability analysis, internal and external linking, and creating helpful content that will rank well on search engines.

Technical SEO refers to all the elements on the back end of your website that contribute to SEO. Technical SEO encompasses everything from how your pages and URLs are structured, elements like page speed and overall web performance, the metadata you include on each page, how images and video are crawled by search engines, and the list goes on.

We’ll get into elements that contribute to both technical and on-page SEO in this SEO FAQ. We won’t always identify them as such, but a quick rule of thumb: If you would assign something to a creative or content person, it’s probably on-page. If you need a web developer or coder to get it done, it’s most likely technical SEO.

What are the most effective on-page SEO techniques for better visibility?

On-page SEO forms the foundation of your search visibility. Ensure your website’s title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags are well-optimized with relevant keywords. Create valuable, informative, and engaging content that keeps users on your site longer. Don’t forget to include internal links to improve user navigation and crawlability for search engines.

What is a SERP?

SERP stands for search engine results page. When you enter a search query into Google or other search engines, the list of results you get is the SERP. You might also see the term “SERP features” used in your SEO tools to refer to parts of the SERP that aren’t part of the ranked search results, such as image carousels, “people also asked” queries, and knowledge panel features.

How do search engines make money?

Search engines make money by getting searchers to click on ads. These ads are displayed both on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and on ad networks they are associated with. Just as with any other medium, the more people that use a specific search engine, the more advertisers are willing to pay for their ad to run. Search engines are extremely vested in providing the best, most relevant organic search results – every single time. It’s the only quality that makes them sticky, and the only competitive edge that matters in their business model.

What are search crawlers?

Search engines use automated programs called bots or spiders to scan websites in their entirety, including the copy itself, the code, and the sitemap. These “crawlers” are how the search engines evaluate and index all the content on the internet to make it available to anyone who wants to search. You might see the word “crawl” used in your SEO tools to describe a single scan by a search engine’s bots. (For example, you can request a new crawl of your site from Google after you make important updates or fixes that will better reflect your website’s structure).

Any time someone searches online, search engines interpret the terms they use and pull indexed content from various crawled websites. The search algorithm determines what content to display on the SERP (search engine results page). What content ultimately gets displayed depends on all the factors we’re discussing in this SEO FAQ.

SEO Audit Tools

What’s a keyword? What’s a key phrase?

A keyword is a word that gets typed into the search bar on a search engine. Marketers spend a lot of time, money, and resources researching what keywords their prospects and customers are using when they look for products and services. SEO tools such as SEMRush, Ahrefs and Moz house massive lists of keywords that marketers can access to make this research easier.

A key phrase is a keyword that contains one or more words. The terms keyword and key phrase are more or less interchangeable, at least in B2B marketing, where it’s uncommon that any product can be searched using just a single word.

A keyword can be broken down into three parts: the head, modifier and tail. The head is what the search is about; the modifier adds detail and narrows the search, without changing the intent of the search. The tail adds clarity and further narrows the search. In the example below, Apple is the keyword, tablet is the modifier, and white is the tail.:

Apple | Apple iPad | Apple iPad black refurbished

When marketers or other content creators write SEO content for the web, they start with a primary keyword and a few secondary keywords. Based on their research, they identify the keywords most likely to be input by the buyers they want. For example, the primary key phrase for this blog is SEO FAQ. And just there, we managed to fit it into our copy one more time in hopes that the search engine gods will smile upon us.

What’s a long tail keyword?

A long tail keyword is a keyword that contains multiple words. People looking for something specific tend to use long tail keywords. For instance, “What is the best marketing automation platform?” is a long tail keyword for the keyword “marketing automation.” (Pro tip: No need to search this particular question on your own; the answer is Act-On).

How do I conduct keyword research to target the right audience?

Keyword research is a critical step in SEO. Use keyword research tools to discover relevant keywords with a good search volume and low competition. Consider user intent and long-tail keywords to better understand what your audience is looking for. Tailor your content and optimize your pages based on these insights to increase your chances of ranking higher in search results.

How does page speed contribute to SEO?

Google uses factors like page speed and overall page experience to evaluate a website’s overall crawlability, which can promote or demote that site’s search results. This is an aspect of technical SEO that marketers ignore at their peril. You can use Google tools like Search Console to see which pages are delivering a good experience for users, and which need improvements to factors like load times and plugin speeds. The thinking behind these factors contributing to SEO is simple: Google wants its search to be a good experience for its users. If you search something on Google, but it takes too long for the page to load, you might bounce from the page and abandon Google Search in favor of another provider.

If your speed and page experience needs work, there are things you can do to improve it. Compress images, leverage browser caching, and minify CSS and JavaScript files to reduce page load times. Choose a reliable hosting provider and consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to distribute content efficiently across the globe.

What are 404 errors?

Usually when you see some version of “Sorry you’re seeing this, but it appears the information you’re looking for no longer exists,” it’s a 404 error.

The HTTP 404 Not Found error indicates that the server could not find the page you tried to reach. This indicates that a specific page may have been removed, or it may have been relocated, but its URL was not changed accordingly. This type of error can also appear if you accidently type in a wrong URL.

This can happen when you replace a product or service with something else, information is repurposed, and/or content is relocated to other sections of your website. It’s not a great experience for your user, but you can control the formatting of the 404 pagers, so you can soften the effect. You can add attractive graphics, for example, and provide links to pages the visitor might like to see.

What are 301 redirects?

301 redirects are communications between your website and search crawlers, which indicate that content has been moved but can still be found in another location of your website. You set them up when you have a reason to redirect the visitor to a certain page.

Redirects preserve the equity of your content so that you can maintain the type of online visibility you’re used to. And since the redirect is not obvious, most visitors will have an uninterrupted user experience and continue to engage with your brand.

What is an XML sitemap?

The best way to think of XML sitemaps is to view them as blueprints of your website that search engines can use to locate specific forms of information, as soon as possible.

While search engines are able to crawl any website on their own, being able to connect with an XML Sitemap allows them to quickly, completely understand:

What your website represents
- What specific forms and categories of content you haveWhere your content is located
- What level of priority each category of content represents in terms of:
  - How often they should be crawledWhat type of visibility they should have
  - Which landing pages should be accessible to online users

When websites do not have this type of sitemap to reference, search engines essentially are left to make their own decisions about your site.

What is a Robots.txt file?

Webmasters and site owners create robots.txt (robots) files in order to offer specific instructions to search engines as to what areas of their website should be crawled and indexed, or accessible to online users.

Basically, when search crawlers want to pull content from your website, they refer to the robots file to see whether or not you, as the site owner, want users to be exposed to particular forms of information.

Depending on the purpose of your website, these files can vary in the types of information they protect and preserve. Most of the time, areas of a website that require users to submit a username and password are included in the robots file in order to prevent this specific type of information from being indexed or engaged by general online users.

What does “search authority” mean? Domain authority? Page authority?

“Authority” is how trustworthy and expert your domain or page is considered to be, as evaluated by a search engine’s algorithm. Many factors, such as the use of language, richness of syntax, links from high-ranking sites, etc., factor into perceived authority to a greater or lesser degree.

What is link building?

Link building (or link earning) refers to the act of attracting or acquiring external links from other websites. These links signal to search engines that the content on your site is unique, meaningful to online users, and is authoritative within the digital space you occupy. The higher the authority of the sites that link to you, the more value these incoming links have. They are also known as backlinks or inbound links.

Building authoritative backlinks takes time and effort. Focus on creating exceptional content that naturally attracts links from reputable websites in your industry. Engage in outreach to relevant influencers, partners, and websites to build mutually beneficial relationships. Remember, quality matters more than quantity when it comes to backlinks.

SEO Audit Tools

What is “duplicate content”?

Duplicate content is material that appears on the web in multiple locations or URLs. This could be on your own site, or it could be duplicate content across two or more disparate sites.

