Podcast Description
Savvy marketers step into The Marketing Spotlight to tell their stories of successful interactive marketing campaigns.
This week in The Marketing Spotlight:
Megan Glover, Director of Marketing, Compendium
New-client success campaign drives higher customer renewal rates.
Time: 9:02
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Podcast Transcript
From Right On Interactive, this is The Marketing Spotlight – a look at how marketing leaders are producing meaningful business results through innovative marketing communications.
This week in The Marketing Spotlight:
Megan Glover: Hi, my name is Megan Glover and I’m the director of marketing at Compendium. I’m responsible for demand generation, PR, branding, and client education activities.
Narrator: Founded in 2007 as a corporate blogging platform that drives search engine optimization, Compendium has evolved beyond SEO.
MG: Compendium is a social content publishing software. We allow companies through our software to generate and distribute content to SEO-friendly landing pages and social networking sites, ultimately with the purpose of generating demand and new business. What really sets us apart is we are one of the only software for search strategies in place that are built for companies with company needs in mind, and with acquisition at the heart of that initiative.
Narrator: Not too many years ago, blogging was synonymous with social media. People and companies published news, information, and content; others joined in the conversation, linked to the most interesting content, and ideas were socialized in the marketplace. Social is a phenomenon.
MG: Social is a great term and when we hear social media, we immediately think of Facebook or Twitter. But long before Facebook and Twitter, social meant something a lot more pure, and that means human. The fact of the matter is, people want to relate with human content. And if you think about the way people are going and visiting online sites, be it social networks or for search, they’re really looking for honest feedback to make their purchasing decisions. So, how blogging fits into that social media piece is that it’s just a tool to allow companies to share that human content. Most companies that do have a blog or do have a content strategy focused around that human content are really looking to get that content found and convert those new customers.
Narrator: Social media platforms in the form of software-as-a-service, or SaaS offerings, manage these content strategies. They come as renewable subscriptions, which puts the consumer in the driver’s seat. That’s why Compendium’s number one value in their mission statement is “lead customers to their goals.” Their top priority is making sure their customers see success.
MG: It’s really the lifeblood of our organization. Without renewable customers, really there is no Compendium. So, it’s really important that we establish educational communications and dedicated success managers to ensure our clients are successful.
Narrator: Compendium has a number of communications outlets to provide success to their clients: A dedicated help desk that provides tactical advice 24/7 and a dedicated success manager who is responsible for leading new clients to their goals.
MG: In addition, we run monthly email and promotional campaigns. These vary from providing a whitepaper to running a contest around content creation or other somewhat pain points that we see our clients facing. We will try to run fun, more educational contests to try to increase those indicators, whatever that may be, whether that may be content or template design or a call to action tweaks, we really try to involve them through promotions and educational resources.
Narrator: For Compendium, the key performance indicator of these new-client success campaigns is renewals. Renewals directly measure customer satisfaction. And satisfaction is also driven by the client and the goals that are set up initially.
MG: Individually, we’ll look at how the client has performed to those goals. As a marketing department, how we measure our campaigns and strategy is really how we’ve elevated certain indicators across our entire client base. So, for instance, if we’re running a content strategy, we’re going to take a look at how we performed in the previous months and then how this strategy or promotion might have lifted either content creation or conversions for our entire client base.
Narrator: If there’s a single challenge in achieving success with this goal of ensuring new-client success, it’s time. Marketers are busy.
MG: Compendium is one strategy among a lot of strategies that our marketers are responsible for. So, initial buy-in to the program and to the promotion is probably our number one obstacle. And then, once we get people to buy-in, we see great success, but getting that participation is our number one obstacle at this point.
Narrator: To answer that challenge, Compendium deploys a critical communications campaign, right from the onset.
MG: We have an entire Getting Started campaign which is an automated process, and we actually use Right On Interactive to automate these communications. But essentially, it is a series of triggered emails based on where the client should be in the Getting Started process. And what this allows us to do is it frees up human resources on our end to execute, but then it also gives the client tangible getting started resources that they can refer back to as they are going through the process. Really the goal of this strategy is to get them up within a ten to 14 day timeframe. We really try our best, and we use automation to do that in order to say, “You have ten days to do this. Here are all of the resources that you need,” and then we will check in with them after that time frame to see if they need any help.
Narrator: This lag time, this ten to 14 days that Compendium uses as a benchmark for getting clients successfully on their way is a key performance indicator.
MG: We measure by how long it takes to get our clients up and running. So, that’s a metric that I know our client success team and our product team measures on a monthly basis. What is time-to-implement? What does that look like? And if it exceeds that 14-day period, then that is an item that we flag to work on the following month and tweak. Whether it’s tweaking the email, whether it’s tweaking the cadence or the messaging within them, it varies, but we use that 14-day max as an indicator as to whether or not that system is performing.
Narrator: In surveys, marketers consistently report one of their greatest challenges is quantifying the return on marketing investments. For Compendium, success directly relates to client renewals.
MG: Our renewal rates with our clients continue to increase month over month. And moreover, what we are seeing is better engagement. And we can track that engagement through looking at email metrics, through looking at phone records and such. So what we’re seeing is a positive trend toward customer engagement.
Narrator: There’s always something to be learned from the experience of deploying a new campaign. If there’s one piece of advice Megan can pass on to other marketers, it’s the organization of the communications themselves.
MG: We made a concerted effort to really pull back and evaluate all of the communications that we were sending to clients, how frequently we really want to touch them, and what’s going to occur at those touch points.
Narrator: So, what about longer term? Looking three to five years into the future, how will today’s strategic marketing initiatives shape Compendium?
MG: They will shape Compendium immensely. We are building as we speak that client base that is going to generate the majority of the revenue for us five years down the line. And it’s imperative that we understand and keep these clients happy, but most importantly successful to ensure that they continue to renew and they continue to up-sell with us and really stay on board with Compendium and love our product and love what we do and what we have to offer. How does this impact five years down the line? Well, if we’re doing our job right, we are building a sustainable, renewable client base that’s really going to fuel the majority of revenue for this company.
Narrator: The Marketing Spotlight is a production of Right On Interactive. Information about our customer lifecycle marketing automation software, as well as our latest whitepapers, podcasts, and other resources are available at www.rightoninteractive.com.
Audio production and voice-over services provided by Rich Cunningham Voiceover