Smart campaigns are THE key feature of Plezi. It allows our customers to use their data to send relevant content to each one of their leads in just a few clicks. It personalizes automation …as well as the buying experience for each of your prospective customers.
It’s the core of our software and especially designed with marketers in mind. So it’s high time we went over how smart campaigns work and the reasons why we created them.
Below, we’ve put together a guide so you can learn about: :
- How smart campaigns use data to better support the day-to-day actions of marketers;
- How smart campaigns work in practice;
- What you are able to achieve by using a smart campaign;
1. Use data to save time and reduce sticking points
Developed to meet the day-to-day needs of marketing teams, smart campaigns are based on a simple idea: in a digital world where data is now (almost) everything, it is absolutely vital to enable marketers to leverage this new additional firepower.
1.1 Friction and loss of time
The first thing any marketer needs is more time! Between creating content, internal coordination with sales, sending emails, and monitoring the website there’s often not a lot left over to do much else.
Many of the marketers we spoke to had chosen complex solutions that offered them a huge number of different possible scenarios, only to end up using them to simply fire out emails. Why? Configuring the actual automation itself (e.g. workflows, development and updating of scenarios) was far too time-consuming.
So, to save them time, we decided to attack the problem on two separate fronts: smart campaigns intelligently automate your entire marketing process and reduce friction points.
1.2 Stop using ideal scenarios
Many marketing automation tools promise they can implement automated scenarios. However, they quickly start to lose their appeal once you start using them:
- it’s extremely difficult to design the ideal scenario for a lead you don’t know much about;
- each scenario that you create also needs to be updated for each new piece of content produced. Failing to do so will mean that all the tool’s “automation” will quickly be not much use and out of date.
Because if you use a tool to automate campaign, but you still find yourself doing the same thing every day, then it’s not really automation.
Our alternative: leverage the data left by leads when they visit your website to deliver relevant, personalized content recommendations.
For our set of machine learning algorithms, each lead is unique: it’s impossible to suggest content that has already been read or which is not targeted to their interests, because these are identified and analysed throughout the buyer’s journey.
A lead’s behaviour is also analysed (e.g. browsing a website, downloading content, opening an email) and is used to create scenarios that are both personalized and unique.
Razi Rima, Business Director and Open Innovation Specialist at ideXlab
1.3 A feature designed for marketers and developed with marketers
We used feedback from a working group made up of managers in B2B marketing, PR, and SEO to fine-tune our solution to best meet their needs and day-to-day requirements.
Based on their recommendations, the smart campaign was born: a feature which allows you to send each of your leads the right content at the right time in a personalized way to move them through the purchase funnel until they are ready to buy.
2. How exactly do Smart Campaigns work?
2.1 Know more about your leads
A smart campaign records all of your leads’ interaction with your content using its automated tracking function:
- opened emails;
- content viewed;
- pages visited;
- information provided in forms and on landing pages of your website.
The profile of each lead is then built up as they visit your website and interact with it: e.g. with contact information, interests, and details of their visits.
The Smart Campaign records and analyses the content they have viewed.
View of a lead record in Plezi
2.2 Manage all of your content
At Plezi, when we talk about content, we not only mean blog articles and white papers, but also requests for demos, contact requests, and brochures for example.
This broad interpretation of what content is, helps a smart campaign to understand leads in a holistic manner.
When the marketing team creates content, they assign certain characteristics to it using “tags” before they publish it online: e.g. type of persona, stage of the purchase funnel, subject.
These tags are then used by our algorithms and help fine-tune their targeting of content. A smart campaign is able to determine a visitor’s interests, position in the buyer’s journey, and intentions based on the content they have viewed.
It then determines the most relevant content that should be offered to each lead. It’s impossible to send a lead the same piece of content twice, or to send content to the wrong marketing target!
Each piece of content is also given a numerical value which is attributed to any lead who views it. Using this behavioural marker, a smart campaign knows in real-time where each of your contacts are in the sales cycle.