Duplicate content can confuse search engines, leading to potential ranking issues. Implement canonical tags to indicate the preferred version of a page and consolidate duplicate content under a single URL. This ensures that search engines attribute the content properly.

What is keyword density?

Keyword density (SEO) is the number of times a keyword or key phrase appears on a web page as a percentage of the total number of words on the page. There’s really no optimal keyword density for your content, but if it’s so dense as to look like you’re stuffing keywords into your copy for the sake of optimization, you might draw a penalty. Some experts peg between 0.5% and 2.5% as good percentages to strive for and something as high as 4% as likely to draw a penalty, but that’s not what really matters.

What does matter is that you write for your reader, not for the search engine. It’s good if your keyword is in your headline and SEO title, and a few of your subheads, but never distort natural copy to accommodate a keyword. If you’re writing naturally, you’ll tend to use synonyms and vary your phrasing, and Google (among other search engines) has begun to look for this. They’re getting better at understanding context – and you can help them by using well-written, informative content that includes words they would expect to find in that context.

How can I monitor my SEO performance?

There are literally hundreds of paid programs that offer various details around your website’s performance, as well as the extent of your SEO success. However, it is important to know that each paid platform gathers data slightly differently. Google Analytics is a baseline tool. The platform is free, as long as you have a Gmail account, and can be easily installed by even the most casual of marketers. With Google Analytics, you can gain critical insight in real time, as well as over historical periods, about

Total traffic
Organic traffic
Direct traffic
Referral traffic
Mobile traffic
Top landing pages
Conversions

You will also want to set up Google Search Console, and Bing Webmaster Tools in order to stay up-to-date with the technical health of your business’s website. With these free platforms, you can review the following details that relate to your website’s overall performance:

Broken links – 404 errors, soft 404 errors, 500 server errors
XML Sitemap status and ability to submit new ones
Landing page appearance within search listings
Rich snippet implementation and appearance within search listings
Warning messages that relate to hacked servers, duplicate content, and other possible penalties related to manipulative SEO tactics

How long does it take for search engines to recognize website updates?

It depends on what actions you take. If you publish a landing page or article, search engines would take 3-7 days to find and index your content. If you want search engines to recognize new content and understand how it relates to your overall website, as well as how it supports your overall SEO efforts, you should create and implement a new XML Sitemap and submit it to your Search Console and Webmaster Tools profiles.

How many links should I have on each landing page or blog article?

A general rule of thumb is to have no more than one link for every 400–450 words. Use external links only when citing an external source, such as for a statistic. When offering multiple citations within a small amount of text, forego some of the external links and just name the source.

Too many links may lead Google and other search engines to conclude that you’re creating an excessive amount of links as a means of increasing your keyword rankings. Worse, they can be distracting to the reader. Make sure the links are relevant, and add value.

How does word count affect SEO?

Search engines do not require websites to have a tremendous amount of text in order to achieve superior visibility. However, there are plenty of studies that show a direct correlation between lengthier content (content that has 1,500 words or more) and increased engagement and visibility.

This doesn’t mean you have to make sure that every page on your website has that much content. But when you have relevant information your target audience is looking for, in rich detail, that will go a long way in supporting your website’s overall SEO goals – partly because it’s more likely to satisfy your readers.

How does mobile usability impact my SEO?

“Mobile SEO” or “mobile optimization” describes the effort of applying search engine optimization elements that help increase your website’s visibility in mobile search queries.

Consider that search is the leading web-based activity performed on mobile devices. Mobile SEO can have a profound impact on your retail business by attracting on-the-go consumers. For B2B, remember that people looking for business information are also increasingly using smart phones

and tablets to get it. Make sure that their questions can be answered by your website –however they choose to access it.

Google transitioned to mobile-first indexing, meaning it will index sites according to their mobile version, not the desktop version. The most effective way to ensure that your entire website can be found and engaged by mobile searchers is to have a responsive website.

What is responsive design?

This is a fluid-grid design that determines what type of device is accessing it, and responds by displaying the most appropriate layout for that device. This results in high-quality, interactive experiences, and allows readers to:

Easily read copy
Immediately navigate to the most desired web page
Easily scroll without having to adjust screen settings
Easily pan in and out

The page layout does not shrink; it changes, leaving out many elements that would display on a larger screen. Responsive websites align with the parameters of each and every single type of device. This includes smartphones, tablets, and desktops, ensuring that your website will display as your prefer in each instance.

How can I tell if my website is mobile-friendly?

Mobile-friendliness is crucial, considering the increasing number of users accessing the web from mobile devices. Employ responsive design to ensure your website adapts seamlessly to different screen sizes. Optimize images for faster loading and minimize server response time. Conduct mobile usability tests to identify and fix any issues that could hinder the mobile user experience.

You can enter your website into Google’s mobile-friendly testing platform to see how well it displays on mobile devices and how search crawlers view your website. Use Google Search Console for more in-depth results on each of your individual pages.

How can I improve my website’s organic rankings?

To boost your website’s organic rankings, focus on producing high-quality, relevant content that resonates with your target audience and aligns with their search intent. Conduct thorough keyword research to identify valuable opportunities, optimize your meta tags and on-page elements, and build authoritative backlinks from reputable sources. Remember, patience and consistency are key in the ever-evolving world of SEO.

^{Using the right tools to pull your SEO metrics and KPIs is crucial to mastering search engine marketing.}

What are some common mistakes to avoid in SEO?

Avoid black-hat SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, or buying links. Duplicate content can also negatively impact your rankings, so ensure proper canonicalization. Focus on creating user-centric content and providing an excellent experience for your visitors.

What are the implications of AI and machine learning on SEO strategies?

The search providers are going all in on upgrading their platforms for AI. Earlier in 2023, Microsoft integrated ChatGPT into Bing search. Soon after, Google rolled out a beta of Bard AI for Google Search. Search engine optimization and search engine marketing tools are quickly following suit, with a variety of tools now available to leverage AI for keyword research and content composition, among other functions.

It’s still early days, and even the experts haven’t fully wrapped their minds around the transformative potential of AI for SEO. Here’s a way to test it. Use the AI results for Google or Bing to search “SEO FAQ” on Google. Was this page the first result? If it wasn’t, we at Act-On still aren’t sure about the full implications of AI on SEO.

What are the SEO implications of moving to a new domain or redesigning a website?

Migrating to a new domain or redesigning a website requires careful planning to maintain SEO equity. Implement proper 301 redirects, update sitemaps and robots.txt, and monitor search console for errors. Communicate the changes to search engines to avoid significant ranking fluctuations.

How to Use Marketing Automation to Optimize Your Marketing and Outpace the Competition

Act-On — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 22:52:04 +0000

Ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels, going in circles, and not getting to where you need to be as a marketer? Sounds like you need to hit the brakes with your marketing communication plan. When it comes to marketing automation, you don’t need the fastest car to win the race – you just need to know how to use it effectively and efficiently.

Luckily, we here at Act-On have an ace driver in Jeff Day, Act-On’s SVP of Marketing, who has 25 years of experience working in go-to-market teams. In this webinar collaboration with Marketing Profs, he sharedl best practices and tactics that work in optimizing marketing automation. It’s the extra boost you need to get you off the slow track and into the fast lane.

When it comes to marketing automation, Act-On’s no rookie. We earned our racing stripes with over 4,000 satisfied customers. Learn how Act-On’s Marketing Automation is the best in the business.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Why use marketing automation tools in the first place? According to Gartner, businesses are using less than 50% of their marketing automation capabilities. That’s like owning a sports car but only driving on suburban roads.

When used correctly, marketing automation users see improved lead generation and more conversions. But although companies increasingly take advantage of the benefits of marketing automation, many don’t feel they’re getting all they could from the technology. According to a recent study, 54% of marketers admit they aren’t using marketing automation tools to their fullest potential.

In the webinar, Jeff and Mike Felix, an Act-On solutions consultant, delivered tips for tuning up your marketing automation machinery to achieve benefits such as:

– Driving more qualified leads

– Converting more leads to sales

– Optimizing your marketing spend

Work On a Well-Oiled Machine

The tools are right at your fingertips: leverage all that data! Start with 1P (first-party) Data – information on your customers you already have, because you’ve been collecting it through their activity on your website, engagement with your emails, and with your social media. Augment that with 3P (third-party) data where it’s helpful, such as demographic and firmographic information from other sources, as well as intent signals. Analyzing this data allows you to fine-tune your messaging into automated programs for that audience.

Next, empower sales: help them optimize their sales ability by feeding them higher quality leads through the front-end of the sales pipeline. Integrate your marketing automation platform to your CRM so your salespeople are equipped with the data that can help move a prospect closer to a sale.

In the process, you can make your other systems better. It’s a virtuous cycle when you empower sales automation, account-based marketing, and social with what your marketing automation platform knows about your customers. The more you lean into your data, the richer your output will be.

Accelerate Conversions and Create More Personal Programs

These days, it’s not a good idea to “set it and forget it” with your marketing automation.On the other hand, moving away from “dedicated send” emails to automated processes is crucial. How? By aligning your automated programs with the marketing outcomes you want to achieve. The content you send for outreach, nurture, and re-engagement programs should vary in tone and content.

Rev up your marketing with a focus on personalization and segmentation. To effectively send more personalized communication, you need to be able to segment your audience based on their characteristics. Put pedal to the metal by aligning nurture streams around the buying lifecycle. Know if your customer is ToFu, MoFu, or BoFu (top, middle, or bottom of funnel), and treat prospects in each part of the lifecycle differently. For instance, those closer to the top of the funnel haven’t demonstrated enough genuine interest for product-focused messages. Hit them with more generalized content. Once they progress further, they’ll be more receptive to pushing harder towards a sale.

Then keep fine-tuning. Analyze, test, iterate – don’t expect to get it right the first time. Nobody goes from zero to 100 miles an hour in one step. Track how your programs are performing, and test new content, subject lines and CTAs.Learn about Best Practices for Email Marketing Automation here.

Get In the Driver’s Seat with Personalized Engagement

Use demographic data to drive content. A prospect’s behavior score and activities should drive the next step in your automated platform: if they’re not engaging with your content, keep them in ToFu and handle accordingly.

Remember, there’s no need to stay in one lane – reach your prospects through multiple channels: email, social and SMS, and remember to personalize your content with dynamic content.

It Takes a (Pit) Crew

You want to hand over the best leads to your sales team. But how do you optimize scoring leads?

Learn how to assess demographic and firmographic scores and see how they match up with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Use behavioral scoring to measure engagement and readiness, to help sales prioritize and follow up with relevant conversations. Shifting gears, how does AI help you to improve efficiency and scale? Read about Act-On’s vision for AI and marketing automation here.

Keep an Eye on the Dashboard

Take steps to tweak and improve. Use your reporting to analyze what is and isn’t working, then take an intentional approach to making changes. Continue to iterate and test, but always measure!

It may seem like you’re on the right track, but are you actually driving sales conversions? Is the marketing fuel you’re spending leading to ROI?

Kick Into High Gear

Watch the full webinar and learn more tips from experts on how to use marketing automation to optimize your marketing and outpace the competition. You can also explore the full transcript below.

Webinar Transcript:

Joe Roberts:

Hello everyone and welcome to today’s webinar. I’m Joe Roberts from Team Marketing Profs, and I’ll be your moderator for today’s event that is Fast and Furious, how to optimize your marketing automation to outpace the competition. Thank you for being here. But before we get started, I have a few housekeeping items to go over. If you lose audio or visual, simply exit out of Zoom, come back in. That should solve most problems. The chat feature is available at the bottom of your screen. It’s a great way to network and meet new people and to add your general comments to. But if you have any questions, please add them to the q and a, that way we don’t lose them in the chat. So we will hear from our speakers and then we’ll go into our Q&A session, and I’ll be asking as many of those questions as possible.

We’ll get to as many as we can within the time allotted. Now I’d like to take a minute to thank Act-On for sponsoring today’s broadcast. Act-On Software provides solutions that empower marketers to engage targets at every step of the customer lifestyle, allowing marketers to build smart and effective programs to grow their businesses and generate higher customer lifetime value. Now onto the official speaker introductions, I’m excited to introduce Jeff Day and Mike Felix. Jeff Day is senior VP of marketing at Act-On and has 25 years of experience working on go to marketing, go to market teams and manage managing all functions of marketing. He’s passionate about building highly productive teams and driving growth in tech companies. Mike Felix is a solutions consultant and sales engineer at Act-On Software, a former engineer at Lockheed Martin and NASA. He brings a decade of experience helping marketers learn that marketing and sales success shouldn’t be rocket science. All right, you’re here for Fast and Furious, How to Optimize your Marketing Automation to Outpace the Competition. Jeff and Mike, the floor’s all yours, take it away.

Jeff Day:

Thank you, Joe, and thank you for everyone joining us today for this optimizing. So this is an optimizing class. We were told to bring the pro tips. That’s why I have Mike here. He’s the pro. I’m just in the lofty towers, but this is a sort of 300 level, 400 level targeted topic in terms of optimizing. So this is not 1 0 1 how to get started. We’re trying to bring you practices that we’ve seen our customers do and we follow ourselves that have really helped to optimize. Oh, I’m on the wrong screen and it’s not advancing. There we go. So you already met us, so we do have fast and furious theme.

Mike Felix:

Little bit. You got to share your screen.

Jeff Day:

Oh, thank you, Mike. Thank you, Mike. Rookie move. All right, let’s see if this works better.

Mike Felix:

All right, there we go.

Jeff Day:

Awesome. I saw the screen. I didn’t know why everyone else can’t see it. Thank you for that. We do have this fast and furious theme, so you’ll see some references to that throughout. We’ll try to keep it a little fun and light straight roads are made for fast cars, turns are made for fast drivers. So you guys are the advanced drivers today, quote by the famous rally car driver calling McRay. I won’t really spend time, I’m not a big fan of reading the agenda, but like I said, this is sort of circuit tips on how to optimize and we’ll follow the agenda that was published to you. I wanted to start out with a poll kind of to set the stage of where everybody is or is feeling like they are in maximizing the potential of their marketing automation platform. Joe, can you help us? There we go. So do you feel like you’re using your marketing automation platform to its full potential? Please pick one.

We got the numbers coming in here. I don’t know if everyone can see the numbers. Let me see. C nnn, my magic ai, C n N driven reports. Tell me. With 72% of participants responding, we’ve got pretty clear winners around, not really closely followed up by somewhat, so not too many people falling into the definitely camp, which is probably why you’re here today. Kind of makes sense. It goes, all right, how do I close that out? And it keeps popping back up. There we go. So let’s keep moving. There we go. What we’re hearing, Mike, you want to lead us through these industry stats?

Mike Felix:

Yeah, yeah. So first and foremost, great to be here. Excited to have this discussion with you guys. To be honest with you. We put that pull out, but we kind of knew what’s most of the answers would be. We’ve seen a lot of data come in through various sources. One of them being Gartner. They identified that businesses are utilizing less than 50% of their marketing automation capabilities. And there’s also another stat to show that less than 50% of organizations that have certain marketing automation tools are not even leveraging them. So a lot of data around the utilization of certain platforms. But what we’re noticing, the title of this presentation is optimizing your marketing automation to outpatient your Competition. There are the other 50% that are, so we want to you with ensuring that you get the most out of this information and you’re outpacing your competition. 80% of marketing automation users see improved lead generation and 77% see more conversions. Marketer, automation users experience a full hundred and 51% increase in qualified leads. 63% of customers are outperforming competitors with help from marketing automation. To be honest, we have about 50 other data points that we could present, but the point here is that there’s evidence to show that what’s happening within this marketing automation space is having a positive impact on your business from a revenue standpoint, but it’s up to you to lean into it.