View of a white paper in Plezi showing the tags associated with this content: subject, persona, and stage of the purchase funnel
2.3 Take control over your strategy
You keep control over a whole range of parameters that enable you to tailor a smart campaign to meet your needs and day-to-day requirements.
You always choose:
- which contacts to speak to from your database, based on specific conditions (e.g. position, language spoken, type of persona, business sector);
- the frequency of emails, the best fit with both your leads’ expectations and your prospecting methods;
- the length of your buying cycle, to make sure it is fully in sync with your specific context for sales;
- the score used to move a lead through your purchase funnel: awareness, consideration, or prospecting;
- the content and format of your marketing emails
The smart campaign dashboard means marketers can draw on actual figures to optimize both their nurturing strategy (moving leads down the purchase funnel) and content.
Using the reports at your disposal, you can, for example, identify for which stage of the purchase funnel, and for which persona type, you lack content. This lets you know exactly where to focus your efforts when creating content!
View of the Plezi smart campaign dashboard
3. What you are able to achieve by using a Smart Campaign;
Every day, marketing teams strive to start up a conversation with leads, but these efforts can often evaporate when the interface of the tools they use creates scenarios that are confusing at best. And workflows often make the implementation of these scenarios far too time-consuming!
We’ve taken the opposite approach. Our smart campaigns are based on the everyday needs of marketers so they can prioritize the results of their hard work in a few simple steps.
Our promise is then, is twofold:
- to help our customers educate their leads, in a personalized way and without taking time away from their teams;
- to enable teams to focus on creating quality content, which is then delivered in the best way possible.
This is where Plezi comes in:
- it automates very specific, time-consuming actions, such as sending emails, enhancing lead profiles in real-time, suggesting tailored, relevant content, managing social networks, creating smart forms and landing pages;
- it saves marketing teams time by supporting them without requiring them to change their methods and adapts to each business sector, their schedule, and their needs.
How does this actually work in Plezi?
- You create a nurturing email directly as part of your content.
- You activate it so that it will be integrated into your smart campaign.
- Your email will then be delivered to those leads whose profile matches the stage of the funnel (awareness, evaluation, or purchase) and tags that you associated with the content when it was created.
View of content used as part of a smart campaign
But what if you don’t have a lot of content? No problem! A smart campaign allows you to start slowly, to promote your first pieces of content, and to gradually identify the appropriate content you need to create that will be of most use to your leads.
By using the comprehensive overview that a smart campaign provides, you can focus your efforts on the areas where they will be most effective.
Maxime Moreno, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Openbee
By keeping our promise, marketing teams who use Plezi can reach new heights:
- Generate more qualified leads: according to our B2B inbound marketing survey of more than 200 companies, smart campaigns enable an average of 14 times more MQL‘s (marketing qualified leads) to be passed on to sales;
- Speak more effectively to leads: emails sent by our smart campaigns have an open rate which is 10% higher than other emails, and the click rate is 50% higher;
- Reduce the sales cycle: a smart campaign shortens the sales cycle of our customers by an average of 20 days;
- Simplify day-to-day tasks by allowing marketers to easily perform a number of complex actions (e.g. develop a content strategy, speak to several different personas at the same time, manage a complete inbound marketing strategy by themselves);
- Save time: our customers are finally able to free up time and concentrate on tasks with high added value: writing relevant content, assisting leads, and developing their strategy.
At Plezi, we also use smart campaigns on a daily basis and use feedback from our own marketers to make them even more effective. As a consequence, all of our customers signed in the 1st quarter of 2020 received emails as part of our smart campaign.
Razi Rima, Business Director & Open Innovation Specialist at ideXlab
Smart Campaigns are the reason why we founded Plezi and our vision hasn’t changed since we started. We believe in the importance of providing all marketers with the best possible tools, whether they’re total beginners or seasoned professionals. Plezi is a solution that grows with its customers and partners, and our smart campaigns reflect these changes. We will develop this feature in a number of different areas, and we can’t wait to share this with you!