Jeff Day:

Absolutely. Right? Yeah, thank you for that, Mike. Yeah, and so it is good that, you know, have the marketing automation platform, but definitely getting used out of it using its features is key that getting outpacing your competition and getting full benefit from it. So let’s dive into that. So of course this isn’t, we don’t do this just to score leads or tot our own horn on how well our emails are performing. It’s really with the business outcomes of driving more qualified leads to get those to sales so that sales is focusing on the highest potential pipeline opportunities, convert more leads to revenue, giving them the giving sales, the signals and the activities and all the information to improve their performance throughout the pipeline. And then from a marketing perspective, to optimize really your R o I so optimize your spend and your effectiveness, focusing, getting the most out of all the inbound leads, outbound prospecting and nurturing those leads into successful pipeline opportunities.

So let’s dive into the meat of how we’re going to help you leverage your marketing automation solution and maybe tune up some of the areas where you are leveraging it. Oh, it’s a build slide. Awesome. So first and foremost, there’s a lot of solutions in the MarTech landscape right now. And if you’re like us, you probably have a lot of marketing technology across the board. Marketing automation tends to be the foundation and the center of the MarTech universe, but you do want to leverage all of these different systems to really make your engine hum at high performance. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about some of the different ways that you can take advantage of these different systems and make your marketing automation platform work at a higher level. Really, the big message is leverage all that data as a marketing automation platform.

You have all the one P, that’s first party data. That’s the data that you’re collecting as a brand about your customers. And through marketing automation, you get their activity on the website, their engagement with your emails, if you’re leveraging s m s, social media, all of the programs and leads that hopefully you’re bringing into your marketing automation solution. All of that creates this wealth of information about what your customers are doing with you and how they’re engaging and really take advantage of that. And then of course, augment that with third party data where it’s helpful. So we bring in a lot of demographic and firmographic information from third party sources because we’re not asking that of our customers as they come in, as they fill out forms or as they engage. So let’s augment that so we know more about our customers as they come in.

And then more and more we’ve got all these wonderful sources of intent signals, third party intent signals that say, Hey, this company is researching these topics a lot. How can you use those intent signals to not only improve your lead scoring, but guide how you want to engage with those prospects as they come in? And that leads to the next point, which is really about increase your relevance to your audience via targeted content and aps. The more about the audience, what topics they’re searching on, the titles the companies are coming from, the industries they’re coming from, you can then tune your content to that audience. So it’s the way you want to speak and the content that you want to provide to a VP of marketing is very different than say an email specialist or a marketing ops person who might be very interested in the systems and the technology and the analytics less about strategy, that sort of thing. So you can use all that data that you have to create automated programs. Sorry, when we say ap, we mean automated programs, the sequenced email programs or sequenced content programs that you set up through marketing automation and you can personalize and fine tune those aps to your audience. Mike, do you want to talk a little bit about the next couple steps?

Mike Felix:

Yeah, no, absolutely. Before I jump into those extra steps, I want to pause for a second to say that even throughout all of this information that a key thing here as you listen to us and what you take away from this presentation is to make sure you explore, turn over every stone, make sure that you understand what the benefit can be from you even having this data. Years ago, we did not have the technology to have this data. So there’s a duality here to technology for one, tech created a lot of noise, two, tech C created a lot of opportunity. So the companies that lean into understanding how to leverage this data to deliver a message at the right time is very important. Okay, so Mark Mar, we’re going to explain later that marketing automation is far more than just what I would say some people consider to be like an email marketing platform, but there’s a lot of depth to this information that we want you to explore even after this short presentation here.

So when we reference journeys, there’s a conversation that there’s a conversation that’s held with anyone who has any type of intent on prospecting or what’s the word, showing interest in your offerings. And marketing automation enables you to have that conversation without expending certain types of resources, but moving that to when it actually matters. So when we start speaking about empowering sales, the best way to empower sales is to give them the opportunity to do what it is that they need to do, which is sell. They need to be able to optimize their sales ability and their output by ensuring that the front end of that pipeline was done well. So by integrating your marketing automation platform and any C R M that you’re using, you’re able to have your salespeople commence that conversation with enough insight so that they know what to say, how to say it, and they have an angle towards being able to move that prospect closer to a close. When we say making other systems better, empowering your sales automation, your account based marketing, your social, what we’re referencing is the fact that the more you lean into leveraging this data, the richer the output would be. All right, and we’re going to lead into some details here in a moment, but I’m hoping that you’re grasping the fact that we have access to more, while we have access to more. There’s also a lot of noise, but we have to make sure that we’re leveraging it in the right way.

Jeff Day:

Yeah, I love the way you put that, Mike, about making your interactions richer with the audience, really, because certainly as one who gets a ton of prospecting emails and calls and everything, somebody who can come to me with a targeted message that already understands what I’m interested in based on whatever I’ve been researching, that’s the stuff that I’m going to engage with, and that’s what we’re trying to accomplish. At the end of the day, we want to engage on a one-to-one conversation with our target audience. And so if you can make that conversation more rich along the topics that customer is interested in, that’s the name of the game. All right, our second poll, how many active automated programs or whatever you want to call them, do you have? So these are programmed automated sequences of either emails, emails and calls, social media messages, whatever you have, but

Mike Felix:

Funnels is a word that many have adopted as well. Funnels, some refer to them as campaigns.

Jeff Day:

Campaigns could be. Yeah. So we got some answers coming in. Let’s see, I’m waiting for the numbers. So we got 62% of participants. It’s a fairly good distribution, I think is Mike, can you see this? Can everybody

Mike Felix:

See? Yeah, I can see it. And it does, again, love the inputs. There is a certain level of predictability to these inputs. The majority of people are none. Each email is a single dedicated send. We’re hearing that a lot. So we’ll be touching on that.

Jeff Day:

Yeah. Well, this is good to understand our audience too. We’ve got a lot of people who are doing still sort of dedicated email approach, clearly with marketing automation that have one to five or six to 10 set up, and then definitely some people who have explored and made maybe more sophisticated and more targeted approaches. So great, we’ll dive in a lot more here. Thanks for sharing that information. Great. So here’s where we’re going to dive into automated programs. Lot of information on this page, so we’ll take some time on this. This is probably our richest topic in this webinar. Really important to think about how you’re leveraging your email, your automated programs, your campaigns to get the most out of them. And while it takes a little bit more to set up these multi-touch campaigns and think about who you’re targeting and building your lists and all that, it really pays over the long run, both in terms of your ability to engage in interesting conversations with your prospects and buyers, nurture them to a qualified lead and a more engaged buyer.

And then to scale what you can do as a marketing automation, because once you set it up, you can, we don’t want to say set up, forget it, because we do actually want you to go back, but you’re not doing a dedicated send every time you want to engage with a customer or send a piece of content. So one of the tips that I really like to do, and I found very effective is to not all campaigns, all outreaches, all communications with your customers are the same. And think about what you’re trying to do as an outcome and create automated programs appropriately that. So one way I think about them is, you know, have outreach emails. Those are kind of your prospecting, your first touch. Maybe you got a list from somewhere, maybe you got a bunch of opt-ins from an event, but they didn’t really engage with you.

So how do I reach out to them and try to drive interest as more of an awareness top of funnel type of activity. Then there’s the classic nurture of, which was a cornerstone of why marketing automation was created and nurturing is like, okay, I got to lead, but it’s not a marketing qualified lead yet. They haven’t yet kind of raised their hand and said, oh yeah, I want to talk to sales. So how do we nurture them and educate them and engage with them more and lead them down the buying cycle? So nurture those first touch inquiries to get them to become M qls. We’ll talk a lot more about that. It’s kind of going to be the core of what we talk about. And then what my team and I talk a lot about is as re-engagement emails. So this is the database marketing.

They’ve already gone through the nurture sequence or the outreach, they never made it to MQL or maybe they made it and got sent back, but this, you want to stay in front of them, keep them warm, stay top of mind with them so that when they do get back into a buying cycle, they recognize you. They’re like, oh yeah, I really like the content for our case that Act-On has been sending. I want to talk to them. I’m ready to engage now. So this is the keep warm, and each of those have a very different campaign structure and you’re going to be sending them different content. I am a strong advocate for building nurture programs for all inbound lead types of campaigns. So I think most people do ’em for paid for lead type of programs, content syndication type stuff, p p c, webinars, events.

But really sometimes, and I’ve seen this a lot, an event might get a follow up like, Hey, thank you for talking to us at so-and-so event, and that’s it. Or do a demo. And that’s a pretty big jump from picking up a t-shirt at an event to saying they want a demo. So can you create a more sophisticated email sequence that says, Hey, as a reminder, here’s kind of what we do and what we’re all about. If you want a quick hit video demo, go check this out. Or go check out our website and check out this. Give ’em a little bit more to chew on. Give them some next piece of content that’s a little more advanced. Maybe something about how to optimize their email programs and help them, educate them on what you do and what value you can deliver to them. And then maybe the last thing in the sequence would be, hey, if you’re interested, contact us for a quick demo. So in that way, every inbound lead is treated more than just a one-time hit. You know, either make it or you don’t, but you build an automated program to help educate them and bring them farther down the buying cycle.

I’ve been talking a lot, Mike, do you want to take over?

Mike Felix:

Yeah, absolutely. I’ll definitely lean into these next few points here. One thing I want to emphasize though is some of the words that we’re using in this presentation optimize accelerate, and we are using the word automated, so I want to speak on that for a second and then lead into these other points. You can do the right thing the wrong way. You can also do the wrong thing the right way. The aim here is to get as close as possible to doing the right thing the right way. So I saw a question in the chat that said, how do I calculate ri? You have to have some expectations on what you’re targeting, and then the focus here is to optimize and then accelerate. Okay? So as you’re developing these programs, as you’re thinking through how you want to engage with these prospects, you have to realize that you’re not going to get this a hundred percent initially starting out the gate.

The purpose of these marketing automation platforms and these programs is to be able to, over a period of time, optimize and get closer and closer to realize whether or not your expectations were feasible or whether or not you should do more to get closer to what you expected and get that return that you’re expecting. A lot of dynamics around that conversation, but we’ll cover some of that later. This point here, personalization through segmentation is huge because you have to ensure that you’re speaking the right language and you have the right message to certain individuals based off of where they are in their buying cycle, what they’re interested in, what problem they may be solving, what they’re looking to address, and how they’re framing their perception of your business and what you’re offering. So personalization is huge, and being able to put various contacts and leads and prospects into different segments based off of what they’re characterized by is very important to be able to automate those programs to them aligning your nurturing around a buying life cycle.

And I know some of you may be familiar, a lot of us marketers we’re using these terms, tofu, mofu, bofu, this top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. Irrespective of what industry you’re in, you have a funnel, you have a funnel, there is going to be a certain level of volume that’s going to be coming into that life cycle, into that pipeline. I’m sorry, that pipeline that you’ve created for your business and some are going to fall out. And then there’s going to be more that’s in the middle of your funnel, middle of your pipeline, and then some are going to fall out. And then at the bottom of it, you’re going to have those prospects that are really close to becoming a customer. Those are individuals that you’re, you’re going to nurture them a little bit differently than the ones that just engaged with your brand. So you have to align your nurturing around what that life cycle looks like for your business. And this takes analyzing, testing, iteration and fine tuning. You’re not going to get it right the first time. I have yet to find anyone over a decade of marketing, running multi-million dollar advertising as advertising campaigns. I have yet to find anyone that got it the first time they optimized. I mean, apple doesn’t even get it right the first time. They optimize, they analyze, they test, they iterate, and then they fine tune.

Jeff Day:

Yeah, and that’s great. And as I’m hearing you talk about all this, and maybe this is a lot, particularly for people who are still in the dedicated email mindset, maybe this feels overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be one step at a time. You can start by creating a few nurture emails and maybe segmenting ’em by industry if that’s what you think is probably most effective. Or maybe you start by building what’s the next inbound campaign that’s coming in, build a nurture sequence off that and just kind of continue to build on it as you time. It doesn’t have to be going from zero to a hundred miles per hour in one step. This can be very iterative and as Mike says, go try something, measure it, analyze it, think about it. Could I do better? Could I do better here? Maybe there’s better content, maybe there’s better segmentation and personalization I can do, and then improve on that and build out the next one with that learning. So it can be a very iterative step.

Mike Felix:

And if I may, one point before we leave this slide, overall within a marketing automation framework or methodology, the point here is to be able to feed your tofu, to feed your tofu more without losing capacity. So marketing automation platform enables you to feed more volume into your tofu so that it can do what it needs to do so that more qualified leads make it down to your bofu. I see Roanna in the chat said, lol, I didn’t know what those acronyms were, so I’m glad you learned something. If you leave with anything, you know what those acronym, those acronyms mean?

Jeff Day:

Yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely right. And that gets to scale. It really does help you do more with less. You can handle more inbound, you can get more top of the funnel stuff going and actually create more bottom of the funnel M QLS with less effort. So little case study here, again talking about top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. At one point we reorganized our automated programs to align to tofu, mofu, bofu segmentation. And this is really with the mindset of saying, Hey, we know top of the funnel, they want more value add, educated, lighter touch information, best practices. Have you thought of this? What’s the impact of ai? It’s less demo and total cost of ownership and case studies and stuff. So how do we start to align our content thinking about our first engagement with a customer, leading them down a funnel, bringing them into a middle of funnel automated program based on the activity that they do with us.

So they only get there if they click and read some and download some content and do some things that we think suggest that they’re actually ready for the next level of content. We had incredible results from this. So we took 23 different individual programs and still with personalization and dynamic content and stuff so that we were speaking to our intended audience, but then aligning it to a tofu, mofu, bofu state, and I mean, look at our open rates we’re 53, 23, 60 9%, 62% are clickthrough rates top of funnel. Not surprising, they’re top of funnel, that’s by definition they’re not quite as engaged. So our clickthrough rate was not great. But then the ones that graduated into mid-funnel and bottom funnel, we had these amazing click-through rates. So overall we were able to improve our open rates from 25% to almost 60%. Our click-through rate from 1.32% on average to almost 32% on average. This really changed the performance of our email programs. And again, depending upon where you are, if you’re starting out with just a few programs, great, I would encourage you to think about how even if you don’t do sort of this level of programs aligned this way, but if you think about the content you’re delivering as top of funnel and then more engaged type of content as people work through their sequences, I think it’ll be very effective for you.

Mike Felix:

And one thing, oh sorry,

Jeff Day:

Should I go back?

Mike Felix:

Yeah, really quickly. I was just going to add, and again, this adds some depth to what you’re seeing here. You’re seeing data around email, but there are other elements that’s happening within a marketing automation platform that’s contributing to these increased open rates. It is visits to webpages, opt-ins, to various landing pages, opt-ins, to webinars. There’s other activities that’s contributing to when these messages are going out to these individuals that’s contributing to these highly effective open rates. So as you can see under the demo track, these individuals have gotten to a point within our life cycle that they are highly interested in seeing or experiencing that demo. So their open rates are going to be high, but all of that required excellent timing in when they were getting those messages. So just wanted to add that.

Jeff Day:

No, that’s perfect. That’s a very good point to make. What drives people from tofu to MOFU to more engaged states within our system is all of the activities off the website, off of email, off social media, off of downloads, form fills, everything that we do on track.

Mike Felix:

And just to address even with that, and we’ll jump to the next slide, the statement around the MQL slash funnel is dead. It’s not that anything is dead, it’s just that the qualifiers are changing. What’s moving people to actually buy those contributors, those elements are changing, so it’ll never die. It’s just that bar that you have to adjust to make sure that you’re more effectively selling. That bar is moving now that people are buying differently.

Jeff Day:

Yep, good point. So personalized engagement, I think this is just maybe hammering home some of the points that we’ve been making to support the previous slides. Demographic data is about the person, so title, what company they’re with, things like that. And that can be in enhanced with firmographic data. How big is your company? Revenue size, employee size, where it’s located, industry it’s in all of that. That usually drives the content that you’re going to deliver, whether it’s industry specific or title specific. The behavior score then is based on the activities that they do with you, as Mike was talking about through your website, through responses to email, click throughs, form fills, content downloads, social media responses, anything like that that drives triggers in both the automated programs. How do you get them to the next step or bring them lower into mofu, bofu and also drives their overall lead score with you. And as Mike said, this is multichannel. It’s not just about email, even though we seem to, that’s the core of what marketing automation have done, but we have expanded to include s m SMS and social media and web responses and forms and web pages, landing pages, all this stuff. So you can really personalize all this content, not just with first name, last name, but really dynamic content, dynamic images, dynamic content blocks within an automated program to personalize to the demographic, the title, the industry, all that.

Mike Felix:

Absolutely.

Jeff Day:

And the outcome is the Glen Garry leads. So yes, I’m aging myself by referencing Glen Garry, Glen Ross, but it is a great movie for any of you who haven’t seen it this out, the qualified leads, these are the really good mql. We want to pass the good golden leads to our sales team, so they’re very effective in using their time to go after the most promising leads and opportunities. So this is really the outcome of why we do all this.

Mike Felix:

And for those who do understand that reference, the whole ABCs in the movie, it’s always be closing because that was the generation that they were in. It was you call conversation, you figure out how to close. Now nowadays it’s more always be converting. There’s different layers to what you’re getting people to commit to or to convert on. So that also ties into how you would be adopting your philosophy around market automation.

Jeff Day:

Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, you don’t have to close on Monday one, just get ’em to take the next step with you, just the next step and then the next step. And then the next step,

It takes a fit crew, advanced lead scoring for sales. So this is now shifting over another part of your marketing automation solution. Talking about lead scoring. Again, as we’ve said, the goal is to hand over the best leads. The Glen Gary leads to sales. Again, we leverage, and I think the sort of advanced thinking is thinking about a demographic slash firmographic score that is based on who the person is, the title they carry the industry, they’re from the size of the company. We have developed our own I C P, our, my gosh, it’s been so long, I don’t even know what it stands for anymore. Ideal customer profile. We talk about ICP all the time. And so your ICP for, if people who are unfamiliar with that term is taking a step back with the business and saying, Hey, who do we want to be selling to?

What’s the ideal customer look like based on company size industries that we’re really successful selling to, maybe activities that they do if you’re in a more transactional business, whatever it is that you can do to segment and profile that customer. And then having that drive how you want to set the demographic firmographic portion of your score. And then using the behavioral elements, all of the activity that they do with you that we’ve talked about. And you can score each one of those. I don’t actually know, I’m, I’m going to guess a little bit here, but it’s usually small points for engaging with you on your website. Maybe a P P L lead where they downloaded some content is five points, but filling in a form to get a demo is 50 points. That gives them an automatic score to MQL and away we go. So you vary your score based on the engagement points that the customer is doing with you in some sort of smart logic to say, Hey, the higher value, the engagement shows a greater level interest.

They’re farther down the buying lifecycle with the end goal being like demographic score plus behavior score will get them to the magic line of mql. And it’s, it’s all moving, it’s all independent, it’s all custom for who you are and how you want to set up the score. And it’s really a matter of balancing the score versus the bar. And here too, it’s just iterate, iterate, iterate until you feel like you’re pretty close. It’s never perfect because there’s always going to be outliers, but just keep iterating and playing with it until it’s close. And then using that to drive not only your automated programs, but then when do you actually turn it over to sales? Sorry Mike, I talked to that whole slide.

Mike Felix:

No, no, this is good stuff. I mean, this is really good stuff. Just carrying on this conversation around scoring, this also leads you to identify different ways to develop your marketing assets as well. So you being able to sort of quantify who is, who’s farther along within their journey is important to your sales conversation, but also looking at that data and scoring them based off of what’s contributing to their readiness. There are just within our business, we organized our website based off of what psychological pursuits someone may have when they’re thinking about adopting market, adopting marketing automation or what other contributors they have. So an example would be what other competitors or what other platforms have they seen? Well, we’ve created content around addressing how we differ from those other platforms. So when we look at not only one score, but what, when we also look at their behavioral pattern, we’re able to see, well, Susan got to the website, the first page she went to was pricing.

So when my salesperson has a discussion with them, most likely I think pricing may be something that’s going to be a high on her consideration when she’s choosing a vendor. But then the next thing that she went to was, well, how does Act-On compare to Marketo or HubSpot or some of these other platforms? Seeing which pages were visited enables our sales team to understand what competitors or what type of conversation we need to have to differentiate us from what they may be thinking already. So all of this, again, it takes iterations, it takes making changes here and the data you get from it contributing to changes over here on the website, on the content side, on the social publishing side, it all works together to, it’s all orchestrated to help you with building your revenue.

Jeff Day:

Yeah, that was absolutely right. Thank you for sharing that. All right. You want to talk about ai? AI

Mike Felix:

Is yes, yes, yes. And again, I know we’re throwing out acronyms. I doubt there’s anyone on this webinar that does not know what AI stands for. If you don’t know what AI stands for, it stands for artificial intelligence. But just know this, it stands for artificial intelligence, right? So as you’re hearing a huge movement about ai, this AI that ai, AI does not replace the fact that you need human intelligence. You need that humanity to what you’re putting out there. But AI can enable you to track and do things that you just don’t want to do or not able to do. So from a standpoint of lead scoring, there are so many different dynamics to scoring that. AI is, I mean, we titled this the future, but we have already adopted predictive elements to leveraging AI, to scoring various leads based off of their sales conversion data, their behavioral data, the demographic and firmographic data and the technographic data, and having AI crunch a ton of data points and be able to provide us with some insight on who may have a higher likelihood to close and what that sales conversation should look like. So this is the future, but it’s only calling it the future because many of us or many companies have not adopted it yet, but it is here right now, especially in Act-On.

Jeff Day:

And we’re very excited about it. It will enable you to do a lot more efficiently. So as we can do AI driven, predictive lead score, AI driven predicted segmentation, audience analysis, we have our brand of content create is called AI create. It can write emails for you. So we are taking the approach that we really want to leverage AI to make you more efficient and effective. And so it’s helping you accelerate. As Mike said, it’ll never, well, I shouldn’t say never. Best practice right now is that it doesn’t completely eliminate, like you should take any of this and then apply the human intelligence, as Mike said, to make sure that content is what you want and the scoring makes sense and is right. But we do think that it’s going to greatly improve your efficiency and scale. All right, we’re getting close to the end of our time and we are getting close to the end of our presentation. One final poll. How often do you measure performance after activating a program? And this is important end cause I suspect that a lot of you measure performance, but how often do you measure performance and make changes to optimize based on that analysis?

And thank you for those who are still with us. We do have just a few more minutes and the answers are coming back in as I suspected, there’s not very many, rarely than ever. That’s good. I like to see that we usually measure performance but rarely have time to make optimization changes. That is true with a lot of us. And then yeah, this is, what do they call this, a W graph or something like that? 2.0 boy, I just went back to engineering school with the two point graphs and analysis. We got a bunch of other people most of the time do this. So good to see it’s on a lot of your minds. It is important of course to measure everything.

But then also the key to optimization, since this is an optimization conversation, is to take the steps to just tweak. It doesn’t have to be massive. You don’t have to change everything, but if you can change a subject line, if you can say, Ooh, I, we’ve got this new piece of content that I think would fit in really well here, let me swap that out, take a little bit of time to improve and tweak and iterate and then bring those learnings in. And that’s really the key to optimization is this continual tweaking. So use your reporting analytics, most marketing automation platforms, certainly our platform has a lot of analytics to help you analyze email performance, other automated program performance to do AB testing automated through the platform. You can dive pretty deeply into each individual email into the automated program as a whole. You can look at all of your content to see what’s performing best, take time to dive in and measure. And then my tip advice is to be very intentional about your experimentation and optimization and say, great, I’m going to apply these changes here and then I want to measure in a couple weeks certain timeframe what the changes were. Did that improve my performance? Great. Now let me take the learning of that one experimentation and apply it across other relevant aps or emails or social media posts or whatever it is.

And then of course, most important, and this is near and dear to VP of marketing here is like, okay, email performance is great, but really that’s a leading indicator to are we driving more conversions? Are we creating more M QLS out of our leads? Are those M QLS converting to more sales opportunities? What are my most effective channels and what’s my cost opportunity? One of the big things we talked at the top of our is how do you get more out of your marketing dollar? And so analyzing it in this way, you can say, okay, well where’s my lowest cost per mql, lowest cost per opportunity and let’s invest more in those areas to get higher roi.

Mike Felix:

Absolutely.

Jeff Day:

Mike, anything you want to add there?

Mike Felix:

And before we leave this, leave this slide just on the topic of analytics and testing and measuring, it’s key to make sure that you’re looking at your data and you’re analyzing things to tell a story in the way that it should be told to get you to those marketing objectives. So an example throughout this presentation, we’ve done a couple polls, right? First poll was, do you feel you’re using your marketing automation platform to its fullest, fullest extent? 53% of you said not really. Next question was, how many active programs do you have? 30 over 33% said none. Every email is single. And then last question was how often do you measure performance? And the highest one here is most of the time. So now if you would’ve just look at one of those questions that most of the time answer, I could mean something totally different if I didn’t already know that over 50% were not using the full capabilities of a marketing automation platform.

So when you’re looking at your sales, your marketing alignment, make sure that you are, you’re really leaning into analyzing your data the way that it should be analyzed so that you’re driving your sales outcomes. Because otherwise, just like someone mentioned Kumar, what should the ideal time be to optimize your learning curve so that it’s not repeated otherwise, you’ll be doing that a lot more. You want to create a cadence so that you are iterating at the right time and you’re iterating in the right way. And I don’t want to say hopefully, but it has to be progressive. All right? So just make sure you’re doing the right thing the right way.

Jeff Day:

This is why he’s the NASA engineer and I’m not. He’s the master of this. That’s awesome. Mike.

Last slide. And just to land this all and a success story we on, we have our marketing automation platform. We have customers, we work with agencies like the marketing guys to help our customers improve and optimize their performance. In this particular case, it was an engagement to help build custom and real-time dashboards, to analyze the multi-touch attribution, to help them optimize their performance, to do things like R O I analysis, which I know is a question that we need to get to. And we did do a lot of what we’ve been talking about today, not surprisingly leveraging, setting them up with behavior data, firmographic data from third party information that we pulled into our platform, helping them get richer data about who they’re driving, who they’re engaging with, building out more finely tuned and relevant automated programs. And then using the analytics that we built with them to measure, tweak and improve. And it really helped this, as the quote says, gives us all the data intelligence we need to execute on our lead generation strategy. So it really does pay off. It works. It is an iterative process. I hope we didn’t overwhelm anyone. We really wanted to provide a whole bunch of different tips that you can draw on the ones that you want to act on next,

Mike Felix:

Full pun intended, full pun

Jeff Day:

Intended, but if you’re sort of earlier in this process too, marketing automation platforms help you do this and can help you automate these programs. And so you just have to take the first step in building out a sequence or a couple of sequences and then just continue to grow from there. I think that’s all we have. We ran a little bit longer than we intended, but that’s to be expected because we’re passionate about our subject here and what we do, and we really want to help you optimize your programs. Do we have some time for q and a, Joe?

Joe Roberts:

I was going to say, if you’re willing to stay on for another minute or two, I think that we can get to a couple of questions. Sweet. Awesome. So I know that you answered a whole lot of them during the process of the presentation, but here’s one that came in towards the end. What should be the ideal time to optimize so that your learning curve isn’t coming in these big lumpy cycles?

Jeff Day:

Great question. I think we’ll probably all have our take, and I wish we could get my email manager on Mike on this one as well, but I think it’s one of those classic both. So as we said, every email, every automated program kind, everything you do, go back and visit it after an appropriate amount of time, measure it, see what’s doing well, see where you’re getting good clickthrough rates or bad clickthrough rates or good engagement, bad tweak experiment. That’s very iterative and doesn’t take a lot of time. And then sometimes if you feel like we showed our case study, we’re like, oh man, I want to do a full revision of how we’re doing our automated programs. We’re going to move more to a tofu mofu, bofu. That was a big effort, took a lot of energy with really surprisingly incredible results that we did not expect those good of improvements, but it had really good. So I think the answer is both when it’s appropriate, but absolutely do the iterative stuff.

Mike Felix:

And if I can add a point there to your marketing automation or just overall marketing, there’s going to be a lagging. There’s going to be a lag between how you’re measuring your marketing performance and how that translates into revenue generated and your sales performance. Certain companies are going to have a longer lag and certain companies have seasons. So if you’re in certain industries, you’re going to get a bulk of your sales during certain seasons. And you also know that when your prospects are looking for solutions, that also is going to be concentrated within certain seasons. So it’s really key to know what your sales timeline and seasons look like, what your life cycle looks like for a particular or your pipeline looks like for a sale. And then aligning your marketing at the front end of it so that you’re not, oh yeah, I clicked go on my marketing automation. Why aren’t my sales going up? It’s a matter of you knowing that there is a lag between what’s happening on a marketing end, the front end of your pipeline, and how that should translate a certain one quarter down the line, two quarters down the line, and then that’s when you’re really going to be able to get the most out of how you analyze that data.

Joe Roberts:

Okay. So one more quick question. Our team is pretty small. We don’t have a lot of resources. What do you recommend is our best first step?

Jeff Day:

Yeah, it’s a great question. We deal with a lot of customers who are sort of new to marketing automation, and that’s fantastic. My personal take, I’m sure my has, is start with what you can do. Journey of a thousand steps starts with the first step. So I’d say figure out who your I C P is. Figure out who you really want to improve your engagement with in terms of a segment or a buying audience, and create a few automated programs that maybe speak to different titles within that and line up some content and use that as a starting point. So if you’re coming from single email dedicated, use that as a starting point, see how that works, measure tweak. Then maybe you can go after the next segment of target audience that you want to go after and build. The nice thing is that it really does become a mechanism of scale, because once you get very efficient at building these things out and you can set ’em, they can run for as long as you want them to, and that gives you the scale to do more and more and more without each individual effort.

Mike Felix:

Ditto.

Joe Roberts:

Okay. Well unfortunately, we are at a time. This was a great in depth, lots of really important information. So many of us need. Thank you both for an amazing presentation and for answering so many of those questions throughout. Again, thanks to Act-On for sponsoring today’s presentation As a quick WI F Y I for the audience, just remember you exit Zoom, there’ll be a window that pops up the very short survey. We’d love to hear what you thought about today’s session. So thank you for joining us and we will see you soon.

Jeff Day:

Yeah, thank you everyone for attending. Thank you. Really appreciate it.

The Benefits of Email Marketing Automation: Is it Time for an Upgrade?

Act-On — Fri, 12 May 2023 17:18:14 +0000

As budgets shrink and buyers get more selective, email marketing is more important than ever. How is your email marketing solution holding up? Is it driving growth and performance for your organization? If it’s not, you owe it to yourself, your team, and your customers to evaluate the alternatives. Maybe it’s time to take the upgrade from your current email service provider (or ESP for short, think Mail Chimp, Active Campaign, Constant Contact) and enjoy the benefits of email marketing automation.

Today’s marketing teams can’t afford to fall behind. Every solution in your tech stack needs to be pulling its full weight by saving you time, delivering a reliable return on your investment, and above all else, giving your prospects and customers a great experience. With over 11,000 martech solutions available, there’s no reason to continue suffering in silence with a platform that isn’t working hard enough.

Difference Between an ESP and Marketing Automation?

There’s a common misconception that Email Service Providers (ESPs) and marketing automation platforms are more similar than they are different. And while it’s true that both software applications are capable of sending marketing and sales emails en masse, that’s where the similarities end. Not sure what the difference is? We’ve got you covered: take a look at our primer on the 5 key differences between email marketing and marketing automation.

If you’re thinking about making the switch from an entry level email service provider (ESP), consider these benefits of email marketing automation.

Lighten the Load of Manual, Repetitive Work

Without email marketing automation, your team needs to spend valuable time on tasks that don’t add much value to your business. Scheduling sends. Segmenting lists. Getting deep in the weeds on customer journeys, campaign paths, and lead scoring. Manually importing and exporting list after list after list. Absolutely drowning in spreadsheets.

Sound familiar? Take the repetitive aspects of email marketing automation off your plate, with features like automated journeys that give your audience the right message for them at the right time, every time.

Break Out of the Single Channel Box

Email is crucial. It’s the backbone of a modern marketing engine. But if your email marketing campaigns aren’t fully integrated into your multichannel marketing efforts, you’re leaving money on the table. Today’s buyers are savvier than ever, particularly on the B2B side. They may have done up to 70% of their research before even talking to a member of your sales team.

If you want to be included in that independent research stage, you have to be putting out multichannel, and multimedia content. Fortunately, marketing automation platforms can help you meet customers where they are. Marketing automation platforms have the benefit of incorporating channels such as social media, landing pages, SMS messaging, webinars, surveys, and more. A high quality marketing automation platform can help you map out the entire journey, and plan the right touch points to reach your future customers.

Become the Sales Team’s New BFF

The relationship between marketing and sales is a tale as old as time. If you’re using an email service provider without full marketing automation capabilities, the relationship might be a little fraught. ESPs have limited if any ability to automatically trigger sales actions, and lead sharing capabilities are inefficient at best.

Without the added benefits of marketing automation, like lead scoring and journey mapping, you can’t route leads to sales as quickly. Remember that savvy B2B buyer from benefit #2? They’ve already moved on to the next best piece of content by the time your sales team is able to follow up with them about the ebook they downloaded from your landing page. Better luck next time.

The result? Sales and marketing aren’t aligned, and trust starts to erode. The sales team wonders why they’re not getting leads fast enough. The marketing team begs for patience as they try to plug the gaps in their ESP with spreadsheets, project management platforms, and elbow grease. Automation cleans up this process and encourages more alignment between marketing and sales.

Manage Your Leads With Ease

That brings us to lead management. For the modern marketing team, how you manage your leads can make the difference between falling short of your end of quarter goals, and popping the cork on some bottles when you shatter your previous conversion records. Marketing automation gives you the ability to build multiple nurture sequences for buyers according to what they’re looking for and where they are in the buyer’s journey. ESP’s can’t do that!

^{Ebooks are great marketing tools: and you can fully employ their benefits with email marketing automation on your side.}

For example, let’s say you have an ebook that prospects are only likely to download when they’re getting close to a buying decision, something like “How to Convince Your CFO to Approve Your Software Purchase.” With marketing automation, you can set up a nurture sequence that helps move that buyer down the funnel, by offering them answers to common objections you encounter in the sales process.

But say for example, you have another group of buyers who haven’t signaled that they’re ready to buy. Maybe they downloaded an asset that’s more top of funnel, like a research report you commissioned with an analyst or a thought leadership piece on the outlook for your industry. You know they’re interested in what you’re selling, but they are likely still learning the lay of the land. Time to serve them a more gentle nurture stream that helps guide them through the buyer’s journey more slowly.

The point is, with marketing automation, you can set up these kinds of automated nurture paths, and they’ll automatically trigger based on your audience’s behavior. No more going cross-eyed from staring at spreadsheets and pivot tables.

Integrate With Your CRM

All of the above benefits will only get you so far without robust and seamless CRM integration. That’s something that not every marketing automation solution can promise. For instance, some of the leading platforms like Marketo and Hubspot are really only offering marketing automation as a loss leader for their own all-in-one CRM solutions.

Act-On doesn’t play that game. We do marketing automation and we do it better than any of our competitors. But we don’t have any interest in hamstringing you to the CRM of our choice. We think you should be able to choose the tools you want, and we’ll work with you to get your integration up and running smoothly. The benefits of that kind of seamless CRM integration include better segmentation, more transparency, improved lead management, and more insight and impact on revenue-focused campaigns.

Interested in learning more about how email marketing automation can launch your marketing efforts to the next level? Check out our recent article on using marketing automation to become a supermarketer!

There’s even a webinar you can explore that goes even deeper on that topic. Sorry, are we being too helpful here?

You searched for search engine optimization - Act-On

How AI Is Changing Manufacturing Marketing

Introduction

Why AI Matters More Than Ever in Marketing for Manufacturing

Four Ways AI is Transforming Manufacturing Marketing Today

1. Predictive Analytics

2. Personalization at Scale for Complex Buying Groups

3. AI-Driven Optimization Across Channels

4. Improve Marketing ROI Through Better Decision-Making

Common Marketing Challenges AI Helps Solve

AI Tools for Manufacturing Marketing

How Act-On Helps Marketers Put AI to Work

Need Help Getting Started?

Manufacturing Marketing Trends to Watch in 2026

Introduction

Seven Manufacturing Marketing Trends for 2026

1. Marketing Strategy Shifts From Lead Volume to Revenue Contribution

2. Marketing Automation Becomes a Core Operational Layer

3. Buyer-Led Journeys Replace Linear Funnels

4. First-Party Data Strategy Separates Leaders From Laggards

5. AI Shapes Marketing Direction — Not Just Execution

6. ABM Evolves to Support Multi-Stakeholder Manufacturing Deals

7. Technical Content and Credibility Outperform Volume Publishing

What These Trends Mean for Manufacturing Marketing Teams

73 Advertising Terms and Jargon Every Marketer Should Know

A/B Testing

Above the Fold

Account-Based Advertising

Ad Audience

Ad Click

Ad Exchange

Ad ID (Advertising ID)

Ad Impressions

Ad Inventory

Ad Network

Ad Serving

Ad Targeting

Ad Units

Addressable

Affiliate Marketing

Attribution

Banner Ad

Bidding Strategy

Blocklist

Bounce Rate

Brand Awareness

Call to Action

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

Channel

Click-Through-Rate

Consent Management Platform (CMP)

Conversion

Conversion Pixel

Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Tracking

Cookie

Cost Per Acquisition

Cost Per Click

Cost Per Completed View

Cost Per Lead

Cost Per Mille

Cross-Device Targeting

Contextual Targeting

Demand-Side Platform

Direct Response

Display

Expandable Banner

First-Party Cookies

First-Touch Attribution

Frequency Capping

Geographic Targeting

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

Identity Graph

In-Stream Ads

Interstitial Ads

Keyword

Landing Page

Last Touch Attribution

Lead